Menorah by Alfred Freddy Krupa
“Why are we celebrating Hannukah this year?” I asked my mother. “I thought our family never celebrates Hannukah.”
“Grandpa made a special request for this year,” she explained.
“But it’s just a family dinner, right? Like what we have for Passover? Because we’re not religious, because Grandma and Grandpa are atheists, right?”
Even though I grew up in a Jewish family, the only Hannukah I remember from my childhood was the first time (and the last time) my mother’s family celebrated it. That’s because in our family Hannukah was a minor holiday that we ignored on principle, even though it was the holiday that the Jewish kids at my school bragged about (presents for eight days in a row!).
“All those bourgeois Jews,” my mother would say scornfully. “They’re just building up an unimportant holiday to compensate for feeling left out at Christmas. Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur are the important holidays, Nina, not Hannukah.”
But on that winter night when I was maybe eight years old, our family of four—my mother, my father, my younger brother, and me—left our house up in the Santa Monica Mountains and headed off to Venice, where my mother’s parents lived, because my grandma was having a Hannukah dinner.
In those days, Venice was still a Jewish neighborhood—before Main Street became hip and trendy and real estate shot through the roof—where my grandparent’s neighbors spoke Yiddish just like them, where there was Hebrew writing on the fronts of the small shops and Jewish things to buy inside them, and where there was a Jewish temple, the Synagogue by the Sea, right on the beach. Their home was an apartment in a small, nondescript, two-story building that they owned and managed. On that winter night, it looked the same as aways, with a neat green lawn and geometrically trimmed hedges that you might see anywhere, and with only a few large, shaggy palm trees and flame-colored Birds of Paradise that gave the neighborhood a Southern California vibe.
When we arrived at the front door, my grandmother Goldie greeting us, saying warmly, “Come in! Come in!” and she pressed my cheeks with her soft, warm hands and kissed me tenderly, saying “Ninala!” Once inside, I noticed that the big table was already set up in the dining room, covered with the treasured lace tablecloth and the place settings that Grandma used for every family dinner. As always, there was nothing to indicate which holiday we were celebrating.
I had always known that I was Jewish. It was my bloodline, my parents told me, and it was even on my mother’s U.S. birth certificate as “Color: Jewish.” But I always understood, too, that my family was different than other Jewish families, especially the families of the Jewish kids at my grammar school, which was in the upper-middle class, predominately Jewish neighborhood of Westwood. This was because it wasn’t just my parents who did not believe in God, but neither did my mother’s parents also did not. Even though both my grandmother and grandfather grew up in Lithuania in Jewish shtetls and my grandmother’s father had been a rabbi, my grandparents both were committed Communists who believed that religion was “the opiate of the masses.” So at that time, I had never even set foot in a temple, and when most of the Jewish kids at my grammar school went off to Hebrew school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I simply went home on the school bus. I had to admit I was very curious about what this “Hebrew school” thing was and sometimes even felt a bit left out, but I was also happy enough not to be going to any more school, whatever the kind.
After saying hello to everyone, the first thing I did was to walk around the big table, counting the places: Grandma, Grandpa, Mommy, Daddy, Auntie Estelle, Uncle Morrie, Cousin Susan. That meant there were not enough seats at the table for us three kids— me, my brother, Danny, and my cousin Stevie! So we were going to be exiled to a “kid’s table” in the kitchen again! I hated that. I always wanted to be at the big table where the stories and the jokes were told, even if sometimes the punch lines were delivered in Yiddish and when the grownups laughed, I had no idea what was so funny.
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