On the night that Mom forgot Hanukkah, she left a message on my voicemail in a halting tone. It said simply, “For some reason I can’t remember the story of Hanukkah.”
At 99, my mother’s always good memory had started to slip. She wanted to know if I could write down the story and bring it to her.
Granted, it can be a convoluted story, so I boiled it down to the nugget. Bad guys desecrated the Temple. Good guys drove them out and discovered that the sacred lamp oil had been destroyed, except for one night’s supply. But miraculously, that oil lasted for eight nights. So, now we light candles for eight nights of Hanukkah to commemorate the miracle.
“That sounds about right,” Mom laughed.
With the story out of the way, I wanted to know what she remembered about the holiday when she was growing up in the Bronx. Her mother, a Russian immigrant, was widowed when Mom was three. The youngest child of a family of five brothers and two much older sisters, Mom talked about them all playing the dreidel game with pennies instead of wooden tops like the ones I grew up with.
When she won a game, (not so easy, I discovered as I tried spinning a penny), she would head to the candy store down the street from their tiny apartment and buy a chocolate candy shaped like a small pineapple for two cents.
So the sweet tooth we have always teased Mom about started at a very young age.
She described the wonderful smells that came from her mother’s kosher kitchen, with the two stoves, one gas and one coal, as she fried latkes (potato pancakes). She set platters of them out for the children. served with homemade applesauce and challah bread. And they sat at the crowded kitchen table, next to the steamer trunk full of memories brought from the old country and ate by the light of the Hanukkah candles burning in the menorah.
“It sounds so warm and happy, Mom,” I said.
“Yes, but I like the way you do it at your house with the stories.”
She was referring to “The Power of Light: Eight Stories for Hanukkah” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. She loved the way George read the stories with deep feeling.
The Hanukkah after Mom passed away George, Sara and I took latkes to her grave and George read from “The Power of Light.” We were going to make it a tradition but George passed away before the next Hanukkah and the night froze into a singular celebration.
Now, seven years later, as I look through the book, I can hear George’s voice bringing life to the stories and see the smile of pleasure on my mother’s face as she listened to him read. I think I would tell my mother now that she didn’t forget Hanukkah. It was always in her heart.
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