Dreidels on the Brain

by Joel ben Izzy

  Back to Ernie Maitloff—who said, “I think I get bar mitzvahed in February. Do I still have to memorize half the Torah?”

  Cantor Grubnitz sighed. “First of all, you won’t get bar mitzvahed. Second, it’s not ‘half the Torah.’ It’s your Haftorah. They’re writings from the prophets, which is what you will chant.”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Shelly Schwartz. She’s really smart, and kind of pretty. “Why don’t we read from the actual Torah?”

  “We don’t want you to get it dirty,” said Cantor Grubnitz, with a snort. “First, learn to chant your Haftorah and become a bat mitzvah. Then, when you’ve done that, you can talk to me about studying Torah.

  “But I know you won’t,” he added with a sigh. “Because no one ever does. You kids today with your transistor radios, you don’t care about being Jewish. You just want to mix in, assimilate with everyone else, and pretend you’re not Jewish. Just like the Jews in Germany, before The War . . .”

  Now it was our turn to sigh. Conversations always turn to what happened to the Jews in “The War.” And when someone says “The War,” you know exactly which war they mean. Not the Vietnam War—which technically isn’t even a war, though everyone calls it one—and not the Korean War, which was a war, but not the war. They don’t mean World War I either, which used to be called “The Great War”—not that there’s anything great about war in my book. But when people talk about “The War,” they always mean World War II.

  “What do you think happened to Jews who didn’t care about being Jewish during The War?” asked Cantor Grubnitz. “I’ll tell you what happened. The Nazis came and got them just the same. Took everything they had, then hauled them off to death camps. You understand? People have died for this religion of ours—and you kids can’t even be bothered to learn your Haftorah portions.”

  There’s nothing you can say or do when a teacher brings up the Holocaust. It’s like this card game called bridge where you put down a special card that’s called a “trump” and the game is over. The Holocaust hangs over Jewish conversations like a storm cloud. I don’t know very much about it, except that some people don’t want to talk about it, so when they do, they whisper. Then, once they start, they can’t stop. What I do know is that during The War the Nazis rounded up and killed six million Jews, in Germany, Poland, Austria, Hungary, and all over Eastern Europe. You know how many six million is? A lot. I asked Mr. DeGuerre, my math teacher, who said if you counted one number every single second and never slept, it would take eleven and a half days just to count to one million. Multiply that by six, and you get sixty-nine days—over two months—counting one number every second without a break. But these six million weren’t numbers, they were real people, with houses and families and stamp collections. And it’s not like they were doing anything wrong—they were just being Jewish. Some of them were my relatives.

  So, right from the first day of Hebrew school, when Cantor Grubnitz started talking about the Holocaust, I knew it was going to be a long year. In that class he also assigned us times to meet with him privately, in his office, which is filled with pictures of famous cantors and rabbis, and stinks of cigarette smoke. My day is Monday—today—which is a horrible way to start the week. At our first meeting he gave me a little yellow booklet with my Haftorah portion and a cassette tape he had recorded of himself singing it, which I was supposed to memorize.

  “And don’t lose it!” he said.

  Since then, every Monday afternoon has been pretty much the same. I go into his office and start to sing what I’ve learned of my Haftorah portion. I get about three lines in when he stops me, then gives me a lecture about how I’m not singing it right and I shouldn’t listen to transistor radios because people have died for our religion. Then he points at the pictures of famous cantors and rabbis and says how much more learned they are than I will ever be. Believe me, an hour of that is a very long time.

  Last night, though, long after the candles had burned down and I lay huddled under the covers in my bed, I had another talk with God and came up with a plan that was supposed to change today’s lesson.

  “All right, God,” I said, “I’m sorry I bothered you with the whole dreidel thing.” It’s funny, but the more you talk to God, the less weird it feels. That’s especially true if you figure there may not be anyone listening, so who cares? “And I know you’re really busy. So, for the record, I don’t care if I get only Shins from now on, okay? And you know what? I don’t need it to snow. I mean, it would be nice, but if you’re only going to do one miracle for me this Kchannuukkah, make my dad’s operation a success. Okay?”

  That’s what we found out last night, after we lit the candles and my mom said they had “news.”

  My brothers and I stared at one another. We don’t like news. We looked back at my mother, who was smiling and nodding the way she always does when something’s wrong. The bigger the smile, the worse it is, and this one was big.

  “Wait a minute,” my dad said. “Why the long faces? This is great news! It’s what we’ve been waiting for. I’m going back to the hospital!”

  Now we stared at him, baffled. How going back to the hospital could be good news was beyond us.

  “No, no,” he said, almost laughing. “You don’t understand. I’ve been seeing a new doctor, a surgeon named Dr. Kaplowski, at Kaiser in Los Angeles.” That explained the “errands” they’d been running downtown. “And he has a whole new procedure for arthritis.”

  “What is it?” asked Kenny.

  “Gold!” said my dad.

  “Gold?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Yep! Dr. Kaplowski is the most skilled surgeon in all Los Angeles! He’ll go into my hips, remove the arthritis, then coat the bones with gold! Real, twenty-four-karat gold—the smoothest thing there is. It never rusts, never tarnishes!”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Howard.

  “Because he’s very busy, and we weren’t sure we could schedule it,” said my dad. “And we didn’t want to get you all excited.”

  “Excited?” asked Kenny.

  “Yeah, this will be terrific!” he went on. “I go in on Wednesday morning. Then I’ll be able to walk with no problem. Not just walk, but run! And jump! And dance!”

  I could not remember ever seeing my dad run. I tried to imagine him dancing, but couldn’t. The closest I could come was a memory from when I was about three, of riding on the back of this green bicycle my dad used to have, as he pedaled along, whistling. My dad on a bicycle—can you imagine? Then, when we stopped, he lifted me up and put me on his shoulders!

  I’ve held on to that memory as tightly as I can, but every time he comes home from the hospital, more bent and broken, it grows fainter. Hospitals are where things go wrong, and the more times you go, the more wrong they get.

  But that’s not how my dad felt. “You know what it will be?” he said. “A miracle!”

  “So,” I said to God, before I went to sleep, “you heard my dad. Snow would still be nice, but the real miracle I want is for my dad. So he can walk. And dance”—then I added—“just not around me.” That’s when I came up with a plan I thought would seal the deal. “And in case my prayers aren’t enough, I’m going to ask Cantor Grubnitz to pray too.”

  It seemed worth a shot. Who knows, maybe God actually likes opera?

  Then, this morning, as I opened the door to walk to school, do you know what I saw?

  Snow.

  That’s right. Snow.

  Everywhere.

  Well, it wasn’t exactly snow. But it was frost, and lots of it, which is practically snow. It covered our lawn, the cars, the mailbox. Tiny icicles hung from the branches of the elm tree in our front yard, and you could feel there was more to come. I checked the barometer on our porch—still between 29 and 30, but now it looked a little closer to 30. I stepped out of the house to explore what was almost a winter won
derland.

  Everything was covered with ice, and as I walked, I could see my breath, which I tried to blow into rings of smoke, like Bilbo in The Hobbit. I couldn’t do it, but it was still pretty cool. Not just cool, but cold. I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets and started walking to school, picturing my father dancing and singing, like Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, with his new golden joints.

  Frosty as it was, it wouldn’t actually count as snow until there were flakes falling from the sky. I needed to see at least one—or two, so I could compare. That’s one of the amazing things about snow: Every single flake is different. Even if you have six million of them, they’re all different. I walked up Kimdale Drive, looking to the sky for that first flake.

  Mr. Culpepper says that if you’re going to tell someone a story, you need to tell them where it’s happening, and I haven’t done that. Here I’ve been going on and on about Cantor Grubnitz and dreidels and golden hips and chopped liver and everything else, but I haven’t told you anything about where I live, here in Temple City. I’m like “the butcher who backed up into his meat grinder” Mr. Culpepper always talks about, “who got a little behind in his work.”

  It’s called “setting the scene,” and Mr. Culpepper gave lots of examples from Tom Sawyer, which we’re reading in class and takes place in a town called St. Petersburg on the banks of the Mississippi River.

  Describing a place is no problem when it’s exciting and colorful like St. Petersburg, with riverboats and haunted houses and buried treasure. But “setting the scene” is harder here in Temple City, because it is the least interesting place in the world.

  Even the name “Temple City” is a cruel joke—there’s no temple and no city. All right, that’s not technically true. There is a temple, but we don’t go there. It’s like the joke my dad told me about the Jewish guy who gets stranded alone on a desert island in the middle of nowhere. Twenty years later a passing ship rescues him. Before he leaves, he takes the crew on a tour of the island to show them everything he’s built. “Over there is my house, and that’s my store, where I sell myself coconuts. Here’s the school, where I would send my kids if I had any. Finally, here’s one temple—and there’s the other.”

  “Wait a minute!” says the captain. “I can see why you have a house, and maybe a store, and even a school for kids you don’t have. But why two temples?”

  He pointed at one. “That one,” he says, “I wouldn’t set foot in.”

  So, we don’t go to the temple in Temple City. When we want to be Jewish, we schlepp across town to another temple three suburbs over. But don’t be fooled: Temple City isn’t named for the temple. It’s named for Mr. Temple, who, by the way, wasn’t Jewish, because Temple isn’t a Jewish name. Go figure. As far as I can tell, he was the one who came up with the money to plan out Temple City, which I figure cost a dollar and seventy-nine cents. That’s how much a pad of graph paper costs at Midway Drug Store. And really, he only needed one sheet to plan our city; he probably used the other pages to plan out the other suburbs around here as well because, like Temple City, they’re all squares, squares, and more boring squares.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking, especially if you’re not from around here. That Los Angeles is Hollywood, and that’s where movie stars live. That’s what my cousin Abby thought, when she came here from Bethesda, Maryland, last year for Kenny’s bar mitzvah. As soon as she got here she started looking around, like she was trying to find someone. When we asked what she was doing, she said she was looking for celebrities. We laughed and explained that we’ve been here all our lives and have never seen anyone famous, and that movie stars aren’t actually real people, and even if they were, they would hang out at the beach, which is miles and miles from Temple City.

  You might be wondering how my family ended up stuck here, in Temple City. I wonder the same thing. As near as I can figure, it’s because of the Rose Parade. My mom and dad both grew up in Cleveland, a big, old industrial city that’s so polluted that a couple years ago its Great Lake—Erie—actually caught on fire! That’s bad. But that was during the summer, when Cleveland is hot and sticky. In the winter it’s freezing, too cold to go outside. As kids they would wake up each New Year’s Day, trapped in their houses, looking for some way to escape, and turn on the TV. And what would they see?

  Thousands of people, some in shorts and shirtsleeves, standing along a boulevard lined with palm trees stretching up to the sky, in a place called Pasadena, California. Huge floats glided past, everyone on them wearing beautiful gowns or bathing suits, smiling and waving. But the most amazing thing of all was what covered the floats. Roses. Bazillions of them, something unimaginable in the Cleveland winter. Had a single rose appeared anywhere in Cleveland, it would have instantly frozen and shattered, its petals falling to the ground. Yet, there they were in full bloom. To people trapped in Cleveland—including my parents, who hadn’t seen the sun in weeks—Southern California was paradise. Though their TVs could only show the rose-covered floats in black-and-white, my parents saw them in every imaginable color—and in those colors, the dream of a new life.

  A lot of people have dreams they never follow—but not my dad. He told me how he and my mom decided to get married and move out west, where they would buy their very own bungalow set on a hillside surrounded by orange trees. Every orange you ate would remind you that you were living the Pasadena Dream.

  By the time I was born, at the rear end of the 1950s, that dream had all but faded away. It turns out my parents hadn’t been the only ones to see the Rose Parade. Millions of people came to Southern California, filling up Pasadena and spilling down into the San Gabriel Valley. They started new suburbs, and suburbs of those suburbs—including Temple City. And they all drove cars, clogging up the freeways and filling the valley with a gray muffin of smog.

  And what about the Pasadena Dream? I’ve only ever glimpsed it. I remember one day when I was about five years old, this winter storm came through and washed away the smog. The next morning, the weather suddenly turned hot—you could actually see the steam rising from the ground. The desert was blooming! I looked up to the north, where there’s usually just smog, and saw mountains sharp and purple against the sky. Actually purple, like the song about purple mountain majesties! I’d never seen anything so beautiful. And you know what was at the top of the biggest mountain, which is called Mount Baldy? Snow. Crisp and white, like you could reach across the sky and touch it.

  That’s when I started praying for it to snow here, in Temple City. I don’t know where you are. You may live somewhere where it snows all the time, like Cleveland. Or Chicago. Or Buffalo. Maybe you’ve been slogging through a long, hard winter, filled with sleet and slush and rain and all that stuff that won’t stop the postman but makes everyone else miserable. But that’s not the kind of snow I’m talking about. I’m talking about the kind of snow that falls silently at night, so you awake to a world transformed. The kind you look back upon years later with a warm glow, recalling how wondrous your childhood was. Like the snow I read about in a poem by Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, where he couldn’t remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when he was twelve, or for twelve days and twelve nights when he was six. That’s what I mean: magical snow.

  Of course, that’s Christmas snow, which is goyisha, but what’s wrong with that? Dylan Thomas wasn’t Jewish, but Robert Zimmerman liked his poetry so much, he borrowed his name. That’s how he became Bob Dylan. And do you know who came up with the idea of a “White Christmas” in the first place? I’ll tell you who. Irving Berlin, the songwriter. Yep, Jewish. In fact, I looked him up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and his real name was Israel Isidore Beilin. You can’t get more Jewish than that.

  So I got to thinking, why not Khanuyakah snow? Like the kind that falls in Chelm. That’s one of my favorite places in the world, even though it doesn’t exist. It’s the mythical Jewish town of fools in Poland. My mother to
ld me about it. She said that she used to hear stories about it from her father—my grandpa Izzy. He died five years ago of cancer and I only ever met him a couple of times, but he was sweet, and funny. When I was younger I used to ask her to tell me the stories, but she never quite did. Instead she told me about Grandpa Izzy, and what a great storyteller he was.

  Then one day, Mrs. Molatsky, the librarian at our temple, told me about a book called Zlateh the Goat filled with stories about Chelm. I know Zlateh sounds like a weird name, and it is, even for a goat, but it’s my favorite book. It’s by this author named Isaac Bashevis Singer, with drawings by this other guy named Maurice Sendak, and it’s great. One of the stories is called “The Snow in Chelm.” It’s about how one Hahnukkah the elders are sitting around stroking their beards—as near as I can tell, everyone in Chelm has beards—wondering what to do about the fact that they don’t have any money. Then they look out the window and see that, while they’ve been talking, snow has fallen, and it shines and sparkles in the sun. They decide it’s not just snow, but actually silver and pearls and diamonds—the answer to all their woes! They’ll be rich!

  But there’s a problem. If the people of Chelm walk in the snow, they’ll trample the diamonds and jewels. So they decide to send a messenger to tell the Chelmites not to walk on the snow. They all agree, but then there’s another problem: The messenger will trample the snow. Oy! They think some more and come up with a brilliant plan: The messenger should be carried on a table by four strong men, so his feet won’t touch the snow.

  In the kitchen they find Gimpel the errand boy, and have the four cooks carry him all over town, knocking on everyone’s windows, telling them not to walk on the snow. They visit every single house to deliver the message. Then the sun rises, and what do they see?