I Was the Dreidel 

by Madlynn Haber (Northampton, MA)

I was the dreidel, which was the starring role in the play called “The Dreidel That Wouldn’t Spin,” when I was 11 years old.  I can’t remember having any lines to say. But I do remember the costume. It was made of four pieces of cardboard, which formed a square, with elastic bands holding the cardboard up on my shoulders.

I can’t remember the story either. What was the plot? Why didn’t the dreidel spin? How did it resolve? I assume the dreidel found a way to spin. I like to picture myself twirling around on the stage—a swirling, tap-dancing dreidel in a great Broadway musical. But  that’s not what happened. There wasn’t even a stage. Just chairs set up in rows in a dingy basement.

It was a poor Jewish neighborhood after-school program, unaffiliated with any synagogue or congregation. That’s one of the parts that stayed with me, the lack of affiliation. Also the immobile dreidel, boxed in, unable to spin, stubbornly refusing to go along.

After the play, the cast gathered together around a menorah. We each said something as we lit a candle. It couldn’t have been the traditional blessings. It wasn’t a traditional Hebrew school. We learned Yiddish instead of Hebrew and believed in socialism instead of God.

I had asked to go to Hebrew school when I was in the fourth grade and after I found myself drifting into churches, kneeling and staring at the statues of Mary and Jesus. My parents couldn’t afford the price of joining a synagogue where I could go to Hebrew school and learn how to pray. Instead, they sent me to this secular Jewish school where I learned to play bingo in Yiddish.

I remember very clearly the image of my father’s face as I looked out into the audience above the light of those Chanukah candles. It may have been the last time I saw him in my childhood. Shortly after, he moved away and wasn’t heard from again. (As an adult, I tracked him down, found the rooming house where he lived, and visited him at the taxi company where he worked.)

On the day of the play, my father came to pick us up in a long, black Plymouth. It must have been shortly after my parents’ separation. We didn’t have a car when he lived with us, and he acquired the Plymouth right after he left. Coming down the front stoop with the screen door slamming behind us, my mother and I got our first glimpse of that car with its high fins. My father was smiling, a proud grin on his face as he opened the car door to let us in.

I slid into the front seat, positioned between him and my mother.  She shut the door and made a tight fist with her right hand.  Then, she sharply tapped on the top of the dashboard. With a slight sneer, she said, “Kind of tinny isn’t it?” My father’s smile faded. None of us spoke after that comment as we drove to the Jewish School.

Years later I learned the traditional Chanukah blessings in Hebrew. Memories of starring in that play return when I light the menorah. I remember the silence in the car.  I can see my father’s grinning face. I can hear my mother’s sarcastic voice. And I can remember myself when I was eleven and I was an immobile dreidel, unable to spin.

Madlynn Haber is a writer living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her work has been published in the anthologies Letters from Daughters to Fathers and Word of Mouth, Volume Two, and in Anchor Magazine and a forthcoming issue of Exit 13 Magazine.