The year I was ten, Chanukah fell during the Christmas vacation that all the schools had, and so I was free to travel deeper into New York City from the outskirts where I lived, and celebrate the holiday with some of my cousins in the Lower East Side neighborhood. They lived in an apartment building over a deli, owned by the couple that lived in one of the apartments. I had stayed with these cousins before, on other special occasions, but never for 8 nights, which was the plan this time.
It was certainly a Chanukah like no other in my life. All six apartments in their building were lived in by Jewish families. That was common enough in such a historic Jewish community as that neighborhood of the city, but it was a novel experience for me, who was hard-pressed to discover any potential Jewish friends in my school, despite our area supposedly having a fairly high Jewish population. Yet, there I was, in what turned out to be an entire building of shared faith and celebration.
