In the latest edition of the novel, the description of Morris Kazenstein’s dreidel has changed slightly. What’s up with that?
It turns out there are two kinds of dreidels in the world. Dreidels manufactured in the U.S. and most other countries bear the Hebrew letters Nun, Gimel, He, and Shin, an abbreviation of the phrase Nes gadol hayah sham, “A great miracle happened there.” The miracle in question, which involved a one-day supply of lamp oil that somehow lasted for eight days,* supposedly took place in the Temple of Jerusalem, in Israel, so on Israeli dreidels, the Shin is replaced by a Peh, and the phrase becomes Nes gadol hayah poh, “A great miracle happened here.” Unfortunately, my primary source of dreidel-lore, Merilyn Simonds Mohr’s The Games Treasury, screwed up the description, combining the lettering from the non-Israeli dreidel with the translation from the Israeli dreidel. I’m a pretty obsessive fact-checker, so I really should have caught this before the novel went to press, but it slipped past me, and nobody at Atlantic Monthly Press or Warner/Aspect noticed it either. The book had already bee
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