Neighborhood Chanukah (and a Toast to Vaclav Havel)

There's a new English bookstore in the neighborhood. Now, I'm a big fan of the "old" English bookstore in the neighborhood, but it's okay to have more of a good thing – and English bookstores are definitely a Good Thing when you live abroad long term. So I've been by the new English bookstore a couple times and even got on their mailing list, just in case any interesting events came up.

A couple days ago, I got an e-mail from them for the first time, which read in its entirety:

"Come by the store this Tuesday, December 20th at 7pm. Roman and Laurel are going to be frying latkes and making applesauce all evening for your Chanukah pleasure. We'll be drinking to Vaclav Havel."

Who are Roman and Laurel? How is Václav Havel (Czech writer, dissident and president, who died just a couple days ago) connected to a Jewish holiday?

Didn't really matter – my interest was piqued AND they mentioned latkes!

I just barely managed to disentangle myself from work in time, collected a couple of friends, and dropped by Shakespeare & Sons.

There, indeed, were a whole pile of latkes, homemade applesauce, and a bunch of friendly, welcoming folks. It turns out Roman is Czech, while Laurel is American and Jewish and in the same boat of wanting to celebrate Jewish holidays but not having many people around who know about them.

So I ate some latkes, ran into the one other American Jew I know in Berlin, chatted with Laurel while she oversaw the frying operation in the store's small kitchen, and even managed to connect an American friend who likes Polish food to a Polish woman who hasn't been able to find good restaurants in Berlin ... a win-win-win all around.

We lit the Chanukah candles together, then Laurel passed out shot glasses of slivovice (Czech plum brandy) and Roman said a toast to Václav Havel, starting with his memory of the first time he heard the name: in 1989, when a fellow student scribbled "Václav Havel for president" on a school desk (this was under Communist rule, when Havel was a dissident leader) and then had to come back in with his parents and aver to the school authorities that it was just something he'd heard somewhere and he didn't even know what it meant. This must have been just months before the Velvet Revolution – and Havel becoming president.

Happy Chanukah! Which, if you think about it, is also a holiday about dissidents.