How I Saved Hanukkah Read online

  Dreidel, dreidel, I made it out of . . . what?

  I looked at the hollow, green, plastic dreidel that Bubbi had sent to us. The gold foil candy coins that came inside it were long gone. We had gobbled them up the second the dreidel had come in the mail.

  “It doesn’t spin,” I said.

  “Well, they are supposed to be made of clay,” my mom said, “or wood or something.”

  When I asked her how to play, she said, “It’s gambling, for chocolate gelt. ‘Gelt’ is money. One of these Hebrew letters on it is a gimel, as in ‘gimme a gimel and some gelt.’”

  “You don’t have a clue how to play, do you?” I asked her.

  “Not a clue,” she agreed. “But we can make up a game.”

  I did not want to make up a game. Here we were not able to have Christmas lights because being Jewish was so very important and we didn’t do the hora and my mom didn’t even know which letter was the GIMEL!

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  HOW I SAVED

  HANUKKAH

  Amy Goldman Koss

  pictures by Diane deGroat

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers,

  345 Hudson Street, New York. New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Dial Books for Young Readers,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998

  Published by Puffin Books,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2000

  Text copyright © Amy Goldman Koss, 1998

  Pictures copyright © Diane deGroat, 1998

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DIAL EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Koss, Amy Goldman, date.

  How I saved Hanukkah / Amy Goldman Koss, pictures by Diane deGroat.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Marla, the only Jewish student in her fourth-grade class, wishes she celebrated Christmas like her best friend, Lucy, until one year when she decides to learn all about Hanukkah and to teach her family about it, too.

  [1. Hanukkah—Fiction. 2. Jews—United States—Fiction.

  3. Family life—California—Fiction. 4. California—Fiction.]

  I. deGroat, Diane, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.K852Han 1998 [Fic]—DC21 96-52715 CIP AC

  Puffin Books ISBN: 978-1-101-65807-9

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Thanks to Sandy Medof, Sue Horton,

  Jim White, and Cindy Kane.

  Kisses to: Momba, Poppa Bear, Emily, Bennett,

  and my Freen. Happy Hanukkah! A.G.K.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  About the Author

  CHAPTER

  1

  “We shouldn’t have to come to school when there’s a sub,” my best friend, Lucy, was saying. “When the teacher stays home, we should too.”

  I nodded and said, “I was just thinking that the last few days of school before the holiday recess are such a waste, they should just cancel them. We’d start vacation the week before. But then that week would be the last week before vacation so it would be useless, and might as well be canceled.”

  “We could cancel backward all the way to the first day of school,” Lucy said. “And since we know the first day is worthless, we might as well skip it too. Right?”

  That’s why Lucy Doyle is my best friend. Not only does she understand me, she also agrees with me.

  “By my calculations,” I said, “that comes out to no school ever. I like it.”

  “Me too.”

  The substitute teacher said, “Hush, girls. You two, in the back! I don’t want to have to speak to you again!”

  It would have been entirely fine with me if she didn’t speak to us again, but next thing I knew, she was calling my name.

  “Will Marla Feinstein please raise her hand?” she said. So I did.

  “Oh, it’s you.” As she walked toward me, she told the class, “Mrs. Guyer thought you might like to make Christmas—I mean, holiday—decorations. Won’t that be fun?”

  Teachers always give us dumb stuff to do before vacation and call it “fun.” It’s because they’re so, so sick of us, they start to get desperate. Our regular teacher, Mrs. Guyer, was the one who was having fun—she’d taken the day off.

  “Someone should tell the sub we’re in fourth grade, not kindergarten,” Lucy whispered. Her breath tickled my ear, making me giggle. But when the sub put a piece of blue paper and a piece of white paper on my desk, my giggles quit. I glanced down at the Hanukkah colors and watched the sub hand out red and green paper to everyone else. My cheeks got hot.

  Mrs. Guyer must have left a note for the sub saying there was one Jew in the class and I was it. A few days ago, before she abandoned us to this sub, Mrs. Guyer had me make a blue-and-white candle when the rest of the class made red-and-green ones. She talked about how everyone is different and that’s what makes the world interesting. But everyone isn’t different—just ME.

  I wished myself out the window, on the playground, across the patchy lawn, on my Rollerblades, and zipping downhill, getting smaller in the distance—a tiny speck.

  Then I heard Lucy’s voice, loud and clear. “No fair!” she said. “I want the colors Marla got!”

  The substitute’s little lizard eyes flicked from side to side. “Oh!” she said. “Are you Jewish?”

  “Totally,” lied Lucy.

  The sub squinted at Lucy’s blond curls and turned-up Irish nose. Then she sighed and gave her blue and white paper too. Lucy made goofy faces behind the sub’s back until I smiled.

  I decided to make a white sailboat on a wide blue sea. But that was too hard, so I rolled my blue and white paper into a tube. I told Lucy that my brother could use it as a sword. Everything is a sword or a gun to him anyway.

  Lucy, who is a great artist, cut her white paper into animal-shaped clouds and glued them to a blue sky. The whole blue-and-white business was way less icky since Lucy was working with Hanukkah colors too—but I was still glad to hear the bell ring.

  * * *

  My blue-and-white “decoration” was stuffed in my backpack. Lucy was waving hers around like a flag as we walked home from school. She sang, “Glory, glory hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler!” Then she poked me. “Hey, Marla, what’s wrong with you?”

  I wanted to sing. It was Friday. A weekend! And then only two mo
re days of school until vacation! But I still felt a little creepy.

  I pulled a lemon off of a neighbor’s tree. “Catch!” I called—and Lucy did. We played catch while we walked, all the way to where I turn left and Lucy turns right.

  * * *

  My little brother, Ned, came charging out the front door, straight for me. He’s always deliriously happy to see me after school. My mom says that’s why I don’t need a dog.

  “Guess who came to school?” Ned said, grabbing at the ends of my long hair. “Guess!”

  “Santa Claus,” I said.

  First Ned’s face caved in, disappointed that I had guessed. Then he looked at me with awe, because I was so brilliant.

  “I went to the same preschool, Neddy. Santa comes every year,” I said.

  “Oh.” Ned thought about that, then perked up. “Guess what he gave me!”

  I did not say, “A candy cane.” That would have been mean.

  “A CANDY CANE!” Ned said. He fished around in his grimy pocket with his grubby hand and pulled out a half-eaten, entirely slimed, candy cane. “Want some?” he offered.

  A fabulous sister might have pretended to take a lick and made extravagant yum-yum sounds. Instead I reached into my backpack and pulled out my blue-and-white tube sword.

  “Happy Hanukkah,” I said. “Ho ho ho.” No one on earth would be excited by that crumpled scrap—except Ned. It must be nice to be three.

  * * *

  Ned jumped around, jabbing me with his wrinkled sword while I put on my Rollerblades. It occurred to me that he moved more like a tree frog than like any kind of mammal. I told him I’d be back before dinner, but still he watched me leave as if I was going off to war, on the moon.

  Rollerblading is the best feeling in the world. It is like sliding on a really smooth wood floor in socks, except better, because you go and go and you’re outside. My arms love it, my face loves it, even my hair loves it. And it’s hilly in California where I live, with lots of glorious downhills to fly.

  I’d had a great pre-dinner ride and was racing back home in the near-dark when Christmas lights started coming on at every house but ours. Lucy likes the pure white lights best, but I think the all-different-colored ones are perfect.

  When I asked why we can’t have Christmas lights, my mom said, “Because we’re Jewish.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” I’d asked. “They don’t make you prove you’re Christian at the store when you try to buy lights.”

  As I zipped toward home, I thought about the Christmas lights. They reminded me again about being singled out at school. Here it was the first night of Hanukkah, but you’d never know it was anything special looking at my house. As I got closer, I saw how boring and sad it looked—the plain, dull frump at a ball full of dazzling princesses. I knew exactly how it must feel.

  CHAPTER

  2

  This Hanukkah promised to be like all our other ones, only worse, because this time my dad wasn’t going to be home.

  My dad is a segment producer for a TV show, which means he makes pieces of the show, not the whole thing. They call his kind of show a “news magazine.” There are three or four segments for each show: Maybe one on some extra-nasty crime or some wacky cult, then one about an amazingly brave person with an icky disease, or some evil threat to the environment, and last, a “warm-fuzzy-feel-good segment,” as my dad calls them, “to calm everyone down enough to go to sleep.”

  Dad has been in the warm-fuzzy department a lot lately. The story he has been working on is about the sextuplets in Washington, D.C. That’s six babies who were born at once, out of one human mother.

  “That poor, poor woman,” Mom had said, way back when my dad first started filming the sextuplets. Since then Dad has flown to Washington to produce one sextuplet segment after another, and we are all sick to death of them.

  In the beginning he’d said the sextuplets looked like a bunch of pink raisins, and they sort of gave him the willies. Now he says they have “individual personalities” and HE can tell them all apart.

  “The network feels that if I stick Santa hats on all six heads, it will be a holiday hit,” my dad had said yesterday. “So I’m taking the red-eye back to Washington tonight.”

  “Cookie has red eyes,” Ned said. That’s the pet white rat at his preschool.

  “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Cookie had the seat next to me!” Dad said. “I often sit next to rats who snore. Or worse, rats who wake me up to tell me I snore.” My dad thinks he’s hilarious.

  “Daddy’s just kidding,” Mom said, shooting Dad one of her looks.

  So my dad told Ned that it’s called a red-eye flight because you get so tired being on an airplane all night that you get red eyes.

  “You’ll see,” he said, “when I get home.”

  When we got up this morning, my dad was gone.

  * * *

  Anyway, it was the first night of Hanukkah, so my mom got out the menorah (that’s the Hanukkah candle holder). I lit the shammes (that’s the candle that you light all the other candles with). Then I handed the shammes to Ned, who nearly roasted himself and dripped wax everywhere while somehow managing to get his candle lit.

  My mom and I sang the song we always sing when we light the candles, and Ned barked along.

  Oh Hanukkah, oh Hanukkah, come light the menorah!

  Let’s have a party, we’ll all dance the hora.

  Gather ’round the table, we’ll give you a treat.

  A dreidel to play with, and latkes to eat.

  And while we are playing, the candles are burning low.

  One for each night, they shed a sweet light,

  To remind us of days long ago.

  One for each night, they shed a sweet light,

  To remind us of days long ago.

  “We don’t dance the hora,” I said. “Why does the song say we dance the hora?”

  “Because it rhymes with ‘MENORAH’!” my mom said. “Should it say we’ll go to the store-ah? Sit on the floor-ah? Invite cousin Laura? What if some Jew somewhere doesn’t have a cousin Laura?”

  I knew that the fastest way to get through the whole stupid thing was to not ask any more questions, but one slipped out. “So which ‘days long ago’ are we supposed to be reminded of anyway?”

  “It’s that war between King Whatshisname and the Maccabees,” my mom said, shoving her slippery brown hair behind her ears, like she does.

  Ned and I didn’t know what she was talking about, so she told us the Hanukkah story. Mom’s version:

  “Two thousand years ago the Jews were minding their own business, going to Temple to worship their one God. Everyone else at the time was into multiple gods and idols and whatnot.

  “Anyway, the bad guy, King . . . Antiochus, came along and said, ‘From now on it is against the law to be Jewish, and anyone who observes any Jewish tradition will be punished as a criminal, taken as a slave, beaten up, and killed. And if you don’t put Christmas lights on your Temple, then I am going to huff and puff and blow it down!’”

  “MOM!” I said. “There were no Christmas lights two thousand years ago. They didn’t even have electricity!”

  “Well, if you want to get picky about it,” my mom said, “there were no Christians or Christmas yet either. But that’s not the point.

  “A Jewish family called the Maccabees,” my mom went on, “said, ‘Not by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins!’ So the king’s soldiers blew the Temple down. Then they did the rest of the usual rotten war stuff.”

  Ned started making machine-guns sounds.

  “Guns hadn’t been invented yet, sorry,” my mom told him. “Maybe swords or slingshots or something.”

  Ned’s gun noises made me think of my dad. If he were here, he would probably put in antiaircraft missiles and sound effects like explosions and dying groans. That’s what he does with the Civil War.

  Ned thinks that stuff is a hoot. I think both my parents are bizarre.

  My mom pushed
her hair back and said, “The Maccabees fought using sticks and stones and stuff. They were just a tiny band of Jews against the king’s powerful army. Miracle number one: The Jews won.

  “Then they fixed up the Temple. They wanted to relight their lamp to celebrate, but the bad guys had spilled the sacred oil with all their huffing and puffing. There was only enough oil left to last one measly night.

  “Miracle number two—like when my gas gauge is on empty and yet we make it to the gas station: The oil burned for eight nights instead of just one. The end.”

  I suspected that Jewish people the world over were listening to this story told differently. Less huffing and puffing, for one thing. My fault, I was the one who had asked her.

  My mom handed Ned and me each a bag from the grocery store and said, “Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to wrap them.”

  In Ned’s bag was a pair of socks that he immediately put on his hands and used as boxing gloves—happy as a clam.

  In my bag were six rolls of Scotch tape. When I did not act happy as another clam, my mom explained, “So you’ll stop using mine all the time.”

  “Gee, you shouldn’t have,” I said to make her feel guilty, but it didn’t work.

  My mom just shrugged and said, “You’re welcome.”

  * * *

  My overnight bag was packed. I was going to sleep over at Lucy’s. She and I had something special planned, something secret, and this Hanukkah business had already taken up a lot of time.

  “We’re supposed to let the candles melt,” my mom said, “but you can’t walk to Lucy’s in the dark and I can’t leave them burning while I drive you.” She was about to blow them out when I stopped her.

  I don’t know why I didn’t want her to do that—I just didn’t. “If we can’t have Christmas because we are so Jewish,” I said, “then let’s at least be Jewish!”

  “We are Jewish no matter what, Marla,” my mom said, but we waited. It didn’t take long for the candles to melt and they looked kind of nice, though not compared to how Lucy’s house looked when we pulled in her driveway. Her dad had hung lights everywhere.