Happy Fahboween
Leah Vincent2013EssaysFirst PersonReflectionsTopicsFamilyOff the DerechThe Frum World
My two-year-old daughter Haven* is going to be a cat for Halloween. Cats are one of her favorite things in the world. She has a mask she painted herself and a black, cat-ears headband and a furry tail that clips onto her pants.
“What are you going to say when you knock on people’s doors?” our sitter prompts her.
“Happy fahboweeeen!” she lisps with glee.
The sitter turns to me. “Did you go trick-or-treating as a kid?”
I laugh at the idea. I have powerful memories of trick-or-treating, but they are vastly different from those my daughter will make today.
When I was little, Halloween was a terrifying holiday—not because of ghosts and spooky witches, but because of “the goyim.” Each year, on the night of October 31st, my siblings and I would be sent to cower in the attic, watching through the window for non-Jews armed with eggs and hatred. My mother would sit on the couch in the living room with the lights off and the curtains drawn, a bag of lollipops on her lap, just in case. If non-Jews came knocking, we wouldn’t dare upset them by refusing them treats.
Growing up in a smallish Jewish community in Pittsburgh, some of my classmates were not as ultra-Orthodox as our family, and I remember turning on a girl who chatted eagerly about her trick-or-treat plans. “How dare you?” I snarled. “Don’t you know that Halloween was used by goyim as an excuse to murder Jews?”
I am named for my mother’s grandmother, a woman whose brothers and sisters were murdered “by goyim.” Both sides of my family moved through a long and terrifying exile in Eastern Europe, dodging pogrom after pogrom—the Crusaders, the Cossacks, the Tsar and his peasants, and the Nazis. Those fears, living on in our collective memories, swelled on Halloween to their fullest.
I remember these terrors of my childhood as I now watch my daughter carefully place her carved, cat-face pumpkin in front of our door. I am happy that Haven’s developing brain won’t be warped by the constant fear of the people around her and the heart-pounding wait for impending victimhood. Still, when she is older, I will tell her the stories of Halloween pogroms, just like I will explore with her the difficult stories of genocide in the Bible and other unsettling tales of Jewish and human history.
I believe that it’s important to share these complex stories with our children. And yet, we often face the challenge: How much of our past do we allow into our current lives? My own personal history has taught me that what happened long ago is not easily forgotten, and there is often a moral imperative to ensure that it isn’t. But maybe we can remember the past without reenacting it. Maybe I can recall my childhood without reliving it. Maybe my daughter can be aware of her family’s history, and still be a cat on Halloween.
Still, even for my daughter, this time of year can be frightening. A week ago, our apartment building put up a cackling zombie in the lobby. Haven stared, wide eyed, and buried her nose in my neck each time we passed.
“Do you want to say hello to the toy?” I asked. She shook her head no, violently. “Mommy do,” she said, and so I waved and said, “Hi, Halloween toy!”
We went through this routine a few times, until yesterday, when we passed, she said, “Haven do?”
“You want to say hi to the toy?”
“Haven pet,” she said.
I put her down and she slowly approached the zombie, then gingerly petted its bloody plastic hand.
“Hahaha,” the zombie cackled, and my daughter, in terror, raced back to my open arms.
*Name has been changed.
Leah Vincent is the author of Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, forthcoming from Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in January 2014.
13 Responses
My daughters WERE attacked by “goyim” on Halloween, throwing eggs, and worse (don’t have to go into that) – not in Bobruysk or Czernowitz, but in Brooklyn.
Formerly Orthodox – of course. There’ve been mischief and worse associated with Halloween. But it is not, in essence, a terrifying night for Jewish kids – certainly not anymore, and the bad old days of New York City lawlessness is long gone. When I was 13 three teenagers grabbed my black hat off my head on shabbos. It really happened. It was unpleasant. But it wasn’t a pogrom. And even if it somehow was, I am far, far better off for not thinking of it as one. The bogeyman conception of Jewish history, especially in 2013, is not helpful for kids.
Dear S.,
Thank you. I’m not Jewish, have been attacked (luckily no eggs hit me) but hold no grudges. I really don’t see much of a difference between expected mischief on Halloween and the expected inebriation of Purim (of which I’ve seen and heard some very unOrthodox things from frummies).
M. – sure – however this post was about how some Orthodox Jews see Halloween, or at least how some of us were raised to view it. And why it it should not be seen that way.
Re Purim, here’s a blog post of mine about how Simchat Torah ‘overdoing’ it resulted in a fatality in 1783.
http://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2013/03/on-napoleons-restoration-of-jews-and.html
A few years ago, I wrote something similar: http://daashedyot.blogspot.com/2006/10/happy-halloween.html
I had a similar experience as a kid, in the large Jewish community in Brooklyn. My parents would pull the heavy curtains, which were normally never closed, across the windows, turn off the lights in the front rooms, and tell us to be quiet and pretend we’re not home. The day after Halloween the sidewalks would be covered with broken eggs and shaving cream. You don’t see much of that any more.
Were there really many trick-or-treaters in Squirrel Hill? My sister-in-law lives in Pittsburgh, and she said that one of her non-Jewish neighbors complained that very few kids come to her house on Halloween.
I found your post very interesting, I had never heard of Jewish persecution on Halloween until recently, growing up in a Catholic household. Do you have more information on this? Specifically, where and when these pogroms occurred on Halloween? I thought that Halloween was not celebrated in Eastern Europe until recently; as a Celtic holiday by origin, it remained largely in the British Isles and Northern Europe until the Irish emigrated out of Ireland, and did not spread to Eastern Europe until after WWII. Do you know of any documented accounts of Halloween pogroms?
What a dumb article. Everyone who grew up in Brooklyn knew what Halloween was like….Eggs, toilet paper and fear of walking in the streets after dark. Liberals like Vincent try to make everything seem so innocuous. It wasn’t. Halloween is a dumb holiday anyway. On Purim, we give gifts. On Halloween, kids demand them from others. How lovely.
As one who was a kid in Brooklyn in the late 1970s, I resent Leah Vincent pretending that Halloween was all in our head. Every year, in spite of all our precautions (including the school dismissing early) numerous children (and some adults) were attacked. I find it hard to believe that such a high percent of gentile children were being attacked every Halloween!
“Everyone who grew up in Brooklyn knew what Halloween was like….Eggs, toilet paper and fear of walking in the streets after dark.”
Ditto
Like Ashley Wood, I also found this article fascinating. Not everyone that reads this blog lives in NY, so I wonder if the vandalism only happened in your part of the world. So “Jimbo” I did not find this article dumb.
Halloween in the 1970s and 1980s was a crazier holiday than it is today. Kids were allowed to roam around unsupervised, and often got into quite a bit of mischief. I do not believe that any of these kids went out of their way to target Jewish families on Halloween, as they tended to remain within walking distance of their own neighborhoods. The few Jewish kids in my town dressed up and went trick or treating, too, so I never had any clue that Jews have issues with Halloween until I became an adult. I’m glad you have chosen to allow your daughter to participate in this fun holiday. Think of how frightened and helpless you felt as you cowered in the attic, and how empowering it would have been to have dressed up and gone out with your siblings (with a little shaving cream tucked away just in case.)
Growing up on the Lower East Side of NYC in the 1960s, Halloween was, essentially, a pogrom of the mind. We Yeshiva kids (Moderdox) ran home as the sun set and the shadows lengthened; we feared the “goyim” with their “mamaloochies,” athletic socks full of chalkdust, or rocks, which could leave either a cloud of dust or pain on the Jewish skin with which it connected. The gentile kids, mainly African-American and Hispanic, ran up and down the halls of our Co-op Apartments, ringing doorbells, but getting nothing. My Nana, an agnostic who kept kosher, gave the kids pennies. “Is that all?” they would sneer. “If you don’t like it,” she would reply, “Give it back.” They never did. Bravo, Nana!