Feast of Lights

Ellen S. Jaffe is an award-winning Canadian author who has written her first young adult novel entitled Feast of Lights. It is set in present-day Toronto during the celebration of Hanukkah. The heroine is Sarah Goldman, a sensitive twelve-year-old girl who is mourning the recent loss of her six-year-old brother Ben. Her brother did of leukemia a few months earlier and her parents are devastated. Her father is a family doctor who disappears in his study to brood. Her mother is a piano teacher who wonders if they shouldn't forego celebrating Hanukkah. Sarah is shocked by this reaction. She decides to polish the antique menorah passed down from her great-grandmother Ruth, and to light the candles each night... .

... Feast of Lights is deeply affecting... In Sarah, Jaffe has created a credible young modern-day heroine who grapples with loss and death in her life... .

... Feast of Lights is lively, colourful, and entertaining, but also a very valuable because it deals with the Holocaust in a way that young readers will fine instructive. ...Young readers, and older ones too, will be inspired and comforted by the story of lovable Sarah Goldman and her "season of miracles."

Set in Toronto, Feast of Lights is a compassionate exploration of grief, healing and growth within a family during what is supposed to be a happy time. Less than six months earlier, 12-year-old Sarah Goldman's younger brother, Ben, died of leukemia. Since then, everything has been different. Sarah, her mother and father have each been mourning in their own way.

Now it's Chanukah. How can this emotionally damaged family possibly celebrate Chanukah?

Dad doesn't want to. But Sarah and Mom are determined to light candles. For the first time, they will use great-grandmother Ruth's menorah, which has been in the family for over a century and has seen many miracles in addition to marking Chanukah's miracle of oil.

To Sarah's surprise, and eventual comfort, magic realism takes over as the candles burn. Night after night Sarah travels back in time, meeting her ancestors on her mother's side of the family at different stages in their lives. Sometimes they can interact. Sometimes not. Sometimes Sarah mingles her awareness of present events and feelings with past realities and emotions. Sometimes not.

Yet, each time, Sarah awakens with a better understanding of the people and events that went into making her who she is today. But who can she talk to about what is happening? Why is it happening? What are the rules? And what does it mean?

As Sarah wrestles with these concerns, she's also dealing with school, friends, winter, etc. Along the way, readers get to know Ben, Sarah's mother and father, her best friend, Marnie, her geeky friend, Raphael, her ancestors and the Kensington Market section of Toronto. Readers also learn about Chanukah, Kristallnacht, the anti-Semitic riots at Christie Pits in Toronto in the mid-1930s, Anne Frank and the Holocaust, the northern lights, and so much more.

When a day of tobogganing at Christie Pits ends with Sarah in the very same hospital where Ben died, reality hits the family as hard as Sarah's head had hit a pine tree. They have to pull themselves together so everyone can flourish even as they remember Ben. The final candlelighting in the hospital is especially poignant as is the visit, the next day, to great-grandmother Ruth in the nursing home and the continuation of family stories at home afterwards.

Carefully crafted and sensitively written, Feast of Lights is also a feast for the physical senses. Smells, tastes, the feel of things, visual descriptions, the sounds of Yiddish words and lyrics, harmonica and piano music all tie the story together as much on the subconscious level as on the conscious level.

A tribute to personal resilience, family heritage and the power of light to overcome physical and emotional darkness, Feast of Lights is, ultimately, a reminder we should keep our eyes open for the everyday miracles that make life so worth living, even in times of sorrow.

Happy reading and Happy Chanukah!

Twelve-year-old Sarah's little brother Ben has recently died of leukaemia. She and her family face the first Hanukkah without him. The dilemma of whether to celebrate or not brings pain and conflict to Sarah and her parents.

This children's novel tackles some of the difficulties that confront bereaved families. Sarah yearns to celebrate Hanukkah, to light the candles as they have done in the past to enjoy the celebrations of this feast... Despite strong resistance from her father she lights the candles each night and is drawn into the world of her ancestors. This 'time travel' for Sarah feels as if she has really gone back in time, revealing details of her ancestors and their stuggles with loss and change...

Jaffe uses the symbolism of the candles in the traditional Jewish sense, explaining their meaning and history... but [she] also uses them to shed light on the struggles of a bereaved family...

I thought this novel was beautifully written and that it would appeal to children between the ages of 8 and 13 years... I think that children reading this would feel comforted by the range of emotions described by Jaffe, from fury and sadness to love and joy. Jaffe includes the struggle of a young girl on the edge of adolescence faced with the loss of a dearly loved little brother... The novel traces the struggles but does not resolve them which I found more rewarding and real...

This smoothly written book tells a relatively predictable story in an engaging way. Sarah's family is struggling with their first Hanukkah since the death of her little brother Ben. They are also, for the first time, using the menorah that her great-grandmother's family brought with them when they immigrated to Canada from Russia many decades earlier. As the candles are lit, one more each evening through the eight nights of Hanukkah, Sarah slips into time traveling, visiting her ancestors at various stages during the epic events of their departure from Russia, arrival in Canada, and struggle to make their way in a new country.

By the end of the book, Sarah has learned more about her family, more about being Jewish, and more about how to live with loss. Readers may feel themselves similarly enlightened.

There are a number of such time-travel/immigrant stories in the Canadian canon for young people, but this one is well told.

Feast of Lights by Ellen S. Jaffe (Sumach Press) is another magical Chanukah story, this one for young teen readers.

The holiday is not the same for 12-year-old Sarah Goldman anymore. Since her little brother died, her parents seem distant to her, and have little interest in lighting the menorah with her. But when Sarah discovers her great grandmother's ancestral chanukiyah, she decides to clean it up and light it each night without her parents. This is no ordinary chanukiyah. For eight nights, after she lights the candles, Sarah falls asleep and is transported magically to her past and witnesses events in her family's history. Her travels take her to a crowded ship transporting immigrants to the new world; to a synagogue in turn-of-the century Europe; to a store in prewar Kensington Market. Sarah meets her grandparents and other relatives when they were very young and learns about her history, culture and traditions.

Feast of Lights is a heartwarming Chanukah tale that intertwines past and present, joy and mourning, and celebrates the importance of family and heritage.

The emotional impact of a child's death is considered to be the worst a parent can experience. Special days that had formerly been times for celebration become events of sadness and avoidance. In Feast of Lights, Ellen S. Jaffe describes the struggle a young girl faces as her parents try to deal with the loss of their six-year-old son, Ben, from leukemia. Sarah feels as if she is caught between them as she tries to regain a sense of normalcy.

Jaffe sets the story in modern-day Toronto at the time of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. The holiday commemorates the regaining of the Second Temple from the Greeks when one day's worth of consecrated oil burned for eight days until more could be obtained.

The vehicle for the miracle in this story is the family menorah, or Hanukkah candelabra, which Sarah polishes for the holiday. Just like miracle offered by the genie's lamp, Sarah's miracle is to be transported back in time every time she lights the candles.

There are eight chapters, one for each night of Hanukkah. In each chapter, Sarah discovers that she, too, is struggling over Ben's death. Everything seems to be a reminder. Sarah wants to carry on the traditions of the holiday which she hopes will help her parents come out of their mourning. But they are distracted, and her father is almost hostile to the idea of celebrating Sarah's favourite holiday.

Every night as she lights the candles, Sarah is drawn back to visit her great-great grandparents at different points in their lives, and she discovers how people lived in Poland and Ukraine at the turn of the 19th century. She encounters her namesake and learns that there are family members she had never known about, including a child who died from leukemia. She sees the hardships they experienced in the Old Country and in Canada, how they dealt with their travail and loss, and how they were able to move on.

The menorah was a gift from her great-grandmother Ruth, now a resident of a nursing home. Through the menorah and her relationship with her long-dead ancestors, Sarah comes to accept Ben's death. After Sarah, herself, has an accident, her parents are shocked out of their stupor.

Jaffe gives the reader a tour of contemporary Toronto and a reminder of its immigrant past. Sarah lives near Kensington Market where her family originally settled. She wanders through the streets there and sees that, among the modern boutiques and Asian groceries, there is a synagogue which was built at the time her relatives arrived. Jaffe adds a sense of veracity by sprinkling the text with Yiddish words that are defined in a useful glossary at the end of the book.

Sarah is a typical, secular, 21st century girl, with all the trappings of contemporary life and with friends of different colours, origins, religions. She wonders at how the world changed over time, and how lucky she is that her family came here, since those who remained behind perished in the Nazi Holocaust.

Children who read this book will be well-informed about Hanukkah and the history of the first Jews who came to Canada and will identify with Sarah's distress.

***/4   Recommended.