Israel Matzav

A Jewish child's Christmas memories

I hope you will all forgive me for posting something that is outside this blog's normal fare. I just read this article in the JPost Magazine (where it is not online), ran into our room and asked my wife whether the author used to be our neighbor when we first came to Israel in the early '90's (she was!). When I didn't find the article in the Post, I took another guess and found it here. It turns out that the one in the Post was an abridged version. This is amazing....

For some people, Christmas never keeps its promise. But for me as a child, Christmas never failed. It was always magical, always a mystery, always the one day of the year that could be counted on to bring us together as a family. In other words, it was the one celebration (aside from Passover dinner at Aunt Sophie's) that my father, Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, wouldn't dream of missing.

For him, a child of immigrants in New York City during the Depression, Jewish holidays were a grim business. Observance was enforced by well-meaning grownups who -- in their own distress, and in their ignorance of both Judaism and of basic child psychology -- meted out fearfulness in the garb of piety. Boring hours in synagogue, uttering endless prayers in an ancient tongue, reciting words whose meaning was left unexplained...while meanwhile, out on the street, to identify oneself as a Jew was to court anti-Semitic violence.

As a father, he resolved early on that his own children would be spared: no one was going to force-feed his daughters any superstitious nonsense. Indeed, the only holiday we observed in full was the one he himself had never experienced personally -- the one with no religious baggage, and whose whimsical traditions he and my mother could sort of create from scratch, improvising as they went along. For him -- and therefore for us -- it was nothing but fun and a shimmering joy, and the fact that he could bestow it so guiltlessly upon his children represented, for him, America's wonderful liberation from his own parents' Old World ties and tribal bondage. Come December 24th, no urgent meeting in Washington, no lecture in Des Moines, not even an editorial deadline, could have dragged him from our midst in snowy Connecticut.

...

My father may have aimed for freedom from ritual, but our observance of Christmas had many, and we guarded them zealously, inflexibly. From late November on, the suspense grew deliciously day by day. Presents -- some already wrapped and ribboned -- were hidden in the chilly closed-in porch where the ping-pong table, waiting idly for warmer weather, wobbled under its annual burden. I'd sneak out there sometimes to take a peek, and the pile kept rising higher. The tree got decorated only on Christmas Eve, not before, and only tiny white lights were permitted -- no tawdry multi-colored ones. Ditto for bulbs -- none but silver and gold. Each year, four handmade paper angels appeared on the mantelpiece, one for each daughter. I was the littlest, last in the row, in red robe and golden wings.

Once (it was the mid-1950s, and the Holocaust had already gotten a fast, temporary burial under a thick, deep silence), one of my sister's friends drove us kids into town for the annual community carol-sing on Christmas Eve. There, on the charming village green known as "God's Little Acre," surrounded on all sides by the whitest and loveliest of Colonial-era churches - Congregational, Methodist and Episcopalian -- we joined the assembly of our fellow citizens as "Silent Night, Holy Night" rose on their happy, sonorous voices up into the frosty air.

...

Then, at last, the crowning glory: my father would appear in his annual Santa Claus costume, which as the years went by, became more and more comical and absurd: Santa as an old woman, Santa as gorilla, Santa with little bells and a tin can hanging pitifully from his tail.

...

At 22, I began advertising to my family that I'd discovered my Jewish identity. I got work teaching English in the most conservative, old-school Orthodox society I could find -- Hasidic Williamsburg -- and my first day on the job happened to be Sunday, December 25th.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:38 PM