COVID-19 AND THE GREAT HANNUKAH SURPRISE

The Zoom call lasted twenty three minutes and forty seven seconds. David Kornblatt had enjoyed talking with his sister Jeannie, her husband Jonas, and their kids Herman and Rose. He loved watching them light the menorah and sing with their whole hearts. They lived in Caesarea and the weather in Israel looked bright and sunny.

After switching off the call, David looked outside and it seemed snowy, dreary and gray. His emotions were unsettled. His Sister had asked why he wouldn’t consider moving to Israel. Their brother Otto lived with his family in Australia and Dave was the only one of the Kornblatts still in Canada. The fact he was alone must have been very hard. He shrugged it off ‘’I love Toronto, I love being in Canada, I really don’t have any desire to be anywhere else.’’ She told him she always had a place for him, and that was the end of the conversation.

The reality was David was in big trouble. He had operated a Knish cart in downtown Toronto. People loved his different flavours, and it was an all cash business. His friend Morris Finestine had a catering facility and he made two hundred knishes a day for David, and they were generally sold out by three o’clock. Since Covid-19 there was no desire or demand for food cart sales. He had to pay his enormous license fee, and Finestine was focusing on making meals for Shivas. It was a confluence of everything happening at the same time. David’s cash flow and savings were almost non-existent.

He had talked to his Super who had passed on to the landlord that David was late with the rent because of Covid and cash flow issues, and he felt sick. He was getting eighteen hundred dollars a month from the Government and his rent was fifteen hundred, his phone bill was one hundred and thirty five and his credit card bills were four hundred a month. He had to eat, and if it wasn’t for the Shtumpy knishes in his freezer he would have been starving. The funny thing was that David learned eating knishes for breakfast, lunch and supper kept you fat. He thought he would be losing weight but stepping on the scale in his bathroom indicated he had put on twelve pounds.

When David pulled his own Menorah out of a drawer he stopped and cried. How had everything gone so wrong. It started with Tamara his former girlfriend. He had loved her, but she…