A Merry Little Hanukah

By MENACHEM WECKER

HOW TO SPELL CHANUKAH… AND OTHER HOLIDAY DILEMMAS
18 Writers Celebrate 8 Nights
Edited by Emily Franklin
225 pages. Algonquin Books. $18.95.

“You don’t need ‘Deck the Halls’ or ‘Jingle Bell Rock,’” sang Adam Sandler in his “Chanukah Song” (1994), “‘Cause you can spin a dreidel with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock—both Jewish.” Sandler’s song, dedicated to “all those nice little Jewish kids who don’t get to hear any Chanukah songs,” was particularly funny, because it was such an inside-baseball reference about an anything-but-high holiday. But despite Sandler’s efforts, Hanukah remains that other December event, evidenced by a recent collection of 18 essays on the Festival of Lights. Almost every one references Christmas.

“I doubt many Jewish writers are asked to contribute to Christmas anthologies,” admitted Emily Franklin, editor of How to Spell Chanukah, in an email. Yet, Christmas is part of many Jews’ winter traditions, so “the mention or inclusion of the trees and stockings is inevitable.” Unlike Hanukah, Christmas is often viewed secularly, according to Franklin, who has authored several teen-girl fiction books. “My grandparents, who are Jewish, celebrated Christmas in Flatbush with their families growing up because they were ‘trying to be American,’” she said. “It’s a complicated issue.”

The 18 non-fiction pieces include a wide range of images and characters, from a kid playing God by manipulating Jewish and Syrian action figures in a papier-mâché Temple replica to a tale of lost love at a Jewish Day School choir. Franklin commissioned each essay for the anthology—no reprints here—since there were so few examples of Hanukah-inspired memoirs. “I didn’t want to create a unified book of pleasant latke memories but rather explore the variety of experiences out there that can be put under the menorah umbrella, so to speak,” she said.

Joanna Smith Rakoff’s “Dolls of the World” begins with her parents’ move to a San Jose retirement community. Asked if she wanted her parents’ menorah, Rakoff can’t picture it. “Was it brass? It hadn’t figured prominently in my childhood mythology.” She passes on the souvenir of a holiday she recalls spending “with minimal to no merrymaking,” especially since her mother hated messy cooking. “Standing over a frying pan for the better part of an evening, getting splattered with an ever-graying batch of batter and hot spurts of corn oil, was definitely not on her list of favored tasks.”

When, anxious to partake of December doughnuts and dreidels with her friends, Rakoff asks about Hebrew school, her parents tell her Hebrew schools requires synagogue membership, and “We’re not sure we believe in God.” At age eight, Rakoff’s longing catches her mother’s attention, but she misdiagnoses it as Rakoff’s jealousy of her Christian friends. “‘It’s hard to be Jewish at Christmas,’” she comforts Rakoff. “‘Everyone is having fun. It’s seductive.’”

Yet Rakoff longs for the communal, familial aspect of Christmas, not the presents. “But what was an authentic Chanukah for an American family?” she wonders. “The truth is, there was no such thing. We grown-ups are now all too coolly aware of Chanukah’s minimal religious significance, that it was a minor holiday, artificially boosted to Christmas-level status.”

This perspective of Hanukah as a sham permeates many of the essays. “Chanukah is really not that big a deal, religiously speaking,” writes Elisa Albert in “Week at a Glance.” “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!”

According to Joshua Braff’s “The Blue Team,” both Hanukah and Christmas “were intended to be religious events but seemed less about God and more about the mall. Both had bearded men on their respective wrapping paper, both had just dynamite, knee-tapping songs written for them, and both were celebrations of truly brave Jews.”

It takes the atheist in Steve Almond to defend Hanukah. Speaking to “those of you who, like me, have fallen away from God, or never knew Him,” who “learned to regard the Almighty as a lunatic superstition,” and who “consider the essential miracle to be consciousness,” Almond issues a commandment in “Chanukah Your Hearts Out!”: “Look not with derision upon the festival of Chanukah.” He continues, “Neither mock the holiday with jokes or silly songs, nor dismiss it as a triviality trumped up to match the retail onslaught of Christmas. Let not these days pass as any others might, as if you were like any other person. You are not. We are not.”

Almond’s defense of Hanukah then has everything to do with Jews being unique children of Abraham, who incidentally “nearly smote his own boy out of dumb loyalty,” and little to do with the Maccabees. Almond stresses that Jews cannot escape their Jewishness and assimilate, even though it is easier to “disavow the tangled skein of our history. Chanukah schmanukah, we might say. More propaganda from the home office.”

Readers who seek true insights, rather than experiences that nod at the holiday, will have to turn to Tova Mirvis’ “Chanukah Glutton.” Mirvis’ story begins like many of the others, lamenting her children’s greed and materialism, and worrying how a latke overdose will jive with her Weight Watchers program. While baking potato latkes, Mirvis ponders the real miracle of Hanukah: “a little becoming a lot.” This holds for both the small jug of oil lasting eight days in the Temple candelabrum and the inferior Jewish guerrilla group fending off the Syrian army. Mirvis decides this enlargement holds true for the minor holiday itself, which came to “occupy a prominent space in American Jewish life.”

But to Mirvis, one of Hanukah’s central themes, which “is generally forgotten once the festivities are under way,” is the rabbinic requirement “to give thanks.” Mirvis swaps the “obligatory Christmas reference” for “the American celebration of Thanksgiving,” where “abundance is tempered by gratitude, and by the realization that it didn’t have to turn out this way.”

Asked what sort of story she would contribute to a Hanukah anthology, Franklin came up with something that resembles Mirvis’ message of thanks. “My happiest memories of this season are of being together with family,” she said of her husband and four children. She would include her recipes for potato, zucchini and sweet potato latkes. But though presents would kick in seven of the nights, there would be one when “none of us receive gifts but instead give to others—the kids choose the charity, and we give the money from this night to them and discuss the cause.”