Chapter 18
18
It was 1997.
I was thirteen, braces on my teeth, hair an uncontrolled cloud of dark puffy curls. At this tender age, I was somehow considered a woman by my people. I’d just celebrated my bat mitzvah. But I didn’t feel like a woman. I felt like a child, and an awkward one at that.
I’d recently had to move out of my room, and into my little sister Rosie’s room, so that my grandmother could have the space that used to be mine. I hated sharing a room with seven-year-old Rosie. But I was also fascinated, excited, and a little terrified to have Bubbe living with us.
Bubbe moved in the week before Thanksgiving, so by the time Hanukkah rolled around, we’d all had a little bit of time to settle in to the new arrangements. But it was still fresh, still strange. My father was polite and respectful to his mother-in-law, in spite of the fact that with my parents, Bubbe was difficult, her mood often sour, her tone sharp. But with Rosie and me, she softened. We were her bubbelehs , her little dolls. She adored us. She would do anything for us.
The first night of Hanukkah, I had the privilege of lighting the candles. I carefully lit the shamash, the helper candle, with a butane lighter. Then I used the shamash to light the first candle in the menorah. It looked so lonely, perched all on its own in the silver-filigreed hanukkiah. But at least the helper candle sat nearby, adding its light in solidarity.
We sang the blessings together: “Baruch ata Adonai, eloheinu melech ha-olam, asher kidshanu b’mitz’vo’tav v’tzi-vanu l’hadlik ner shel Chanukah.”
“Happy Hanukkah!” Mom said, clapping her hands merrily. “Time for presents! David, help me with the big one...”
My parents exited the room. Rosie, eager for presents, grabbed a dreidel and sat on the floor, spinning it to distract herself until our parents returned. She was humming the old tune “I Have a Little Dreidel.”
Bubbe’s eyes were fixed on the flickering flames, but then she turned them toward me.
“You know, bubbeleh ,” she said in her thick Yiddish accent. “Hanukkah isn’t really about presents.”
I nodded solemnly, although I was pretty sure that Hanukkah was, in fact, very much about presents. Bubbe’s face was lined and solemn, her lips narrow and well-defined. Her snowy hair was short, curling slightly around her ears, but not as tightly coiled as my mother’s or mine. It was finer, like Rosie’s, although before it went white, it was as dark as mine. By thirteen, I was already as tall as her; she was a short, round woman, but her posture was impeccable and she always seemed larger than she was.
“Bubbe,” I said softly, “if...if it’s not about presents, what is Hanukkah about?”
I winced as soon as I asked the question, feeling silly for asking such a stupid thing. I’d learned all about it in Hebrew school. I knew about the Maccabees, the fight for religious freedom, the victory over oppressors. About reclaiming the temple and rekindling the lamp, which had only enough oil to last one day but somehow lasted eight days, until more oil could be procured and the light sustained. I worried that now Bubbe would think I hadn’t paid any attention at all to my Hebrew school education. (Which, to be fair, I mostly hadn’t. But I did remember the Hanukkah stuff.) To my surprise, though, her answer mentioned neither Maccabees nor miracles.
“Survival,” she said, her voice sharp and sure. “Hanukkah is about survival.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Not just Hanukkah,” Bubbe continued, and for once, she didn’t slip me a snack as she offered me her words. “ We are about survival. Every holiday we celebrate, every story we tell—our people, our history, it’s all about survival. That’s what we do, bubbeleh . We survive. Never forget that.”
“Yes, Bubbe,” I promised.
“When we’re attacked, we fight back,” she said darkly. “We will always be attacked, and we will always fight back. We fight harder, and smarter. We do what we have to do. And in the end? We survive.”
I shivered a little, because she was doing that thing she did, where she started to scare me by making things too real. When she alluded to all the darkness she’d been through, I could practically see the demons of her past slipping out of the shadows, catching hold of her, and threatening to reach out and grab me, too.
Most of the time, when she edged toward this darkness, my obvious discomfort would pull her back. She would see the fear in my eyes and hate that she put it there, so she would stop talking. Or at the very least, she would change the subject or tell me to run along, to spare me. To let me bask in my innocence for as long as possible.
But not that night.
“When they were coming for my family,” Bubbe said, her voice so low I could barely hear it, “I had to do something. Had to make sure we survived. I knew what was being done to people. I knew we might be killed. And I was only one small girl, only a little older than you are now, but I had to do something, to save myself even if I couldn’t save everyone else...and that’s when I remembered the legend of the golem.”
The golem.
Her voice lowered when she said the word, shaded with something like reverence. I didn’t know what the word meant, but it made me feel cold. I blinked, shivering harder, wanting to hear whatever story Bubbe was about to tell, but also dreading it.
The Hanukkah candles were dancing lower now, and my mother had turned out the overhead lights before we lit them. Shadows stretched across the room. What was a golem? I couldn’t form the words, but I didn’t need to. All I had to do was listen as my grandmother kept talking.
“A man,” she whispered. “But not a man—more than a man, and less than one. A creature made from earth. From dust, from clay...from desperation. He has a word on his head. Alef-mem-tav.”
She lifted a finger into the air, adorned with the emerald ring, which glinted darkly in the flickering candlelight. She traced the outline of each letter, finger trembling slightly.
Alef-mem-tav.
“Emet,” she said. “It means truth . And as long as truth is on his brow, the golem will keep his people safe. And when he’s not needed, we simply erase the alef.”
She drew her palm through the air, as if wiping something away, and my tongue went dry.
“When you erase the alef, that leaves mem and tav. Which spells death . But taking him from truth to death, it doesn’t kill our golem. It just lets him rest. Tells him to be patient. To wait. Until we need him again.”
“You...made...?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
But she shook her head.
“I would have,” she said. “I should have. But before I could, they came for us.”
They came for us.
I felt the words in my bones.
“Bubbe,” I said, shuddering and wanting comfort. Hoping she could make this thick knot of terror in my stomach dissolve by winking and telling me she was just joking. “That...that’s just a story, though, right? It’s not real? It’s just a story—”
“‘Just a story,’” she repeated, shaking her head. She was looking past me, the flickering lights of the candles snapping fire in her dark eyes. “As if stories are not the most powerful things we have.”
“Presents!”
My parents burst into the room, turning on the overhead light, flooding the room with too much brightness and cheer all at once. Rosie squealed with delight, but I just sat frozen, staring at my grandmother, whose eyes were on the steadily declining candles.
“We survive,” she whispered once more, or maybe I just imagined it.