Chanukah started Friday evening, and since Mr. Luo’s heritage on his father’s side is Russian Jewish, we, um, didn’t do anything special.
The only thing that came down from that side of the family is food, although of course it was his mother, not his father who cooked the various Russian and / or Jewish recipes that he occasionally cooks for me. He’s a complete bagel snob, but that has more to do with the NY part of the heritage (and no, most bagels in NYC these days do *not* meet his standards or those of his NY relatives).
In a post about donor insemination, Lisa wrote about choosing a donor who was Russian/ Ashkenazi Jewish, and how her thinking about his background has changed.
I started researching and also meeting some of my kids’ donor sibling families who actually picked Sergei because he was a Russian Jew or because he was an Ashkenazi Jew. It became clearer to me that, because of the history of European/Russian Jews and because of their emphasis on passing down tradition and heritage, I have a bigger responsibility than ever occurred to me before. People of the Jewish faith and ethnicity are telling me that this is NOT so much the same as if he was just an American from the suburbs with a protestant mother.
Mr. Luo is an American from the suburbs (by way of a childhood in la Isla Bonita) with a Protestant mother, and in his family that is just about the same as the fact that his father’s family were Ashkenazi. As far as I can tell, they have been secular at least as far back as his grandfather who immigrated to the U.S., and as I mentioned the only culture that got passed on was the food. There is probably a connection between that heritage and the fact that Mr. Luo listens to more Eastern European folk music than, say, African or Latin American, but I don’t even know if that came from his family or was picked up in later life. (Mr. Luo adds that he is also a fan of Russian classical music.)
And speaking of heritage, they don’t even know the grandfather’s real last name, because he changed it to avoid discrimination (more the anti-Russian bolshevik kind than the anti-semitic kind, according to Mr. Luo). Even his kids don’t know what their father’s original name was.
Mr. Luo says his mother rebelled strongly against her southern Christian background (not known for its support of women scientists in her youth), but she did pass along food (of course) and the secular version of Christmas.
Although it is less urgent to me now that I live in a place where the sun doesn’t set at 4:30 in the winter, I like the idea of celebrating light in midwinter (though the electricity usage of the mega-outdoor-lighting displays gives me pause). And I like the idea of teaching the Chocolate Chip about his or her cultural heritage. (If learning about Russian Jews and Irish Catholics and the famines and wars that led to their immigration doesn’t help the kid understand the need for peace and justice, I don’t know what will.) (Now I am hearing Frank McCourt remembering his father’s drunken lectures on “800 long years” of oppression in Angela’s Ashes.)
However, I can barely keep up with my limited expectations for the holiday that I grew up celebrating, without trying to add in one that neither I nor Mr. Luo have ever celebrated. (He does remember getting Chanukah chocolate coins from his violin teacher when he was a kid.) Especially since Christmas Day falls during my semester breaks, while Chanukah often does not (purely a coincidence, and nothing to do with the privilege of the majority religion, that).
