Growing up in a mostly Orthodox neighborhood in Queens in the 1980s, I watched as my neighbors’ backyards and front porches filled with the same prefabricated sukkot each autumn. The bottom half was yellow fabric; the top was blue. A bamboo mat provided the roof — or schach, as my Hebrew school teachers called it. From my vantage point at the kitchen window, they looked lovely and, at least from a distance, relatively easy to assemble.
My family’s sukkah was different.
Ours was made from cinder blocks and wooden poles, which we draped with green tarps and secured with plastic cable ties. Our schach consisted of circular wooden poles that I hand-selected with my dad at a lumberyard when I was five, back in the pre-Home Depot days. I still remember the smell of freshly cut wood and the cacophony of machines slicing the lumber to our specifications. As a carpenter’s son, my dad took great pride in our homemade sukkah. My mom loved that it was inexpensive compared with the prefabricated versions.
Secretly, though, I was a little embarrassed by it. With so many neighborhood children attending yeshivas while my sisters and I went to public school, our sukkah was just one more way my family stood out.
Building it seemed to be an all-day affair. I liked helping my dad, pulling on work gloves and holding the tarp as he stretched it tightly around the poles. But my favorite part came afterward: decorating.
My sisters and I made paper rings from construction paper. Some years, we followed a pattern, alternating blue and white rings in a nod to our love for Israel. Other years, we made rainbows. I also created collages from the Rosh Hashanah cards we received and hung them inside. Our decorations were as makeshift as the sukkah itself, but they gave us a chance to be creative and make the space our own.
When I visited my temple’s sukkah as a child, I was always in awe of its beauty. Foil garlands and shiny decorations shaped like seasonal fruits dangled from the bamboo ceiling. I wondered whether my neighbors’ sukkahs were similarly adorned.
For a while, I thought ours simply didn’t measure up. But as I grew older, something changed. I began to love our makeshift sukkah.
At night, when we invited our extended family over for a dessert party, I would look up at the stars through the schach, shivering in my sweatshirt as the autumn temperature dropped. It was our family’s version of camping under the stars.
And to my delight, I learned in Hebrew school that many families in Israel actually slept in their sukkot during the holiday. I begged my parents to let us do the same. Unfortunately, that request was quickly dismissed.
Still, I loved those nights inside our little structure of cinder blocks, poles and green tarp. There was something magical about sitting beneath a roof that wasn’t really a roof, surrounded by decorations we had made ourselves, with the night sky just beyond the branches.
Our sukkah was never the prettiest on the block. It certainly wasn’t the easiest to put together. It required sweat, ingenuity and, sometimes, splintered hands. But it was built by my dad. Decorated by my sisters and me. Filled with family, food and laughter.
What I once saw as the thing that made us different became, over time, the thing I cherished most. I suppose I finally got over my sukkah envy. And maybe that was the real gift our sukkah gave me: the understanding that something doesn’t have to look perfect to feel like home.
New Year, More Kveller. A few dollars keeps Kveller joyfully, honestly free.
