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 24, 2023 · 7:00 am

Caught in the Middle

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

I am lucky enough to have

friends on either side

of the religious diamond, 

fundamentalists who swing from the right,

and atheists who bat from the left.

I stand squarely in the middle,

unsure which side to root for,

let alone play for.

I am caught between 

piety and protest, tradition and rebellion.

There are so many teams,

as there are so many religions.

For which team do I sign a long-term

contract on the dotted line?

The Pittsburgh Protestants?

The Boston Buddhists?

The Miami Muslims,

or the Jersey City Jews?

Doesn’t God pitch for all the teams?

Who is to say which team is best,

which team is strongest,

which team leads the league?

We are all essentially on the same playing field.

We are all part of the same cosmic lineup.

We need to feel connected,

no matter which team we play for.

We do not wish to be wandering alone.

Mel Glenn, the author of twelve books for young adults, is working on a poetry book about the pandemic tentatively titled Pandemic, Poetry, and People. He has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. You can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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July 17, 2023 · 7:11 am

A Psalm of Pizza

by Rich Orloff (New York, NY)

While waiting with great anticipation
For the cheese pizza I ordered
Because I am consumed with hunger
And I really need this pizza

God knocks on my door

I open the door
And God says
I offer you the universe and all of its wonders
And I offer you life’s greatest gift, love

That’s nice, I reply
But I was really expecting a cheese pizza
And I’m very hungry
Where’s my cheese pizza, God?

God smiles, in that inscrutable way God does
And leaves
Continuing a lonely mission to go door to door
Offering the universe and love to all who will receive it

While over and over
People respond with disappointment to God’s offering
Because they were expecting a cheese pizza
And God didn’t deliver their prayer

Rich Orloff writes both poems and plays.  His poems have been published in The Poet, Fragments (published by T’ruah), and Fresh Words magazines, and they’ve been presented at churches and synagogues, performed in theaters and schools, read at meditation and yoga groups, and spoken at events both lofty and intimate.  Rich’s plays include the Purim-themed musical comedy Esther in the Spotlight (performed so far in New York, Toronto and Tel Aviv), the comedic revue OY! (over 50 productions in the United States – and one in Bulgaria), and many more, of all lengths, styles and subjects.  Rich’s plays have had over two thousand performances on six continents – and a staged reading in Antarctica.  More at www.richorloff.com. 

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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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June 12, 2023 · 6:59 am

Skater’s Waltz

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

I freely admit I skate
on the surface of Judaism, 
content to glide through life
with minimum knowledge of
Jewish lore and wisdom below.

I do not possess the right tools
to fish for deeper meanings
among the school of books
that explores the depths of
man and meaning.

But it does raise a question:
Am I less of a Jew because 
I skim over the pages 
of books I don’t understand?

I don’t think, while skating,
I am capable of falling into
the cracks of knowledge
in the pages of sacred scrolls
that live below the surface,
out of my flailing reach.

Can a man be righteous
without the study of religion,
with only the trappings of it? 
Can he be a good man, even
if he decides to keep on skating?

In my own fashion, 
with my own skates,
and at my own pace,
I will continue my dialogue
with my religion while
humming a skater’s waltz.

Mel Glenn, the author of twelve books for young adults, is working on a poetry book about the pandemic tentatively titled Pandemic, Poetry, and People. He has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. You can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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May 29, 2023 · 6:30 am

I Wanted to Be More Jewish

by Carol Blatter (Tucson, AZ)

My dad died of lung cancer on January 16, 1965. I was twenty-two. I remember Mom and me trying to find his tallit to be used in his burial which was tucked away somewhere in the apartment. Luckily we found it. Do I ever remember him wearing his tallit? No. Why would he? He didn’t go to synagogue on the Sabbath to engage in prayer. Nor on other holidays either. 

Because he had a hard life and had to work long hours including on Shabbat and on Jewish holidays, he left behind any Jewish observance. (I am assuming that he had some Jewish education in his childhood but I never had a way of verifying or refuting this. All my dad’s  family are deceased).

Jewish practice could not heal his losses. He lost his dad when Grandma locked his dad out permanently for his abusive behavior. Dad, the oldest child, lost his childhood when he became a dad for his family. He lost the love and attention from his mom, my grandmother, who was raising Dad’s three younger siblings. He lost an education when he dropped out of school in eighth grade to support his family. He lost his sense of self-esteem and the ability to earn a good living in his adult life. 

I grew up in a Jewish and Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. I always knew that I was Jewish. Most of our neighbors were Jewish. An Italian family lived next door. I thought that we had a good relationship with them. Maybe it was a superficial relationship because we were of different faiths. Thinking back I realize they never came to our apartment. Did my parents ever invite them even for a cup of coffee and chat? Did they ever invite us to their apartment for a cup of coffee and a chat? Not that I can ever remember.

We had a dance toward the end of sixth grade before graduation. John Mortorello, a very nice Italian boy, asked me to the dance. When I told my parents, Dad was incensed. He probably said something like, I can’t believe that you are going to a dance with an Italian boy. He was visibly upset. It’s hard to remember my reaction. I wanted to go to the dance and I was content to go with John. Mom didn’t say anything. I don’t think I knew much about prejudice. But I was beginning to learn. I still went to the dance with John. Did Dad have bad memories of having been beaten up by some Italian and Irish kids when he was a kid? Does that explain his reaction? 

Did he fear that eventually I would meet and date and, perhaps, marry a non-Jewish boy? I have no idea what he thought. 

Dad had an ice cream parlor and luncheonette when I was growing up. Many Syrian Jews frequented the store. For some reason Dad kept complaining about the Syrians. Why complain about the customers who brought income into the store? And why pick on other Jews just because they originated in Syria? Not from Minsk or Pinsk or Brooklyn? Not Ashkenazi Jews? Were their skins darker than ours? Did they have accents that made it difficult for them to be understood? I wonder what dad really feared. What I do know is that he feared the goyim. But Sephardic Jews are not the goyim. 

Dad and I never talked about our religion. I don’t think that I learned anything about our Jewish traditions from Dad. Showing was a way of teaching, and Dad was not a role model for Jewish practices.

My recollection is that neither Dad nor Mom went to the neighborhood synagogue on Kol Nidre night nor on the following day. I have my doubts that they prayed at home and fasted. I never saw this happen. What was strange was Dad taking on the role of a taskmaster on Kol Nidre night. I can still hear him telling me what I wasn’t allowed do. I couldn’t turn on the radio. I couldn’t watch TV. I couldn’t read. There wasn’t anything I was allowed to do. What was going on with Dad? Why this strange behavior? Why was he so harsh? So dictatorial? When did Dad ever tell me what to do or not do on other Jewish holidays? Not once that I can remember. In telling me the rules of Yom Kippur as interpreted by my dad, perhaps he was assuaging his guilt for his own non-observance. He could tell himself he was a good parent keeping me in line Jewishly. It is as if he fulfilled his obligations as a Jew even when he didn’t.

I was ten and in fifth grade. I told my parents that I wanted to fast on Yom Kippur. They appeared shocked and surprised. Imagine seeing my parents standing there frozen like two statues facing a traumatic event. I wondered. Did they think I was too young to make an informed decision? Did they think that I might die if I fasted? After their brief whispered chat, they agreed I could fast but only until 3 PM. I was ok with that. But they didn’t say anything about fasting with me.

I’m thinking back to when my dad sat shiva for his dad. I was eight years old. It confirmed that  my dad had some knowledge of Jewish traditions. He followed the Jewish practice of mourning for his dad. Despite a life-long fractured relationship, he knew he had to sit shiva. He had to say goodbye to his dad in this traditional way. Maybe in his dad’s death, he forgave him.

Thinking about all the main Jewish holidays, Sukkot, Purim, Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Ha’Shanah, Yom Kippur, and Chanukah, I can’t remember any family celebrations. I don’t know if I knew so little about these holidays that I didn’t feel a sense of loss. Maybe in a subconscious way, I did. Somewhere in my childhood, I decided I wanted to be more Jewish. Where this came from I have no idea. But it has shaped my entire adult life. 

I’m proud to be an observant Jew.

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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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