- You are nine years old and desperately pleading with your parents to let you have a Christmas tree for the umpteenth time. “Come on,” you whine, putting all your power into your puppy dog eyes. “They’re so pretty!” Dad, who was raised in a kosher household and isn’t too keen on pine needles imbedding themselves in the carpet, shakes his head no. “Sorry kiddo, not today.” Humphing, you turn your eyes on Mom, the Italian-Jewish firebrand and the reason the household even celebrates Christmas, if only in a commercial fashion. She looks at me, then Dad, and sighs. “How about we get one of those silver trees with the LED lights and call it a Chanukah bush?” Later that night, when the little “bush” is lit and shining in the corner of the living room, even Dad has to concede that it looks nice.
- When your relatives come to visit for your 12th birthday, Grandma brings you a copy of Fiddler on The Roof. You are a Broadway freak, so you immediately pop the disc in the minute everyone leaves. As the songs of Anatevka flow through your ears, you can’t help but cry at how beautifully sad the music is. The next morning, you go on Youtube and binge klezmer tunes, allowing your heart to sway along to the mournful cries of the violin.
- Cleaning out your bookshelf sometime well in your teens, you stumble upon an old picture book Dad used to read to you almost every night during winter. It’s a story about a kind old woman with poor eyesight welcoming a bear into her home for latkes after mistaking him for the rabbi. Of course, this being a children’s story, the bear leaves with a belly full of fried potatoes and the old woman discovers her mistake after the REAL rabbi shows up later that night. You shudder to think of what would have happened were the story to take a more realistic turn of events; the poor bear wouldn’t have stood a chance.
- Your parents give you your Star of David several months after a visit to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. After seeing the piles of shoes worn by dead children, the Nazi propaganda, and the models of the gas chambers, your soul felt as cracked as the glass of Kristalnacht. Now though, as you place the necklace around your head and fasten the clasp, you feel a renewed sense of strength. You may not be the most religious person in the world (you’ve just had meat and cheese in the same dinner, you can’t speak Hebrew, and you never were a bat mitzvah) but you are a part of a people who have survived so much. Ever since that point, the necklace has never been removed from your person.
