“So do you get presents every night?” That, along with “is there a Hanukah Bush?” was the extent of Andy’s friends’ interest in Hanukah, in the entirety of his faith, actually. And though Andy felt confident enough to answer – gifts were usually exchanged during the first two nights and there was no bush, just a menorah – there was plenty about his religion that mystified him. There was the Hebrew language with its harsh, guttural sounds and funky alphabet; the holidays whose names he mixed up and whose meanings were reduced to dietary prescriptions (dairy on Shavuot, hamantashen on Purim, nothing at all on Yom Kippur); the dozens of other things, large and small, which separated him from his friends, who were Episcopalian or Catholic and claimed Sunday as their day of worship and had no need for any tongue but plain old English.

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