“Riddles”, the Mysterious Hanukkah Wooden Robot……by Robert M. Katzman
© May 20, 2012
In 1984, late Fall in Evanston, Illinois I was trying to figure out Chanukah.
What could I do about Chanukah?
My nearly twenty-year-old Chicago international magazine store, Bob’s Newsstand, was ten months from closing. I had no income and no way to buy presents to celebrate the two thousand year old, eight-day Jewish holiday, the “Festival of Lights” for my three children. Lisa was nine, David was six and Rachel was four.
I was thirty-four and less than a year from my mid-life crisis and two years of unemployment. No one wanted to hire the formerly self-employed guy. They say we never stay.
What could I do that would charm them?
Sitting in my garage which used to be a barn one hundred years earlier, when the historic house was built in 1882, and which was then converted into two apartments, or coach houses as Evanston called them, now empty and perched above me, I sat among my numerous woodworking tools in the dim light of dusk.