Yael Buyanover
Three candles are burning on our hanukkiah near the philharmonic hall, and snowflakes melt around them. Jews are dancing. Passersby glance over curiously and hurry on; they have their own preparations for New Year’s to worry about. But for us, it is Hanukkah, and we are dancing. Bella Naumovna and I shuffle around in the melting snow. At 79, she feels the cold less than I do. I look at her, so lovely and cheerful, and remember the story I have heard from her more than once.
It is hard to explain why, but for me this story has always been connected with Hanukkah.
Her mother managed to evacuate from Ukraine with three-year-old little Bella and the ailing grandmother. Overcrowded refugee trains, bombings. Their handbag containing their documents was stolen, greatly reducing their chances of survival in a country where you are nobody without a piece of paper. Even now, that loss has had repercussions: there is no way to prove that Bella Naumovna is entitled to "victim of Nazism" status. She doesn’t look like a victim, either; there is nothing tragic about her. Just look at how merrily she dances, how she goes to the theater. The grandmother died in Moscow, and her mother made it to Yaroslavl with little Bella. There they found a kind Jewish man, the director of a flour mill; he gave her mother a job and a small room. Without documents, during the war—just imagine. With a worker’s ration card and some sort of roof over your head, you can live—hungry and cold, but you can. And they survived; her mother had experience surviving under inhuman conditions.
The candles have burned out. Now we’ll go to the synagogue, where the tables are set: doughnuts, a little vodka, a concert.
Little Bella’s mother grew up in a shtetl near Bila Tserkva. Petliura’s men slaughtered almost all the Jews and, for some unknown reason, dragged her and her little brother off with them. Her little brother was killed because he could not walk fast enough. But little Bella’s mother was found and raised by her grandmother. They were poor even compared with the destitution around them, the hungriest and most ragged of all. But little Bella’s mother was a capable, strong-willed girl, and she managed: she graduated from technical college and married. Her husband was arrested a year before the war, and then came evacuation, hunger, and work. Work and endless poverty. Bella Naumovna told me that she first tasted cutlets when she was ten. Her mother made only four: one cutlet each for the evening and one cutlet each for the morning. Bella could not fall asleep, she wanted another one so badly. So she ate a cutlet, and in the morning her mother gave her hers.
Bella, too, was a capable, strong-willed girl, an athlete; she graduated from medical college, married, and gave birth to two daughters. She is still charming and optimistic, and well loved in the community. She has cultured and kind Russian women friends. They come to the synagogue with her for the holidays too. Well then, Bella Naumovna, l’chaim? To the miracle of deliverance in the days of the Hasmoneans and in our own days.
Isn’t it a miracle that we are alive and celebrating Hanukkah together?
Bella Naumovna’s husband was Russian. What can you do? That’s how it turned out. It is that way for many in Russia, among the "captive children." How did that happen?.. And on a branch of an olive tree, snatched from the fire, the fruit that grew was not olives but something else. Cranberries, perhaps? A perfectly good, healthy berry, in harmony with the local natural world.
The Jews get up from the table and gather a minyan for Maariv. Russian Jews, bitter as the olive tree and frost-resistant as cranberries.
In chapter 68 of the Psalms of David, it is written: "From Bashan I will bring them back; I will bring them back from the depths of the sea."
Bring us back, return us! From Bashan, Magadan, San Francisco, Severodvinsk. Our Hanukkah candles burn from the taiga to the British seas. Each candle says: we are here, we are waiting for news of Redemption.