We Carry the Light

The Hanukkah Your Kid Will Never Forget

Ten stories. Ten kids their own age. And in each one, something older than any of them slips into a single night of Hanukkah: a golem that will not stop copying you, a stranger at the door who is more than a stranger, a dreidel that spins far too long.

This is the real Hanukkah, not Jewish Christmas. Not a minor holiday inflated to go candle for candle with a Christmas tree. Courage and mischief instead of gift wrap. Olive oil and growing light instead of greeting-card sparkle. And one quiet truth a kid will carry for years: that holding on to who you are is the bravest thing a person can do, and it has always cost something.

Written for readers ages 9 to 13 who have outgrown picture books, in stories so alive they get read once and then pressed straight into a friend's hands.

Set across the real Jewish world, from Beverly Hills to Brooklyn to a Moroccan kitchen gold with frying sfenj, these ten stories follow ordinary kids through very ordinary problems: a party on the same night as the family lighting, a grandmother who sings too loud in a language no one at school understands, a great-grandfather who is suddenly afraid to put the lamp in the window. Then someone they did not expect quietly arrives.

A few of the ten:

• The Golem of East 21st Street: a girl who skips her family's lighting and the mute clay giant that follows her to school, doing exactly what she does, until her own bluffing becomes slapstick she cannot outrun.
• What the Sfenj Knows: the only kid who brings Moroccan sfenj instead of jelly doughnuts, and the sharp widow Judith, who has no patience for anyone embarrassed of where they come from.
• The Window: a survivor who will no longer put the hanukkiah where the street can see it, a grandson who does not understand the fear, and a visitor of old grief that says what no one else will.
• Ocho Kandelikas, Loud: fog off the Seattle water, a Ladino song sung far too loudly in public, and the quiet magic of the evil eye showing a girl what she almost threw away.
• The Eighth Lamp: an Ethiopian Jewish girl in Israel meeting Hanukkah for the first time, because her community never kept it, learning what it means to be handed a light and asked to carry it.

The real Hanukkah, from every corner of the Jewish world.

No blue-and-silver sameness, no latke standing in for every Jewish family on earth. We Carry the Light is rooted in specific living communities and their true traditions: Persian families in Tehrangeles who keep the lamp away from the window out of old habit, Ladino-speaking Seattle, Bukharian Queens, Syrian Brooklyn, Soviet-émigré Brighton Beach rediscovering a holiday three generations were forbidden, Cuban-Sephardic Miami frying bimuelos beside the radio.

Perfect for:

• Middle-grade readers ages 9 to 13 who have outgrown picture books
• Jewish families, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Persian, Ashkenazi and more, who are tired of only ever seeing one kind of Hanukkah and want their own on the page
• Families of every background who want a true, living window into a neighbor's or classmate's holiday, not a tourist pamphlet
• Hebrew school teachers, synagogue librarians, and classrooms exploring the real diversity of the Jewish world with depth and respect
• A gift for a kid caught between fitting in and holding on
• The eight nights of Hanukkah, and Jewish gift-giving all year round

The magic is real, and often very funny. The courage is real, and never preached. It is the rare holiday book a child races through and remembers for years, and the rare Hanukkah book in which every family finally gets to see itself.

Give them eight nights of it, and give them the oldest Hanukkah lesson there is: we carry the light ourselves.