Opening this book, one might expect to find familiar tales about the Festival of Lights. But in fact, over half of the twenty-one pieces have never been published in English before. The anthology includes stories and excerpts, memoirs, essays, and poems. They explore a wide variety of settings and perspectives on being Jewish, as well as on Chanukah itself. Some contain bitterness; others, wonder and triumph. Two use the Chanukah time period as a background to tell stories of relationships. (In one from 1914, hospitality is extended to an acquaintance who ends up running off with the narrator’s wife.) The collection is less a celebration and more an exploration of Jewish behavior during the holiday season.
Mark Strand’s poem, “The Coming of Light,” Chaim Potok’s story, “Miracles for a Broken Planet,” and Elie Wiesel’s remembrance from Auschwitz, “Lighting Chanukah Candles in Death’s Kingdom” — each of these speaks to the core meaning of the holiday. By contrast, Emma Green’s essay, “Chanukah, Why?”, critiques how the modern celebration of the holiday centers eating mediocre chocolate and playing dreidel.
In an excerpt from Friendly Fire by A. B. Yehoshua, an older Israeli man finds himself living in East Africa, wanting a time-out from his country after his son was killed by friendly fire in the West Bank. He throws the candles his sister-in-law has brought him into the fire. The piece that closes the book, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s “Gifts of the Last Night,” describes the chance encounter between an older man — a writer reminiscing about how his parents’ gifts to him escalated in value toward the last night of Chanukah each year — and an older woman, the daughter of an anarchist publisher who ducks into a coffee shop on Broadway on this last night of Chanukah to escape the cold wind.
The unnamed editors threw a wide net in gathering their “greatest.” The book includes everything from Emma Lazarus’s 1882 poem, “The Feast of Lights,” to Curt Leviant’s 2020 story, “A Chanukah Tale from Old Russia.” Other widely recognized authors include Theodor Herzl, Sholom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon.
Sharon Elswit, author of The Jewish Story Finder and a school librarian for forty years in NYC, now resides in San Francisco, where she shares tales aloud in a local JCC preschool and volunteers with 826 Valencia to help students write their own stories and poems.
