“There’s going to be trouble if I catch you using the Cuisinart,” somebody always yells from another room. “The potatoes and onions have to be grated by hand.”
I cannot count the number of times I have stood in someone’s kitchen under this threat, eyeing the food processor with longing.
Making latkes always seems to involve taking turns scraping unpeeled, organic russet potatoes over the large holes of a beat-up four-sided metal grater — a process that makes as much sense to me as jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. Even with a parachute, it seems like a pretty extreme way of reminding yourself how it feels to be alive.
But for most diaspora Jews in the United States, that’s the essence of Hannukah, a celebration of thousands of years of Jewish resilience and self-preservation against the many campaigns of erasure we’ve been subjected to.
Like many Jews of the post-Holocaust generation, we have a family menorah with special family significance. My late mother-in-law was the same age as Anne Frank, born in Berlin and living there on Kristallnacht in November 1938 when the Nazi SS burst into their apartment and took away her father and brother.
There’s no playbook for what to do on the night when your democratically elected government sponsors riots against your Jewish community. Parents had to improvise.
There’s no playbook for what to do on the night when your democratically elected government sponsors riots against your Jewish community, with your fellow citizens rampaging through the streets of the Jewish quarter, breaking shop windows with sledgehammers, burning your synagogues, and throwing your friends and neighbors from rooftops.
Parents had to improvise.
So she and her mother did the best they could to try and survive the unspeakable misery unfolding outside their apartment — they stayed up all night and sculpted the entire story of Hansel and Gretel at the kitchen table. “That night I became a sculptor,” she told me.
Later, when her family was reunited, their parents put her and her brother on the last Kindertransport out of Berlin. They were eventually reunited again in New York, where she had a long and successful career as a sculptor and teacher of sculpture.
The menorah she crafted and that we use carries her story and all of our stories dating back to the desecration of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 168 BCE in and the “rededication”— or “Hanukkah” — three years later by the cranky band of village priest-warriors, known as Maccabees, who would rather fight and die than sacrifice their Jewish identity.
The Second Temple, as you might have inferred, had been rebuilt on the ruins of the First Temple, and the Western Wall that stands to this day in Jerusalem is one of its last remaining walls — one of many large-scale pieces of archaeological evidence of Jewish resilience in Jerusalem and in our ancestral homeland.
The menorah these priests rekindled in the reconsecrated temple was later depicted in the carved reliefs on the Arch of Titus, after the Roman Army’s final destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. You can still see this relief in the Forum in Rome. The carvings there clearly depict my ancestors being frog-marched out of Jerusalem as slaves all the way over to Europe, schlepping the temple’s holy menorah as one of the army’s most recognizable spoils of war.
We light candles to commemorate the rededication and the miracle of that one tiny, still-sealed, single-serve cruet of consecrated olive oil that they found in the temple’s ruins — a portion that burned for eight days and nights — a reminder that military victory and survival are as miraculous as our people’s continuous connection to our origins and to our story.
As the Israeli political writer Haviv Rettig Gur has often said, “A Jew who knows her own story is unstoppable.”
That link to oil is also why we eat fried things on Hanukkah, and in my family, that always means potato latkes with sour cream, salt, and applesauce.
“I don’t see why we bother with low-fat sour cream,” I’ve heard myself say more than once, poking the shredded potatoes with a wooden spoon in a big stainless steel mixing bowl filled with water and ice cubes. This is a trick we learned from my great-Uncle Bill. It keeps the shreds from discoloring.
“I mean, we’re frying the latkes. It’s not like we’re baking them.”
A voice always calls sternly from the other room.
“I heard that.”
