The Miracle of the Dreidel

In my childhood home, family game night wasn’t part of our culture. I played games with my friends -- Old Maid, Risk, Monopoly, and endless rounds of jacks, which I inevitably lost due to my miserable clumsiness -- but game-playing with my parents? That was for Leave It to Beaver Americans, not us. My parents were too foreign. Both had moved to New York as adults after surviving WWII in Europe -- my father in a Hungarian labor camp and my mother in Auschwitz. Rebuilding their lives was an all-encompassing task leaving no time for games. There was one exception, though: On one of the nights of Hanukkah, we gathered round the brown Formica dinette table to play dreidel.