Medieval Hanukkah

Since the first night of Hanukkah is December 7th--not very far away--I decided to post an article I've run before on my other blog, Getting Medieval (because like any older person, I'm beginning to repeat myself):

Growing up Jewish in a Christian America was sometimes trying, especially when my family was of the reformed variety. Christmas couldn't be avoided. It was everywhere in shops, on television in the children's fare of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer", and on the radio with Christmas carols bombarding the airwaves. Little wonder this little Jewish girl comes to look on at Christmas with brightly shining eyes.

But it was the Dickens Christmas of roast goose and wide-skirted carolers; Father Christmas and plum pudding (of which I had never partaken), that captured my imagination.

Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights that rolled around usually at the same time as Christmas, just couldn't hold a candle. Er...

But it is a holiday with many meanings and expresses many events at once. The medieval Jew embraced it: the idea of the smaller army of Jews rising up to conquer their gentile oppressors. Always a popular theme with Jews in Europe when they were ousted from so many places, just as they had been ousted from the Holy Land. They could relate to that ancient history since it kept happening to them again and again.


Given that this is a holiday with no biblical source (the Books of Maccabees where part of the Hanukkah celebrations can be found, are listed in Christian bibles, which are apocryphal to Jews and not considered part of the canon), there was a clash between those rabbis who followed oral rabbinic traditions and those that were strictly biblical. (The same clash occurs between Protestants and Catholics regarding traditions with a small "t" and Traditions with a large "T". In the Last Supper, for instance, where the gospels say that Jesus is reclining at table is a perfect example of the importance of following tradition with a small "t". Biblical commandments in Exodus have God exhorting Moses to instruct the people to eat their Passover standing up as a people in flight, ready to high-tail it when the time is right. But sometime between the time of Moses and the time of Jesus, Jewish tradition changed to the partaking of the Passover in a reclining position. As it says in the Haggadah [the prayer book used during the Passover Seder] the Egyptian Hebrews stood to eat just as a slave stands to eat in the presence of his master. But to recline is to exclaim one's freedom. Thus Jesus, as a good Jewish boy, follows Jewish tradition rather than God's biblical command.)

The source for Hanukkah, or the Dedicating of the Temple, comes from something called the Megillit Antiochus or the Scroll of Antioch, dating from somewhere between the 2nd and 5th centuries AD (there's more on that in the Jewish Encyclopedia.) The Books of Maccabees talks about a re-dedication of the Temple by Judah Maccabee, his brothers, and his army, but never specifically mentions a miracle, only that the celebration should last for eight days, which, indeed, most Jewish holidays do. (In Jewish numerology, Seven is the perfect number: seven days of creation. But the number eight--God--is beyond perfect. When a boy is eight days old he is circumcised and brought into the covenant. Eight days for most Jewish celebrations.) It is this scroll that gives us the story of the miracle of the oil.

The Story: Around 175 BCE, Antiochus IV Epiphanes King of Greek Syria and other places, ruled over the Jews and outlawed Judaism, ordering a statue of Zeus to be erected in the temple. The Maccabees revolted, won, and worked to reconsecrate the Temple, getting all that nasty gentile stuff out of there, building a new altar, etc. In order for the re-dedication to be complete, the menorah or candelabrum or multi-burning oil lamp was to burn for seven nights, but there was only enough consecrated oil to burn for one day and there was no time to get more. But it miraculously burned for eight days. Thus the eight day celebration.
In the middle ages, the Megillit Antiochus was read aloud in synagogues much as Purim, another rabbinically declared holiday and another tale about Jews rising up against their oppressors, was celebrated. Jews reenacted the lighting of a menorah in the synagogues as well as in their homes. The proper way to light a menorah is to have it in a doorway. Not quite practical, so the next best thing is to have it in a window, fulfilling the rabbis decree to show the miracle to the world (which is why there are all those public displays of menorah lighting. It is NOT the Jewish answer to a public lighting of a Christmas tree. If anything, it's the other way around.)
 
Though for all that, Hanukkah was never a huge holiday. It was just one of many. Certainly not a High Holy Day like Rosh Hashonnah (Jewish New Year) or Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). It was another reminder to Jews of God's miracles and His dedication to the Chosen People no matter where they find themselves and under what circumstances.

And by the way, have you noticed that it falls on different days year by year? That's because it's a moveable feast. The Jewish calendar follows the cycles of the moon and so Hanukkah can fall as early as Thanksgiving and as late as after Christmas, but usually comes somewhere in between.

The tradition of giving a gift for each day of the holiday is more a reflection of their Christian neighbors during a gift-giving season than part of any older tradition. The Eastern European tradition of eating foods cooked in oil, however, can be more gratifying if not cholesterol-building. Because it is a feast of oil burning, foods such as latkes (potato pancakes) and donuts are part of the fare. Can't knock that. Playing the dreidel is supposed to be a reflection of a game that the Maccabees played while waiting to attack their enemies. It's like dice. It's a gambling game.

Incidentally, you haven't miscounted when you see a menorah and wonder why it has nine places for candles instead of only eight. The center place is for the shamash or helper candle. It merely lights the other ones. However, you will notice in all the older images and bas reliefs of menorahs, they have the more traditional temple number of seven arms (six and the shamesh).

So next time you see a menorah and hear about Hanukkah, don't do what my Christian contemporaries did when I was a child (and still hear on occasion); don't compliment the Jew on "their Christmas". Appreciate it on its own level, its ancient and varied traditions.

And have a latke. They're tasty. 

Dangerous Medicine: An Interview with Larry Karp

by Sandra Parshall
 

As a physician, Larry Karp worked in the field of reproductive genetics and specialized in complicated pregnancy care, founding the Prenatal Diagnosis Center at the University of Washington, and Swedish Medical Center's Department of Perinatal Medicine.  During that time, he authored three nonfiction books and wrote newspaper and magazine articles, as well as a monthly column of commentary for the American Journal of Medical Genetics. In 1995, Larry left medicine to write mystery novels full-time. He has published three Music Box Mysteries, a standalone, and three Ragtime Mysteries.

For his new novel, A Perilous Conception, Larry returns to an area of medicine he knows well to craft a suspense novel set in the days when a storm of controversy raged over “test tube babies” and the doctors who performed in vitro fertilization. The book was published this week by Poisoned Pen Press. Recently Larry talked to us about it and about the various turns his professional life has taken.

Q. Tell us a bit about A Perilous Conception.

A. It's 1976. Despite fierce international controversy over whether in vitro fertilization should ever be performed in humans, doctors around the world race to be first to produce a baby by this procedure.

Dr. Colin Sanford, a brilliant, ambitious obstetrician in Emerald, Washington has a plan. He recruits Dr. Giselle Hearn, an experienced laboratory geneticist-embryologist at the University who's frustrated by the ultra-conservative policies of her department chairman. Drs. Sanford and Hearn, working secretly, set out to put their names in history books.

Unfortunately, a secret that big is hard to keep. Dr. Hearn's lab supervisor catches on and demands a blackmail payment. Several months later, one of Dr. Sanford's patients gives birth to a healthy boy, and Sanford prepares to make an announcement at a press conference. But before that can come about, the baby's father kills Dr. Hearn and then himself.

Police Detective Bernie Baumgartner's investigation is hampered by pressure from influential people at the University who want to control sensationalism that might harm the institution. But dogged, tenacious Baumgartner suspects that Sanford and Hearn were in fact doing IVF, that they succeeded with the Kennetts, and that murder, suicide, and other crimes were the fallout. A double cat-and-mouse game develops between doctor and detective, and as stakes escalate, truth becomes an increasingly-evasive commodity.

Q. Is this a stand-alone or the start of a new series?


A. Right now, I'd say a standalone, which is the way I've imagined the book all along. Barbara Peters, my editor at Poisoned Pen, felt the story was Dr. Sanford's, and encouraged me to focus on him, keeping Baumgartner in the role of a sideman. Still, some early readers have commented that the detective is an interesting character, and they hope to see more of him. I can't quite picture the good Doctor Sanford in another mystery novel - but I guess one never knows. Some day, Baumgartner, with or without Sanford, might just grab a plot thread and start running with it.
   
In any case, my next book will be another standalone.

Q. What kind of person is your detective, Bernie Baumgartner? What qualities make him a good detective to investigate this particular crime?

A. Often, our major personality characteristics are both our strong and our weak points, and such is the case with Bernie. Think of a pit bull bred for OCD. In the search for a murderer, this guy won't be deterred or intimidated by anyone, not influential community members, not the Chief of Police, not a very clever and knowledgeable doctor. But his thirty years of dedication to his work have alienated his wife, who's ready for him to retire to a life of leisure with her. He'd rather drink sulfuric acid.
   
The detective is haunted by the fact that his cop-father was killed on the job before Bernie was ever born, which intensifies his determination to get to the bottom of a case where the father of a newborn baby possibly produced by in vitro fertilization has committed murder, then suicide.
   
Bernie's also a decent man who takes people as they come, sympathizing with their struggles with problems often of their own making. This increases his effectiveness in getting information out of interviewees who don't want certain things to ever come to light.

Q. How did your personal experience as a doctor contribute to, or inspire, the story?

A. In the 1970s, I did a research fellowship in Reproductive Genetics, fertilizing mouse (and occasionally human) eggs in the laboratory. Then, in 1983, I set up the Reproductive Genetics Facility at Seattle's Swedish Medical Center, and served as its Medical Director. In 1985, this laboratory produced the first IVF baby in the Pacific Northwest, and I delivered that baby.
 
Q. Your career as a doctor would seem to make medical thrillers a perfect choice for you as a writer. Why did you write the Music Box Mysteries and the Ragtime Mysteries instead?
 
A. When I changed careers, after 30 years in high-intensity medical work, I wanted to make a clean break.
   
I'd been collecting and restoring antique music boxes, as a way of getting a little time here and there away from medicine, so I set my first mysteries in the antiques subculture. My amateur detective, Thomas Purdue, was a neurologist and a music box aficionado. Through three books, you never saw him treating a patient, but he did use his specialized medical knowledge to help solve murder cases. That went down all right with me. Just to keep doctors out of my books altogether didn't seem worth the time it would've taken for me to learn the ins and outs of what electricians, philosophy professors, or nuclear physicists know and do.
   
As for the ragtime mysteries, the history of the genre is fascinating, having nearly as much to do with racial prejudice as with music. Ragtime history is full of intriguing unanswered questions. In 1899, no unknown young black composer could realistically have hoped to receive royalties for his or her work - so how did Scott Joplin come to sign a royalties contract for the breakthrough ragtime hit, "Maple Leaf Rag"? Did Irving Berlin really steal music, as Joplin claimed he did, from Joplin's opera Treemonisha, to write his own breakthrough hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band"? Also, ragtime history is populated with the most wonderful characters, just begging to hop from history into fiction, and fill in some of those historical blanks. Parenthetically, one of them, Walter Overstreet, the mayor of Sedalia, MO in 1899, was also a practicing doctor, and though he was not the protagonist, his medical work set him up to be a prime mover of the plot.

Q. What has brought you back to medicine as a topic in A Perilous Conception? Is this a story you’ve thought about for a long time, or did something happen recently to inspire you to write it?

A. During the race to produce the world's first IVF baby, before Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe crossed the finish line on July 25, 1978, there was a great deal of ill feeling and heavy-duty sniping among workers in the field. Accusations were made that some investigators had withheld important information from research papers, such as minute but critical details of the composition of tissue culture media.
   
In 1973, an obstetrician in New York with much-questioned scientific credentials claimed to have fertilized an egg with sperm from the woman's husband, but before he could replace the embryo into the woman's uterus, his department chairman learned of his clandestine operation, and disposed of the contents of the test tube. The upshot was a lengthy, acrimonious, highly-publicized trial in 1978, chockablock with painfully intense emotions, claims, and counterclaims. Ironically, just at the time of that trial, Lesley Brown, in England, gave birth to the world's first IVF baby.
   
Before Swedish's Reproductive Genetics Facility produced their IVF baby, there was a two-year competition with the University of Washington's facility that I'll call spirited.
   
Throughout my medical career, I accumulated ideas for the novels I'd write once I'd gotten sufficient time, and the leeway to focus on a fictional world. Considering the rewards, financial and ego-related, that would accrue to the winner, and the major moral, ethical, and emotional ructions that roiled around reproductive engineering in the 1970s, it occurred to me that someone just might end up murdered. Then, when I'd finished my ragtime-based mysteries, Dr. Sanford came forward in my mind and began to develop a plot for such a story.

Q. The appetite of readers for medical thrillers – stories about everything that could possibly go wrong in the hands of medical professionals – seems endless. Do you have any thoughts on why people love these books?

  A. Hmm. Probably for the same basic reasons there's a huge audience for science-fiction thrillers. There's a good deal of genre overlap between actual and speculative science.
   
When I was a kid, our family doctor, a man with near-supernatural powers of diagnosis, came across as a shaman, someone with magical powers to ward off evil influences. There was absolutely nothing of the charlatan about him, but when he walked into a sickroom, opened his huge black bag, full of mysterious instruments and vials, and turned his eye onto the patient, that patient knew he or she was going to get better. Knew it. The doctor seemed to have power over life and death, and it was because of his unintentional influence on a young boy that I went into medicine myself.
   
So in medical thrilllers, there's someone with special powers, pitted against a major source of evil. Can the shaman use his arcane knowledge to safeguard the patient, the city, or maybe the entire human race? How much higher could stakes go? And if the medical specialist fails, what would this imply about the security we look for and wish for every time we visit a doctor's office?

Q. Each of your series has been a trilogy. Do you believe most series should be short? Do you think you might return to either or both of your series sometime in the future?
A. I don't think of the Music Box Series as a trilogy, a set of three closely-related books that develop a single theme. And with the different protagonists, different locations, and a time spread of more than fifty years, I don't think of the Ragtime Trilogy as a series.
   
Okay, got that out of my system.
   
I felt as if the overall narrative of my trilogy, which told the story of the birth, death, and revival of ragtime music in America, was finished at the end of The Ragtime Fool. Anything else I might've written would have seemed anticlimactic, a pale add-on. But I suppose I might one day write a different story, probably a standalone, with ragtime as background. (One of the early ragtime figures was a very colorful doctor, but he hasn't stepped up with a story...yet).
   
As to the Music Box Series, I wouldn't mind writing one more book, since I had to leave one of the principal characters hanging between life and death at the end of the third book. I intended to resolve the matter in Book Four, but my publisher went out of business, and my new publisher does not pick up series in progress. And I love Poisoned Pen Press more than I want to write another Music Box Mystery.
   
Also, I've gotten to prefer writing standalones. My books are strongly character-driven, and starting fresh each time gives me more leeway to different kinks and twists in human minds.

Abe Lincoln is supposed to have remarked that a man's legs (well, a woman's too, but this was the 1860s, so let's cut him a little slack) should be long enough to reach the ground. That's the way I feel about how long a series should be. In the end, it's got to be the author's prerogative. The story about Conan Doyle's forced resuscitation of Holmes to the contrary, if the author has tired of a series, I think readers will shortly follow suit.

Q. What fiction writers do you most enjoy reading? What have you learned about writing from reading their books?

A. I read about half mystery novels, half literary. To name a few of the writers I enjoy and learn from:
   
Three of my fellow Poisoned Pen authors are high on my list. Donis Casey shows me ways of constructing ultra-believable human characters. From John Daniel and Mike Hayes, I pick up hints on how to integrate humor into a mystery without having it be disruptive; Mike is also a master at generating irresistible page-turning impulses.
   
Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse series was also very helpful with lessons on creation of multidimensional characters.
   
In the work of Charles Todd, P.D. James, and Patricia Highsmith, I find avenues for effectively presenting the ins and outs of human behavior, and lessons on how to generate sympathy for characters (in the case of the last-named author, whether or not that sympathy is deserved, a very useful skill, and one I tried to apply in A Perilous Conception).
   
Among literary authors, I admire the prose of John Cheever, who always seemed able to move his stories along without effort and strain. As they said about Joe DiMaggio, he made the hard ones look easy. And Stanley Elkin is unmatched for producing verbal pyrotechnics, lines I read over and over, aloud, just for the auditory pleasure of it.

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Visit Larry’s website at http://www/larrykarp.com and his blog at http://www.larrykarp.blogspot.com.