How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (3 page)

Each cubicle had a number: 408, 409, 410 . . . I was actually going to come face-to-face with the buyer of children's apparel and accessories . . . 411, 412, 413 . . . millions of children throughout this country would for the first time enjoy keeping their throats and necks covered during the coldest months of the winter . . . 414, 415, 416 . . . in your face, Katherine Akers . . . 417, 418, 419!

Beverly Shore's empty cubicle caught me by surprise. What now? Do I wait? Do I leave a Creature Comfy in front of her monitor with my business card propped in its paws? Do I look for someone else from children's apparel and accessories?

“Can I help you?”

I turned around. A young woman in a business suit, holding a Styrofoam cup.

“Yes, I'm looking for Beverly Shore.”

“I'm Beverly Shore,” she replied with not a little bit of hesitation.

“My name is Joshua Neuman.”

I fumbled with my suitcase, got down on one knee and opened it up, and two or three of the Creature Comfies tumbled out. I picked them up and held up a Mickey Mouse rip-off—an intellectual property litigator's wet dream.

She looked at me as if I was a retarded man showing her my collection of string. I had planned to say, “I would like to introduce you to the Creature Comfy,” but the only thing that came out was “Uh, Creature Comfy.”

“You don't belong here. I'm going to call security.”

T
HE FUNNY THING
was that while we were waiting for security to arrive, I had ample opportunity to rebound, to put her at ease, to make my pitch. That's what a real salesman would have done. But as much as I wanted to make my father proud, find a direction in life and get the Creature Comfy on the shelves of department stores across America, all I could feel during those moments was
bad for her
. I imagined what it must have felt like for her to experience this awkward twenty-five-year-old with his suitcase materializing in her place of work, brandishing bizarro versions of Mickey, Minnie, and Curious George. So instead of showing her how the Velcro held both ends together and trying one on, I just stood there with my eyes lowered, waiting for security to escort me out of the building.

Christmas and Chanukah overlapped that year, so when I went home for the holiday, virtually every house on our block but ours was glowing with green and red Christmas lights—thousand-watt suburban altars of excess. The kids on the block were out having a snowball fight, laughing and screaming, all of their necks exposed. I remembered when I was one of them and I used to spot my father turning the corner I was now turning, briefcase in hand, exhausted from doing zipper business—the loving smile I could see envelop his face the moment he spotted me.

My father and I had missed the holiday rush, though no competitor, to the best of my knowledge, has since snatched up the Creature Comfies and turned them into an empire. I entered my parents' house, took off my shoes, and dumped the Creature Comfies on the floor of the living room. Who was I kidding? I wasn't a salesman—if I was really going to be a writer I wasn't going to be a successful salesman on the side. I wasn't going to be a successful anything
on the side
.

That night, my father, mother, brother, and I lit the menorah—the menorah my grandfather had bought for my parents in Israel in the early 1970s. We kept it in the window “for all the world to see,” though it was hard to imagine the light from these two flimsy candles from ShopRite being noticed by anyone on a street glowing like the Vegas Strip.

I stared into the fire and thought about the suitcase, S
ø
ren Kierkegaard and Franz Rosenzweig, the suit from my college interview, the potential infringements upon international copyright law, the look on the face of Beverly Shore as I stood in her cubicle, and whether the holes where my hoop earrings used to hang had closed up for good. I thought about my late grand­father, my father, and I standing in front of that same menorah, singing the same prayers every year and dreaming of empires as our neighbors burned watts and drank eggnog, never giving a second thought to the neck warmth of America's children.

ELISA ALBERT

Week at a Glance

I.

I
T'S SIMULTANEOUSLY THE FIRST NIGHT OF
C
HANUKAH, MY
P
APA
I
RWIN'S NINETY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, AND
C
HRISTMAS, THE LAST WEEK OF 2005.
I
AM HOME IN
L.A.
FOR A VISIT, MY FIRST IN A GOOD LONG WHILE.
I
T'S A CELEBRATORY CLUSTER-FUCK, AND MY MOTHER IS HOSTING A PARTY.

“We light one candle tonight, for the first night, and this other candle is called the
shamash
,” she explains in a voice usually reserved for kindergarteners.

Present are my father and stepmother, my brother and his wife, some cousins, my mother, Papa, and me. Things are a wee bit tense, for many boring and complicated family-issue reasons, all of which boil down to
I don't want to be here
.

My brother's wife is invited to light the menorah, which is pretty straightforward since it's only the first night and there is therefore only the one single candle to light. My brother is wearing a pair of two-hundred-dollar jeans that first appeared around the time he and his beloved miraculously found each other on JDate. I'm feeling fairly homicidal, but I sing thinly along with the
bracha
.

By the soup course, the man of the hour—Papa Irwin, not Jesus—is nodding off at the foot of the table, a depressing paper party hat resting asymmetrically on his head. One cousin is totally trashed and keeps telling me that I have sadness inside me and that she therefore would like to hypnotize me. A teenaged cousin smiles shyly and repeats, “What up, Carrie Bradshaw?” ostensibly because I live in New York and spend a good deal of my time having cocktails with the girls, sleeping with strangers, and lounging around my apartment staring at my laptop. Throughout dinner my brother's wife unwraps and feeds him pieces of chocolate gelt. She eats no gelt, not because she doesn't love money—quite the contrary!—but because she is anorexic.

I feel empty and morose, and strangely enough not even my gift-wrapped copy of this year's
Best American Short Stories
(Thanks, Mom!) makes things better. I wonder whether I should wake up Papa so that he can enjoy his party, but he's probably happier asleep, and I'm more than a little jealous. If I could nap through family time I'd probably enjoy being around my family a great deal.

I excuse myself before birthday cake is served and lie on a dew-covered chaise in the dark backyard. It seems I have a voice message, the blinking red light on my cell like a beacon of hope. It's from an inebriated friend, himself home for a visit in the Midwest, wishing me a “Shabbat shalom, motherfucker!” which is funny, since, of course, it's not Shabbat. “I'm calling all the Jews in my phone,” he says. “But you're the only Jew in my phone, so really I'm only calling you!” This is sufficiently uplifting, and I spend the rest of the evening trying to relax on the chaise, fruitlessly searching for even one star in the Los Angeles night sky.

A Happy Chanukah to one and all.

II.

After last night's circus of despair, I forgo the candles ritual tonight. I have no plans and I'm in too crappy a mood for polite company. Oh, and it's the day after Christmas! So the Western world feels shut down, desolate, totally depressing. There is only one thing to be done.

Every Jew and his mother are seeing
Munich
tonight. What this means, I realize belatedly, is that I am trapped in the sold-out theater alongside roughly half of heeb L.A. How did I not foresee this? Inevitably, I run into several dozen friends of my parents'. And my ex-father-in-law, who proffers a small wave and thereafter avoids eye contact. (Which, interestingly enough, is not so very unlike how it felt being married to his son.)

“Are you here by yourself?” asks the fourth or fifth family acquaintance I run into. I feel completely pitiful. Christmas is a time for Jews to see movies
together
.

“No,” I lie. Then I duck back into the crowd, muttering something about finding my friends.

I locate a single seat next to a benign older couple who, thankfully, don't look the least bit familiar. They endear themselves to me twenty minutes into the film by nonchalantly passing me the popcorn. I have found my friends after all. When the lights come up at the end, the husband is white-knuckled with rage. “What'd you think?” I ask him. As Maestro Spielberg himself has pointed out, this movie is something of a Rorschach test for divergent Semitic passions. The man doesn't disappoint.

“I'll tell you something,” he says, fury cutting away at every word. “It ain't a picnic being a Jew after Auschwitz.” I want to point out that it probably wasn't a picnic to be a Jew
during
Ausch­witz either, but I just nod emphatically as he goes on about counterterrorism not being morally equivalent to terrorism. I (violently) disagree, but I cannot afford to alienate my new friends, not when there's a minefield of family acquaintances still filing out of the theater. He and his wife promise to buy my forthcoming book; I wish them a Happy Chanukah. And voilà! The left and the right have called a special holiday truce.

III.

My mother's Havurah has its annual Chanukah party. The Havurah is a group of friends who meet once a month to schmooze, eat, and talk about books and politics. Even though I live three thousand miles away and don't have all that much to say to anyone, I've known these people and their children for about as long as I can remember, and I'm increasingly grateful for this kind of continuity.

It's a bustling party, a warm, lively, colorful gathering with food-laden tables and adorable children underfoot and a gigantic pile of gifts by the fireplace. Its resemblance to anything I've experienced of late in my own family home is minimal. When we arrive, the three candles in several
Chanukiot
are already burning in the window, casting a further glow on the proceedings.

The traditional gift exchange (also known as a Yankee Swap, but insert joke about tightfisted Jews here) goes something like this: Everyone brings a gift costing fifteen dollars or so. We draw numbers out of a hat. Number one picks a gift and opens it. Number two can either swipe number one's gift or choose another gift to open. And so on down the line. It's best, in this game, to pick a high number out of the hat, so that you can see everything that's already been opened and take your pick. Fortunes can be won or lost in an instant. I am excited to draw a whopping 17.

There's a scented candle assortment, a neat baking kit with novelty cookie cutters, an M. C. Escher book, a T-shirt reading
KISH MIR IN TUCHES!
, and then someone opens the gift I know I will claim as my own: an oh-so-apropos humor book called
50 Relatives Worse Than Yours
.

Later, on the way to the bathroom, I duck into a carpeted hallway lined with photos: wedding photos, portraits of the grandparents as young men and women, baby photos, the whole nine. Like all family photos (others' and my own), they fill me with unwieldy bitterness and hard-core longing all at once. My favorite of the little kids, a porky eighteen-month-old with a six-hundred-word vocabulary, comes toddling down the hall in a rainbow onesie, holding fast to a jelly doughnut. The last time I saw this child she was in utero, and the next time I see her she'll probably be a bat mitzvah, but no matter. “Hi!” she says. I grab and kiss-attack her and pretend to munch on her belly. She cracks up and we return to the party together. There are things I covet that, alas, can't be grasped with even the highest Yankee Swap number.

My friend Heather, also in town visiting her own family, picks me up. We go for Mexican food in her mother's car and listen to ancient CDs of a local Jewish pop star whose relentlessly earnest, heavily synthesized musicalizations of various prayers and parables have earned him a die-hard fan base of Jewish housewives all over Southern California. Heather and I share a secret past of having been members of this man's preteen chorus army, when we were each sort of voluntarily molested by, respectively, a much older teen and another aspiring Jewish pop singer. We sing along, doing the cheese-ball jazz-hand choreography as we remember it, more or less exactly like when we where thirteen.

IV.

Today I fly to Seattle to spend the rest of the week with two of my best friends: Sarah and Jackie. Jackie and I both live in New York, but Sarah's in medical school out here, so we three haven't gotten to spend any quality time together in a while.

After some requisite gaping at the Space Needle, the lush, hilly views, and the stunning multitude of lovely coffee shops and cafés around town, Sarah takes us to a Chanukah party hosted by friends of hers, an engaged couple.

The guy is Jewish, but the kind of Jewish that seems to back away from itself: not
Jewish,
mind you, just Jew-
ish
. A real fan-of-Seinfeld kind of Jew (
not that there's anything wrong with that
). His fiancée is not a Jew but has spent the last three days making latkes. She explains how at first they were too soggy because she'd used too much egg. Then she scrapped that batch and started from scratch. But the frying itself was tricky, so half of the second batch had to be tossed. She wanted the latkes to be perfect. She really respects Jewish culture, and it was important to her that the latkes come out right. The latkes, needless to say, seem pretty loaded (and I don't mean with applesauce and sour cream, either).

“Are you guys Jewish?” she asks us politely.

“Hell, no,” we say, shaking our heads in jest at the distastefulness of such a thought. (Then, when it's clear that irony has no place here, we feel bad. “Yes. We're Jewish,” Jackie says. “And the latkes look great!” “Do they?” our hostess asks anxiously. “Latkes are hard for everyone,” I reassure her.)

When it comes time to light the menorah, our hosts cast about helplessly. It becomes quickly apparent that Jackie and Sarah and I, along with the affianced guy, are the only children of Israel at this Chanukah party. “Don't look at me,” Sarah says, backing away from the menorah like a vampire from a cross. Jackie and I—Jewish day school refugees, both—have a brief argument over whether tonight's four candles go on the right or the left. I think they go on the right; she thinks the left.

“Rabbi Hillel said the right and Rabbi Shammai said the left, so it's fine either way,” Jackie says, with more than a trace of sarcasm.

“Wow,” someone says. “You guys really
are
Jewish.”

We sing the
bracha
alone and embarrassedly, like we're on display at the mall next to a giant tree, a cardboard menorah, and a fat old biker dressed up as Santa. People! Chanukah is really not that big a deal, religiously speaking. If it didn't happen to fall around the same time as the good old alleged virgin birth, Ross from
Friends
probably wouldn't even know about it! Will our hosts be throwing a Sukkot dinner in their backyard? A Tisha b'Av study session? A Purim hoedown? I think not. So why, in the absence of any other Jewish observance or identity, this big, blue-and-white-streamered, latke-obsessed Chanukah thing?

V.

By some Maccabee miracle, Jackie and I have scored a pair of below-market tickets on Craigslist to tonight's sold-out Sleater-Kinney show at the Showbox. What a day we're having: strolling, shopping, eating, laughing. I love this city, it's official. And I love my friends! And now we're seeing my favorite band at a storied Seattle concert venue! For eighteen bucks! Which is also
chai
! Life does not get much better. But for the fact that my sinuses still hurt a little bit after having expelled lemonade from my nostrils at dinner when Jackie made me laugh too hard recounting a comedy routine she saw recently (in which David Cross poked fun at misuse of the word
literally,
as in “I
literally
shit my pants!” or “My brother's wife
literally
has an ass for a face!” or “My boss is
literally
retarded!”), I am having a grand time.

We are busy dancing and sipping vodka tonics when the amazing Carrie Brownstein, between spectacular sets, makes mention of the big C:

“So tonight's Chanukah,” she says to the crowd, fiddling with the knobs on her guitar. There are few cheers. It's a wonderful thing to belong quite so completely to my surroundings. This is what life is for, I think: to be a living, breathing, contradictory mess
and
belong entirely.

Janet Weiss, the drummer, concurs. “Yeah.”

“I think it's like the fifth night,” Brownstein says.

“Woooo-hoooooo!” yells a guy nearby.

“Sixth!” I shout, just to participate, but then realize that I am wrong. It matters not.

“Sixth? Fifth?” Carrie asks. “Shit, I don't know. I can't be trusted with these things.” And with that the ladies rip into “Rollercoaster” (or maybe it was “Dig Me Out,” I can't remember; I can't be trusted with these things).

We forget to light candles tonight, as it's two
A.M.
by the time the show's over and of course it's raining and we're pretty buzzed, so as soon as we manage to find a cab back to Sarah's, we hightail it woozily to bed.

VI.

We get into a fight today. Sarah feels left out because Jackie and I share a life in New York; I feel left out because Sarah and Jackie wake up hours earlier than I do and go running together (why would anyone
do
such a thing?); Jackie's annoyed because Sarah's annoyed; Sarah's annoyed because Jackie's annoyed; I'm annoyed because Sarah only grudgingly indulges my vegetarianism; and so on. It's not so much a fight as a crossing of wires, a tripping of multiple overlapping insecurities and anxieties. Finally things boil over and we have a good cry, profess our collective undying love and affection, and immediately feel better. Typical girl bullshit. The truth of it is, my friends are my family (see also: Night I).