This Hanukkah, as my family and I kindle our lights as close as possible to a Manhattan apartment window, I’ll be thinking of the Singer family of Warsaw, circa 1910, as evoked by Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903 or 1904-1991).

A lightly fictionalized slice of life, “A Hanukkah Eve in Warsaw” appears in his 1984 collection Stories for Children. The first-person narrator is six-year-old Itshe (a diminutive for Isaac), a dreamy redhead with an overprotective mom who won’t let him walk to and from school alone, as the other boys do. The “school” in question is a kheyder, a designated room in the home of the melamed, or teacher. His classmates are the sons of upwardly mobile merchants and businessmen, while young Itshe is the child of a pious, learned, but decidedly small-time neighborhood rabbi—the kind who solemnizes weddings and divorces and pronounces on whether a chicken is kosher. We get to know him and the population he serves in a different volume of memoirs, In My Father’s Court.

Much to the boy’s chagrin, an assistant teacher is usually enlisted to walk him to and from school. On the eve of Hanukkah, though, he asks Itshe to make his way home unaccompanied. The late-afternoon darkness, a sudden snowfall and Itshe’s own self-absorption combine to render the familiar streets foreign. His mind and his feet both wander, leading him to an unfamiliar thoroughfare, where a stranger snatches him out of the path of an oncoming trolley just in time to avoid being hit. After some questions from well-meaning passersby, which he answers with lies unaccountable even to himself, he is identified as the rabbi’s son and escorted back to his family’s apartment building on Krochmalna Street.

But instead of going directly home, Itshe stops off to play with his friend Shosha (to whom an entire novella would eventually be devoted). He fantasizes about running away with her, content just to be in her presence until his mother and sister, worried sick about the missing child, burst in and drag him home. He’s clearly in hot water.

Then, a kind of Hanukkah miracle happens: Itshe’s father receives him with a smile, urging the family to light the menorah together and not allow the holiday to be ruined. They enjoy the kind of cozy Hanukkah evening we know well: wicks burning in olive oil, warm latkes, even a present for the young miscreant. He is given a shiny dreidel and a beautiful prayerbook imported from the Land of Israel. In what is perhaps a sign of times gone by, his sister Hinde Esther, who would become a novelist in her own right, is furious that only her scapegrace brother receives a gift, especially as she has spent all afternoon grating potatoes while he has wandered and cavorted. “The worst dog always gets the best bone,” she observes acidly.

But the story doesn’t end there. Writing six decades after the events he describes, the author recalls the unfolding of the dinnertime conversation between father and son. Itshe fantasizes about going off to Berlin to be educated, returning as a professor, and marrying Shosha. His father mentions that he had an aunt named Shosha; in his worldview, marriage matches are foreordained, so perhaps the boy’s strong feelings for the neighbor are a clue regarding the Divine will, to be revealed over time. The story dramatizes the emotional connection that can take place through storytelling around the family dinner table.

Father and son each has in mind a Big Story, an imagined life’s path for young Itshe to tread as he grows up. Rabbi Singer is focused on the past and the collective story of the Jewish people, its long exile and eventual redemption, while Itshe is focused on the never-ending tale of his own seemingly limitless future. A skeptic who never made peace with traditional belief and never stopped wrestling with his discomfort (sometimes in the form of literal demons), Isaac Bashevis Singer found his place in the development of modern Jewish culture. The only Yiddish author ever to win the Nobel Prize, his work is woven tightly into the fabric of Jewish modernity.

When we read a story like this one aloud, with two or more generations present, it catalyzes our own conversations about hopes and dreams for the future—and connections to the rituals that have been handed down to us from the deep Jewish past. Stories like this one shed their own warmth and light—not because they are ideal but because they are authentic. Isaac Bashevis Singer explores real tensions between siblings and a yawning gap between generations. He reminds us that families are made up of individuals who yearn, suffer, grow, and teach each other—perpetually—who they are. Families educate each other in what it means to be human, and sharing Jewish stories can help catalyze our most searching, open discussions of what it means to live as Jews in the twenty-first century.

This Hanukkah, after the candles are lit and the latkes are eaten, consider reading this story with your family. Below are some prompts for conversation.

• Have you ever wandered off, gotten lost, run away, or gone somewhere you weren’t supposed to? What happened, and how do you look back on that time?
• Think about a time when someone has been kinder to you than you thought you deserved. What about a time when you were kind to someone who didn’t fully deserve it? How did those experiences make you feel?
• What are some of your favorite Hanukkah memories? Which senses do they involve?
• What do you dream of learning someday?

Read Miriam’s translation of another Yiddish Hanukkah story, here. It’s part of a series of Yiddish holiday tales for children that will run in The Forward newspaper throughout the Jewish year 5785. Each story is prefaced with an introduction to provide useful context for the reader

Darshanit Dr. Miriam Udel is the 2024 Covenant Foundation Jewish Family Education Fellow. She is also the Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University where she teaches Yiddish language, literature, and culture.

Miriam is the author of Honey on the Page (NYU Press, October 2020), a collection of nearly fifty Yiddish stories and poems from around the globe, most of them appearing for the first time in English translation. Miriam is also the author of  MODERN JEWISH WORLDMAKING THROUGH YIDDISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in September 2025.