Babby promptly hired Rico the Clown for our Chanukah party

Back in the day when there were only three kinds of doughnuts (shudder-inducing custard, unnaturally vivid jelly, and plain), we used to have our Chanukah parties in my grandparents’ dining room. There’d be the usual fare: bagels and lox, lasagna, and blintzes. Sometimes there was soup  (maybe a savory tomato soup with fermented cabbage), sometimes there was szilvas gomboc  (a jam-stuffed dumpling coated in bread crumbs), but there was always a multilayered, chocolate-frosted dreidel cake for dessert.

We’d try to get there early to catch a game of dreidel with my grandfather and to hear him tell the latest adventures of Kiki and Lala. My mother and aunts would join my grandmother in the kitchen, while the teens would mill around, dissolving easily into laughter. Eventually we’d migrate to the table where conversations would splinter off according to age group. As the cousins chatted, the adult conversation drifted our way, punctuated by Hungarian phrases.

The party was most often at night, but for some reason no one remembers anymore, when I was 13, the party took place on Sunday afternoon. Because it was scheduled for daytime rather than night, the party was going to run a few hours longer than usual, and my grandmother was concerned that her toys wouldn’t sufficiently entertain the kids for such an extended period of time.

Cousin Mirca suggested she hire a clown.

She showed my grandmother the ad she’d seen in the Jewish Press, and Babby promptly hired Rico the Clown for our Chanukah party.