Chanukah in Berlin

One of the things about being an unemployed artist is that you frequently have to be on the move – and here I am not speaking of the particular challenges of practicing your craft, but rather the more mundane task of finding a new apartment when the lease runs out. For the last few months, I dwelt in a place high above the fray, with central heating and comfortable couches where I could cocoon. It was too good to last, and in its place I have found a suite of very large rooms with a very small coal oven which is supposed to provide enough heat to keep me warm. For a few days I was sort of shocked…you mean, I actually had to do something to make heat? I had to light a fire? Preposterous!

But then I realized that my room had 14 foot ceilings and a piano, and that perhaps it is not so good to be comfortable all the time. Besides, my new roommate – Adam - an Orthodox Jew from New York – is great fun. We both like Amadeus and are sort of obsessive about good coffee. I will never forget the sight of him in his yarmulke showing me how to load the furnace…. “Do you think we’ll get more heat if we use corpses?” I asked. Fortunately he got the joke.

Besides, I knew Adam was a kindred spirit because he invited 4 people for dinner and bought enough food for 20. He asked me if 4 bags of ziti were enough and I told him it would be plenty, but he bought more just in case, because you don’t want people to go hungry…..They say that the memory of famine lasts generations. My grandmother survived the war and thought that if the only thing she fed my father was chocolate pudding, he would surely become strong. He got rickets. My mother was ill in the hospital and I thought if I just made her scrambled eggs with extra butter and cream it would make her better. I did not know she couldn't eat it, and yet she could not tell me. I wonder if there will be a day when we can just eat. Not while there is hunger - nor for the generations that come after, say I. There will have to be a hundred years of plenty before food becomes just food.

Tonight we are having a Chanukah party at our apartment. Adam just came in with 50 pounds of potatoes that he carried with him on his bike from the Turkish market down the road. “Do you think this will make enough latkes for 20?” I said it would, but he is still not so sure.

Bless him for that.

We do not have a menorah so Adam and I went down to the recycling bin to look for empty wine bottles that we could use as candle holders. The candles were too big, so Adam took out his pen knife and started whittling them down so they would fit. It wasn’t exactly kosher, but surely God gives special dispensations for people trying to celebrate Jewish holidays in Berlin. I think there is even a blessing asking God to just let it go because you are trying your very best, under the circumstances. If there isn’t, there should be.

Of course, this was not the first time I found myself without a menorah – when I was young we lived in an Aboriginal community in northern Manitoba, which most people would say is the middle of nowhere but which most certainly is not. We did not have a menorah but we did have a 2x4 and some red candles left over from a dinner party, and in the middle of the wilderness we kindled festive lights that shone in the darkness. And so it does not matter whether or not you have silver candlesticks, nor does it matter where you are. Any place where you light candles becomes for a moment the centre of the world, and a holy place from which the planets will for a brief moment, take their orbit - if they have any sense in them.

I am off to buy some more potatoes…

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.

Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honour’s sake.

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling fame.

-Hannah Szenes (1921-1944)