For all the stories of Maccabees and cruses of oil, Chanukah is ultimately a holiday about family togetherness. So mused the multitalented artist Arthur Yorinks when he sat down more than a decade ago to write “The Flying Latke,” a children’s book about a Chanukah pancake that magically circumnavigates the globe. Now the tale’s play version, which sold out its run last year in Tribeca at The Flea Theater, returns to the same theater just in time for this year’s Festival of Lights.

For the ancient Romans, life was short but art endured — “vita brevis, ars longa,” as the Latin saying goes. Alas, the helpless Yiddish writers in Nathan Englander’s first play, “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” directed by Barry Edelstein, can count on neither, as they face the extinction of both their earthly existences and the entire Jewish cultural life of Russia.