(A short story to celebrate Hanukkah. I was going to write a blog, but this was more fun.)
 
Alex didn't like to cook. Not only did she not like cooking, she was terrible at it. But in the spirit of the season, she volunteered to have the family party on the eighth night of Hanukkah at her Georgetown townhouse. Which meant latkes.
 
"We don't keep kosher." Her fiancee Kolya would of course try to find a reason to get out of hosting the party. He would attend family gatherings to please her, but he didn't enjoy them. 
 
"Dealt with. Besides the only one who's that strict is my brother, and he's not coming. We'll eat latkes, light candles. It'll be fun." 
 
"I've never made latkes." He did almost all the cooking. He liked it and was good at it, never once commenting that Alex as a capable and smart attorney should be able to follow a recipe. 
 
"I know. Your Jewish education is woefully lacking. But it's okay. I'll make them. You can relax and enjoy my family."
 
"Just shoot me." 
 
"Don't tempt me."

But she wasn't really tempted or even annoyed. She loved him for who he was - even if she sometimes would have liked him to be a little less introverted.  But she understood why he felt uncomfortable. He'd had a difficult childhood and was still struggling with physical and psychological injuries from imprisonment and torture after the intelligence agency for which he worked had betrayed him. He was unable or unwilling to talk about either, and he felt he had little in common with her gregarious and comfortable family.
 
He retreated to the piano in the living room where he improvised on Gershwin tunes for an hour. At least, he could play piano if he didn't want to socialize. But that wasn't the point of the holiday, was it?
 
On the day of the party, her great aunts, her great uncles, her first cousins, second cousins, and her cousins once removed arrived bearing gifts and kosher wine. She watched Kolya greet guests, and knowing that he was making the effort gave her a warm glow.
 
Then she retreated to the kitchen for the all-important job of making latkes. She grated onions and potatoes in the food processor, dumped all into a bowl, made patties, and then began the process of frying the mixture. But instead of remaining as patties, the potatoes and onions spread out in a gooey mess. With a spatula, she tried to form the traditional shape. Within minutes, smoke filled the room.
 
Kolya rushed into the kitchen, followed by her 86-year-old Aunt Shelly. He grabbed the frying pan off the stove. 
 
"Heat's too high." He dumped the burned mess into the garbage. 
 
"And too much moisture, Alex dear." Aunt Shelly gave a tentative swipe of the spoon to the mix. "What did you use as a binder?"
 
"Binder?" Alex asked. "There's potatoes and onions. That's it."
 
"Oh, for goodness sakes, Alex. Go have a glass of wine. Kolya and I will do it. Kolya, is there a cheese cloth around?"
 
He located one, and then he grated more onions and potatoes. Aunt Shelly squeezed the liquid while he, at Aunt Shelly's directions, measured out potato starch, matzo meal, salt, and pepper and finally mixed in two eggs.

"I'll make the patties," Aunt Shelly told Kolya. "You fry."
 
Alex watched them and then retreated to the living room where one of her great uncles complained loudly about a recent Supreme Court decision. Kolya and Aunt Shelly emerged half an hour later, Kolya carrying the platter of latkes, which he set on the table next to the sour cream and the apple sauce. 
 
After the latkes but before sunset, the great-aunts, great uncles, first cousins, second cousins, and cousins once removed gathered around the Hanukkah menorah. Alex lit eight candles for the last night. As she placed the shamus candle in the center of the menorah, she noticed Aunt Shelly hanging onto Kolya's arm, while they talked quietly. He glanced over at Alex and smiled.
 
After everyone left and the house was clean, she curled up next to him on the couch. "How did you get on with Aunt Shelly?"
 
"I enjoyed making the latkes with her. And then she told me about her father - who immigrated from Kiev." He was silent for a moment, stroking her hair. "My grandmother was from Kiev."
 
"It wasn't such a bad evening after all, was it?"
 
"Not bad at all. Even though I know you burned the latkes on purpose."
 
"Moi?" Her feigned innocence didn't fool him. But it didn't matter that he knew. He'd enjoyed himself, and at least for the evening, he'd felt a part of her family. That was good enough.
 
For more on Alex and Kolya, check out Trojan Horse and Nerve Attack - where they are main characters.
 
How to Make Latkes
 
There are many recipes on the internet, and they are going to be more precise than my instructions. But - if you like experimenting:
 
Grate a lot of potatoes and slightly fewer onions.
Press to get the liquid out. 
In a bowl, mix the potatoes and onions with enough matzo meal or flour that there is no moisture, add one egg, unless you have a lot of potatoes and onions then add a second egg, salt, pepper, and potato starch. Make the mixture into patties.
Using a frying pan (cast iron works best) heat oil and then dump in patties.
Cook until crispy on the bottom, then flip. 
Cook until the second side is also crispy.
Serve immediately with apple sauce, sour cream, or jelly.

Every kid loves it. Every adult hates it. Well, not every. Skiers at least like it on the mountains. I don't ski, but I love snow - at least through December. But then, I've always suspected that I suck at adulting. That's what my kids say anyway. My adult kids.

Here in Vermont, we usually see the first snow sometime in October. It's late this year, now only a week from Thanksgiving, and we're finally seeing the first accumulating snow. In New Jersey, where we lived until about seven years ago, we'd usually see the first snowflakes a week or so before Thanksgiving. I could be back in New Jersey on this schedule. Not much difference.  Except for the mountains. The untouched woods.  The vast silences - and by the way, we only have those vast silences because it's November. The tourists, no longer lured by colorful leaves or the warmth of summer, have fled to spots where shopping malls and milder weather offer a plethora of activities.

I always feel a little torn about the tourists. I personally prefer they not be here, and yet I know that the state economy and the livelihood of many of my neighbors depends on visitors. So I try to be welcoming when I'm tailgated by people with out-of-state tags, or when I watch them bully their servers in locals restaurant or clog my favorite trails. They are necessary to Vermont. Still, in November I no longer have to be torn. The annual departure of visitors is not my fault or my responsibility.  With their absence, peace has again descended.

We may flee too. My husband, who is in fact better at adulting than I am and who grew up in Florida, likes snow for skiing but otherwise detests it. We made an agreement when we moved to Vermont. We would spend most of the year here but for the months of January and February, we'd pack up our things and head for someplace warmer - with palm trees. Last year, we stayed put for the reasons that everyone stayed put - and also that we had a 17 year old cat who had kidney diesase would not do well traveling. Our Lizzie died in May, we have our vaccines, and this year, we're discussing going.  But we haven't made a decision. I'm hoping for at least one or two big snows - where I can put on my boots and wade through drifts to gaze at the white topped trees in the woods that surround my house.

Writers tend to base characters on people they know. The protagonist of my thrillers, Kolya Petrov, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the United States and intelligence operative, has quite a few of my husband's characteristics. But he has my love of snow and is not crazy about heat.  I'll take him with me on my walks through the silent woods of winter. Maybe it'll help me figure out the plot to my next book.

Let it snow.

Eighty-three years ago, the persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazis moved into a new phase with the destruction of Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues, the murder of almost a hundred Jewish people, and the mass arrest of thirty thousand Jewish men who were went to concentration camps. It was the end of the first phase of the Holocaust, moving from legal restrictions to violence. 
 
Beginning soon after the Nazis took power, Jews had been legally barred from schools, from most professions, from marrying non-Jews, from employing non-Jews, even from park benches and playgrounds - and had been libeled as vermin and parasites for so long that when the Nazis launched the violence against its Jewish population, the majority of Germans either participated or ignored it.
 
But what happened in Germany on November 9, 1938, is only part of the story. 
 
What happened in the rest of the world as the news of the violence spread?
 
There were expressions of outrage by various faith leaders around the world. There were demonstrations of support. The leaders of France and England expressed sympathy for the victims but were restrained in their condemnation. After four days, FDR did strongly condemn the Nazi attacks on the Jewish population and withdrew the American ambassador to Germany.
 
On November 23, 1938, the Los Angeles Examiner published a headline proclaiming, "Nazis warn World Jews will be Wiped out unless Evacuated by Democracies."
 
There were of course the other voices - who blamed the Jewish victims for the violence, Father Charles Coughlin, who voiced anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi views the most prominent among them.  
 
And beyond that?
 
In 1935, there were 523,000 Jewish people living in Germany, and another 200,000 Jewish people came under Nazi rule when Austria was annexed in early 1938. After Kristallnacht, they were desperate to leave, although by then, Germany would allow Jewish refugees to take only eight percent of whatever they owned with them. 
 
They would have left anyway, but there were few places for them to go.
 
The United States in 1938, limited the immigrants from Germany and Austria to 27,370 people, regardless of whether they simply wanted a better economic life or they were fleeing persecution, and the quota did not change, even as the violence grew. After Kristallnacht, 127,000 Jewish people applied for the 27,000 spots. By June 1939, 300,000 people applied for visas. Beyond the limited spots for immigrants, Nazi confiscation of Jewish property made it more difficult - because the United States had financial requirements for anyone seeking to immigrate.
 
A bill proposed in a Congressional committee to take 20,000 German Jewish children into the United States was strongly opposed and never even made it to the floor, with public comments like "20,000 charming children will all too soon grow into ugly adults." (From the wife of the US commissioner of immigration.)  As a side note, after 1940, when Britain was being bombed, the Congress voted to accept thousands of mostly non-Jewish British children.
 
The UK did not lift immigration restrictions on German or Austrian Jewish adults in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, but the government did agree to accept Jewish children under the age of 17 in a program known as Kindertransport. Some ten thousand children were accepted between 1938 and 1940. The vast majority never saw their parents again, who were trapped and murdered. 
 
There were a few other places that Jewish people could flee in the aftermath of Kristallnacht: Bolivia accepted 30,000 people. Shanghai took 17,000. Beginning with Hitler's rule, some 60,000 German Jewish people immigrated to Palestine until 1939 when in response to the 1936-39 Arab revolt, Jewish immigration was limited. Jewish people also immigrated from Germany to other countries in Europe (where most were eventually killed).

Would the Germans have embarked on mass murder if Kristallnacht had provoked a stronger world reaction - something more than the few tsks of disapproval that actually occurred? Possibly. But possibly not. What is certain - is that if in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, countries around the world, like the United States and Great Britain, had opened their doors to accept more Jewish refugees, many lives would have been saved.
 
What happened AFTER Kristallnacht?
 
Kristallnacht was prelude to the horrors that were to come. There has been so much written about what happened - there is so much testimony from survivors and eyewitnesses - that I cannot possibly do it justice here. Still, a brief summary: 
 
 Mass killings of the Jewish population of Europe began after the start of the war. By 1941, Germany began deporting Jewish people from Germany itself - to ghettos in Poland and then to killing centers. In early days, the Germans hoped starvation and disease would kill the majority - but then because Jews were not dying in sufficient numbers, the Nazis built the gas chambers. In the conquered Soviet territories, 1.3 million Jewish men, women, and children were shot and dumped in mass graves. The estimates are that between 160,000 and 180,000 German-Jews were murdered. In Poland, out of 3.3 million Jewish people, somewhere between 2.7 and 3 million were killed. A total of six million dead from all of the countries that the Germans occupied. Two out of three Jews who had lived in Europe were killed.
 
Why Remember?
 
With the passage of eighty years since the start of the war, (and eighty-three years since Kristallnacht) Holocaust survivors have almost disappeared, as have the World War II veterans who liberated the concentration camps. With those disappearances, disturbing trends are being seen.
 
Holocaust denial: a survey in 2020 found that sixty three percent of adults under forty did not know that six million Jews were murdered - over half believed that two million Jews were killed. One in ten had never heard the term Holocaust. While ninety percent believed the Holocaust happened, seven percent weren't sure, and only three percent did not, a disturbing eleven percent believed that the Jews caused the Holocaust.
 
Increasing incidents of anti-Semitism: There are increasing attacks on Jewish people in the United States, along with anti-Semitic rhetoric across social platforms, with statements like "Hitler was right." In 2019, the FBI found that although Jews are only around 2.4 percent of the population, they are the victims of approximately 60 percent of religious hate crimes. 2021 has been a banner year for anti-Semitism. To name a few incidents just from October: A synagogue was set on fire in Austin Texas; a Torah was vandalized at George Washington University in Maryland; in Texas, members of the "Goyim Defense league" put up banners reading - Honk if you know the Holocaust is Fake and Vax the Jews;  in Bucks County, PA, school board officials received threats: "Death to the Jew."
 
Trivialization of the Holocaust: It has become more and more common for people who don't like something that the government wants them to do - to compare their experience to that of the Jewish people under the Nazis. Before anyone makes a comparison of anything short of genocide to the events of the Holocaust, a visit to the Holocaust memorial in Washington D.C. might be in order. Maybe spend a few hours sitting in a replica of one of the boxcars that transported millions of people to their deaths in the gas chambers.
 
Remember that the violence began with Kristallnacht.