A Hanukkah gift for the ages

My cousin Gila decided to convene her sister, Miriam, and all their children and grandchildren to look at Gila's and Miriam's parents' photos that are bagged, piled, or in albums.

So, Tuesday night, the last night of Hanukkah, they did just that. At a holiday party in Gila's and Chaim's home in Jerusalem, they celebrated the eighth night of Hanukkah: first victory for freedom of worship.

And then began the viewing of the photos, mountains of visual documentation, each image a frame in the story: generations of family, people, nations — living, struggling in the crucible of local and global events.

Among these photos is the one in Gila's hands — an image that Chaim captured and sent to me, commenting, "thought you might enjoy this shot." Yes, Chaim, you were so right! You sent me a Hanukkah gift for the ages. Here's why.























Photo studio portrait of two sisters
In the photo, I appear to be about nine or ten years old and my sister, 15 or 16. To prepare for the photo session, I remember getting a haircut and choosing the dress I wore. Though I was pleased with how I looked in the photo, I immediately protested the false colors of my dress. Instead of rich reds, washed-out rose pinks appeared. I remember my sister’s dress, too — clearly more grown up than mine, with a waist unbounded by a tie.

I recall that my parents distributed copies of the photo to my maternal grandparents (also living in New York) and to my mother’s sister, Ruth, and her husband, Leo (in Connecticut). My Aunt Ruth and Uncle Leo were childless, and winning their hearts was the upside of the resulting lack of local cousins.

Until Chaim sent me the image this week, I had no idea that my parents also sent a copy to Gila’s and Miriam’s parents, my Aunt Sarah and Uncle Matityahu (in Haifa’s suburb, Kiryat Motzkin).

Me: part brat, part trooper
I am not proud that I felt I could practically wrap around my pudgy finger my Uncle Leo. And I am totally ashamed that I once hijacked my father into buying me a beautiful doll carriage (coach style), taunting, “Uncle Leo will buy it without requiring me to read Hebrew books.” What a brat! My father caved and bought the carriage, and I immediately felt guilty about my lip (though I loved pushing those fancy wheels along West End Avenue and Riverside Drive).

Yet I wasn’t all antagonistic. When I turned 12, I got a parakeet, which joined me on trips to visit my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Leo. The bird, traveling in a little carrying cage they bought for these journeys, rode the train with me from New York’s 125th Street and Lenox Avenue station to South Norwalk, Connecticut. There, my aunt and uncle met my parakeet and me and drove us home, where the guest room offered a bed for me and a standard-size cage for the bird.

In appreciation
Aunt Ruth and Uncle Leo played central parts in my childhood. They took me to restaurants and the beach, and Sundays and holidays we rode in my uncle's grey DeSoto around their neighborhood — exotic haunts to a kid from Manhattan. In their grocery store (Friedson and Sons), I drank all the chocolate drinks I could swallow and munched on bags of Wise Potato Chips while I played with a steady supply of kittens my uncle kept to do a job I understood (thankfully) only years later.

My aunt, whose stock of Revlon nail polish seemingly included every shade of red, let me paint my stubby nails with abandon. She bought me red shoes, summer and fall outfits, and later, in my early teens, taught me to knit, even supplying wonderful yarns and pattern books and the occasional “kit” to knit slippers and a scarf that cleverly doubled as a hood.

Together, my aunt and uncle spoiled me rotten, which felt like sheer heaven (I suspect for them, too, for every child and adult deserves spoiling). My happy memories with them offset some of the pain of losing my father about the time my sister went off to college and then got married. The love for me of this childless aunt and uncle mitigated my losses partly, and probably theirs, too. And I am thankful, too late for them to know, for their care and affection.

So, when my cousins in Jerusalem went diving into their parents' photographs this week and then discovered and shared this image of me and my sister, I felt the warmth and tears the discovery triggered: memories of special times and missing important people from a childhood and youth vanished yet never forgotten.

A Hanukkah gift for the ages.