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Reclaiming [Includes Back Cover]
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Reclaiming The way they tell it in my family, at first there was no Hanukkah. My immigrant grandparents, once pious, felt overwhelmed, it seemed, by six children clamoring for melting-pot America. In December, presents were exchanged. It wasn't Christmas, but it wasn't Hanukkah either. The calendar obliged: it juxtaposed, or even overlapped, the holidays. Assimilation? Hardly. The family dinner was likely to be pot roast and potato pancakes, called by their Yiddish name, latkes. Slippage. What happened after that is the story of how an immigrant family, by its third generation, reclaimed traditions abandoned in its first. One aunt married a more religiously observant man; then another did, and then I did. By the time my children were born, Hanukkah was firmly in place. Not just traditional food and presents at the right time, but candles in a menorah for eight days, songs and spinning the dreidel, at which my husband had excelled as a boy. And the story of Hanukkah: how the Maccabees led a band of Jews in revolt against enforced conversion to Hellenic gods, and won, despite great odds. When a cruse of sacramental oil sufficient for one day was lit in the rededicated Temple in Jerusalem , it burned, the story goes, for eight. My husband's memories from his Vienna boyhood became part of our children's. His are simple and straightforward: the blessing of the Hanukkah candles, each night one more added to the menorah and illuminated, until at last all eight blaze at once; the giving of Hanukkah gelt, small amounts of money, to the children to bet on the outcome of dreidel-spinning. Our two streams blended in the children, and the children's memories are now also mine: They light the candles, which in turn illuminate me. 207 208 CELEBRATIONS My husband taught the blessings and the songs to all of us together. I fumbled at the piano, sight-reading while we sang, loud, to cover the mistakes. "Maoz Tzur" ("Mighty Rock"), and whatever else seemed appropriate from a secondhand songbook for religious festivals. My mother flung herself into making latkes, cheering on her grandson, who hung around the stove, an appreciative gobbler-up of delicious pancakes hot and crisp from the frypan. My mother knows the secret of keeping potatos snowy white throughout their tedious, knuckle-skinning preparation on the grater (no blender or food processor for her: texture is everything). Hers don't blacken. Mine do, just as matzo balls, when I'm foolish enough to try them on Passover, explode as soon as put to boil in the pot, making the cooking water resemble a kind of kosher eggdrop soup. (When you're good at reverse cooking alchemy, as I am, you have to be careful where you lay your hands on holidays whose message is transcendence.) Later, we had the good fortune to be invited as a family to a neighboring family'S Hanukkah zimria, a songfest. Though the food was always good, the thrilling center of it was the communal singing. These friends had gathered and copied for their guests a treasure of songs, well beyond "I Had a Little Dreidel." We sang them in parts and rounds to the accompaniment of a piano, a guitar, and finger cymbals passed around so that even the most unmusical could take a turn at clopping out the rhythm. The host's gorgeous baritone (in his pre-parent days it had graced the Christmas programs of the Collegiate Chorale) led the motley enthusiasts . In Hebrew school the children made menorahs. Let my sons's words describe his: "A yam-shaped slab of clay into which I poked holes with a pencil, then slathered on gold paint. I considered it a work of art." So did I. And we managed to use it alongside our store-bought menorah year after year (as we used my daughter'S blue-and-gold-painted clay candleholders on Friday nights) without burning down the house. The children are now grown. My daughter, playing over Hanukkah memories, lists as favorites the candle-lighting, singing, and dreidle-spinning. Conspicuously omitted are the eight days of present-giving. I think I know why. Some sense must have seeped Reclaiming 209 through of our wondering what on earth to give the childrenevery night a present?-after the second or third. She spotted the real and separated it from the false, even though we stopped this routine when the children were big enough to appreciate a single...