Category Archives: American Jewry

March 30, 2009 · 8:36 am

A Rally for Harmony

by Mimi Schwartz (Princeton, NJ)

As an American Jew—the child of German refugees—overt anti-Semitism was my parents’ old world, not mine. There’d be an occasional remark here and there, but everyone gets that in multi-ethnic New Jersey. No big deal, I thought, until 500 anti-Semitic flyers were posted on the walls and kiosks of the college where I’ve taught for twenty-two years. That was a shock. Some had swastikas leaning on Jewish stars. Some had a picture of Hitler and of an Israeli soldier, both of equal size. Its caption read: “How many millions must die?” Some had the Christ-like figure of crucifixion paintings, but instead of the expected cross, the arms were draped over a Jewish star, evoking the imagery of Jew as Christ killer. The caption read, “Stop the Murder. Free the Palestinians.”

The flyers were taken down quickly (someone said they’d been posted “without going through school channels”), but a Rally for Harmony was organized in response as way of saying communally: “Hey! You can’t do that around here.” I expected good campus support, especially from those, both Jew and Gentile, who were involved in the school’s Holocaust and Genocide Program, because a central question of those courses has been: “What would you do if…?” Until the flyers appeared around the college, the need to answer had seemed hypothetical.

“Anti-Semitism like that is gone now!” students in my Holocaust through Literature and Film course proclaimed three months earlier while examining a Nazi flyer, circa 1934. It showed a black-haired, fat man with a long hooked nose handing candy to two blond children, and the translated caption read: “Jewish sex fiend passes out sweets with sinister intent.” People don’t believe such rubbish anymore! That’s what the majority of my class (who were white, Christian, early twenty-ish, and first-generation college) had assured me.

They repeated this conviction (although more tentatively) after watching “The Long Walk Home,” a film about the African-American bus boycott in Montgomery, 1955. And again (although with even less conviction) after “School Ties,” a movie set in a rich New England prep school in the 1950’s, where the kids turned against a newly imported football star once they found out (after a winning football season, their first) that he was Jewish.

I show these movies interspersed with Holocaust films to connect past with present. Otherwise it is too easy to be self-righteous about what those Germans did way, way back then. Gradually, student platitudes about tolerance give way to personal stories about bigotry: from not being served as a Black at Denny’s after the prom, to picking on a Jewish roommate who hogged the refrigerator with Kosher food, to shrugging off Polish jokes from fraternity brothers when you are Polish.

The initial tellers are African-American, Hispanic, or Jewish, but then everyone jumps in, sharing injustices they have observed, been victim of, or taken part in. The conversation becomes less guarded. We argue about harmless joking vs. ugly prejudice, moral responsibility vs. risking your life, and what would you do if it happens again. As long as I can keep honesty mixed with civility, everyone keeps listening to one another.

A second shock, regarding the flyers, was that my friends on the political left were boycotting the rally. The 500 flyers were, they said, a non-issue. The real issue was Israel as “The Occupier” with a totally unjustifiable policy. Citing the right of free speech, they were more upset with the college administrators, whom they accused of oppressing the students who posted the flyers.

One colleague—and friend of twenty years—said that taking the flyers down was an outrage, a conspiracy. (I suddenly hear “Jewish conspiracy.”) “All the flyers did was display Palestinian suffering,” she said, practically spitting the words out. “So what if they didn’t get official permission, a mere technicality, an excuse meant to appease the Holocaust powers who were organizing the rally.” ( I suddenly hear “Jewish power.”) She wasn’t going near the rally, which, she said, would be “totally controlled and scripted.”

“But this rally at least admits to a college problem,” I said, swallowing anger. She shrugged. “You didn’t find the flyers offensive?” No response. “The Jew as Christ-killer, the ways the arms are spread out, as if nailed to a cross?”

“Gee, I didn’t get that!” she said, her eyes widening on an earnest face. “I saw it as the figure in the Pieta, you know, a mother suffering for her dead son, like Palestinian mothers.”

This is a professor whose walls are lined with history books. Are you really that naive? I wanted to yell. And what about Israeli mothers who are suffering? And don’t the Israelis have the right for self-defense?

We were saved from the end of friendship by the bell ringing for the next class. “Well, many people here feel the flyers are anti-Semitic,” I said and backed away, feeling betrayed. So this is why my Dad left Germany, I thought, hurrying off, my heels echoing on the red floor tile. People like me, cautiously silent. People like her, self-righteous and unpredictable.

“Okay, okay, I may be over-reacting,” I conceded over lunch to another colleague who dismissed my analogy to Nazi Germany as Jewish paranoia made worse by my parents’ narrow escape. True, I was haunted by whether I’d be as smart as my father who saw the danger signs early enough. The story of how he’d attended a Hitler rally in 1931 and told my mother that night, after seeing thousands of arms raised in adoration, “If that man gets elected, we leave!” had been repeated to me, over and over, as a survival guide. And here were 500 “signs”—posted!! So why weren’t my friends seeing them?

“You can be against Israeli policy and not be an anti-Semite,” said this colleague evenly (he happened to be Jewish), as we ate tuna sandwiches, his bushy beard catching a few crumbs. Weaned on anti-war rallies of the sixties, he has been re-energized by what he sees as another version of the injustice of Vietnam: the same military/industrial complex, the same First World capitalism vs. Third World poverty. Only now Israel is the colonial oppressor. “The Israeli leaders have no credibility, not when they keep building Jewish settlements on Arab land,” he said quietly.

“No argument about that!” I replied. My belief in the security and safety of Israel doesn’t make me pro-settlements, a distinction that keeps getting lost in the ‘for-or-against’ polarization. “So are you coming to the rally?” I offered him my bag of chips as extra enticement, now that we’d found common ground.

“No, it’s a fraud,” he said.

“But not having a rally is worse.”

“The flyers weren’t anti-Semitic in intent, you know. One of the two kids was in Jewish Studies.”

I wanted to shout: Would you say that if those who had hung the Willie Horton posters said, “It’s okay. One of our publicists is Black!” But I thought reason might still make him come to the rally, scheduled in thirty minutes. “Well, if we don’t support a harmony rally, the extremists rule—whatever their stand,” I said.

He shook his head. “No one will say what he really thinks!” and he stood up to go. “Besides,” he said, turning to walk away, “I have a class, a review session.” He waved.

“So bring them!” I called. His was a social history course, after all.

I headed for the rally, thinking about Saul Friedlander’s book, Nazi Germany and the Jews. One of its main premises is that the early silence of the universities as a moral guardian of society helped to make Hitler feel he had “a green light to proceed.” I would send my colleague the quote that struck me most:

“… When Jewish colleagues were dismissed, no German professor publicly protested; when the number of Jewish students was drastically reduced, no university committee or faculty member expressed any opposition; when books were burned throughout the Reich, no intellectual in Germany, or for that matter anyone else within the country, openly expressed any shame.” (P.60)

I always wondered what those German professors told themselves in order not to act. Was it some rationalized sense of justice that let them ignore the images of Jew as sex fiend for a higher cause? And do my colleagues ignore images of Jews as Christ killers for some similar impulse of Right?

The new flyers that appeared on the kiosks were of Palestinian women weeping for their sons, daughters, and the lost land that was their birthright. No swastikas and Jewish stars (someone nixed that), but they made a strong case for justice for the Palestinians without knee-jerk images of hate. That, to me, is what free speech on a college campus is all about: the right to argue your position without the crutch of insult that prevents real listening. Free speech is not hate speech, I tell my classes whenever someone uses fag, Jap, cunt, kike, fatso, to make a case. And everyone seems grateful, as if the venue for open expression is safer with limits.

Only sixty or so (out of 5,000) gathered for harmony in the D-Wing Circle on a blue-sky day before finals week. A Muslim student in T-shirt and jeans came to the open mike to say, “We need to think of ourselves as human beings first, not as Jew, Christian, and Muslim first.”

A Jewish student with a yarmulke stood up to proclaim, “We are all God’s children.”

An African-American woman said, “We must overcome our differences and treat each other with respect.”

A man with a turban said, “We are all Americans who seek peace.”

After each speech everyone applauded vigorously, despite words that sounded like Hallmark cards. We knew the alternative from other campuses—shouting, pushing, even fistfights—and that 7,000 miles away, the lack of commitment to these words of harmony keeps feeding the tragic spiral of Israeli/ Palestinian violence.

There were students from the Jewish Student Union, the Muslim Association, the Hellenic Association, the Asian Student Association, the International Club, the Women’s Coalition—fourteen groups in all. There were two-dozen administrators and faculty members —some acting officially; others, like me, representing one citizen. Five of my students showed up, which was better than none, I suppose, given upcoming exams and that many probably never saw the flyers before they were taken down. The President didn’t show either, a delayed Board meeting, someone said.

Around the concrete wall of the circle were colored signs—Civility, Freedom, Communication, Dignity, Respect—the kind we hang in kindergarten classrooms to teach young children about how to behave. For six-year-olds, they are new words to be taken seriously, executed daily. For adults, their worn, tired repetitions make us impatient. Yes, yes, yes, but….

But within the walled circle for harmony they seemed to frame what might explode. A colleague who loves Plato and Aristotle came up to me and whispered, her face red with anger: “I’m here to support anyone who tells Israel to get the hell out of Palestine!”

“Hey, this is a harmony rally,” I reminded her, managing to swallow Jerk! “We are here to put salve on some wounds.”

“A waste of time,” she said, and left.

I thought how her rage, like mine, if spoken into the open microphone would turn the Rally for Harmony into Cable TV cross-fires of yelling and sound-bite slogans of good and evil that force you either to cheer, boo or change channels in disgust.

At least words like “We must treat each other with respect” keep people connected like bonds of communal prayer or the daily “I love you’s” we tell our mates even when we feel wronged. By themselves these words do little except to hold off permanent damage; but without them, there is little chance to lay the foundation that might turn self-righteousness into something more meaningful, as happened in my class.

I was about to leave when my lunch friend, the activist, showed up. He was “only passing by,” but wanted me to know that he was planning a series of real forums next semester to discuss the Middle East and its repercussions. He and another faculty member were drawing up a list of speakers to lead discussions on the history of the region, American policy options, religious and cultural differences, Zionism vs. Racism, first amendment issues.

“Great!” I said, feeling more optimistic.

‘Forum’ in the Greek spirit of the word suggests ‘insight,’ not to ‘incite’ as a rally does–even a harmony rally. And in a forum-style atmosphere, I could try again to convince my colleagues of their blindness to those anti-Semitic flyers. And maybe Muslim students would be more open about bigotry against them on campus. And we could debate free speech vs. hate speech. And Israelis and Palestinians could be invited to describe their respective homeland’s needs and suffering and fears.

I was on a roll of optimism, imagining people becoming reasonable.

But then the harmony rally ended, and someone began ripping down the bright pink, green, and yellow signs. “Stop! I’ll take them!” I yelled, knowing that wherever we meet, we’ll need to hang those signs again– Civility, Freedom, Respect, Dignity and Reason—and to keep looking at them.

Mimi Schwartz is the author of Good Neighbors, Bad Times – Echoes of My Father’s German Village, which won the 2008 ForeWord Magazine Book Award for memoir (and soon to be released in paperback). Other books include Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, a marriage memoir, and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (with Sondra Perl). Her short work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The New York Times, Tikkun, Jewish Week, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, among others. Six of her essays have been Notables in Best American Essays and she just won a 2008 Pushcart Prize in nonfiction. For more information, go to http://www.mimischwartz.net/

This essay, which appeared in slightly different form in Tikkun Magazine, is reprinted here with permission.

2 Comments

Filed under American Jewry

Tagged as , , ,

March 16, 2009 · 8:19 am

Shema: Hear! Listen!

By Gloria Scheiner (Sarasota, FL)

We signed the Shema today.

We cupped our ears and raised one finger to show the Lord is One.

It was Tot Shabbat at my daughter Elana’s temple, and everyone was called to listen.

The Lord is One, and we were one Jewish community.

The parents recited the blessing over their sons and daughters, and, of course, Elana, Michael, and three-year-old Chloe sneaked in a special prayer to include their miniature dachshund, Otto.

The Shema urges us to hear, to listen!

I listen.

I listen to my forty-year-old son, Adam, when he calls me each morning at 7:20 am on his way to his office.

I hear all about his day’s plans, his stories about the kids, the challenges of raising a family in today’s world.

I listen.

I listen to his six-year-old.

“Grandma,” he says, “I have to go to a listening class every Sunday. Everyone wants me to listen but nobody wants to listen to me.”

I listen to him.

I listen to my forty-three-year-old son, Jac.

He shares his excitement about his partnership, his books, his music, his recipes, and sometimes even his dates.

“Hey Mom, I completed Sunday.”

Who else but someone who has listened to him could share that excitement?

Because I listen, I know what he’s excited about: the Sunday crossword puzzle.

We listen to each other because we love each other. We love each other more because we listen to each other.

“Listen, Glo. I’m furious. Why do I have to bla,bla,bla…?”

I listen to my sister’s frustration. The more I listen, the more I connect.

It’s so easy to love and be loved. Just listen!

The Shema tells us to hear, to listen, even when it’s a challenge to listen to a loved one when Dr. Alzheimer interrupts his speech and flow of thoughts.

It gets more difficult every day, but I am determined. I am pledged to listen.

Some days are better than others. Yesterday was not one of the better ones.

Tomorrow I will have my hearing aids checked.

I want to listen.

Gloria Scheiner is a member of “The Pearls,” a group of six women who meet every Monday in Sarasota to write. “We choose a word and write for about ten minutes. If we like it, we are free to expand it, edit it, or just hone in on a particular phrase or idea. What I love most is how one word evokes such a different chord in each of us.”

8 Comments

Filed under American Jewry

Tagged as ,

March 2, 2009 · 8:32 am

A Miracle In Rhodes

by Helene Kroll Gupp (Sarasota, FL)

It was September, after Rosh Hashanah, and we were on the island of Rhodes searching for a synagogue to spend the most sacred of all our holidays–Yom Kippur.

Along with another couple, we had flown to Athens, then to Mykonos, and now we were in hot and blindingly sunny Rhodes.  Somehow, we had located an old synagogue, down a dusty street, practically hidden from view.  Through a series of disjointed verbal expressions and elaborate hand illustrations, we got our message across to some local townspeople that we wanted to pray at the synagogue.

We were directed to the synagogue’s caretaker, an elderly woman with numbers on her arm.  She instructed us to come back the next day for services at 9 a.m.  Obediently, we did just that.  But 9 a.m. Greek time means “whenever!”

The synagogue had a strong Moorish feel to its architecture and an even stronger odor of dust and mold.  When my husband and our friend, Arnie, each put on a tallis belonging to the synagogue, they kept sniffing until they realized that the scent encompassing them was one of layers and layers of dust.  Obviously, a tallis was used but once a year!

Slowly, a few people started drifting into the synagogue.

A young woman, employed by a cruise ship docked at the port, told me she was Jewish on her father’s side but that in her heart she felt Jewish and wanted to be part of this holiday.

A few tourists rudely rushed in, snapped some pictures of the bimah, and ran out as quickly as they came.

Then three Israeli soldiers on holiday strode in.  Young and vibrant, they filled the synagogue with their exuberance.

Since it was an Orthodox service, the women sat on one side.  And because the young men were also Orthodox, they would not consider including women in the minyan that was required to hold a proper service.

One of the soldiers offered to act as rabbi and hazzan, and patiently waited with us for a quorum of ten.

All in all, there were nine men present; not enough for a minyan.  We all sat around in that stuffy synagogue, waiting to start the service.

Suddenly, a tourist, dressed uncomfortably in a suit and tie, rushed into the ancient building and breathlessly asked, “What time does the service start?”

“Now,” we all exclaimed.

He was our tenth man!

In that moment, thousands of miles away from our home and our temple of three thousand people, ten men and four women celebrated Yom Kippur.  We had our minyan. And for another year the Day of Atonement was observed anew in Rhodes.

I will never forget that holiday in Greece.  It taught me how important every Jew is.

Of all the High Holidays I have spent in my hometown synagogue, none will equal that experience of being part of the continuation of an ancient tradition.

And I will always remember that little synagogue and the miracle I witnessed there: the miracle of one minyan that preserved Yom Kippur for another year on the island of Rhodes.

Helene Kroll Gupp came to Sarasota in 1994 from her hometown of Rochester, New York where she enjoyed a thirty-two year career in public relations and development, including stints with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, State of Israel Bonds, Jewish Home and Infirmary, and lastly, Jewish Family Service. A life member of Hadassah, she is active in Women’s American ORT, Gulfside Chapter.

1 Comment

Filed under American Jewry

Tagged as , ,

February 16, 2009 · 7:31 am

The Sabbath

by Sandra Yoffee (Sarasota, FL)

My visits with my grandparents were always treasured times, especially when it included the Sabbath.

This was a day joyfully observed each week since my Grandmother, Bubbe, and Grandfather, Zedeh, were devout Orthodox Jews.

On Friday evening before sunset, Zedeh would change from his shabby work clothes into his steel-grey wool suit and snowy white shirt accented with a muted maroon tie.  In his weathered black shoes, he then walked to the nearby synagogue to welcome the Sabbath with prayers.

Bubbe, who remained at home, would light the Sabbath candles and put the finishing touches on her day-long task of preparing the Sabbath meal.

“Come here, my child, and watch as I welcome the Sabbath by lighting the candles,” she said.

I watched as she circled her wrinkled hands around the flames of the candles. With her hands placed over her closed eyes, she sang the blessings for lighting the candles. The beautiful candelabra, etched in silver, resembled a small tree with branches that held six candles. When all the candles were lit, the room was bathed in the glow of their flames.

When Zedeh returned from shul, we sat down at the dining room table to enjoy a delicious Sabbath meal.

After the blessing over the wine and challah, we would feast on steaming chicken soup with feathery light kneidlach, succulent roast chicken, and luscious kugel.

After dinner Bubbe and I sat in the darkened living room on the brown mohair sofa with only the shimmering light of the Sabbath candles.

She told me stories from the old country, and, while the Yiddish flowed, I listened until my eyelids grew heavy and I fell asleep.

On Sabbath morning, we dressed in our finest clothes and walked to their synagogue, B’nai Moshe, on Fifth Street in South Philadelphia.

The synagogue was a beautiful building with many stained glass windows that, through their pictures, told the history of our Jewish heritage.

Bubbe took me upstairs to the balcony where we sat with all the women.  She introduced me to her friends and told them I was her “shaynah aynecal,” her beautiful granddaughter.

With the sound of the women’s whispered prayers in my ears, I leaned over the railing and watched my Zedeh pray in the sanctuary below.

The men, covered with prayer-shawls, swayed front to back as they prayed.

The melodies of their prayers still linger in my memory.

Whenever I go to synagogue today–if I listen quietly–I can hear echoes of those prayers.

The simplicity of their lives, intertwined with their religious practices, forever remains a beautiful part of my memory of them.

Thus my grandparents instilled in me my pride and joy of being Jewish.

Sandra Yoffee was born in Philadelphia, PA, and moved with her husband, A.G., in 2002 to Sarasota, FL, where she is a member of “The Six Pearls,” a writing group dedicated to memoir-writing.

2 Comments

Filed under American Jewry

Tagged as , , ,

February 9, 2009 · 8:19 am

Digging in the Dirt: Gardens, Blessings, and Tu B’Shevat

By Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

With Tu B’Shevat coming, I’ve been thinking about the holiday–it’s the new year of the trees, the end of winter, the beginning of spring– and about our attachment to the land and its fruits. Living in New York City for the past 25 years, it’s so easy to feel disconnected from the holiday. This year, however, is different. My father has taught me to be a gardener.

Gardening has given me another perspective on produce and how it gets from the ground to the table. I grew up in Connecticut and now live in New York City, where it’s easy to think that vegetables come from the Food Emporium or Fairway, and that they really do grow with that shiny spray stuff on them. It’s easy to forget that produce comes from the dirt.

I’ve never been a nature girl and wanted nothing to do with my father’s garden for many years. But I became interested about two years ago as I watched my father work in his garden and saw the look on his face. My father welcomed me into the garden. He taught me how to smell the soil to see if it is good, how squash should be planted close together in a circle and then thinned out, how cucumbers need to be planted near a fence because their tendrils need to climb, and that parsley can last until January or February if it’s covered at night when the frost hits. We worried about what would happen if there was no rain or too much rain. And many times, we were in the garden speaking to the plants, urging them to grow, or just sitting on the lawn watching the garden, and talking about our amazement at how sometimes in the sunlight it seemed we could see the plants growing.

My father taught me that I had to get my hands in the dirt. He said if I wore gloves I wouldn’t be able to feel it. He showed me how to feel the connection between the earth and me. It took time to get used to that. I was constantly on the lookout for worms, snakes, and bugs, but once I made peace with that fear I couldn’t wait to wake up early in the morning, go to the garden, and see what had happened the previous night.

When I was back home in New York, I would call my father, and we’d discuss how the plants were doing in the garden, especially one small, faltering eggplant in the south corner which we finally agreed we couldn’t save and had to pull out. Even when I wasn’t there, the garden was present in my life.

My father showed me how to hill and weed around the plants as they were growing, and I began to feel like a kid again, covered from head to toe in dirt. I began to re-connect to those experiences of seeing things for the first time. My heart jumped when I saw the seeds push their way up through the soil or when the first purple of an eggplant appeared. I ran screaming into the house when we began harvesting the plants to show my mother the first carrots, the first red tomatoes, and ears of corn. I began to understand why my father was always in his garden, and I wanted to be there too. I enjoyed being in the dirt. I looked for work in the garden. If there wasn’t something to be hilled, weeded or planted, I was disappointed.

Before becoming a gardener, I would recite a bracha over food but it didn’t contain much meaning for me. I could recite the blessing in the morning: “Blessed are you, Sovereign of the Universe, who dresses the naked” because I knit and know the amount of work that goes into making a garment. As I put on my clothes, I could relate to the seriousness and intention of this blessing. I don’t want to recite a blessing in vain, and I think the fact that I couldn’t connect to an experience with the earth made it hard for me to consistently recite the brachot over food.

And then the garden got me thinking about figure eights. The more I gardened, the more I saw and felt the growing process, the more I saw how brachot are related to experience, and how experience is related to brachot and how they are truly inseparable. I understood how brachot and experience constantly flow back and forth, into and out of each other. I think that’s probably what the rabbis had in mind when they created brachot.

My experience with brachot has been enriched because I made the connection that the rabbis were trying to teach. I don’t mean to say that one must have a deep experience in order to recite a bracha. That’s not possible every time, and one doesn’t need have to have my type of direct experience either. I don’t have a spiritual experience every time I recite a bracha. But what I hope for is that a bracha, which is really an acknowledgement and doesn’t need to always be formal, will sustain me, will relate to an experience, and I hope that my experiences will make me want to acknowledge them with brachot.

This year I plan to celebrate Tu B’Shevat at a seder (a kabbalistic invention modeled on the Passover seder) with four cups of wine and different types of fruit. Even though it is winter and I am far from the garden, I know that the experience of reciting brachot at the seder will take me back to the garden and that the garden has brought me to a new understanding of the land, its fruits, blessings, and brachot.

Janet R. Kirchheimer, a poet and teaching fellow at CLAL–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, is the author of How to Spot One of Us, a collection of poems about the Holocaust.

This essay, which previously appeared in e-CLAL, CLAL’s weekly webzine, and in various Jewish newspapers, is reprinted here with the author’s permission

If you’d like to read a sampling of poems from How to Spot One of Us, visit the online magazine, Babel Fruit: http://web.mac.com/renkat/Winter_07/Janet_R._Kirchheimer.html

And if you’d like to learn more about the book, visit: http://www.clal.org/sp137.html.

For more information on Janet, check out the CLAL website: http://www.clal.org/clal_faculty_jrk.html

1 Comment

Filed under American Jewry, Jewish identity

Tagged as , , ,

February 2, 2009 · 7:49 am

Ask Your Father and He’ll Tell You

By Ruchama King Feuerman (Passaic, NJ)

My father is getting older, weaker. I had been pretending it wasn’t so, ignoring how slowly and consciously he walks to the fridge, how it takes weeks to recover from a cold, how he keeps asking me to repeat what I’m saying because he can’t hear so well. And then there are the new bottles of pills that join the old ones on his night table. I’d been overlooking that.

It’s not that he’s faded completely, not by a long shot. He still has a full head of hair which is pretty amazing for a man his age. He makes astute comments on politics, wry observations about human nature, and knows just the thought-provoking question to ask on the parshah that makes me realize I’m not half as smart as I think I am.

And yet, and yet. While his memory is all there, the vividness of certain memories isn’t. It strikes me as a loss. He is, after all, the repository of the memories of his entire generation. His life was vastly different than mine, and he was there as I began to experience my own life. His life stories shaped mine.  Why should they be lost?

I could kick myself for all the things I didn’t ask my grandparents when they were alive. For instance, my grandmother was always insisting she was related to a famous rabbi. Though we respected our grandmother, for some reason we thought she was exaggerating. Everyone we knew claimed to be related to a famous rabbi. Her last name had been Ziv, which didn’t ring any bells back then. By the time I was older and put together that Ziv and the Alter of Khelm were one and the same family name, my grandmother had already died. I didn’t have enough genealogical information on hand to make a real connection to the Ziv dynasty and I probably never will. Gone. A beautiful piece of family history down the tube. Not to mention the memories she carried with her of a previous generation.

I find as my father ages, I’m seized with urgency. I am hungry for details of his life, the small, seemingly trivial memories that shape a man and his personality–the names of his boyhood friends, the games he played, the after-school jobs he took, the teacher who believed in him, the principal who didn’t. Then there are the big memories that are part of a cultural narrative of what has been called the greatest generation: rationing in World War II, playing marbles at his friend’s house and hearing a radio bulletin announce “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor,” gas and butter rationing during the war, scrap metal collections, having to give up his bedroom every weekend to the Jewish soldiers his parents hosted at their home.

I was so influenced by my father’s memories growing up that I sometimes felt I was right there, observing the single great tragedy of his life, when a car knocked off his ear when he was a young boy. I see him going to school, wearing a bandage on the side of his head because his Depression-era family couldn’t afford to buy him a prosthetic ear. I ask my father everything: how he got kicked out of high school for poor grades only to earn a full merit scholarship a year later to William and Mary College; how twenty-nine relatives all lived in one small house in the 1930s, the whole crew subsisting on Grandpa Sam’s single salary as a tailor; how he became religious in his late twenties and so set in motion a generation’s return to Judaism. I write down everything, and in my father’s retelling of his life, I see an image of Yaakov wrestling with an angel, for just as Yaakov had been maimed and yet emerged stronger, so had my father. I want to know it all, even his failures, the parts where he didn’t vanquish his fears. But not too much failure. It’s hard for a daughter to hear.

They say a photograph is worth a thousand words. We love our photo albums for the memories they hold, but pictures will never capture the who said what to whom and why–the special fragrance of a Pesach cholent, the feel of a Borsalino on a yeshiva bochur’s head, the young daughter who at every Shabbos meal would plan in great detail the kind of wedding she wanted, the certain niggun that made everyone turn pensive. I know now that photos are not nearly enough, that these memories will not carry over unless they are written down.

I search out the details of my father’s life in a way that makes it new to me. He was born in Washington , D.C. and speaks with a Southern accent. As one who found Judaism later in life, he is filled with religious enthusiasm, constantly quoting his rabbi or the Torah in what I call Southern-Israelite speak–he can’t help sounding like a gospel preacher sometimes. His favorite verse from Tehillim is:  “Hashem has granted me joy according to the days he has afflicted me,” and, boy, I see how that verse has played itself out in his years.

He is too weak these days for walks or even to hear details about my children’s life, but he’s never too weak to talk about his own. He gets comfortable on the easy chair. I ask a few questions and he starts speaking. I’m a fast typist (and he speaks more slowly than he used to). I see it’s not the first question I ask that gets him going. It’s the second question, that’s a response to the first. The “Really? And what happened when you said that?” or “Hmm. That sounds pretty terrible.” And he’ll interject, “No, actually it wasn’t,” and he’ll set me straight until I get it all down the way he remembered it and he saw it and knew it. I’m riveted to his words. He doesn’t use any flourishes or metaphors or fancy language. It’s plain, plain, plain, and yet I’m under the spell of a master storyteller. He knows how to pause and make me physically ache for his next phrase. “Nu, so what happened?” I urge. I’m at the edge of my seat. He’s not only telling his story, but my story, too. Because what happened to him is ultimately my story as well. My father’s sense of himself entered me and is part of who I am today, but unless I write it down, my kids won’t understand me, and certainly not him. And every generation must understand the previous one.

At certain points I say, “Dad, did that really happen?” He nods. Uh huh. Or a few times he’ll shake his head, “Don’t put that part in.” I don’t include it, though I can’t understand what he finds so raw or objectionable. Still, they are his memories and he can decide. Sometimes in the middle of speaking he nods off to sleep. I say, “Dad.  Da-a-d?” He gives a start, blinks a few times and says, ‘Where was I?”  “The part where your bubbe was apoplectic because she thought the Irish policeman was going to arrest her,” I prompt. “Oh, that part.” He pauses. “I thought we passed that.” “Nope.” So he obliges and fills me in.

I can hardly believe what he has endured. There have been so many car accidents, aside from the first one. The next accident took place in his early twenties. A car collision threw him fifteen feet from his car and he landed on a huge spread of red ants. Those red ants softened the hard ground and thus, saved his life, but his face blew up afterward like a beach ball. He was laid up in a hospital for six months. There were more accidents that followed and many illnesses. At any point in the year he could walk into a hospital and be admitted. There were financial catastrophes and death struggles to make a living. There were petty betrayals and the deeper disappointments of not fulfilling one’s potential, big mistakes and bad choices. He says it all in a bland voice. He is beyond any requests for pity. It’s like it happened to someone else. Thankfully he rounds it out with the good stuff, the shining moments, the heroism of supporting a family, his religious renaissance, his outrageous chessed and volunteer work and his position as gabbai in shul, the connections he made with people which lifted him to a different plane entirely, the love he instilled into his family. The totality of his life hits me. I type and weep, blow my nose and type some more. He seems surprised to see me cry, and then I can’t help notice a look of gratification on his face. Here at the computer, I am bearing witness to his rich, difficult life.

I’m not alone in this. In the writing workshops I lead, I see more and more people writing about their parents and grandparents. They are more than witnesses. They are creating treasures, word heirlooms to pass down to the next generation. I’m not telling anyone to write about their parents. It just happens. Cousins get thrown in and great uncles and aunts, and neighbors too. Such stories. The bubbe who sped off on a horse to a different village in her eagerness to make a shidduch. The Munkach Hassid who used his famed humor even at the pits, and how some Jews escaped while the Nazis, y’mach shmam, were literally rolling with laughter. Such stories. Sha’al avicha v’yagecha, zkainecha v’yomru lach. “Ask your father and he’ll tell you what happened….” (Deut. 32:7) Hearing these stories, I feel richer. Even if they aren’t my own parents’ stories, they still feel like mine. I feel the scope of another human being, another Jew. Any Jewish life is an event, a reason to sit up, notice and take notes.

Ruchama King Feuerman is a novelist and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times and numerous publications. This story is reprinted with her permission from her recently published anthology, Everyone’s Got a Story. (www.judaicapress.com/product_info.php?products_id=614 – 65k –)

Feuerman, who lived in Israel for ten years studying and teaching Torah, now resides in Passaic, New Jersey, where for the past fifteen years she has taught writing workshops. She recently was awarded a 2009 Artists’ Fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

To find out more about her upcoming writing workshops, visit: http://www.writetogether.typepad.com/

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, Jewish identity, Jewish writing

Tagged as

January 26, 2009 · 8:37 am

The Gray Hairpin

by Linda Albert (Longboat Key, FL)

Granny, who was my mother’s mother, stayed with us every year when the High Holidays rolled around because we lived within walking distance of a synagogue, and, as a traditional Jew, she would not drive on the holiest days of the year. Each time she came to visit, I had to share my bedroom with her.

Her name was Rose Bennett. Born in Russia, she had come to Detroit, Michigan when she was eighteen to marry Louis Solovich, the brother of her sister’s husband. The two families lived next door to each other. Her sister had ten children; Granny had six. Along with Granny’s other sisters and brothers and their progeny, I used to think I was related to the entire city.

As a young girl I pretended to be asleep while Granny prepared for bed and would peek as she undressed, releasing her pendulous breasts from the confines of her corset and undoing the pins from the bun in her snow white hair. As interesting as these observations were, however, they didn’t make up for the loss of privacy I felt forced to endure. And the stray gray hairpins that remained scattered on my dresser after she left were an irritating reminder of that sacrifice.

Whenever Granny was with us, she took it upon herself to try to get the snarls out of my hair, which was blond and a feature my strong-minded mother called my “crowning glory.” Despite my complaints, I was not allowed a haircut from the ages of three to twelve. Instead, I wore my hair, which otherwise would have hung down to my waist, in fat, ugly, and unfashionable braids. Not only did I hate those braids, but I despised the unpleasant pinches on the cheek that they prompted and the comparisons to “pretty little Dutch girls.”

In an attempt to distract me from the pain of the hairbrush working through my knotted hair, Granny tried to tell me stories about the Old Country. But I whined and carried on so much she was never able to get to an ending. How was I to know until years later that Granny had collected rain water to wash her own hair? In her own gentle way, she had tried to teach me to take pride in myself and value my gifts.

When I turned twelve, my oldest cousin Ginny convinced my mother to allow me to have my hair cut short. Without my braids and those awful snarls, Granny’s reason for story-telling stopped. It never occurred to me to ask her to finish her stories. I simply assumed she would be around forever and I could hear them later.

My mother used to say that while Granny kept kosher, at least she wasn’t “crazy kosher,” and didn’t inflict her ways on her children, all of whom became Reform or liberal in the practice of religion. When she was with us, Granny performed her rituals in quiet corners, lighting Sabbath and holiday candles while we went about our worldly ways unaware of the richness we might be missing. And every year I continued to share my room with her, finding forgotten gray hairpins on my dresser as reassuringly annoying souvenirs of her visits.

These visits came to a jolting halt for me when I was a sixteen years old. Though she had looked like an old lady from an early age with her white hair and flowered dresses, her corsets and matronly bosom, and her old-lady tie-shoes with the thick black heels, Granny suffered from nothing more than hypertension and arthritis, and otherwise had the energy of a girl. Yet one night, in her seventy-second year, she announced to my aunt and uncle, with whom she lived, that she didn’t feel well, lay down on her bed, closed her eyes, and quietly died.

I was devastated. The minute I heard Granny was gone, I knew I had thrown away a priceless opportunity to understand my grandmother and to know more about my heritage. What was it like for Granny to have come to America when she was only eighteen to marry a stranger? How did she manage when she was left a widow with six children? (My mother, the youngest of six, was only eight month’s old.) How far did Uncle Max, the only boy in a fatherless household, actually get when he ran away from his home in Detroit to find his grandfather in Russia? Was he punished or hugged when he was finally found? Why didn’t anyone talk about Grandpa Louis, the handsome man in the picture and the hinted at “brains of the family”? And why did she stick to her traditional ways? Nobody but Granny could really answer those questions, and now it was too late for me to ask them.

The minute it was too late, I knew how much love and patience Granny had bestowed upon me, despite my lack of deservedness. I knew then with painful clarity that Granny would always be one of my greatest teachers, not only by her example as a woman who had taken the challenges of life with grace, but by the lesson of her death. I promised myself that I would never again take anyone or any situation quite so for granted. I would ever after be instructed by the inevitability of endings in life.

For years I regretted my failings in relation to Granny. I found my heart warmed by anyone who pronounced my name with a foreign lilt. I gravitated to other people’s stories. And then in a writing class twenty years after her death, I wrote about Granny in a character sketch, starting and ending with the memory of those gray hair pins, how real they remained to me, how much I still loved my very special grandmother, and how much I would have liked to thank her.

I read the piece later to a group of other writers. Just as I got to the last line in which I said I hadn’t seen a gray hairpin in twenty years, the woman sitting next to me spied something on the floor and leaned down to pick it up. Incredibly, it was a gray hairpin.

Ever since then I like to think that I have redeemed myself in Granny eyes and have been forgiven.

Linda Albert’s essays, articles, creative non-fiction, and poems have appeared in many publications, including McCall’s Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Sacred Journey, Today’s Caregiver Magazine, Itineraries, and the Borderline and SNReview Literary Journals. She lives on Longboat Key, Florida with her husband. You can visit her on-line at http://snreview.org/ (autumn 2008, poetry section) or at her website http://www.lindaalbert.net/

6 Comments

Filed under American Jewry

Tagged as , ,

January 6, 2009 · 9:22 am

An Act of Atonement

By Harriet Kessler (Woodbury Heights, NJ)

We were probably the first girls– Susan Fuld and I–to be bat mitzvahed in all of Rego Park, NY.

It was 1946, and our shul, the Rego Park Jewish Center, was a storefront across from the public library on Booth Street.

I don’t remember the rabbi’s name. And I don’t remember anything about the ceremony. I do recall that Susan and I prepared for and went through the ritual together, and that of all the 12-year-old Jewish girls in P.S. 139, we were the least likely bat mitzvah candidates.

Both of our families were ideologically secular.

Susan’s parents, middle-class intellectuals, were college educated civil servants who read The New York Sun at night. Her father, an accountant, and her mother, a grade-school teacher– Zionists who made aliyah some seven years later when the House Un-American Activities Committee came calling–believed that religion was the opiate of the people.

My parents, a self-taught plastics engineer and a housewife, were labor-oriented high school graduates who read The New York World Telegram and were Workmen’s Circle devotees. In fact, living in Far Rockaway before our move to Rego Park, we could have doubled for the family that ate on Yom Kippur in Woody Allen’s Radio Days.

Despite our parents, Susan and I went to synagogue.

Not that our parents objected. They simply looked at us incredulously when we called for each other and trotted off to children’s services every Saturday, questioning what we found so appealing about spending time in the synagogue.

I dreamed of becoming a writer and a singer, and shul meant stories and music. David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, Noah.  Such high drama! I loved the Bible stories because they were exotic and powerful. And I loved the songs–David Melech Yisroel, Hine Ma Tov, Shalom Alecheim, Ein k’Eloheinu–that let me show off my high notes as I sang at the top of my lungs.

Shul also meant celebration. The best was Simchat Torah which I so enjoyed that my mind’s eye often returns to a chubby little girl in a sailor dress and brown oxfords, her black corkscrew curls bouncing as she parades with all of Jewish Rego Park (except for Susan’s parents and mine), dancing down the center aisle of the old Jewish Center.

But if we went to shul despite our parents, we prepared for our bat mitzvah because of them.

For Susan– and it was all her idea–the Jewish rite of passage was intended to help her parents bear the pain inflicted by her older sister.

Dorothea, Susan’s senior by seven years, had married a Catholic boy, graduating from high school and eloping the next day with him before his Army unit left for Europe. Secular or not, her parents were devastated.

I never questioned why Susan’s performance of a ritual that was meaningless to her parents would help matters. But I took her word that becoming a bat mitzvah would assure her folks that they still had one Jewish daughter.

For me, though, the bat mitzvah meant atoning for my father’s sins.

I knew–even at 12–that my father had battled his temper all his life, usually without success except where his family was concerned. When I was eight, for example, we’d moved from Far Rockaway because of his shame following a 3 a.m. arrest. (The police car’s screaming siren had alerted all the neighbors.) His crime? Socking the arresting officer’s brother-in-law in a fit of road rage.

But, more significantly, my dad’s 13th year had come and gone sans bar mitzvah because of his lack of control. Like the young boy in “The Conversion of the Jews,” an early Philip Roth story, my father was the thorn in his heder rebbe’s flesh. Taking nothing on faith, continually interrupting the class with a relentless stream of questions, he eventually provoked the rabbi into striking him with a stick.

Where Philip Roth’s protagonist responded to his rabbi’s blows by screaming, “You don’t hit over God,” running from the schoolroom onto a rooftop, and threatening to jump unless all the Jews converted, my father simply hit the rabbi back–and ended his own Jewish education.

To my young mind, his missing out on a bar mitzvah meant that he wanted for Jewish legitimacy. I decided that he needed validation and that I needed it, too.

Was my father pleased? I don’t remember. Was I less isolated? I don’t recall that either. If I was, the feeling didn’t last.

Looking back, though, the bat mitzvah seems like a milestone in my unending struggle to be a good Jewish-American.

It was my first act of atonement, and, possibly, my most genuine–a touchstone that I return to year after year.

Harriet Kessler, whose first love is short story writing, is longtime editor of The Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey and Attitudes Magazine. You can read her work at www.jewishvoicesnj.org

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, Jewish identity

Tagged as , ,

December 31, 2008 · 11:13 am

Kallah Bereishis

by Jeanette Friedman (New Milford, NJ)

On my 12th birthday I wasn’t standing in front of a Torah scroll to make a blessing but in a darkened sukkah with some friends and a birthday cake without candles. (There were no candles since I wasn’t permitted to blow them out).

It wasn’t fair.

I could stand behind the curtain upstairs in the musty women’s section of our Crown Heights shul and peek down at the men, including my twin brother, as they recited the  blessing over the Torah as “Chassan Bereishis”– The Groom of Genesis.

Why, I wondered, couldn’t there be a “Kallah Bereishis”– The Bride of Genesis?

I was a Beis Yakov girl, a student at the ultra Orthodox girls-only school where they taught us the Pentateuch and Prophets and only the halacha we needed to know about running a household and being a good wife.

But we had TV at home, and I had a high school teacher, Shirley Jacobson, who taught civics and spoke about political action and talked to me about going to college.

She inspired me to convince my parents to let me to go to Brooklyn College, as long as it didn’t cost them anything except the bare minimum.

Brooklyn College saved my life.

It’s where in September, 1970, in the middle of my battle for freedom and my escape from the Orthodox women’s ghetto, that I met my husband Philip, a Vietnam vet, and we’ve stuck together through thick and thin for 37 years.

At Brooklyn College, I learned how to be a Jew and a citizen of the world without suffocating ritual.

I learned how to use my Jewish values to make the world a better place for other people, and how to make the world a better place for me—from marching against the war in Vietnam in 1965 to marching in the Women’s Lib parade in 1970.

When I joined the school newspaper, I met a group of people who gave me courage to move out and up. They were the first to appreciate my writing ability, and taught me a trade that still pays the bills. They taught me how to look for an apartment and drive a car. They taught me how to dig for information and to use the power of the pen.

Whenever I was in conflict with myself or my ethics, the first person I turned to for advice was Sol Amato, a kid from the Lower East Side who used to wait tables in the Borscht Belt. He was the dean of the special baccalaureate degree program and a very gentle man.

I remember Sol’s office and the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet filled with papers about the great philosophers and minds of the world. Sol always asked the right questions, gave thoughtful answers, and pointed me in the right direction.

And then there was the late Dolly Lowther Robinson, a sharecropper’s daughter who went to law school and became Secretary of Labor for the State of NY and a Model Cities Commissioner under Abe Beame.

Without Sol and Dolly, above all others, the road I was on would not have led to Rabbi Jack Bemporad, Chavura Beth Shalom, and this bat mitzvah ceremony in Alpine, New Jersey

When Phil and I moved to Teaneck, we had four kids, ages 1, 2, 3 and 9. We had been in town about two years when, in 1979, someone painted swastikas on the synagogue where my kids were going to nursery school.

That’s when I started down this road– with my fellow sons and daughters of survivors–which has led to meeting amazing people, including world leaders, and travels around the world.

Eventually, the road, twisting and turning, led to Rabbi Jack, who has taught me much, though I’m sure I frustrate the hell out of him because he has had to uncross all the ultra-Orthodox hardwiring in my brain.

It’s because of Rabbi Jack that I’ve looked into the Talmud.

And it’s Rabbi Jack who I want to thank for helping me with my new beginning.

That’s because as we begin the Torah cycle again on Simchat Torah, and I step up to the bimah on my 60th birthday to read the Creation and the First Day, I feel like the bride that I dreamed of when I was 12 years old.

The bride of Genesis–kallah bereishis.

A freelance journalist, editor, and author, Jeanette Friedman serves as communications director for the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. This essay appeared in slightly different form as “My Bat Mitzvah Speech, Simchat Torah 2007: Today I Am A Woman” at her blog, http://www.jeanettefriedman.com/ It’s reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, Jewish identity

Tagged as , ,

December 14, 2008 · 7:30 am

Mazel

by Brenner Glickman (Sarasota, FL)

Does an animal have a soul?

It’s a question that Maimonides explores in his commentary on the Torah’s commandment to let a mother bird go free when taking her fledglings or eggs.

Maimonides suggests that the mother bird is like a human mother–capable of care and love– and he teaches that the essence of this commandment is mercy… mercy for the mother and recognition of her feelings.

“There is no difference in this case between the pain of people and the pain of other living things,” he writes.

In other words, we cannot destroy her young in her presence because it would be too hurtful for her to witness.  We must set her free.  She is like us.

Still, this question–does an animal have a soul?–haunts me because of something personal in my life right now.

At the beginning of this summer, our dog, Mazel, received a devastating diagnosis.

Normally, when we come home, Mazel gives us such a greeting, I cannot even tell you.  He jumps, he yelps, he licks, and just shows us in every way how happy he is to see us.

But one evening in June we came home and there was no greeting.

We found Mazel lying on the floor unable to get up.

We took him to the animal ER.  After a few tests, the vet told us what we most feared.  Mazel was filled with cancerous tumors and suffered from massive internal bleeding.  There was nothing we could do.

The doctor told us to take him home and spend his last few hours showering him with love.

Mazel was our dog for ten years, our first child, if you will.  We picked him out at the pound and gave him a home and a life and love.  And he returned the love every day and with every lick.

When he was still a puppy, he comforted me when my grandmother was dying.  I will remember it forever.

I was sitting on the couch in the living room and I started to cry.  Mazel walked right over and sat at attention right in front of me.  He looked right into my eyes, and then he tilted his head to the side, just like so.  And then he jumped on the couch and nuzzled me.

The thing is–Mazel was not allowed on the couch.  He knew not to jump on the couch.  He also knew that at that moment he was supposed to jump on the couch.

We started to make plans for Mazel’s burial.  We were conflicted.  We wanted to bury him whole, in keeping with Jewish tradition.  But we decided to cremate him instead, so we could bury his urn on my family’s island in Maine.  It was his favorite place in the world, and we were planning on going in August.

And then something happened.  Mazel revived.  His bleeding stopped.  He started to feel better and walk around.  After a few days, it was like he was himself again.

We were delighted beyond words.  We knew it wouldn’t last, but we were so grateful for every moment and every day we had with him.  We hugged him and kissed him every chance we got.

And he lived all of June.

And he lived all of July.

And then, on August 2nd, he came with us to Maine like he did every summer.

And he had a ball in Maine.

And then, one evening, he got still again, and, a few hours later, he died.

He had made it to Maine, where we were able to bury him in the manner we had wanted, in the place that he liked best.

My brother had just lost his dog a few months earlier.

He said to me, “They give you so much love, and they don’t ask for anything.”

And I thought, that is so wrong! Mazel asked for stuff all the time.  He asked for food, he asked to go out, he asked to come back in.

But that is not what my brother meant.

They ask for so little from us, and they give us so much.

We miss him so much.  Our house is so empty without him.  We will get another dog soon, but not just yet.  We need to mourn for this one.

My wife imagines that when our time comes and we go to heaven, Mazel will be waiting there for us and give us a great greeting.  I like that a lot.  I like that a whole lot.

I am so proud that we come from a tradition which recognizes that animals are precious and that they have, as Maimonides suggests, a soul capable of so much love.

Brenner Glickman is rabbi of Temple Emanu-el in Sarasota, FL, where he and his family have adopted a new dog, “Jerry” (also known as Jerusalem). You can visit Rabbi Glickman’s  blog at http://www.jlive.org/profiles/blog/list?user=3o0apsblovluy

1 Comment

Filed under American Jewry

Tagged as , ,