Hanukkah

Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights, enters the novel not as a scene of celebration or religious observance but as a quiet, almost dismissive marker on Maddie Schwartz's internal calendar. The holiday appears at a moment of profound personal upheaval, when Maddie lies awake in the early hours after a broken glass has sent her mind spiraling through memories of her past. In this restless state, she begins to calculate the best time to leave her marriage, and Hanukkah is weighed and rejected in a single breath — deemed "unimportant" as she considers the timing of her escape.

The Context of the Broken Glass

The mention of Hanukkah comes in the wake of a small domestic accident: a broken glass that costs Maddie five more minutes with dustpan and broom, ferreting out every sliver. By the time she finishes cleaning, it is almost two in the morning, and sleep will not come. Her mind races, going over lists of things undone and overlooked. The present offers nothing to hold her attention; instead, her thoughts drift twenty years backward, to the time when she first knew Wally — and her first love, the one her mother never suspected. This is the emotional terrain that Hanukkah interrupts: a woman caught between a failed past and an uncertain future, unable to find footing in the present.

The Calculation of Escape

Maddie's consideration of Hanukkah is folded into a larger, more consequential calculation: the precise timing of her departure from her marriage. Her birthday is next month, and she runs through the calendar with a strategist's eye. December is rejected because of the holidays, though she notes that Hanukkah itself is "unimportant." February seems too late; January is dismissed as a cliché, a mockery of New Year's resolutions. She settles on November 30, twenty days after her thirty-seventh birthday. The holiday's dismissal is thus not casual — it is part of a deliberate, almost cold-blooded scheduling of her own liberation, a decision made in the dark hours of the night while her husband sleeps.

The Symbolic Weight of the Holiday

The offhand dismissal of Hanukkah carries a weight that the novel does not belabor. For a Jewish woman in mid-1960s Baltimore, the holiday would ordinarily mark a season of family gathering, of lighting the menorah, of domestic ritual. Maddie's reduction of it to an "unimportant" obstacle in her escape plan signals how thoroughly she has detached from the rhythms of her household and her faith. The holiday becomes, in her hands, not a sacred time but a scheduling problem — a measure of how far she has drifted from the life she is preparing to abandon.

The Return of the Past

The Hanukkah passage is also bound to the return of a repressed past. Maddie has kept Wally out of her mind for all these years, and now he is back, appearing to her like Elijah showing up for his Passover wine. The religious imagery is pointed: just as Elijah is welcomed at the Passover seder as a herald of redemption, Wally's return to her thoughts heralds a different kind of redemption — or ruin. Hanukkah, the festival of rededication and the miracle of light, stands in ironic contrast to Maddie's own dark night of calculation, in which she dedicates herself not to faith but to escape.

Narrative Significance

The Hanukkah reference functions as a temporal anchor and a thematic counterpoint. It places the reader precisely in the liturgical calendar of late 1966, grounding Maddie's personal crisis in a specific season. At the same time, the holiday's dismissal underscores the novel's larger concern with the collision between inherited tradition and individual desire. Maddie's rejection of Hanukkah as "unimportant" is a small but telling gesture — a woman so consumed by her own reckoning that the Festival of Lights barely registers as a flicker. The holiday thus illuminates, by its very absence of reverence, the depth of Maddie's estrangement from the life she is about to leave behind.