Category Archives: Family history

December 11, 2023 · 7:30 am

The Challenges of Conversion

By Joseph O’Keefe (Rockville Centre, NY)

Please do not call me by my Hebrew name. As a convert, I am considered the child of Abraham and Sarah (Avram v’Sarah), but they are not my parents. Brian and Cathy are.

For all the richness that Judaism has brought to my own life and family, I have never been able to reconcile with this tradition – particularly as it involves the love and support of those that positioned and prepared me for the choice to embrace a new faith. 

Is it possible to feel fully accepted when such a distinction is made between Jews-by-birth and Jews-by-choice? At what point does the symbolism of a shared ancestry ostracize the convert? And how can their ‘real’ past be recognized while simultaneously honoring the history of their adoptive one? 

Anita Diamant opens her invaluable book Choosing a Jewish Life with an anecdote about a rabbi telling a convert that even Fitzgerald can be a Jewish name. That may be true outside of temple. But where it also counts, during rites and rituals, the gentile’s past is essentially disregarded.

Having been raised a Roman Catholic, I was familiar with the Biblical stories of Abraham and Sarah, including how they are told that their descendants will someday be as numerous as the stars in the sky – the very beginning of Jewish lineage and the reason why all converts are considered their children. 

There is an undeniable beauty in the idea that we Jews share a common set of parents and that our ancestors were prophets singled out by the Almighty. To be born to Jewish parents is to draw a continuous line between oneself and the ancients, but the convert lives both inside and outside the diaspora, and assigning a single surname to the entire group can leave us feeling ‘other.’

Heritage should be a point of pride, particularly for a group whose history is so heavily defined by attempts to eradicate it. The stories of crypto-Jews, those Jews who secretly practiced their faith in 13-14th century Europe, were an inspiration to me during my conversion and remain so now. Even today, some Jews proudly refer to themselves as Kohans – descendants of an exalted line dating back to the Israelites. My birth name, O’Keefe, tells its own story, but it is easy for converts to feel some insecurity when their Hebrew names so clearly denote newness, i.e., the absence of longevity. 

Not all sects recognize converts like myself as equal members of the faith, and those looking to join stricter denominations are subject to an even more rigorous process than I was. Between the ascendance of antisemitism and the hard-right drift in Israeli politics, I worry about the distinction becoming relevant should my family ever need to seek safe haven – this despite the fact that, as many of the Jews I know have noted, the conversion process has left me more knowledgeable than some born into the faith. In fact, there are plenty of stories of Jews by choice who took to their new faith so strongly that they became more orthodox than their partners had anticipated or hoped. 

My parents had already come to know and love my wife before I chose to convert. From the time we began dating, we knew that religion would be an issue, and there were plenty of intense discussions along the way. She had been raised in an observant home, attended yeshiva, and wanted to be married under the chuppah. Like countless others in our position, we took a class together while I did some one-on-one study with our rabbi and learned some basic Hebrew. In time I found myself in the mikvah, successfully pleading my case in front of the beit din and embracing a new faith while my wife was reconnecting with hers. 

Admittedly, I do not recall thinking much about my new name during the conversion work. It was not until we were invited to  to the bema after I had finished that it truly dawned on me. 

Members of my family had come to temple to celebrate, and my in-laws were sponsoring the post-service meal. My wife had been helping me with my pronunciation and I was sitting nervously waiting to be called when the rabbi introduced us by our Hebrew names. She said it quickly enough that few likely   noticed, but I did. And then again at our aufruf. And during our vows. Now it is written in the ketubah that hangs in our home and will be recited at my children’s mitzvot and someday at my own funeral. 

My conversion certificate is a joyful souvenir of the time spent learning about and embracing Judaism, but its signatory line stings. It is a reminder that no matter what has been gained and how I have worked to join this community, there are some lines that can never be breached. Nevertheless, I continue to live a life informed by faith, and we are raising our children to do the same. My parents have since passed and though their names are illuminated on the dates of their Yahrzeits and I remember them at Yizkor, I cannot help in moments of solemnity to feel envious of those who carry the names of their actual parents along with them and, even more, to think that mine deserve better.  

The questioning of tradition is itself an expression of Judaism. On the very first night of conversion class, the rabbi told us that doubt was an essential part of the journey and that so long as we were to be Jews, it was our responsibility to argue and debate. So here I am doing my part. If Judaism means to embrace its converts, recognition of their actual pasts is a good place to start. 

Joseph O’Keefe is a research administrator from Long Island, NY where he lives with his wife and two children. 

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December 4, 2023 · 7:30 am

I forgot to light a candle

by Dennis Gura (Santa Monica, CA)

I forgot to light a candle the other day:

It was an uncle’s memorial,

But he was gone before I was,

And the recollections second-hand:

What my father mentioned,

The documents entrusted to me,

The rare, very rare, comments of my grandfather.

I did not know the precise date until

After they too were gone, when

I dug through the papers

And figured out the World War

Two details. They did not mark

The date.

Nor did they light a candle,

And certainly no prayer was uttered.

No kaddish for the boy gone in France.

My grandfather might have

Been bemused, or likely annoyed,

That I would recited the doxology

For his sons, or for him,

For that is an obligation I have

Saddled myself with.

But this year, I neglected

To consult my calendar in

A timely fashion, and the

Day on which I should have

Lit the candle to

Honor the sacrifice of

The too-young uncle

Had already passed.

No candle this year.

Perhaps this scribble will do

To recall the uncle gone

Before I, or my elder sibs,

Arrived, though both of them bear

His name in some fashion. Perhaps

Their lives will make do

For the absent flame.

Dennis Gura is a father, husband, and an engaged and serious Jew who tries to understand a complex and confusing world as best as possible. A native Angeleno, he has been deeply engaged in Jewish thought and experiences his entire life–the ethnic, the ethical, the secular, and the religious.  He was privileged to study at Machon Pardes in 1982-83, and has since bounced around various LA synagogues and Jewish groups.

If you’d like to read more of his work, visit his Substack page, where this poem first appeared (and is reprinted here with permission of the author): https://dennisgura.substack.com

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October 16, 2023 · 7:30 am

You Want Me to Keep a Kosher Kitchen? Really? 

by Carol Blatter (Tucson, AZ)

I was surprised when my husband-to-be told me that he wanted me to keep a kosher kitchen.  

“How do you keep kosher?” I asked.

“I can show you. I use white gold-rimmed glass dishes which are ok for both meat and dairy on the first two shelves of that cabinet.” 

He pointed to a wooden four-shelf cabinet with a brass handle on its door above the Formica counter. 

“I keep pans for dairy and meat on the third and fourth shelves. On the back side of each one is incised with either a D or an M.  I can put sticky notes on each of these drawers so you will know which silverware is for dairy and which is for meat. It’s really easy.”

“I don’t think it sounds so easy. . .” 

Anxiety visited me. My stomach felt tense and I started to sweat. My heart rate climbed. I’ve never been very good at change and I’ve always feared failure. Now recollections of old failures tried to take hold of me again. 

A few deep, steady breaths helped me relax. Keeping kosher is not a test of competence. What are the worst things that can happen? Maybe I will mix up meat and dairy silverware? Maybe I will make an egg and cheese omelet using a meat pan instead of a dairy pan? Then I reminded myself that mistakes are inevitable. There’s no penalty I could think of for goofing up with the exception of my slightly damaged ego, some embarrassment, and some shame which will all be short-lived. Maybe I will disappoint my husband-to-be, but that’s ok. He’ll have to get over it.

I took the big step. I told him I would keep kosher.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

* * *

My husband, unlike me, grew up in a kosher home. His parents never mixed meat and milk. They had separate meat dishes and dairy dishes. And they had separate dishes, pots and pans, silverware, and utensils set aside only for the eight-day holiday of Passover. That’s what he knew and keeping kosher was his choice in adulthood.

“We’ll work on this together,” he told me. “I use these bowls for cereal at breakfast and small dishes for sandwiches like tuna and egg salad for lunches on the weekends when I’m not at work. And I use these large plates at dinner time for a meat or chicken meal. Sometimes I use these larger bowls for kosher soups. Almost all are parve except for the chicken soup.”

“What’s parve?”

“Neutral. Parve foods can be eaten alone or with meat or dairy. Glass doesn’t retain either. ”

“What else will I need to know?” I asked, feeling my stomach churn again.

“Don’t get too worried. You’ll be fine. We’ll work together preparing our Shabbat dinner. What about chicken for the main meal? 

“I know many ways to make chicken,” I said, relieved to know I could cook some of my favorites, like baked chicken with seasonings of onion salt and paprika, mixed with wine and orange juice, and chicken cacciatore, chicken browned first with minced garlic and baked with a tomato, onion, and basil sauce.

“Wow, that all sounds great. I was a bake ‘n shake man until you joined me.”

* * *

We married a few days before Passover to avoid the eight-week no-marrying period between Passover and Shavuot.

All I remember about Passover was seeing a box of matzah on the kitchen table in our apartment. We didn’t search for the chametz. I never saw my mom do a mega-house cleaning. I don’t think we even had a seder. So how could I have possibly known what to do?”

Fortunately, friends invited us to the first seder on Passover just after we got married. We arrived early. I told Bobbie, our hostess, that I had no idea how to keep kosher for Passover. She showed me the pantry where she kept the Passover-only dishes, silverware, pots, pans, and utensils. In a second pantry, she kept Passover-only non-perishable foods. Bobbie taught me which foods were appropriate for Passover.

In the middle of the table was the seder plate with the roasted egg, the shank bone, the celery, the hazeret, the charoset, and shavings from the horseradish root. We read from the Haggadah and discussed the theme of freedom from slavery and the current forms of enslavement. I’ve never forgotten that seder. It shaped my understanding of Passover and my desire to give seders in the future.

* * *

Throughout the fifty-four years of our marriage we have kept kosher. For me, keeping kosher is part of being a proud and devoted Jew, continuing a practice that has contributed to Jewish survival for thousands of years. 

Carol J. Wechsler Blatter is a recently retired psychotherapist in private practice. She has contributed writings to Chaleur Press, Story Circle Network Journal and One Woman’s Day; stories in Writing it Real anthologies, Mishearing: Miseries, Mysteries, and Misbehaviors, Real Women Write: Growing/ Older, Real Women Write: Seeing Through Their Eyes, Story Circle Network’s Kitchen Table Stories, The Jewish Writing Project, Jewish Literary Journal, New Millennium Writings, 101words.org, and poems in Story Circle Network’s Real Women Write, Beyond Covid: Leaning into Tomorrow, and Covenant of the Generations by Women of Reform Judaism. She is a wife, mother, and grandmother. 

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October 2, 2023 · 7:30 am

Rebel

by Lori Levy (Sherman Oaks, CA)

If everyone else is doing it, that’s a good reason not to do it—

     Dr. Richard (Reuven) Sobel, my father, RIP

In my granddaughter’s jujitsu class

there’s a boy named Rebel—

a name to live up to, I think.

I am not a rebel

but the rebel in me roars

when it comes to holidays, traditions, rituals.

I want to do them my way

which means no fasting on Yom Kippur.

Fasting gives me a headache. I need coffee

when I wake up, food to start the day.

Only then, belly full, can I contemplate my sins.

If it’s up to me, we don’t have to bother with the symbols

required for a Passover plate: shank bone, bitter herbs, haroset.

Can’t we skip the long prayers and just eat matzo?

One year we are in Spain on Rosh Hashanah,

all of us there for my nephew’s wedding.

We celebrate the holiday with apples and honey

on a blanket at the beach. Perfect, I think.

My rebel smiles and disappears.

Sometimes, filled with guilt, I accuse my rebel:

you’re just lazy—too lazy to cook and host

a big holiday meal, though you don’t seem to mind

when others do the cooking. What kind of Jew are you?

No, not lazy! I shout. (Am I my rebel?)

I do want my loved ones at the table with me,

not for prayers, not for the Bible I never read,

just a meal, togetherness.

I wasn’t raised on holidays—except Hanukkah,

for a few gifts, so we wouldn’t feel left out

when all the other kids in our small Vermont town

were getting toys and clothes under their Christmas trees. 

No Purim for us, or Succot. No synagogue in our town

or Jews in my class. No Bar Mitzvah for my brother— 

but when he turned 13, my atheist father and 

non-religious mother took us on a trip to Israel.

Several years later, there we were, living in Israel.

I could talk about history, the Holocaust—or just say

I fell in love with the country. Or maybe

with Israeli men. I married one.

We celebrated the holidays with his family,

but now, years later, I’m back where I began,

not wanting the rituals that were never, back then,

a part of my life. I’m happy to be a Jew, but

this is my Judaism: my Israeli husband,

Israel, my kids born there. It’s not about Moses or

the Torah. Maybe it’s nothing more than

hummus and pita, Israeli pickles and olives.

We eat them in Los Angeles now.

Lori Levy’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod International Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Poet Lore, Mom Egg Review, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., the U.K., and Israel.  Her work has also been published in medical humanities journals and in Jewish journals such as The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Shirim, and The Jewish Journal. Her chapbook, Feet in L.A., But My Womb Lives in Jerusalem, My Breath in Vermont, is forthcoming from Ben Yehuda Press in the fall/winter.  She lives with her extended family in Los Angeles, but “home” has also been Vermont and Israel and, for several months, Panama.

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September 4, 2023 · 6:30 am

What’s In A Name                            

by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

Annette.
Yes, that’s right.
Like Annette Funicello
if you are old enough to remember
the most popular Mouseketeer’s
television career.

Yes, named after my grandmother,
Hannah, or, in English, Anna.
A Jewish tradition,
naming for the dead,
so their memory and names are not lost
like forgotten pages in time.
Annette is “little Anna”
but definitely not French.

Ancestors from what is now Ukraine.
Before that Russia.
Before that Poland.
Before that a genetic mutation
hurtles me back in time
to the First Temple
in Jerusalem.

We Jews assimilate
but carry our names and histories
with us where ever troubles
and travels take us.
Our names, reflections
of double or triple identities.
In Hebrew
my name is Channah Bat Shayna
and Bat Lev.
Channah daughter of Shayna
who became Jean,
Lev who became Leo
when they crossed
the Atlantic sick in steerage.

We carry our heavy histories,
sometimes unbearable,
fastened on our backs.

I asked my mother once
why she never named me
for her sister Mae,
killed by the Nazis in Poland.
She said there were too many tears
that soaked that name.

But my new great niece
is named Paisley Mae.
A red-cheeked North Carolina baby
who carries the past
as a piece of her
like a pure white pebble
perhaps smoothed over
by the passage of time
until the rough edges
of history disappear.

Annette Friend, a retired occupational therapist and elementary school teacher, taught both Hebrew and Judaica to a wide range of students. In 2008, she was honored as the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Jewish Educator of the Year from San Diego. Her work has been published in The California Quarterly, Tidepools, Summation, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.

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August 21, 2023 · 6:30 am

Something about the rugelach

by Carol Coven Grannick (Evanston, IL)

Something about the rugelach…

they bring her to mind 

the word rolling out like pastry dough

spreading smooth and silky, caressed then cut

they bring her to mind 

as part of the duet with Dad during nighttime travel

dark-lit stars, Yiddish lullabies in the language of then 

the word rolling out like pastry dough

with tastes of comfort and warmth and now

tenderness of hugs still desired this long time later

spreading smooth and silky, caressed then cut

fondled, filled and curled with tenderness then baked

now infusing my mind with the delicate aroma of my mother’s memory.

Carol Coven Grannick is a poet and children’s author whose award-winning novel in verse, Reeni’s Turn, debuted in 2020. Her poetry for adults and children appears/is forthcoming in numerous print and online magazines, and she has received two Illinois Arts Council grants and a Ragdale Foundation Residency for her work.

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August 14, 2023 · 6:58 am

Bar Mitzvah

by Perri Weinberg Schenker (Cincinnati, OH)

Like Moses, you stand poised to ascend,

wrapped up in the tassels of your courage and your fear.

Man-child, my child.

Child of God, child of green grass,

of ocean waves and snowflakes,

of flames that never consume.

Surely you know—surely—

that today you will leave behind

the spindly legs and tender leaves

that propelled you here.

Before this crowd of sinners and supplicants,

you will shed that skin, and rise.

Will the mountain expand you,

braid your soft sinew into knots?

What will you learn from the pebbles beneath your feet?

Man-child, my child,

Child of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,

square your shoulders

so they can bear the heavy stones.

Plant your foot into rock, foot into rock,

finding the rhythm, 

finding the crevices where secret knowledge hides.

Wedge yourself a foothold

in the footsteps of your fathers,

and climb

—away from me.

Perri Weinberg Schenker is a writer and editor in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she focuses on academic publications, textbooks, medical manuscripts, and marketing communications. She has always been a closeted poet, and “Bar Mitzvah” is her coming-out poem. Perhaps she’ll share more in the future—who knows?

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August 7, 2023 · 6:30 am

Connections

by Liz Paley (Concord, MA)

There’s a certain time of day when the light comes in my kitchen that reminds me of my childhood home. Only recently did I start to notice it. My father died in January, on New Year’s Day, and now he and the house are gone. I miss him terribly. It’s during the late afternoon when this light comes in, and it’s the same time of day that I usually called my dad. 

“Well, good afternoon,” he always said, when he picked up his old landline. 

My father grew up in the Bronx, in a segregated neighborhood; Jews in one area and Blacks in another. So, at an early age, he understood injustice. He was the first in his family to attend college and after marrying my mother, who was not Jewish, they moved to Long Island. They built a life there for my sister and me and he was deeply rooted in the community. A local newspaperman, my father was fair and forward thinking. 

He ran for town supervisor in the 1960’s. He was a Democrat in a Republican stronghold, but also a Jewish Democrat in a predominantly Irish and Italian community. He told us that when he campaigned he would introduce my mother using her maiden name, a recognizably Italian one. It was a strategy, he said matter-of-factly. He knew he was up against antisemitism and he wanted the Italian vote. He still lost. It took me years to recognize the vulnerability and courage it must have taken for him to run for office.             

Our family embraced our different backgrounds but most of what I learned about Judaism was from my mother, not my father. He was a man who had faith in family and community, but not in religion. My mother, the daughter of immigrants, grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She went to Brooklyn College where she met my father who was seated alphabetically next to her. A schoolteacher, she tried her best to teach us about Jewish holidays and tradition. Growing up, we would celebrate with both sides of our family, and it was fun – Seders with some cousins and Easter egg hunts with others. Sometimes, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins from both sides would gather at my parents’ house. What we all had in common was a connection to each other. 

For me, though, there were times I felt I belonged to both traditions and other times when I felt as if I didn’t have either fully. I watched my mother hide the Christmas wrapping paper when she brought gifts to my Jewish grandparents because she didn’t want their neighbors to see. And I remember when the Rabbi in our town told my sister she could no longer attend Jewish youth group because a parent had complained she was there. These experiences were all part of my foundation. 

In the last few years of my father’s life, we sat quietly in the house he had lived in for over sixty years. It was the one I grew up in. I can picture him sitting in his worn black leather chair holding a pencil nub, working on a Sudoku puzzle in the New York Times, and sipping lukewarm coffee from a mug he’d poured earlier in the day. The afternoon light would fall across the room. I found purpose and love in those visits, and my father and the house anchored me. 

After my mother’s death, a few years prior, I often felt powerless. I turned to family recipes as a connector with my father. I made the dishes for him that my grandmother had made when I was a young girl. I’d make her matzo ball soup, challah bread (to mixed reviews) and sour cream cake, carefully following her cursive notes in an old cookbook. I’m not all that sure of the connection my father felt with his parents. His emotion was often kept at bay. My grandfather had failed my father in many ways, mostly through his absence. But the food helped me feel connected to my past, my Jewish heritage, and most of all, my father. 

I have unanswered questions about what my father’s Jewish identity meant to him. I feel a sense of loss now in not having discussed it more with him. I do, however, know what his identity as a newspaperman meant to him. My father instilled in me a love of words and using them to somehow try to make sense of things, even if we got parts wrong. He modeled a life of curiosity and reflection. Today, I continue to question the role of religion in my life but I do have faith. I also follow in my mother’s footsteps by trying my best to pass down Jewish traditions to my daughters. 

New Year’s Day seems like an odd day for a life to end; it can be a time of anticipation and hope. It was one of my mother’s favorite holidays and I’d like to think they spent this past one together. Someone once told me if you’re not looking for signs, you won’t find them. So I look. I notice the afternoon light coming in and wonder what my father would think of this exploration of our family’s Judaism. I watch shadows dance across the floor and listen closely for my father’s, “Well, good afternoon.” 

Originally from New York, Liz Paley worked in social services for many years. She now lives in Concord, MA where she teaches preschool. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe and Ruminate Magazine. She was a finalist in Ruminate Magazine’s 2021 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize. She has two grown daughters.

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July 10, 2023 · 6:30 am

Coming of age on Blake Avenue

by Janice Alper (La Jolla, CA)

Six days a week, after morning prayers at synagogue, Zayda set up his notions stand, with needles, threads, barrettes, bobby pins, hairnets, and other stuff, on the sidewalk in front of his basement knitting store on Blake Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn. He lumbered up and down the steps hauling six sawhorses and three planks of wood. Once in place, he disappeared into a dark storage space, and carried up flimsy cardboard boxes laden with the goods. By 9:30 am, in all seasons, he was ready for business.

The dark, dank basement underneath a two-family house—sandwiched between Sapoff’s children’s shop and Brodsky’s appliance store—reeked of kerosene from a black stove even when it wasn’t on. Along the curb a pushcart sold fruits and vegetables. Another sold fresh fish, where the pushcart man yelled, “Fresh flounder today.” 

The fish, with clear glassy eyes, sat on a pile of shaved ice. Grandma bought some and the man wrapped it in newspaper. “Enjoy,” he said, as he handed it to her.

On the farthest corner a commercial laundry belched steamy, moist clouds which floated over to us from the large dryers. Across the street, the German bakery perfumed the air with fresh breads Grandma bought at the end of the day—crusty seeded rye, thick black pumpernickel, and onion rolls saved for breakfast the next morning. Sometimes she treated me to a crumb bun. The powdered sugar covered the front of my clothes as I gobbled it up and licked my lips to get the last of the sweetness.

Even at five years old, I noticed Zayda was different at his stand than he was at home where he seemed as if he was the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. I covered my ears and fled to my room when he came home from the store. He only spoke Yiddish and was strict about my behavior, making me say a morning blessing and warning me no to talk to boys.

“How come you don’t speak English to me?” I asked.

He looked down on me with his beady brown eyes, “Sha, Yenta,” and put his finger to his lips.

My parents opened their grocery store in another neighborhood when I started kindergarten in 1945, so Grandma took me to Blake Avenue every day after school. To pass the time I’d sort the plastic barrettes by shape and color—pink butterflies, mock red ribbons, and white daisies. Whenever I held a pair up to my hair, Zayda wagged his finger at me. I’d escape to the safety of the basement where Aunt Hilda sold yarn, knitting needles, knitting books, and provided knitting instructions to the customers.

Downstairs, I crossed my arms around myself in the coolness. It felt comfortable, despite the smell of kerosene in winter and summer, and as time passed, I didn’t notice it. Even on gloomy winter days, when Zayda stood huddled in a warm overcoat, hands in pockets, a muffler on his neck, and earmuffs to keep the frost from his ears, it was still brighter outside than the store below where the light came from two bulbs, each one pulled on with a metal chain. On the counter in back rested a bronze cash register where numbers popped up in a window when you touched the keys.

Along the walls the yarns were in boxes—light-weight ones for cardigans and baby sweaters, heavier ones for scarves, or for crew necks with reindeer patterns. The names of the colors were written on the boxes—scarlet, maize, beige. Some of the wool came in balls where you pulled out a thread and it was ready for knitting. Others were hanks that had to be made into balls before you could use them. More than once Aunt Hilda said, “Stick your arms out, Janice.”

She took the loops of the skein and placed them on my wrists. I’d spread out my arms so the wool wouldn’t droop as she wound it into a ball. It tickled and I loved the soft feel against my skin.

One day Aunt Hilda handed me a pair of knitting needles with two rows of bright red stitches on one of them. “How would you like to learn to knit?” she asked.

“Oh, can I?”

“Of course, I’ll show you.”

I sat on a stool and faced Aunt Hilda whose plaid woolen skirt covered her knees. She bent her head, with its crown of long braided hair framing her face and showed me how to wind the yarn on my finger and transfer the stitches from one needle to the other. My first attempts were clumsy, and I kept dropping the stitches. “It’s hard,” I whined.

“Don’t cry, I’ll help you.” She guided my hands until I managed on my own. I wrapped the long belt that I had just made around my waist and paraded in front of Aunt Hilda. “You look satisfied,” she said.

I marched up the stairs to show Zayda, “Look what I made.”

“Good Yentele,” he said and patted me on the head.

Grandma packed Zayda’s lunch every day: two hard boiled eggs, two slices of buttered rye bread, an apple, and a large thermos of coffee. Sometimes she surprised him with a tuna fish sandwich. He took his lunch downstairs and sat next to the kerosene stove he used for a tabletop.

Grandma watched the stand while Zayda was gone. I liked being there with her, especially since she couldn’t hear so well, and I sometimes had to shout what people were asking her. I’d lean over and repeat what the customer wanted into the hearing aid on her chest.

One time as I arranged the cards of barrettes, she took a pair, shaped like red ribbons, and handed them to me. With her finger on her lips she whispered, “Don’t tell Zayda.”

Later at home I looked at myself in the mirror with the plastic barrettes in my dirty blond hair and paraded up and down, hands on hips, like the ladies in Mommy’s Redbook magazine.

As I got older and could be on my own, I didn’t go to the knitting store after school; instead, I stayed home by myself. It was a relief to be free of the place. I had time to spend with my friends enjoying an egg cream at Vogelson’s candy store, or playing a game of stoop ball, before I took the bus to Hebrew school.

….

On a rainy Sunday, in 1953, as Zayda sat in the entrance to the basement store, the black kerosene stove exploded and started a fire. Zayda ran up on to the sidewalk and scratched his head as he watched the firemen work. Not much was salvaged, and the knitting store closed forever.

My mother shared the news with me and added, “I don’t know what Papa will do now without the store.”

Zayda continued with his habit of going to shul twice a day. 

I, on the other hand, had been doing without the store for many years by then. Already in eighth grade, and no longer at Talmud Torah, my time after school was filled with band and Honor Society. However, Young Judaea replaced my formal Jewish education. Fascinated with the egalitarian role of women in the fledgling state of Israel, I began to seek ways to be part of a an egalitarian community. Something I continue to this day.

It all began on Blake Avenue.

Janice Alper has reinvented herself in her senior life as a writer of poems, personal essays, and memoirs which have been published in San Diego Poetry Annual (2018, 19, and 20) The San Diego Union-Tribune, and Shaking the Tree. 

Currently, Janice’s memoir, Sitting on the Stoop, about her Brooklyn, New York childhood from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, is available on Amazon. You can view it here:

Sitting on the Stoop

Words Bursting in Air, her book of poetry, may be obtained by contacting her at janicealper@gmail.com. And you can follow Janice on her occasional blog at www.janicesjottings1.com

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June 26, 2023 · 6:30 am

13 Ways of Looking at a Jew

by Bill Siegel (Boston, MA)

1.

Evil takes many forms. To monologist Spalding Gray (Swimming to Cambodia), it’s a nameless cloud drifting around the planet, randomly settling down on humanity now and then –  a Jack the Ripper, an Adolph Hitler, a Pol Pot, an Osama bin Laden. Like a bad dream.

I knew a girl in high school, in the late 1960s, who had recurring dreams in which Nazi soldiers break into her family’s home and take her parents and brother away. When they come to take her, she invariably wakes up screaming, never knowing if, in the dream, they’d taken her or not.

But it’s not a dream. We don’t get to wake up in the morning and shake off the nightmare, breathe a sigh of relief, and return to normal. It can’t be understood and dismissed that easily, because it keeps happening – day after day, night after night, week after week, year after year, generation after generation.

2.

Some people say they are tired of hearing Holocaust stories.

“Enough already, let’s move on,” they say.

“Don’t be such a victim,” they say.

“Don’t try so hard for attention,” they say.

“Stop living in the past, it’s all so boring,” they say.

“It never really even happened,” they say.

That’s what they say.

3.

My nieces – part French-Canadian, not Jewish – are talking. The older one is working on a high school project. “I have to do a collage of images about the Holocaust,” she says. Her younger sister doesn’t even raise her head from her magazine. “Which one?” she asks.

4.

I read a newspaper account of two teenagers who slipped a note into a girl’s backpack as they sat in class studying the work of minority authors. Addressed to “My sweet Jewish princess,” the note explicitly described sexual acts the writer would perform with the girl while pretending to be Hitler. It was written by a girl with her boyfriend’s encouragement. Both of them were charged with second-degree harassment and intimidation based on bigotry or bias, which carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. I don’t know if they were actually tried or convicted, but this was not a first-time occurrence. They apparently had a history of such “antics.”

This happened in the next town to me, in Central Massachusetts, on the eve of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, ushering in the Jewish New Year 5758, in the very Christian year of 1997.

5.

I have letters written by my father from the World War II battle-front in France. Written in Yiddish, using carefully scribed Hebrew letters, they are addressed to his parents, my Bubby Rose and Zayde Harry. I can’t read the Yiddish, but I can make out my father’s name in the letter’s closing. It reads “Dzakie,” the closest he could get to his Americanized name, “Jakie,” since there is no “j” sound in the Hebrew alphabet. His given name in the new land, America, is foreign to his own people.

6.

On Sundays we regularly visited Bubby and Zayde, where my father and Zayde huddled together in a corner of the tiny den, having a lively, though hushed, conversation in fluent Yiddish.  My father might be reading from letters written by Zayde’s brother, who never left Ukraine for America. Other times, Zayde would tell my father what to write, in Yiddish, of course, in letters back to Ukraine.  During these conversations, my mother or Bubby might contribute some valuable bit of information or commentary in Yiddish, though the rest of us, second-born American kids, had no idea what anyone was talking about. Other than a few choice and creatively formulated insults or compliments, they didn’t teach us much of the language.

7.

When my sister was about 16, she rebelled against our weekly visits to Bubby and Zayde’s house.  She was put off by all the “old language” talk and refused to go there again unless everyone spoke English. To this day, it feels like one of the holes in life that can never be filled, something to mourn: the ability to converse with my grandparents in their native language, or at least bathe myself in the sound of it, like a warm, comforting shower.

8.

In Marge Piercy’s novel, Gone to Soldiers, a woman is sitting shiva for her son who was killed in World War II. She is, understandably, devastated. Another woman castigates her for “excessive” grief. “It’s been three days,” she says. “Enough already. Get over it.”

Typically, at the end of the shiva period, which can last for 7 to 8 days, the rabbi takes the family for a walk – around the block, through the village, the neighborhood. The walk guides the family back to an active, purposeful life, and reminds them that the death of their loved one does not signal the end of the world, that though they must never forget the deceased, they are still obligated to continue moving forward — or else, as the rabbi told my mother at shiva for my father, “They will never get all the way around the block.”

What it is not, is an occasion for scolding anyone for their grief.

9.

After my father’s death, after sitting shiva, I find myself in a synagogue that I’ve never been to before. I’ve come to say the Mourner’s Kaddish for him. It’s early morning, but the service has already begun. I’m wearing a black lapel pin and black ribbon snipped by my mother’s scissors, identifying me as someone in mourning, someone who has lost someone. One of the men, dressed in a tallis and cradling an open prayer book, greets me at the door and welcomes me in. Another one comes over to me before I’ve found a seat, and asks who my people are and who I’m mourning for. 

I’ve found a place to be.

10.

The Kaddish prayers, unlike almost all of the other Jewish prayers, are written in ancient pre-Hebrew Aramaic, likely dating back more than 2,600 years, to mourn the destruction of the First Temple. Every time I chant it, I feel grounded in the here and now, but with tendrils connecting me to Jews all around the planet reciting it at the same time I am, as well as  to an unending stream of mourners going back millenia. 

Kabbalah teaches that Creation is made up of “worlds beyond our world,” in time, in space, in spirit. Standing with congregants in early morning, reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, I feel at home in that multi-dimensional, eternal Universe.

And that is good enough.

11.

There are rules: 

Keep a kosher kitchen. 

Stay with your own kind. 

Go to shul. 

Fast on Yom Kippur. 

Find a nice Jewish girl. 

Get an education.

Be a doctor or a lawyer. 

Be a mensch. 

Don’t marry a shiksa.

But so many Jews try so hard not to be Jewish. Or at least not to be recognized as such. Even in shul, I was taught from a young age to “assimilate” into American culture and society. They never taught us quite how we were supposed to do that, but even as a child I somehow knew that “assimilate” meant “camouflage yourself,” hide, blend into the background, don’t call attention to yourself and your Jewishness. That way – maybe, just maybe – you’d be safe.

12.

“That’s funny, you don’t look Jewish” — the bitter-sweet punch line that doesn’t really need a joke. It’s a tag line in and of itself. We laugh at it, almost proudly, as if it’s recognition of having done a good job of assimilating.

13.

I sometimes believe that there are many people (Jews among them) who will be secretly, and perhaps not so secretly, relieved when the last Holocaust survivor passes on. Maybe they don’t want to confront the truth so directly, the horror, the pain.  But they’re mistaken. Yes, the day will soon come when the last of the victims of Hitler’s death camps are gone. 

But “last survivor?” Never. Survivors of the Holocaust are born every day.

* * * * * * * * * *

Bill Siegel lives in the Boston MA area, and writes both prose and poetry – about family, fishing, jazz, and more. He has two manuscripts in process: “Printed Scraps”, poems inspired by Japanese woodblock prints; and “Waiting to Go Home”, about family and memories of growing up. His work has been published in “Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust” (Northwestern University Press), and “Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop” (University of Arizona Press). His poems also appear in Blue Mesa Review, Rust+Moth, JerryJazzMusician, Brilliant Corners, and InMotion Magazine, among others.

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