A Child's Hanukah (and Christmas) in Queens

By MARGO RABB

As a child, I thought it was an unspoken fact that Hanukah paled drastically when compared to Christmas. The Festival of Lights seemed in another dimension entirely from the dazzling monstrosity of a tree hovering over Rockefeller Center, the intricate scenes in Lord & Taylor’s and Bloomingdale’s shop windows, the Sears catalog, Macy’s Santaland, and best of all, Snoopy’s, Frosty’s, and Rudolph’s TV specials. In our house, we succumbed to the Christmas frenzy, and not even guiltily—I felt proud of my modern parents, since my sister and I were the only ones among our Jewish friends who were allowed to leave cookies for Santa and put up a tree (albeit usually a free tree, obtained after dark on December 24^th, when the sellers had gone home). I didn’t really understand why my Jewish friends weren’t allowed to do this, either, since religion seemed to have little to do with the holiday, as far as I understood—certainly religion had nothing to do with the Christmas of Snoopy, Frosty, or Rudolph.

My parents have since passed away, so I can’t ask them what made them embrace both holidays. My mother was raised Orthodox, and my father in a Yiddish-speaking secular home. But the idea of celebrating Christmas was never even discussed—it was just accepted; it was what our family did. I think now that my parents’ reasons for it were complicated, but a main factor, I believe, was that it was a luxury we could afford because we lived in Queens. Queens: the land of all-encompassing culture, the capital of mish-mash, of Greek diners beside Irish bars next to Jewish delis and Turkish, Korean, and Pakistani grocers. We lived in a borough that pretty much celebrated everything.

My school district in Queens has been, for years, one of the most ethnically diverse in the city. At P.S. 11, my elementary school, Jews were a minority—as was nearly everyone. Most of my elementary school classmates were either born in a foreign country themselves, or their parents were. In my third-grade class my peers hailed from Iran, Ireland, Romania, Israel, Mexico, Thailand, Argentina, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Germany, Pakistan, Japan, Greece, China, Korea, India, Russia, and Turkey. And that’s of a class of 28 students. An attempt was made to incorporate these varying nationalities into the curriculum via international food festivals, when everyone brought their family’s specialty (always one of the best days of the year), and regular reports on our different holidays. Each year, I and the three other Jewish students in my class reported on Rosh Hashanah, Hanukah, and Passover—the history, traditions, songs, and food and entertainment.

I was always the Food and Entertainment reporter, discussing the virtues of playing dreidl for m&m’s vs. pennies; I described in detail my cousin Ruth Rosenblatt’s legendary latkes, unique in their non-greasiness.

This is not to say that either my sister or I appreciated the diversity of our neighborhood at the time, or appreciated Queens at all. It was the opposite. We were perpetually begging our parents to exchange our row house for a farm in the Midwest.

I’m convinced that the cause of this was books. The books that my sister and I devoured as children were not city books—our two favorite series were Little House on the Prairie and The Great Brain, set in the Midwest and Utah, respectively. We read and re-read them until the covers nearly fell off. Rural life seemed such a better alternative to the incessantly rumbling subway, the kickball games in our alley, the occasional giggle-inducing flasher, and our omnipresent neighbor Lucille in her bathrobe and curlers, smoking a cigarette outside her basement apartment. As soon as we could, we fled the city for schools far away—I went to college in Indiana, and my sister to Pennsylvania and then Utah.

Being in the Midwest was the first time that I felt different for being Jewish. At Passover, I went to the local Kroger’s grocery store to buy matzo meal. When I couldn’t find it on the shelves, I asked the manager for help. “Motso Meal?” he asked, squinting. “It’s Jewish,” I said. “For Passover.” He told me: “Check in the ethnic section, next to the salsa and the soy sauce.” I met people who’d never seen a Jewish person before, who thought it was “fascinating.” But mostly, I felt left out by the huge towering electric cross along the drive to Indiana on I-70, and the pervasive Christian feeling on campus. When my anthropology professor used the words “our culture” I squirmed. Our? Who’s “our”? My mother was born in Germany, and my father in Brooklyn, though his parents had emigrated from Poland—I had felt almost Mayflowery in comparison to most of my elementary school classmates, but now I felt odd. Now I missed the Jewish feeling of New York, something I’d barely been cognizant of before. I sought out other Jewish students on campus, and I began to feel more Jewish than I ever had before.

This experience of going to the Midwest and feeling like an outsider, of feeling different for the first time, is what inspired my own series of young adult novels, Missing Persons, which is (not exactly coincidentally) about two Jewish sisters from Queens who run away to Indiana. To avoid being caught by their wicked stepmother, the girls need to hide their identities, including their Jewishness, to fit in. Doing this makes the sisters realize how important being Jewish is to them. They’re forced to celebrate Hanukah in secret, and having to pretend to celebrate Christmas gives them little pleasure.

I, too, have lost my interest in Christmas, and no longer have a Christmas tree. And my family’s Hanukah parties are still going strong—they’re smaller, and sadly, Ruth Rosenblatt has passed away, so another cousin makes the latkes. And I live in New York once more, in Brooklyn, where my local grocery has an entire shelf dedicated to matzo meal.