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December 3, 2004/Kislev 20 5765, Vol. 57, No. 14
Celebrate with stories
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Chanukah, with its stories of the miraculous cruse of oil and the tiny band of mighty Maccabees, nears. The first candle is just days away. Why not celebrate, at least one night, sharing one of the charming stories writer Ozzie Nogg has collected in her tiny treasure, "Joseph's Bones" (OZNAS Books, $15 paperback)?
Nogg, whose holiday features appear regularly in Jewish News, is an Omaha writer and storyteller who began her literary career writing advertising copy and came to telling, and retelling, the stories of her rich Jewish heritage later in life.
The daughter of a Lithuanian rabbi and rebbetzin, she grew up steeped in yiddishkeit, yet with a New World tam.
"My parents were Old World," she says, "but also very forward-thinking, pragmatic."
Her stories, some recollections of her father's tales, others her own, reflect both.
In "Teshuvah on the Interstate," Nogg captures the very essence of Yom Kippur. She tells of her father's very real act of teshuvah, or turning, when the Noggs (Ozzie, little brother Michael, father and mother) traveled to a family reunion.
Hurtling along the freeway to Minneapolis in the family's white Pontiac, her father realizes suddenly - actually after Michael points it out - that they are going in the wrong direction.
"Oi, gotteneyu!" roughly translated as "omigod," is how Nogg's mother reacts.
Her father, even as the suggestion that they watch for the next turnaround is barely out of his wife's mouth, propels the car across the median and makes a sharp U-turn. Teshuvah, fast and easy.
Or in "The Cap Poppa Got from the Czar," a touching reminiscence about Chanukah, her father describes the secret ingredient in her mother's latkes, the piece of her knuckle that she grates into the potatoes. Both endearing, and true.
And what about "Bubbie's House," where Nogg recounts taking her family on a trip to Duluth to see Bubbie's house, the scene of many of Nogg's warmest, and most delicious, childhood memories?
She writes of sitting on the porch swing of the old house and recalling the stories her Bubbie told her. Later, visiting her old Uncle Harry, who still lives in Duluth, she tells him excitedly about going with her children to see Bubbie's house on Seventh Street.
"Oi, Osneleh, Osneleh," he comforts her. "Bubbie's house was on Eighth Street. And they tore it down years ago."
The house may be gone, but the stories remain. And, that, says Nogg, is really all that matters.
"We need to tell the stories," says the mother of four and grandmother of five. "We need to shlepp our ancestors with us."
That's the impetus for Nogg's retelling and for the name she chose for her book.
Joseph's Bones, she explains in the introduction, refers to the promise that Joseph made to his father, the patriarch Jacob, to return his bones from Egypt to the Promised Land. And to the subsequent pledge Joseph exacted from his children to bury him there, too. Which they did, some 400 years later, on the eve of the Exodus, after a frantic search for the bones, buried deep in the Nile, carrying them for 40 years through the desert.
These stories, says Nogg, are her legacy to her children and grandchildren, the bones to carry with them.
Simple truths, ordinary stuff, she writes.
Worth retelling.
To purchase "Joseph's Bones," send $15 plus $2.50 postage and handling for one copy, $1.50 for additional copies, to OZNAS Books, PO Box 3353, Omaha, NE, 68103-0353. A portion of proceeds from sales benefits Omaha's Beth El Synagogue.
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