Francie Arenson Dickman

My grandmother was lazy. So although she had nice things, she never used them. When she died, I was just out of graduate school and setting up my own apartment. Rather than give away belongings good as new, my mother bestowed them upon me. For years my brother and I, living on different floors of the same building, shuttled my grandmother’s vacuum cleaner between us via elevator.

Still today, my home is littered with my grandmother’s stuff. Her Sunbeam mixer is in my kitchen. Her sewing kit is in my laundry room. A pearled coin purse is in my dresser, a framed picture of her mother Fanny, for whom I’m named, is on my nightstand. And every December I pull from my dining room cupboard her menorah.

When I was little, my grandmother went to Israel with her sister and returned with two of what I always considered ugly menorahs. All Bible, no festivity. Identical. One for her, one for my mother. My grandmother never used hers. It was pristine when I got it. The other, however, became the menorah of my childhood. The one we lit every Hanukkah before my mother ducked into the closet where she “hid” the presents. My grandmother’s became the menorah of my daughters’ childhoods.

It’s not pretty, but to me, as to my kids and my mother, it’s what Hanukkah looks like. The beauty is in knowing where it came from and that for eight days in December, there’s one on my mother’s countertop that looks exactly the same.