A Season of Miracles Read online

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  A SEASON OF MIRACLES

  A Holiday Novel Byte

  by

  Ed Goldberg

  Uncial Press Aloha, Oregon

  2010

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events described herein are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60174-106-6

  ISBN 10: 1-60174-106-5

  A Season of Miracles

  Copyright Š 2010 by Ed Goldberg

  Cover design

  Copyright Š 2010 by Judith B. Glad

  All rights reserved. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author or publisher.

  Published by Uncial Press,

  an imprint of GCT, Inc.

  Visit us at http://www.uncialpress.com

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  A Season of Miracles

  Magic. Every day was magical in this new and magical America. Samuel Itzkowitz, for seven of his eight years, had lived in a world devoid even of common contentment, but now he existed in a world of enchantment.

  Brooklyn! Even the name was filled with forward motion. Brooklyn! It soared.

  Sammy was born in captivity. He was born to Jews hiding in a root cellar in a Polish farmhouse. The farmers had rented rooms to his father's family for many summers, and when Warsaw became a branch office of hell, his family fled to the country. The farm couple took them in. Not gladly, and with more than a little trepidation, but they did it.

  Sammy's mother, Rachel, was pregnant. Sammy was born on December 25, 1940. He learned, as quickly as a new baby has ever learned, to cry softly, or not at all. They lived as moles, or bats in a cave. But even moles can emerge from their tunnels and bats from their caves. Yossel and Rachel Itzkowitz, and their baby Samuel, were trapped in their darkness for five years, as the world sorted itself out.

  Every year, on his birthday, Sammy was treated to the muffled sound of merriment and laughter coming from the house above. And the sound of the farm family singing, joyous and poignant, the Polish carols. He loved his birthday, because it was the only time of year there was sweetness in the world.

  The farmer's wife, who sneaked down at night and in the early morning, would bring lavish treats: roast birds, stewed fish, cakes, aromatic puddings. But only on the day of his birth. The rest of the year, the food was nutritious, but ordinary.

  Sammy loved his birthday.

  The year after his fourth birthday, the world suddenly changed. The farmer and his wife threw open the doors of the root cellar, which had been concealed with rugs, and called for Sammy's family to emerge. Trembling with fear of betrayal, they went up the stairs. It was then that they learned that they were free, that the devil Hitler was dead, and that the war was over.

  Sammy gasped. He had never seen sunshine, or grass, or trees, or heard a bird sing. It was almost like being reborn.

  Like so many other refugee families, the Itzkowitzes were sent to a displaced persons camp. There they met concentration camp survivors, and blessed their hole in the ground as the stories of these tragic people unfolded. There Sammy learned that there were other children in the world--all shapes, sizes, appearances, and personalities. There he learned that he was a Jew, and that others had been killed for that reason alone.

  And there, he had his first Hanukkah.

  In that overcrowded, dirty, forlorn, and numbed setting, he was told the story of the Festival of Lights, of the desecration of the temple, the revolt against the Greek oppressor, and the purification of the temple in the aftermath of victory. He learned that the sanctified oil, only enough for one day's burning of the eternal light, lasted eight days until the new oil could be produced.

  A miracle. A miracle of resistance to tyranny, a miracle of spirit, a miracle of light.

  Sammy's parents had celebrated no holidays in their mole hole. The joyous songs of Hanukkah had never been heard in their cellar. He was captivated by the lighting of the candles, the lusty songs celebrating the Maccabee heroes, the eight days of little gifts to the children, as poor as they were in that sad place.

  As the month of December progressed, he noticed that the American GIs were preparing for their own celebration. Candles began to appear in barracks windows, and sprigs of greenery, and chains of colored paper.

  The night before his birthday, Sammy was awakened by singing. He dressed and sneaked out of his barn-like dormitory, drawn toward the sound of the music. While not exactly the same, the songs were much like the singing he had heard faintly through the earthen ceiling of the cellar every year on his birthday.

  He peeked through the window of the barracks, and saw an amazing sight: a small pine tree in the middle of the room, festooned with candles, and the GIs standing around it singing and drinking from their mess-tin cups. Their faces, lit from the candle glow, seemed more like the faces of children than battle-weary veterans.

  One of them spotted him at the window, and pointed. Sammy panicked and ran. A GI ran out, and scooped the boy up in his arms. When he was brought into the barracks, Sammy nearly expired from terror. But they were not angry. They were happy to have him there. One of them who spoke some Polish told him that he was their guest. Sammy was given food and an amazing drink called Coca-Cola.

  He told them that the next day was his birthday, and that it was the only celebration he had ever known. But it always seemed to be celebrated by people who hardly knew him. How did they know it was his birthday?

  The Americans all laughed, and then looked sad. Sammy was confused. But they filled their tin cups and gave him another Coke, and began singing again. Sammy eventually fell into an exhausted sleep on someone's bunk.

  One of the GIs carried him back to his bed in the dormitory, tucked him in, and put a little gift for him under the covers. It was not much, really, just the guy's old Boy Scout knife. But it was all he could think of to give Sammy.

  When the boy awoke the next morning, he was filled with the sweetness of a beautiful dream, one that seemed so real that he could still taste the Coca-Cola in his mouth.

  He squirmed in his bed, and his hand touched an unfamiliar object. It was a many-bladed knife, tied with a red ribbon, with a curious symbol and the letters BSA on the handle. Astonished, he turned the knife over and over in his hands, inspecting it minutely. He opened and closed the blades, unsure what some of them were. When his parents awoke, they were as bewildered as he.

  He described his dream of singing and Coca-Cola, and a pine tree with flickering candles, and realized that it was not a dream, could not be. The GI who spoke Polish came into the dormitory leading the social worker who looked after the camp, and they straightened the mystery out.

  Sammy discovered that day that he had received not only his first birthday present, but his first Christmas present.

  The next couple of years passed slowly, the tedium alleviated by Sammy's closeness with the GIs, who taught him to play baseball, and to read, write, and speak English--not excluding those words that soldiers are famous for--and by the annual festival of Hanukkah/Christmas/Sammy's birthday. Then, in January of 1948, Sammy and his family, and many others from his displaced persons camp, emigrated to the United States.

  The boat ride over was horrible, long and uncomfortable, with many people crammed together, and many sick from disease or the rolling of the big boat. But the sight of the tall buildings and the Statue of Liberty excited the passengers, an
d spontaneous singing and dancing broke out on deck.

  A sour-faced sailor muttered to his buddy, "These Jew greenhorns wouldn't be dancin' if they knew what was waitin' for 'em."

  His friend looked back at him and said, "It wasn't so long ago that our parents came over just like this. Have a heart."

  Sammy overheard, and looked the mean sailor right in the eye. He said, in perfect American, "Listen, you stinkin' swab-jockey, mind your own business and keep your trap shut!" The sailor was stunned into silence, but his friend laughed so hard, that Sammy was afraid the man would hurt himself.

  Sammy was no longer a creature who hid in a hole.

  The entry at Ellis Island, the hassles with rules and forms and questions and examinations, the pushing and shoving, the whole experience was forgotten as soon as the Itzkowitzes were free in America. At Sammy's insistence, and with some browbeating by the social worker assigned to them, they took an apartment on the top floor of a building. There were six flights to climb, but the windows looked out unobstructed in four directions, and the Brooklyn sunshine poured in like a deluge.

  Sammy started public school, and took to it. He was curious, smart, aggressive, and he needed some manners. All agreed, however, that he learned fast and got along well with teachers and other pupils.

  Sammy was constantly amazed. His classmates were a picture of the ferment he saw in the streets in his working-class neighborhood: gruff, hearty Irish; dark, mercurial Italians; stolid, silent Slavs; Hasidic Jews with black hats and long sidecurls; colored people with burnished skins in many shades, who he quickly discovered did not like the names most often called them.

  By the end of the school year, Sammy had many friends. He got on well with all of them, his experience with GIs having been a valuable training exercise. That summer, he was introduced to major league baseball, and the Brooklyn Dodgers. He shared the thrill of watching Snider and Furillo and Erskine, and the magnificent Jackie Robinson, whose significance was lost on no one.

  He adored Stan Musial, whose people had come from Poland, and he hated the Giants, like he was supposed to. He would take long subway rides to watch Joe DiMaggio, who seemed to be a being of a higher species, play in Yankee Stadium.

  He went to Coney Island, ate Nathan's hot dogs and rode the rides until he was on the verge of throwing up. He went to the beach with his parents, and they saw the haunted, pale-skinned refugees, many of whom tried to hide the numbers tattooed on their arms. Once more, they blessed the Polish farmers and their hole in the ground.

  On the Fourth of July, they oohed and aahed with everyone at the fireworks display, and Sammy tried to explain the meaning and importance of the whole thing. "Momma, Poppa, it's just like the Hanukkah candles, lights for freedom. Only bigger, like everything here, and in the sky. Hanukkah candles in the sky!"

  America, Brooklyn, was a land of make-believe, a paradise. And all the while, secretly in his heart, Sammy anticipated his first Hanukkah/Christmas/Sammy's birthday in this magical place.

  The time rolled by. Labor Day. The new school year. The World Series--even though neither the Yanks nor the Bums played. Then, Halloween.

  "Let me get this straight," Sammy asked his friend, Irv Feigenbaum, "you dress up in some kind of weird outfit, and you ring doorbells of perfect strangers, and they give you candy or cookies or money. And if they don't, you do something mean to them?"

  "Yeah," said Irv.

  "And this is allowed?"

  "Yeah, schmendrick, it's Halloween."

  Sammy shook his head in amazement. "Irving, this is the greatest country on earth."

  Then came Thanksgiving, and Sammy learned of the Indians and the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims came here because they were badly treated at home. They nearly died, and the Indians showed them how to survive. It was almost like his family were the Pilgrims, and the Polish farmers were the Indians, and helped them to survive. Then he thought of the Poles in buckskins and feathers, with painted faces, and he laughed so hard that the teacher, Mrs. Catalano, made him leave the room until he composed himself.

  The morning of the Thanksgiving holiday, Mrs. Feigenbaum took Irv, his sister Marsha, and Sammy into Manhattan to see the Macy's Parade. Sammy, who had been in nearly a continuous state of astonishment since landing in America, reached a new level.

  Besides the marching bands, with pretty girls in little short skirts and guys blowing tubas and hitting glockenspiels, and floats that looked like locomotives and gingerbread cottages, there were big balloons of funny people and animals. The balloons were as big as buildings and floated like feathers, and lots of strong men had to hold them down with ropes. A dog as big as a house, and it wants to fly away!

  On the subway ride home, Sammy said little. His brain had overloaded. All he could think of was: if this is for Thanksgiving, what will be for Hanukkah/Christmas/Sammy's birthday? The very last thing in the parade was Santa Claus. Sammy knew what that meant, and he almost burst from anticipation.

  Soon, it was December, and preparations for the holidays began to accelerate. Mr. Feigenbaum took Sammy and Marsha into the city to look at the decorations in all the store windows. Lights, glittery stuff, angel hair, every place seemed to have something, even the smallest candy store. The best was at 34th Street, where Macy's and Gimbel's sat across from one another in fierce competition.

  Macy's had a whole series of windows, all the way around the block. Each one was more spectacular than the previous one. Tiny figures of elves, and reindeer, and children at play, and families in tiny houses decorating tiny trees with tiny stockings hanging from tiny mantelpieces. Finally, the last window featured Santa visiting the houses. Wonderful.

  Gimbel's concentrated on Santa's workshop, with elves working on dolls and toy trains and sleds and footballs, but everything moved! The little figures bent and turned and banged little hammers and sawed with little saws. Marsha, who had seen stuff like this all her life, was unimpressed.

  Sammy was transported. America was not a place, it was a wizard's creation, a vision, a hallucination. No place in the world had the subway, and the Dodgers, and Mrs. Stahl's knish shop, and buildings to the sky, and Halloween. No real place.

  They walked up Fifth Avenue, exhilarated by the crowds and the noise and the bustle, and the Santas ringing bells as money got thrown into their pots, and bands in uniforms playing carols, and all the stores like a fantasy. The air was crisp and cold, and their breath was steam, and people smiled at each other.

  They passed a huge church, with almost as much activity in and out as a department store. Mr. Feigenbaum told them it was St. Patrick's Cathedral. "I know, daddy," said little Marsha with a five-year-old's sophistication.

  And then they made a sudden left turn in the middle of the block between two buildings, and Sammy saw the most gorgeous thing he had ever seen in his life. It was a Christmas tree a hundred, no, a thousand feet tall with a million lights on it. At its base was a statue of some almost naked guy flying, all gold, and under him was a skating rink, with people of all shapes and sizes gliding on the ice like swooping seagulls. Sammy's eyes bulged, and his breath came short.

  Marsha turned to him and said, "This is Rockefeller Center. And that is the biggest tree in America." Sammy would have had no trouble believing that it was the biggest tree in the universe.

  This was the capper to the most spectacular day in Sammy's life, bigger than emerging from the root cellar, bigger than the Boy Scout knife, bigger even than the first sight of the Statue of Liberty. It wasn't until later that night, just before Sammy dozed off in a state of near-bliss, that something began to gnaw at him. He pushed it out of his mind, but slept restlessly in and out of strange dreams.

  The next day, he understood. Nowhere, in no place, was there a display for Hanukkah. Santas and manger scenes, trees and wreaths, reindeer and wise men by the dozen. No menorahs, no silver paper "Happy Hanukkah" signs, no evidence that such a holiday existed. Christmas carols were everywhere. Kids sang them on the streets, radio stations playe
d them, people in grocery stores hummed them.

  But where were the heroic songs about Judah Maccabee and his brothers, the jolly songs about the games and good little children? It was almost as if there were no Jews in the world at all. Maybe that is what that wise-guy sailor meant on the boat. This is what was waiting for us. We have become invisible, insignificant, swallowed up.

  And more. Sammy had always associated Christmas with a special feeling, complicated, tied up with a burst of joy in a dark place. With the GIs in the displaced persons camp, it had been the same, joy lighting up out of despair. The feelings he had felt in his hole in the ground, and in the camp, had nothing to do with presents or fancy decorations, or huge trees. The most wonderful tree he had ever seen was a scrawny pine in a barracks, little candles dancing light among the branches. The light on the faces of the American soldiers, far from home and lonely, singing their carols in the midst of the human wreckage of war, this light was more than all the lights on Fifth Avenue, and all the mechanical elves in the world.

  In magical America, there was no magic in Christmas. Amidst all the lights, there was no light in people's faces.

  Sammy brooded. Everyone noticed, but no one could make him tell what was on his mind. An almost-eight-year-old in a moral and philosophical crisis is not the usual thing. But Sammy grew up in a cave. This was all fresh and new. Irv and Marsha noticed nothing, Sammy realized, because this was always the way it was for them. Just like the big tree. It was just a big tree for Marsha, not a vision. And the other kids, who celebrated Christmas, all they talked about was what they were going to get. They were like thieves planning a heist, and spending their loot before the fact.

  Matters reached their climax the next Monday in school. The class was making Christmas ornaments, singing carols, writing a class letter to the North Pole asking, no, demanding gifts from Santa. Sammy was fuming. No menorahs, no candles, no dreidl tops for Hanukkah games, and, to top it off, not even a discussion of what the meaning of Christmas might be.