NOT HER GRANDMA’S HANUKKAH

At the end of A FATAL FIRST NIGHT, Ella Shane is lighting her menorah and enjoying an unexpected present from a friend. (Can’t tell you who because – spoiler!) The note points out that Hanukkah is not nearly as important a holiday to Jews as Christmas is to Christians…and that’s true, from a religious standpoint. By 1899, though, Hanukkah is taking on considerable cultural importance for American Jews, and that would only grow in the 20th century.

For Ella, and real people who came up from the tenements, Hanukkah was a marker of how far they’ve progressed. Poor new immigrants like Ella’s Jewish mother would not have brought, or spent limited family money to buy, a menorah. It just wasn’t that important an event to tie up precious resources. The High Holy Days in the autumn, and Passover in the spring were the holidays that mattered.

Hanukkah was a relatively minor spot on the Jewish calendar for centuries. But things changed in America.

As the 19th century went on, there was a deliberate drive among Jewish leaders to encourage immigrants to celebrate the holiday. Part of it was the way the Hanukkah story speaks to self-determination and religious freedom in a new country founded on those very ideals. Also, at least part of it, as immigrants wanted to assimilate, was the desire to have a December holiday too. Not that community leaders meant to encourage that – the whole point of the Hanukkah celebrations was to foster Jewish identity, not copying Christmas.

Someone like Ella, a tenement orphan made good, is exactly the sort of person who would start a more elaborate Hanukkah observance than what, if anything, she had as a kid. Prosperous families would send their children to special events, and light beautiful menorahs, putting them in the window in the Jewish tradition. Of course, people probably didn’t feel comfortable putting them in the window in every neighborhood…but the menorah in the window isn’t just a universal symbol of light against darkness – it’s also a very Jewish statement: We are here, we are still here, and we are bringing our light to help heal the world.

For Ella, and likely many others, it’s also at least partially an act of defiance. While her specific situation was unusual, there were plenty of people who were determined to hang onto whatever bits of their heritage they could, even while becoming and remaining wholly American. Hanukkah became one way to do that.

And about Ella. As the daughter of an extremely rare interfaith marriage, raised by her Irish Catholic father’s family after the death of her Jewish mother, she sees honoring and celebrating her Jewish identity as a way to keep her mother’s memory alive. So Hanukkah has a much more personal meaning to her, in addition to the religious and cultural one.

One more little note about Ella. While her friend imagines her lighting her candles to celebrate, that’s not what she’s doing. She’s actually lighting an oil menorah, popular in the 19th century…and a callback to the Hanukkah miracle of one day’s oil burning for eight. It’s also a callback to my family: my husband has his grandmother’s oil menorah.

Whatever you celebrate this season, may it be joyful and blessed! Throwback Thursday idea? Drop it in the comments!

By Kathleen Marple Kalb author of the Ella Shane mysteries, A FATAL FINALE, out now, and the upcoming A FATAL FIRST NIGHT due out April 27, 2021 from Kensington.