by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)
“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 Illinois 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. 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.
Then I went into the kitchen to verify that, yes, the small red and silver kitchen table was set for three. But what was that next to each of the plates? A small, mesh bag of gold coins! Auntie Estelle walked up behind me, placed her hands on my shoulders, and laughed. “It’s Hanukah gelt!” she said.
Suddenly I was happy. I’d seen those golden “coins” before in Jewish delis and was fascinated by the candy that looked like money, just as I was by any candy that looked like something else, no matter how it tasted. But these, I knew, were chocolate coins. My grandmother was a renowned cook, who baked perfect desserts that the grown-ups raved about, like mandel bread, poppy seed cookies, and sponge cakes. But those plain desserts were always disappointing. I always wondered: Where were the chocolate chips? Where was the yummy chocolate frosting?
Then my Grandma Goldie came into the kitchen, put her flowered apron on over her neat navy blue dress, and started grating potatoes for latkes. On Jewish holidays, my grandma always cooked an entire multi-course meal for the family from scratch, making the same dishes that her two daughters and their husbands remembered from their childhoods. I sat down at the kitchen table and watched my lovely grandmother—with her soft pale skin, soft curly grey hair, soft smile, and soft voice—doing one of the things that she did best: cooking delicious food for her family.
Then Danny and Stevie came running into the kitchen but stopped suddenly, eyes growing larger, when they saw what was on the table.
“It’s Hanukah gelt!” I said.
“Oh, boy, candy!”
“And it’s chocolate candy!”
As the boys scrambled into their seats at the table, I could hear the adults in the other room, saying “delicious, Goldie,” and “absolutely wonderful,” about the chopped liver they were smearing onto pieces of matzoh. I wondered as always how they could possibly love the pungent, rancid, fatty flavor of that unappetizing-looking brownish paste. Then, as they often did, they started to talk about people who were not there.
I knew that my grandfather, Meyer, who was the oldest son in his family, had come by himself to the U.S. from Lithuania when he was only sixteen, settling in Chicago where there was already a community of Lithuanian Jews. Once there, he earned enough money to bring his father over to join him, and then he and his father worked together to earn the money to bring the rest of the family over to join him, including his mother and the rest of his siblings. That was why Meyer was a hero to his family, and all his siblings looked up to him.
My mother had told me so many stories about what it was like to grow up as part of that extended Davis family—all those crazy aunts and uncles, with their radical politics, vegetarian diets and goat’s milk fresh from the farm, nude swims at night in Lake Michigan, and romantic spats, and the crowd of all-girl cousins who played cards and gossiped and slept together in an abandoned box car on the lake shore every summer. Most of that family was still in Chicago, where I had never been.
My grandmother, who was from a different part of Lithuania than my grandfather, had also come to the U.S. alone at age 18. She had joined two of her older sisters in Chicago, then met and married my grandfather shortly after that. So, although my grandmother’s parents, brothers, and one sister stayed behind in Lithuania, my grandmother, too, had a few relatives the Chicago area. And both my mother and her sister, Estelle, had grown up there, surrounded by a large, extended family, as had Cousin Susan, Estelle’s daughter from her second marriage.
All those relatives from Chicago—whom I had never even met—seemed to be what the grownups in the family talked about when we gathered together on holidays. For me, in their ghostlike presence, they vastly outnumbered the group of real, live humans sitting at the family table, making our immediate family feel small and incomplete.
Soon the kitchen was filled with the warm, savory smell of frying onions and potatoes, and my grandmother set the first batch of latkes on the kitchen table in front of Danny, Stevie, and me. She served us each a pancake, along with boiled chicken, cooked carrots, and applesauce. “Eat, children! Enjoy!” she said and then turned back to the stove. And no one, I noticed, was saying anything about Hannukah—there were still no special words about what we were celebrating or why.
And when the grownups were finally served their dinner, I heard them saying the same two words they always said at the beginning of our dinners, “La chaim!” That simply meant, I knew, “To life!” And those words were not religious, not a blessing, not a prayer, not any kind of grace. But even just that simple Hebrew phrase told me that being Jewish still meant something to my family. Yes, they were all atheists, but they always gathered together on holidays like Passover and Rosh Hashanah that only Jewish people celebrated, where they ate food that only Jewish people cooked—chicken soup with matzo balls gefilte fish chopped liver potato latkes blintzes stuffed cabbage brisket smoked white fish pickled herring tzimmes potato kugel kasha varnishkes kishke noodle kugel rye bread matzo taiglach mandelbrot sponge cake halvah hamantaschen.
I knew that my grandparents, both Jewish, had married each other, and my mother had married a Jewish man, my dad, and all her girl cousins had married Jewish men, too, and all three of Aunt Estelle’s husbands had been Jewish. I knew that something happened to my grandma’s family in Lithuania during the Holocaust, but besides the fact that being Jewish was something you could be killed for, what else did being Jewish really mean to my family?
Grandma’s latkes were perfect: crisp and golden on the outside, tender and savory on the inside. And the carrots were slightly firm and deliciously sweet. We three kids quickly polished off our food, including second helpings of the latkes, and then gazed longingly at our bags of Hannukah gelt. Then we had a conversation that went something like this:
“I wonder what ‘gelt’ is,” I said
“It means ‘money,’ I think,” Stevie said.
“Money,” I said. “Yeah, ‘cause it looks like money. Hmmm. But why is the chocolate money Jewish? And why is there chocolate money on Hannukah?
“’Cause it’s Hannukah tradition,” Stevie said, “you know, like the menorah.”
“But isn’t the menorah ‘cause Hannukah is supposed to celebrate some miracle of oil burning in some temple for eight days instead of one?”
“Well, yeah.”
“That doesn’t seem like very big of a miracle,” Danny said.
“What doesn’t?” Stevie said.
“Oil for eight days.”
“Well, maybe that’s why it’s a dumb holiday we don’t usually celebrate in our family,” I said.
“Yeah, ‘cause the miracle isn’t very miraculous!” Stevie said. We all laughed.
“I want to eat my gelt now!” Danny said.
“I’ll ask!” Stevie said.
When permission was granted, we ripped open our mesh bags and poured the golden coins onto the table to inspect them. There were coins in three different sizes, each embossed with mysterious Hebrew characters. I wanted to make my candy last as long as possible, so I selected one of the smallest coins to start with. I carefully peeled off the top layer of foil to reveal a flat, round disk of soft, limp milk chocolate, broke off a piece, and inhaled an odd sickly sweet scent that reminded me of Play Doh. When I placed the chocolate on my tongue, I concluded that it was blander, softer, and nowhere near as good as a Hershey Bar, but still it was chocolate, something I never ever had before at grandma’s house.
As the three of us were focused on taking tiny bites of our chocolate coins, both of our grandparents came into the kitchen and stood together next to the table. I was surprised that my grandfather, who typically ignored all his grandchildren, was now gazing down at us with interest. A tall, thin, handsome man with iron grey hair and glasses, remote and mysterious, he always seemed to be sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette and reading the Daily World when Danny and I were spending time with our grandma.
“Your grandpa wants to give you real Hannukah gelt,” our grandma said. Then my grandpa reached into his pockets and handed each of us five large silver coins. “He made a special trip to the bank just to get silver dollars for you children,” grandma added.
“Happy Hannukah,” grandpa said.
I stammered, “Uh, thank you, Grandpa.”
And the boys chimed in, “Yeah, thank you, Grandpa! Happy Hannukah.”
After our grandparents returned to the dining room, I held the heavy silver coins in the palm of my hand and studied them. I realized then that for this night a special dinner had been arranged just so my grandfather could give us, his grandchildren, a gift. I guessed that giving coins to children on Hannukah was traditional, and that my grandpa had been given them when he was a child in Lithuania because, otherwise, why else would he have given them to us? But it was so difficult to imagine the world from which he and my grandmother had come. There was a religion I didn’t understand, a language I didn’t know, and a feeling of belonging to a group of people I had never seen, yet I was somehow tied to it all, through these two people, my grandparents, and through these very coins they had given me.
The gift from my grandfather should have been making me glad, so why did I feel so much sorrow mixed in with my happiness, like that time I went swimming in a natural hot springs up in the Sierras, and the strong current of the hot geyser water that was bubbling up from a crack in the earth kept pushing me back out into the icy water of the river of melted snow that was rushing down from the mountains, and I had to keep swimming and swimming just to stay in the warmth?
“Wow! Five whole silver dollars!” Stevie said. “That’s a lot of money. And they’re probably worth even more than just a dollar ‘cause these coins are really old. Look at the year on this one: 1898!”
“I’m not gonna spend mine,” I said. “I’m just gonna keep them. I’m gonna eat all the chocolate but I’ll keep the real money forever and ever.”
“Me, too!”
“Me, three!”
Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (see yogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right.
The Jewish Writing Project 