How Many Jewish Bloggers Does It Take...

I never respond to memes. Not because I’m anti-social (well not entirely) but because I’m always leery of being part of a pack, as if answering a meme will ultimately lead to my joining a right-wing vigilante group. But when I was asked by Leah of Accidentally Jewish if I were interested in being one of the 36 Jewish bloggers that writer Amy Güth was hunting down for her Chanukah meme (1 blogger on the first night, 2 on the second, 3 on the third, etc.), I didn’t want to miss out on that party.

Amy Güth is definitely one of the cool kids. According to author Eric Spitznagel, “If Tom Robbins and Exene Cervenka had hot, filthy sex in some dank back alley, their illegitimate lovechild might look something like Amy Güth.” Check out her impressive website and blog and read her new book “Three Fallen Women” which manages to be “both touching and terrifying, sentimental and demented, ferociously dark and unapologetically hopeful.”

Amy sent her cabal of Jewish bloggers the following questions:

1. Quick! You must turn a plate of latkes into an upscale gourmet delight (as if they aren't already?). What would you add to them to dress them up, flavor and/or garnish them?

I am a purist when it comes to latkes, just give me the simplest recipe of potatoes, onions, salt, and oil, oil, oil. Yes, I’ve made sweet potato and zucchini latkes (yawn) but I always come back to the original. This year I made them at our goyishe friends Michelle and Steve’s house while they were away and Kendall was babysitting their kids. It was ideal—I got to indoctrinate Keane and Chase into the wonders of heavy Jewish cuisine and our house doesn’t smell like an onion field. Poor Michelle is still slipping on her kitchen floor and squeegeeing oil off her walls.

2. What is the dumbest thing you've ever heard anyone say about Chanukah?

The first thing that comes to mind is an old “Saturday Night Live” from the late 1970s when Mary Kay Place was hosting the show during Chanukah. They did a sketch with Gilda Radner and John Belushi as a stereotypical Jewish couple and Mary Kay and Dan Aykroyd as their uber-Goy friends coming over to celebrate Chanukah. I still remember Mary Kay Place’s perfect delivery of the line, “Bobbie, these Chanookah decorations are out of this world!” I guess that’s not so dumb but it still makes me laugh 30 years later.

I have little tolerance for Chanukah being billed as “Jewish Christmas.” The two holidays have about as much in common as Yom Kippur and Hitler’s birthday.

3. What's the best possible use for olive oil?

Is that a cue for some clever sexual repartee? I am hopeless at such allusions so I’ll just say that some excellent high quality olive oil drizzled onto a great piece of bread with a little fleur de sel on top is a thing of beauty.

4. Settle it once and for all. Latkes or hammentaschen? Which do you prefer? What about pitting the winner of that contest against sufganiyot?

Most hammentaschen you find today are leaden doorstops including the ones I tried last Purim from Canter’s. I enjoyed them anyway (who said being a leaden doorstop was a detriment in Jewish cuisine?). My favorite flavor is poppyseed which I think would make me fail a heroin drug screening, no? But if I were forced to pit these two items against each other, there’s no contest: latkes rule. Sufganiyot share a similar fate to hammentaschen in this country but I’ve had exquisite examples of both in the old Jewish quarter in Paris. And my old Hebrew teacher Mrs. Hankin, a Holocaust survivor, used to make sufganiyot that were so delectable I’d dream about them the rest of the year. Strangely, she called them latkes. I guess she thought that’s the only word us grandchildren of Eastern European shtetl Jews would understand.

5. What's the best way to mix up a game of dreidel?

The deep dark secret we Jews try to hide from Gentiles is that playing dreidel is truly a bore. In fact, I’m not convinced that it wasn’t invented by anti-Semites to drive home the libel that Jews are obsessed with money, even during the holidays. On the other hand, I did a Chanukah presentation in my daughter’s 5th grade class last year and the kids went nuts playing dreidel. After an hour, the room took on the desperate air of the casino at Bally’s.

When I was in 5th grade I played a giant dreidel in the Shaare Tikvah Hebrew School Chanukah program and proceeded to careen into fellow spinning dreidel Scott Whitcup, sending us both to the floor during our rendition of “S’vivon, sov, sov, sov.” This produced my first Jewish-related shame spiral.

6. My novel, “Three Fallen Women,” shockingly enough, is about the lives of three women. Which three women would you like to have over this year for latkes and why?

This question is so broad it intimidates me. I saw earlier bloggers mention Katharine Hepburn and I would do anything to break bread (break latkes?) with her but I think in honor of Amy, I’ll limit my answers to Jewish writers.

My first pick is the brilliant writer Anzia Yezierska (1885-1970) who wrote several gritty Jewish-themed novels including “The Bread Givers,” “Hungry Hearts,” and my favorite, “Salome of the Tenements.” If you’ve never read this largely forgotten author, you must check her out. She had a fascinating and troubled life, born in a Polish shtetl and working in a sweatshop after emigrating to the U.S. at the turn of the century. Samuel Goldwyn brought her out to Hollywood to turn “The Bread Givers” into a silent film in the 1920s but she hated it here and eventually returned to the Lower East Side. She fell back into hard times during the Depression and got a WPA job cataloguing the trees in Central Park. I can only imagine the obstacles she faced as a Jewish woman writer back then but her amazing books are intensely authentic. Anzia, have a latke!

My second writer would be Lillian Hellmann (1905-1984), a tough cookie who didn’t suffer fools. I have admired her writing from “The Children’s Hour” to “Watch on the Rhine” to “The Little Foxes.” She has been accused by many of fabricating elements of her past, including those that were later featured in the film “Julia,” but being a person who massages my own life events as I see fit (as long as they follow the “spirit of the truth”), I say “you go, girl!” Dashiell Hammett supposedly based his Nora Charles on Hellmann. Can you think of two more different entities than Lillian and Myrna Loy? Her response to HUAC during the McCarthy nightmare was classic: “To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.” Care for a dollop of sour cream, Lill?

The last writer I want to invite to my latke fest is playwright Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006) if for no other reason than to hear her distinctive voice that was stilled way too soon and experience that wonderful Wasserstein wit one more time. She gave birth to her daughter when she was 48 years old and it makes me so sad to imagine that Lucy, who just turned seven this year, will not be growing up with her way cool mom. I loved “Uncommon Women and Others,” “The Heidi Chronicles,” and “The Sisters Rosenzweig” and I was in the middle of reading her memoir “Shiksa Goddess” when she died at the age of 55. Welcome back, Wendy. More applesauce?

But wait, I just saw that several other bloggers cited their late mothers for this question. I have to say that if I could bring my mom back for latkes tonight with me, Kendall, and Leah, that would trump any other possible visits.

7. Other than “Three Fallen Women” (har har), what book do you think would make a great Chanukah gift this year? What book would you like to receive as a gift this year?

I have to guiltily admit that having just discovered the Wonderful World of Güth, I have yet to read “Three Fallen Women” and if I don’t receive it as a gift (pointed hint to my loved ones) I’ll be ordering it next week.

This question is also such a broad canvas that it paralyzes me so I’m going to pretend that we’re just talking about memoirs written by the Jewish women bloggers I know and love. Of course I already own their books but the ones that I’m thinking about that would make PERFECT Chanukah presents include “The Division Street Princess” by Elaine Soloway, “Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants” by Jill Soloway, and “Queen of the Oddballs” by Hillary Carlip. These books brilliantly convey the unique fabulousness of three very different Jewesses. Get all three and wrap them together for your special friend. But HURRY, Chanukah is almost over!

8. What bloggers didn't participate in Chanukah Blog Tour 5767 and you think should have?

I heart Jewish bloggers—several of my favorites have already participated. If this meme business didn’t make me so uneasy, I’d tag Annie Gottlieb, Neil Kramer, Tamar Jacobson, Wandering Jew, Toronto Pearl, Cruisin-Mom, That Black Lesbian Jew, Tequila Mockingbird, Naomi Caryl, and the aforementioned Soloway, Soloway, and Carlip (sounds like a Century City law firm).

I think I’ve just discovered why I never do memes.  Aren’t the answers supposed to be short and pithy? Sorry, Amy, I don’t know from pithy—my responses are as bloated as I am after eating a plate full of latkes.

Comments

[Leah]

Danny-

I'm so glad that I was able to twist your virtual arm and you joined in our Hanukah fun! And, funny, I have those same three books on my shelf.

Fabulous!

Leah

[Neil]

Uh, can I ask for one of those Hanukkah gifts now?

And I love latkes, but comparing them to hammentaschen is like comparing the wine you get a Trader Joe's for three dollars to some fine French wine.

[tamarika]

Wow, Danny. Reading this made me feel so ignorant about the culture of Hanukkah, excepting from an Israeli point of view. For example, sufganyot are my most favorite - not latkes and certainly not "oznei haman." And I have never played "dreidel." For me, though, I sing my songs in Hebrew about sevivonim with the words, "nes gadol haya poh," not "sham." Am I still in Israel in my heart? The favorite book of the year that I asked for was "God Delusion" by Dawkins (which I am really hoping I receive for Christmas!) ... ahem, not really appropriate for this Meme I think.

So, thank goodness you didn't tag me and I was not identified as a suitable Jewish blogger or invited to do this meme ... although recently I discovered that I am connected to a direct track back to 1715, of a long line of the Chief Rabbis of Rhodes Island, Greece. Ho hum. I guess I just never will belong, eh? or do I choose to belong to it all?

But I surely loved reading your post!

[Danny]

What do you mean, Tamar, I did tag you, check again! You're one of the most "suitable Jewish bloggers" I know...even if you are an atheist!

[Amy Guth]

No, you are one of the cool kids! Thanks a million. Your answers were wonderful!

[tamarika]

Hi Danny,

Consider me tagged:

http://tamarika.typepad.com/mined_nuggets/2006/12/tagged.html

Smiles.

[Elaine Soloway]

Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Woe to those who must follow you -- and that includes me!
Love all of your posts, and this one is a classic.

Elaine

[Emily]

Hmmm,YOU a right-wing vigilante? Could any former Heinemann employee ever become such a thing? But welcome to the world of memes (or, as I think of them, adult slam books). My book group is reading The Bread Givers this month, so I'm glad to see it show up here, and then we're going into New York in February to tour the Tenement Museum. Want to join us?

[cruisin-mom]

Danny, I'm so flattered...of all the Jews you could choose, you chose me? (afterall, I'm no Neil Kramer). Does this mean "you like me, you really like me?"!
Well, I won't even try to complete with your thoughtful answers, but I will just say this: Latkes should be simple. Never use sweet potatoes. That's like using carob intstead of Chocolate (blech!). Of course, please don't tell anyone, but I make them from the box. (and they all disappeared quickly at our hanukah party).

[OldOldLady Of The Hills]

This was superb, Danny... and, as always funny and dear..Thank you for the tag...I have no answers to any of these questions...HA HA! But, I do want to tell you this: Both my Grandmother and my Mother made the classic latkes with BUTTER....OIL, never saw the inside of our house...at least not that I can remember...And these latkes were fantastic...mouth watering...UNBELIEVABLY great!
My Grandmother & Mother's hammentachennn(Forget the spelling, please), were always the best I've ever tasted anywhere and most of them were delicate Poppy Seed...Help Me Oh Lord I'm In Hog Heaven!

BTW: This "famous" Birthday dinner that we will have one day before the year is out, I hope..and before I turn 76....I would love to taste your "Latkes" , oil and all! Could that be on the Menu?

Happy Happy Hanukah, Dear Danny And Kendall.....

[Pearl]

Danny, thanks for adding my name to your "would tag" bunch. I won't address the meme except to say, "Don't hate me. But I think I'm more of a hamantaschen lover myself...when it's made with cookie dough and preferably nut-filled." However, I did make a very yummy potato-feta-cheese batch of latkes a few years ago.

Thank you, too, for bringing my attention to writer Anzia Yezierska -- her life and writing sound most interesting and definitely worth checking out.

[sarala]

I just stumbled across your blog. It is good to have an antidote to too much Christmas blogging. My part Jewish (me, spouse and kids), atheist (dad) and Christian (step-mom) family had latkes for dinner last night.
I'll check out more on your blog in the future.
Thanks for the anti-Xmas cheer.