​I've decided to periodically write a blog on legal matters because, well, I know something about the law. And I get tired of seeing people get it wrong. 
 
So the topic for today: Hearsay. It comes up all the time in novels and movies, and in real life drama. If you pay attention, you'll see testimony called hearsay as a way to discredit the witness and get the testimony stricken from the record. So what is it?
 
Most of time, the non-lawyers talking about hearsay just, well, get it wrong. It's annoying but be careful about correcting people on Twitter. (I tried, and it got vicious.) Some people seem to think that hearsay is anything said outside of a courtroom by someone other than the witness on the stand. They also seem to think that hearsay is always excluded in court. (Also wrong. Will explain later.)

Definition: 

So first - what is it? This discussion is going to be about hearsay under the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) - and state rules can be and often are different. Here's the definition  of hearsay in the FRE: "“Hearsay” means a statement that:
(1) the declarant does not make while testifying at the current trial or hearing; and
(2) a party offers in evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted in the statement."
 
Yeah, but what's that mean in plain English?

In other words, it's an out of court statement that is offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted.

Huh?
 
Quick demonstration: You have Liz, a witness on the stand in the court proceeding. Liz repeats a conversation with John, in which John stated, "My wife had an affair and stole my mother's jewelry to give to her lover." Is that hearsay?
 
What do you think?
 
The answer is maybe. (Betcha didn’t expect that.) It depends on the reason the testimony is offered. That's what's meant by offered for the truth therein.
 
If the wife is on trial for the theft of the jewelry, and the statement is intended to prove that the wife is indeed a thief, then it is hearsay. Unless it comes under one of the many, many exceptions to hearsay, it should be excluded. (To be discussed later.)
 
HOWEVER, if it's not the wife on trial for robbery but John who is on trial for murdering his wife - it's not hearsay. The purpose of the testimony is not to prove that the wife did indeed have an affair and steal jewelry but to establish John's state of mind - that John was angry because he BELIEVED that his wife was having an affair and stole his mother's jewelry. It's not being offered for the truth of the matter therein - it doesn't matter whether the wife actually had the affair and stole the jewels.  What matters is whether John believed it - which would give him a motive to kill his wife.
 
Let's try it again with another witness statement. The witness reports that Biff said that people in the crowd are armed. Is that hearsay? It is if offered for the purpose of proving that people in the crowd were armed. It is not if offered for the purpose of showing that Biff believed that people in the crowd were armed.
 
Got it?
 
More complications: under the FRE out of court admissions by a party at trial are not considered hearsay. 

Example:

If a witness reports that Biff said: "I sent people to kill Louie because Louie wasn't loyal." Would that be hearsay?  Even though it's being offered to show that yes, Biff did indeed send people to kill Louie because Louie wasn't loyal, it still isn't hearsay under the FRE if Biff is on trial for attempted murder, because admissions of a party opponent are not considered hearsay.

A caveat: admissions are not hearsay, but they're not always reliable evidence. Especially with people in police custody who might be vulnerable because of their age or mental disability. People make false confessions all the time. Unfortunately, admissions are such strong evidence that they often contribute to wrongful convictions. Another blog, another time.

What might be hearsay?  

How about when a witness says, "Mark told me that he gave Biff a gun, a knife, and a bottle of ketchup, even though he knew that Biff planned to give them all to someone else to kill Louie and then dump ketchup on the body." Is that hearsay?

If Mark isn't a co-defendant, yeah, would be considered hearsay.

So is that statement excluded?
 
Maybe but probably not.
 
First, there has to be an objection. Even if it is hearsay, the judge ain't going to kick it out unless the attorney for the defense makes the objection. Then the judge will rule on whether it's admissible or not.
 
If the judge makes a bad ruling on an objection, that can come up on appeal. If there is no objection, it can't be appealed. The only recourse is to try for ineffective assistance of counsel for failing to make the objection. In other words, your lawyer was shit because he wasn't objecting when he should have. (These are notoriously hard cases to win, by the way. Even if your attorney was sleeping on the job.)
 
That's why it's important to have an attorney who is NOT asleep at counsel table.
 
Here's what would happen with decent attorneys on both sides.  The prosecutor would have a witness on the stand who reported what Mark said about the gun, the knife, and the ketchup. The defense attorney would rise.
 
"Objection, your honor. Hearsay."
 
The judge would then give the prosecutor a chance to respond. "Your honor, this statement comes under the exceptions to the hearsay rule. It is a statement against interest and the declarant is unavailable because he refuses to testify."
 
(The declarant is Mark, by the way. The statement against interest is the fact that Mark could be charged for providing the gun, the knife, and the ketchup, especially since he knew that Biff wanted to kill Louie.)

There may be more argument on whether this fits the criteria for allowing hearsay that comes under the exception to the rules as a declaration against interest - but like all evidence rulings, it depends on the judge applying the rules to the statement. 
 
There are more exceptions to the hearsay rule under the FRE, and I'm not going into the rest of them in this blog. I have a thousand words to write on my next novel today, and I'm behind. (Which may or may not be a true statement.) But at least you should have an understanding not only of what hearsay is and how complicated it can be, but why a good attorney is necessary to navigate the legal system.
 
Until next time.

Pesach, more commonly known as Passover to non-Jews, starts Friday night. (The English word, by the way, is a translation of the Hebrew name which literally means to pass over.) 

Pesach is a big deal. It may in fact be the most important holiday in the Jewish calendar. (Sorry, my non-Jewish friends. Hanukah really isn't much of a holiday.) For those who are religious in any traditional sense, it not only celebrates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, it celebrates the covenant between the Jewish people and God. Even those of us - like me - who are somewhat dubious on the God concept - can celebrate the holiday as a renewal of the human spirit, as a celebration of human potential, of Jewish heritage, and as a reminder of how lucky we are to be free. This makes it an important time to remember all of those who are not free and who are struggling to be free, especially poignant this year, as we watch the Ukrainians' inspirational battle against an enemy that wants to take away their freedom and kill anyone who resists.

I grew up in a Reform/Conservative home. By that, I mean we belonged to a Conservative synagogue, but were more Reform in practice. My mother kept vaguely kosher - we didn't have ham or pork products in the house - but she bought non-kosher meat and she wasn't that strict about not mixing dairy and meat. For Pesach, we got rid of bread and ate matzoh for the eight days of the holiday, but we still ate cereal and other foods that were not kosher for Passover. (I've done other blogs on kosher rules. Not the place for it here, but will answer questions in the comments if you're interested.)

So what is the celebration like for those who are observant? Before the holiday begins, there is a rush to clean the house of any hametz - food forbidden for the duration of Pesach that includes, but is not exclusively, leavened bread products. Matzoh, the flat unleavened bread made from flour and water, is the only grain product allowed, and it can't be any old matzoh either. It has to be matzoh that is kosher for Passover. To make cookies or cakes - the only flour allowed is matzoh meal.There are five grains - wheat, rye, oats, barley spelt - that are forbidden during Pesach. For Ashkenazi Jews, it gets a little complicated with rice, corn, lentils, beans not exactly forbidden and not exactly allowed. Rice, corn and beans have been prohibited since the 13th century, but in 2015, that was lifted for Conservative Jews. (For orthodox, not so much.)   (In fact, if you're observant, you only consume food that has been marked kosher for Passover, including Cola products, by the way. I used to stock up on kosher for Passover coke because it was the one time in the year that I could get sugar sweetened coke instead of corn syrup sweetened coke. Look for Coke bottles with a yellow cap.)

The first two nights of Pesach are celebrated with a seder - the famous ceremonial meal where the exodus from Egypt is retold, four glasses of wine are consumed, various ritual items are eaten. Ritual items include a matzoh of course, boiled eggs, parsley dipped in salt water, a weird sort of sandwich made of an apple nut wine concoction, horseradish and placed between two pieces of matzoh.

The length of the seder depends on the level of observance of the household. As an adult with children, my husband and I used to have seders that lasted maybe 45 minutes to an hour, but then we just hit the highlights, especially the four glasses of wine. When I was a kid, we would often go to my Uncle Arthur's house. Seders at my Uncle Arthur's orthodox home could last for hours, with a reading of the story in Hebrew, a reading in English, and then a discussion of what various rabbis thought various passages meant. It was a wonderful family gathering, but I did get a little hungry as the evening went on. We'd eat around ten o'clock. After the meal, the readings were supposed to continue, but my Dad would always stand and proclaim - time for the book of Exodus - and off we'd go.

For the religious, the first two days have the same strictures on work and use of electronics etc that are forbidden on Shabbat. Same with the last two days. Food preparation is allowed, but the stove or oven has to be left on for the duration. The four intermediate days essential work is allowed, but not non-essential work. For a definition of essential work - ask someone else.

Jews, however, differ in observance from the very strict to the  hey- okay - I'll eat a piece of matzoh. I'm closer to that end of the spectrum. But I do enjoy the gatherings, the fellowship, the rituals that remind me of my childhood and of my parents, the food, and the wine, even if I remain skeptical on the theological part of the holiday. With our kids grown, Jim and I have attended seders with friends or at the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe. This has been lost with covid - temporality I hope -I haven't felt comfortable having or attending a large gathering since 2020. But I've continued to celebrate in my own way, with matzoh ball soup, matzoh, gefilte fish, horseradish, and overcooked chicken for dinner. (Don't forget almond macaroons for desert.) And every year of the pandemic, I rewatched the Prince of Egypt, thereby fulfilling my duty to rehear the story of the Exodus.

This year, the first two days of Pesach coincide with Easter Sunday. In medieval times, the close positioning wasn't all that good for Jewish people. Both holidays became occasions to kill Jews - when religious crazies in the Christian world accused Jews of using Christian baby blood to make matzohs and of killing Jesus and then went on rampages to hunt and kill us. But we live in different times now, at least most of us do. And celebrations of both holidays have something to do with boiled eggs. So celebrate what we all have in common and enjoy whatever you celebrate. Chag Sameach. 







 

​It was minus seventeen degrees - minus forty-five windchill - when I woke this morning. One of the downsides of January in Vermont. It's a good month to write, to read, and to think. Good for downhill skiing, if you're so inclined. I'm not. I do a bit of cross-country skiing from time to time, but not at these temperatures.
 
Lately, much of our entertainment has come from keeping the fire going in the woodstove and watching the bird feeders. We have two bird feeders up - once we did the initial winter fill, the birds took a little time to realize that the food was there and that it was not a trap. Since then, it's been a riot of birds and squirrels.
 
The chickadees came first. They were almost polite, taking turns at the feeder, while those not eating patiently waited in trees and bushes. But the chickadees were soon crowded out by finch size brown birds with whitish yellow breasts, a species that we have yet to identify, but whatever they are, they have no manners whatsoever. Six or more will perch on the feeder,  crowding each other, even pecking at new arrivals, in a bid for a turn at one of the holes that lead to the birdseed. 
 
We have two downy woodpeckers that have been visiting regularly. The large one, with a red head, dubbed Woody by my husband, is twice the size of the other. I personally have my doubts that they are the same species, but I have limited knowledge of birds. When Woody arrives, the smaller birds retreat to the snow-covered branches of the very large lilac bush near the feeder and watch angrily until Woody has eaten his fill. 
 
Two blue jays have also been gracing us with their presence. We suspect that they are a couple. I checked on the web since, as stated above, I know nothing of birds, and discovered that male and female blue jays are indistinguishable by their feathers, and gender can only be determined by mating and nesting behaviors. However, when they mate, they mate for life. Jim and I have decided that this is a loving couple - whether it's true or not, a romantic story goes a long way in a cold winter. The blue jays, however, don't land on the bird feeders. They scramble for the seeds dropping on the ground underneath, competing with the squirrels. It seems that the squirrel proof feeders which we purchased do not fit the body size of bigger birds like jays. The small birds have no problem. The woodpeckers, perhaps because they are accustomed to twisting their bodies on tree trunks, manage as well.
 
The squirrels, though, are less than thrilled with having to make do only with seeds that drop from the small birds' frantic meals. Periodically, they try to scramble up the side of the house to figure some way onto the feeder. So far, they've had no luck. However, along with amusing us, the squirrels have sparked the interest of our 11-year-old cat, Xiao. They leap on the windowsill outside. Xiao leaps on the windowsill inside. The squirrels jump down and run for it. The squirrels probably know that he can't get out, but they're taking no chances.
 
The squirrels are a variety that I'm unfamiliar with as a former resident of Ohio, New York, and New Jersey. They are red with stubby, half-length tails. I keep wondering if all of them had some sort of accident - but it's probably a genetic thing. Perhaps squirrels with longer tails were more likely to be caught and consumed by the many predictors here in the Vermont woods. Or perhaps, other squirrels just found the shorter tails attractive. At some point, I'll research it. I'm not interested enough at this point.
 
We had two stale ends of whole grain bread, and Jim thought that perhaps the squirrels would like something more substantial than the occasional seeds. Yesterday afternoon, he tossed the bread into the snow close to, but not directly underneath the bird feeders. Then we hung out at windows for half an hour, waiting for the squirrels to discover and consume the bread. To our surprise, they were afraid of it, avoiding going near these strange and apparently foreboding objects. This morning when I rose, the bread was still there.  I assumed, given the minus seventeen-degree temperatures, that the bread would be frozen solid and of no interest to wildlife at this point. However, when I checked on the birds and squirrels after spending some time working in my office, the bread was gone. I assume the squirrels either took it or consumed it so completely that nothing was left. Apparently, squirrels like frozen dinners.
 
It astonishes both Jim and me that the birds and squirrels can survive in such temperatures, although it probably explains what they are so frantically fighting for the birdseed. We did our part by filling the feeders before the weather went sub-zero, and we are probably feeding several dozen birds, maybe more, as well as three or four squirrels. But still, humans would not survive outside for long in this weather. That the birds and squirrels can do so seems nothing less than miraculous.
 
Today Jim and I are sticking close to the fire in our woodstove that supplements the central heating, and not venturing even a toe outside.  We have a supply of food and wood that will get us through until temperatures rise to a more balmy 5 degrees or so. And we have books to read and to write to keep ourselves occupied. I'm busily editing Bloody Soil, the book I just finished writing which once again features my Russian Jewish secret agent, Kolya Petrov. Jim is working on his second book: his first will debut next November, the same month as Bloody Soil.  In breaks from our fictional worlds, we will continue to marvel at the amazing spectacle outside our windows.
 
 

I first wrote the below tirade on New Year's maybe four years ago when I was still a member of Rogue Women Writers. I recycled it in 2019 because it was still true then. I'm recycling it now, with a few edits to be consistent with our current covid times - and, yeah, I still hate the holiday. What do you want? At least I'm consistent.

​Why I hate New Year's

I hate the New Year’s holiday. Always have. Well, not always. When I was a kid, it was the one day in the year when I got to stay up until midnight. I’d eat potato chips with onion dip and watch the stupid ball come down, usually with a babysitter because my parents were usually at a New Year’s party. I envisioned an elegant, fun filled evening of romance – an illusion I kept of New Year’s parties until I hit dating age and the pressure of having a special someone for the holidays – which I rarely did until I met my husband in my late 20s.
 
Now, much older and happily married, I still dislike New Year's. As someone who tends to be a bit on the depressive side, I just get worse around New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. So, at this time of year, with everyone making lists, time to make my list – of ten things I most loathe about this holiday.

1. Television news listing the most significant events of the past year. I know that journalists, like the rest of us, want to take the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, but this is just lazy. And, yeah, yeah, I know all the shit that happened last year, from the January 6 attack on our democracy to the surge of covid when we thought we were out of this but we weren't.  I don’t need to be informed that these were significant events. I’m already aware. Which leads me to:

2. The annual listing of the people who died in the calendar year. Can you spell d-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-n-g? Or morbid? They died. I’m sad. And apart from all the celebrities who died, we lost a load of people to Covid, most of whom will go unheralded - but were very special to their kids, their spouse, their parents.  The years I lost my parents - listening to the sad droning over famous people who had passed just made me sadder.

3. On a lighter note – New Year’s hats. They’re stupid looking. Enough said.  

4. Restaurant dining on New Year’s Eve. I first wrote this in prepandemic times, when people still went out to restaurants. I haven't been to a restaurant  - except to put on two masks, run in and pick up carryout - since last summer when we had the brief illusion that Covid might be over. But even for those souls who do go out to restaurants or who want to wax nostalgic over going out to restaurants in the past, going out on New Years Eve sucks. So, maybe you give in to the idea that you should do something to welcome the fact that you’ll be writing the wrong year on your checks – if you still use checks – for about a month and decide to go out to your favorite restaurant for your favorite meal. Only your favorite restaurant isn’t serving your favorite meal. It’s serving a $200 per person New Year’s Eve special. With Champagne – which is supposed to make up for the fact that your meal is $300 more than you wanted to pay. And you have to drink Champagne –which leads me to...

5. Champagne. It’s expensive. It’s festive. We’re supposed to love it. I don’t. As generally served, it’s a sweet fizzy drink. If I want a drink, I’ll take Scotch. Glen Livet is very festive. If I want sweet, I’ll have a milkshake. But we’re supposed to drink Champagne, because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Kind of circular, but there you are.  

6. The forced gaiety. Again, for me in these covid times, not so much my problem - but in non-covid times, people feel like they should be going to parties to welcome the New Year. And the parties are miserable. The music is ear-shatteringly loud, and people who don’t know how to dance are bumping and grinding into each other. You’re supposed to be dancing along with them, with a brief period of kissing everyone within reach when the clock ticks down to the new year, even though you just want to flee for fresh air. Then there’s the forced gaiety of the people you see crowded into Times Square waiting for the stupid ball to come down as it does every year. Those smiles you see on the faces of people in the crowd on television – they’re either too drunk and stoned to know what’s happening or they figure this will be the last image their loved ones have of them.  Hence the grins to fool the families into thinking their last moments were good ones.  

7. People shooting guns or fireworks at midnight. Usually happens just after I’ve fallen into a deep sleep, having resisted the social pressure to stay up past my usual bedtime. Scares the dogs. Scares me, especially when idiots fire actual bullets into the sky, and yes, people sometimes do fire actual rounds into sky.  Don’t people realize that what goes up….  

8. New Year’s resolutions. No, I don’t make them. Why set myself up for almost certain failure once a year? I do that all the time. Don’t need to make a big thing about it.  

9. The darkness after the holiday. After New Year’s Day, all the decorations come down. The decorated trees, the strings of lights, even the scary Christmas balloons, they all disappear until next year.  It’s the lights, bright colors or even just strings of white lights shining in the dark, that I especially miss. They disappear, and we’re left with the coldest, darkest, and most depressing month of the year. January just goes on and on until it turns into February, the second most depressing month of the year. We could use some festive lights, at least until Valentine’s Day. And some more presents. Make every Friday in January a day to give one present to someone you love. Only not chocolate – I’ll still be fat from not having made a New Year’s resolution to lose the holiday weight. Books make really good January presents.  

10. Finally, let’s get to the essence of the holiday. New Year’s marks just how quickly time goes by and how fleeting our lives really are. This may in fact be the core of my whole shtick about New Year’s – because the holiday just underscores what I already know – “what heart heard of, ghost guessed: it is the blight that man was born for….” We are mortal. Time is short. Yada yada. All the hats and the drinking and the fireworks and the forced gaiety are just trying to conceal that truly terrifying fact. In these Covid times, New Year's marks just how long we've been struggling with this pandemic, and that in 2020, we really thought we had it bear and things would be great.  
 
So, yay, another year gone. Take a deep breath and plunge. May the coming year be, well, at slightly better than the last two.
 

​When I was a child, I wanted a Christmas tree. Back then, there were Jewish families that had what was essentially a Christmas tree, but they labeled it a Hanukkah bush. I tried lobbying for a Hanukkah bush, but my parents weren't buying. I heard the same thing every year.
 
"We're Jewish, and we don't have Christmas trees."
 
Which was a pretty funny stance to take, given that we celebrated Christmas - in a manner of speaking - until I was about eight years old. By Christmas, though, I don't mean the religious holiday. 
 
Christmas is actually several holidays jammed together on the same date - but for convenience's sake, labeled as Christmas. For Christian believers, Christmas is a solemn religious celebration of the birth of their Lord. But there are many who celebrate the day who are not believers - they are celebrating the holiday that I would label - the Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-Up- the-Tree. Of course, for many, the two holidays are combined. Santa can move between the camps - designated as St. Nickolas for the religious - or just Santa Claus for those more secularly inclined.
 
For my people, the Jewish people who refuse to celebrate either the solemn religious holiday or the secular Celebration, there is the annual Feast of Chinese Food and a Movie - when - as tradition holds - we romp through empty city streets, enjoying the lack of traffic and the silence.
 
As a side note: I've never been religious, at least not in any traditional sense.
 
When I was a child, we half celebrated Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-Up-the-Tree -- without the light-up-a-tree part  -- because we were Jewish. However, my parents had felt that they had missed out as kids, and they didn't want us to feel left out. Frankly, the holiday consumes almost two months of the year - and it's pretty damn alluring. The lights. The story of magic. So we hung up stockings. We woke up to gifts on Christmas morning brought by Santa Claus. We watched television specials about Christmas, when said television shows featured Santa Claus but not when they featured a lady on a donkey, which I thought had nothing to do with the holiday.  But no tree.
 
At age eight, my sister spilled the beans about Santa, and we stopped the Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts - probably because my parents knew about the lady on the donkey and didn't want us to celebrate That holiday. I didn't start celebrating the Jewish annual Feast of Chinese Food and a Movie until I moved to New York. (The Chinese food in New York was much better than the Chinese food in my hometown of Cincinnati.)
 
Fast forward a few years: I met the man who is now my husband. He was handsome, funny, smart, kind - and I could enjoy his Christmas tree because he wasn't Jewish. I like to think the last part isn't the reason I fell in love with him - although that first Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-up-the Tree when we decorated his Christmas tree together was pretty enchanting.
 
As a second side note -- my husband has the same level of religiosity as I do -- which is to say, not much.
 
So through our marriage, now towards the end of its third decade, we celebrated everything especially, when our children were younger. Jewish holidays and the not so Jewish holidays - especially the Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-up-the Tree. We really did it up. We went to the same Christmas tree market every year where we drank hot cider, fed pet goats, and fought over what would be the perfect tree. We'd decorate the tree to the music of the same album. We baked sugar cookies and watched The Santa Claus. And on Christmas morning, Santa brought copious gifts. (Christmas afternoon, we'd head to the movies - thus honoring both heritages.)
 
So now that my children are grown and thanks to Covid, not spending the holiday with us, I'm doing some re-evaluation. I'm feeling a little more ambivalent about the whole Christmas tree thing. I have gotten more in touch with my Jewish heritage over the last few years, even though I remain agnostic - and that combined with the rise in anti-Semitism has me a little less enthusiastic about the Celebration of Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-up-the Tree. This ambivalence was especially fueled with the rise in people feeling the need to insist that everyone, regardless of belief, say Merry Christmas. Two years ago, I was shopping at Costco in December and the guy checking my cart to see whether I was shoplifting wished me a Merry Christmas. I wished him a Happy Hanukkah back. His response: "Oh. You're one of those."
 
Yes, I am proudly one of those. Just not a religious one.
 
We already celebrated Hanukkah by lighting the menorah. As a Jew, I should be celebrating the Feast of Chinese Food and a Movie on December 25. But, there is still a pandemic, and I'm not comfortable in restaurants or movie theaters. And despite everything, the decorated trees are pretty, the lights alluring, and I am still married to the same wonderful guy who is still not Jewish.
 
So despite my ambivalence, this year we will celebrate a modified Give-a-Lot-of-Gifts-and-Light-up-the-Tree. We won't be able to be with our kids, but we might give each other a gift or two. The tree is maybe a foot high and made of pink pipe cleaners. But we will be celebrating whatever it is - together.
 
Happy whatever you celebrate.

(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.  

​We have a history, Dracula and me.  When I was thirteen, I read half of Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time. I was petrified. I'm not completely sure just what terrified me at that time- but there was something beyond the fact that I was a highly sensitive young person who scared easily and tended to avoid horror stories. Something about a beloved person dying and then transforming into a monster that would destroy everyone she loved frightened me to the point that I couldn't sleep.
 
Now I wasn't completely stupid, even at thirteen. My rational mind did know it was fiction and that vampires didn't really exist. At least I knew that in the light of day. But when the sun set and we all went to bed, my irrational mind took over. I still remember lying awake, hearing branches brush against the windowpanes, and worrying whether it was Dracula trying to get into my house. In the morning after a sleepless night, I asked my parents if I could have a crucifix -- since in the book that was the one thing that would keep Dracula at bay.
 
I'm Jewish. Proudly Jewish. My parents -- even more so.
 
My parents, with the knowledge that vampires aren't real but with the additional knowledge that they had a scared and slightly crazy young teen who had stayed up all night, came up with a compromise. My father bought me a mezuzah necklace - a small silver cylinder that contains the holiest prayer in Judaism, the Shema.  If I wore it, it would keep off vampires, my father told me. I wasn't so sure. I wasn't convinced that vampires would recognize or fear Jewish prayers. I wore it anyway, and it did calm me down. (I still wear the mezuzah not to ward off vampires but in memory of my father.) 
 
I also returned Dracula to the library without finishing it. 
 
It was years before I took up Dracula again and finished it. By then, I was in college and more in control of my mind -- or as in control as anyone in college might be. I never forgot how powerfully the book had affected me at the age of thirteen, but by that point I could analyze books with a bit more skill. I noted with amusement the association of evil and sexuality, how the descriptions of women who were not vampires emphasized their purity, and those of vampires, their sexuality. I was also fascinated by the origins of the Dracula myth -- how Stoker had incorporated real history into the creation of his vampire, that of a Romanian ruler from the Middle Ages, known alternatively as Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler, who had particularly sadistic methods of execution.
 
(As a side note, when I created my villain for Trojan Horse, the first of my thriller novels, I reached back into that early terror. I couldn't resist. My villain Mihai Cuza, an anti-Semitic descendant of Vlad the Impaler, has nothing of the supernatural about him, but he likes to imitate his ancestor when killing people and he's particularly sadistic towards my Russian-Jewish protagonist.)
 
But interestingly, an article I recently read about Dracula has changed my perspective on that thirteen-year-old experience. Rob Silverman-Ascher recently wrote "The Antisemitic History Of Vampires" in the publication Alma. I had never made the association between anti-Semitic stereotypes and Dracula, but once he laid it out, I was convinced.
 
First, Dracula's physical description emphasized a hooked nose and bushy hair, both of which occur in caricatures of Jewish people. He hoards wealth. His house, while large was “that neglected that yer might ‘ave smelled ole Jerusalem in it.” - Chapter 17, page 7.  The choice of Jerusalem -- interesting.
 
According to the article, Dracula was written in the time period when Jewish immigrants, fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe for London, were being described as a "parasitical race with no ideals beyond precious metals" in the British periodical, The Spectator.  Silverman-Ascher also notes that Dracula is Eastern European, with an accent, and he is the ultimate parasite, just as Jews have been described as parasites. Dracula exists off the blood of the living, invoking images of the blood libel --  Jews killing Christian babies to make matzah -- that has been the rationale for massacres of Jews for centuries. Then there's the even creepier stuff - the sexual degeneracy terms used to describe Dracula's preying on young innocent Christian women - that parallels how Jews were portrayed as preying on beautiful German women in Nazi propaganda.
 
And finally, the coup de grace, Dracula cannot bear the sight of a cross or the touch of Christian objects. Yup, Jewish caricature.
 
Maybe what should have frightened my thirteen-year-old self was not the thought of Dracula breaking into my house but the thought that anti-Semitic tropes were used to create him and that those kind of tropes were used as justification for murdering people like me and my parents in the years before my birth. 
 
That doesn't mean we should ban Dracula. Just be aware that it does use troubling anti-Semitic stereotypes - as well as outdated ideas about sexuality.  And the modern versions of Dracula, as noted in Silverman-Ascher's article, have moved away from the more problematic tropes to more diverse and less frightening imagery of vampires - for example Twilight's shiny and helpful vampires who drink animal blood. I personally have a lot of fondness for Spike and Angel - the sometimes good, sometimes bad vampires from the late 1990s, early 2000s television series -Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
 
Anyway, it's Halloween. Who doesn't love a good vampire story at Halloween?

 The outrage at the use of non-Jewish actors to play Jewish characters on television and in movies has received a lot of coverage lately and has sparked good conversations about how Jews are treated differently than other minorities when it comes to casting. But just as important as discussing the choices in casting Jewish characters is discussing the types of Jewish Americans characters who appear in books, on television, and in film.
 
In an age of rising anti-Semitism, it's more critical than ever to have Jewish American action type heroes. But finding Jewish American action heroes isn't easy, and portraits of Jews, for the most part, remain depressingly familiar. As a Jewish American writer of thrillers, I found it disturbing on both a personal and a professional level.
 
Jewish action heroes in books or film generally fall into two categories - Jewish resistance heroes in World War II or Israeli tough guys - like Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon. Ever since Leon Uris penned Exodus and created Ari Ben Canaan, ( who was played in the movie by the gorgeous Paul Newman) Israelis, love them or hate them, have been portrayed as tough and smart protagonists in novels and on television. If there are Jewish secret agents or action figures in non-World War II fiction of any kind, they will be Israelis. Not American Jews. For non-Israeli Jewish heroes, look to World War II. While books and media about the Holocaust, often portray Jews as victims or as being rescued by brave non-Jews, occasionally Jews do inhabit more heroic roles. Inglourious Bastords shows a Jewish American military unit killing Nazis. Defiance depicted the acts of Jewish partisans. In novels, John Hersey's The Wall and Leon Uris' Mila 18 portray the heroism of the Jews who mounted the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 
 
It's much rarer to see American Jews portrayed as heroic in film or television in a contemporary setting - risking their lives to stop evil.  There is the Amazon Prime television show Hunters - in which Al Pacino leads a group to fight against a Nazi threat in the United States. But these kinds of shows are rare. On television, Jewish American characters are more likely to be depicted in leading roles in comedies rather than in leading roles in suspense or thrillers: Seinfeld, the Amazing Mrs. Maisel, the Goldbergs, the Nanny, the New Girl. Unfortunately, comedies all too often get their jokes from playing up Jewish stereotypes - the loud and obnoxious Jewish mother in the Goldbergs, the Jewish American Princess, as personified by the shoe and hat conscious Midge. Beyond those explicit caricatures, Jewish American characters tend to be shown as intelligent but neurotic, maladjusted, and of course, cheap.
 
I was recently struck by the lack of fully rounded Jewish characters in television while watching the last season of a popular television detective show, placed in Los Angeles. In the city of Los Angeles, Jews make up seventeen percent of the population, the largest Jewish community outside New York and Israel. But in this show, which has depicted the Latino and the Black community and characters with depth and sympathy, I can remember no characters explicitly identified as Jewish - until the final season when a rich man arrested for a Ponzi scheme identifies himself as Jewish (and there was no reason for him to claim a Jewish identity) in a conversation with his attorney. Not only had the Jewish culture of Los Angeles been ignored in the series, the only character who is openly named as Jewish in the series is someone whose depiction as a rich, greedy, dishonest coward would have won approval from Goebbels.
 
So what about the world of literature?  
 
There is of course a wider range of Jewish American portraits in novels than on television. Literary fiction is filled with sympathetic Jewish American characters, but not necessarily action heroes. There are some mysteries with Jewish American protagonists. Faye Kellerman writes a detective series with a Jewish police detective; Henry Kemelman wrote novels with a mystery solving rabbi; Michael Chabon wrote The Yiddish Policemen's Union. 
 
But I mainly read suspense and thrillers, especially in the espionage realm. And I remain unaware of Jewish American protagonists or heroes in the thriller genre, and especially in the world of espionage. Harlan Coben comes pretty close with his Myron Bolitar series, but Myron , the Jewish character, is a sports agent, not a secret agent, who leaves much of the heavy violence to his deadly buddy, Win.
 
Why does it matter?
 
I've been thinking about this lately in part because I write an espionage thriller series with a American Jewish immigrant to the United States from Russia as the hero. (Check out Trojan Horse and Nerve Attack on my other pages.) And yes, there is some self-interest in promoting my own work. But, I'm also thinking about it because of the rise in anti-Semitism.
 
In recent years, the old stereotypes about Jews that had been driven underground have remerged, and this is not helped by media and books that show Jews as victims, or worse, as intelligent neurotics, as money hungry, bossy, loud, or, as in the case of the seventh season of the detective show mentioned above, financial criminals.
 
And while American Jews do work in the CIA and American Jews are members of the military in real life, they still face discrimination. According to a discrimination lawsuit filed by a Jewish attorney fired by the CIA, not only was he accused of dual loyalties, but he was described as being "rich" and having a "wealthy" father. Separately, Darrell Blocker, a 28-year veteran of the CIA and a Jewish Black American, in a 2020 interview described the suspicion with which his Jewish colleagues were regarded, suspicion which he ironically avoided because colleagues perceived him as a Black American rather than as a Jewish American.
 
To combat prejudice, it's necessary to break stereotypes. American Jews work in the intelligence field and the military in real life, and we should see them in those kind of roles in novels and television, not just as doctors, lawyers, bankers, comedians, writers. Fictional characters have the power to engage our sympathy and admiration. It's important to see members of non-mainstream groups, and this includes Jews, in different kinds of roles, especially, in the role of heroes, in the vital fight against prejudice. 
 
Books, movies, or television won't defeat those who will persist in their hatred. Having more Jewish American heroes won't muzzle neo-Nazis, and it will take a lot more than simply changing the roles inhabited by Jewish characters to counter the rise in anti-Semitism. But it's a start.  Fiction, television, and movies play critical roles in our society in enlarging empathy, in allowing us to understand and identify with people other than those in our own circles, and by portraying minorities in non-stereotypical roles, start to change perception. 
 
It's time for more Jewish American action heroes.