At Home, part 11

Hanukkah was not known or celebrated at all in Spain, but we had a couple of Hanukkah events before we left for the States. First was a party at Amy and Eric’s apartment in Madrid. We hadn’t seen their place before. Located just around the corner from Mike’s original “bachelor” apartment in the northern part of the city, it was a spacious modern flat in a building with a portero (doorman). There was only a tiny cadre of Jews at the American School, so our group was small—the Levine-Gronningsaters (Amy was Jewish, Eric was not, the girls hadn’t had any Jewish education) and an embassy family in which only the daughter was Jewish (her birth father was Jewish, but her mother and her stepfather, with whom she lived, were not). We had a fun afternoon, though, with a good lunch provided by Amy and a few Hanukkah songs and games.

Then, the last day of school before school vacation, Mike and I fulfilled our commitment to Mr. Tribe by showing Julie and her fifth-grade classmates how to make latkes (potato pancakes), a traditional Hanukkah dish. Mr. Tribe had a stove in his classroom and often invited parents in to demonstrate how to make their native dishes.

The making of latkes involved the shredding of several potatoes, a job that Mike and I were not prepared to do by hand, so we hauled in our Cuisinart. And that meant we had to haul in our 20-pound electrical converter so we could operate the thing. We shredded potatoes and put the kids to work cracking eggs, mixing in matzo meal, and heating up the oil for frying.

“Is this mixed okay?” Álvaro asked, and Mike went to inspect his work.

“Hey, let me crack an egg!” Frank insisted, trying to grab a bowl away from Cristina while I tried to mediate.

As tasty as the latkes were, the high point of the demonstration was when Mike set a glass dish on a burner he didn’t realize was hot. The dish made a deafening crack and split in two, mercifully not shattering. The kids ate their pancakes with applesauce, and we adjourned for vacation, sated.