August 24, 2020 · 6:39 am

One-two-three

by Rita Plush (New York, NY)

A short muscular man, Adler elevator shoes his footwear of choice, my father liked to have the last word. Actually, he liked to have every word, not only with my mother and me, but with the world at large; he dispensed his unsolicited opinions at will and with abandon. Boundaries? My father? 

It gets around that a relative is contemplating a divorce. He’s on the phone in a heartbeat speechifying that marriage takes work (ask my mother about that!). A neighbor is trying for a baby. He holds forth on everything from birth deformities to breastfeeding. Doesn’t matter who, give him half a chance to interfere, he’s on it like a smile on Liberace. 

Enter his mother, my grandmother—the only person who could zip his lip, the one he took advice from, instead of giving to. 

Short like my father, feet so small she bought her shoes in the children’s department. A pint-sized woman, she spoke mostly Yiddish, and when she talked to my father in that furious pitch and rhythm of the mother tongue, she was an Amazon in Mary Janes. Yes, mommy; yes, mommy, to whatever she said, my father became a six-year old boy. 

That six-year old was worried big-time when my brother was getting married and my father learned shrimp was on the wedding menu (shell fish is verboten under Jewish law). My grandmother kept kosher in her home and outside of it; if she got wind her grandson’s wedding was serving non-kosher food, Oy vey! wouldn’t begin to tell it. 

His solution: hightail it to the caterer and offer him money on the sly to make the big event kosher. It did not occur to my father that his visit was unseemly, and that the caterer would refuse his bribe, and the in-laws who were hosting the affair would find out. 

The big day arrived. Some fancy footwork was in order.  

“Let’s dance, Ma,” he said, and waltzed her tiny feet far from the seafood table. One-two-three, one-two-three. “Vau iz der lox,” she said. Where’s the lox? “Later, Ma.” One-two-three. But try as he might to shift her away from the crustaceous creatures, he was no match for my grandmother. 

“Dos iz nisht keyn kehshr.” This is not a kosher affair, she said and pulled a knowing face. 

“It isn’t?!” my father said, all innocence, sweating in his rented tuxedo. 

Rita Plush is the author of the novels, Lily Steps Out and Feminine Products, and the short story collection, Alterations. She is the book reviewer for Fire Island News, and teaches memoir, Continuing Education, Queensborough Community College. If you’d like to learn more about Rita and her work, visit: https://ritaplush.com

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July 27, 2020 · 6:50 am

An Afternoon Cup of Tea

by Brad Jacobson (Columbia, MO)

Down more than one hundred steps

by an old graveyard and a green mountain

resembling camel humps.

A white towel hangs on a hook.

Water drips into a small pool of water

sunken in a cave. A tsaddik is buried here.

Legend says those that immerse

become pure.

Bobbing in chilly water:

Ad-dah-mah, mah-yeem, shah-mah-yeem.

Earth, water, sky.

I dress without drying off.

In my journal, I write:

My father and I are here together.

Afterwards we walk on the ancient streets of Tzfat

talking and laughing.

My mother joins us for tea.

Brad Jacobson is a volunteer every summer in Israel in the SAREL program. He teaches TESOL at the Asian Affair Center at the University of Missouri, where he has an MEd in Literacy. In the summers he enjoys exploring places with his camera like the Old City of Jerusalem, Tzfat, and the Red Sea where he scuba dives. He has been published in Tikkun, Voices Israel, Poetica, Cyclamens and Swords, and the University of Missouri International News.

“An Afternoon Cup of Tea” is from Brad’s new book, “Lionfish: The Poetic Collection Of A Traveler’s Experiences In Israel,” and reprinted here with the kind permission of the author and publisher.

You can read more of Brad’s poems in his new book. Visit the link to see more: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1946124648/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860&linkCode=sl1&tag=beeps-20&linkId=b8e4722d77fdd5f0148ae60390d40ec2&language=en_US&fbclid=IwAR3ZBUQsla0CdU7voiaWm5FRPXzEEIglc0tuceGIUFwSsys5u14kBYEscLU

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July 13, 2020 · 9:56 am

Bone on Bone

by Linda Albert (Sarasota, FL)

I turned my back on some of your skills

before I really learned them—bridge parties,

lemon tarts with whipped cream piped around the edges,

three-layered tea sandwiches without the crusts—

because of all the hours I judged you’d lost there,

the chaotic kitchen, the clean-ups that always fell to me.

I got rid of your impatience

right from the beginning—

the time keeper tyrant

who kept you running until

it seemed to me you missed your life.

In that, I might have gone too far,

and now I want some back.

Your maxims, I weeded out along the way—

though I confess that job took years.

If it’s true that God will only help the ones

who help themselves, then who needs God?

Airing dirty laundry in public is sometimes therapeutic.

The bed I make is not the one I always have to lie in;

There is no actual law.

But I do cherish your English bone china,

that set of thirty two with the gold rim and green border

you bought from Uncle Jack’s jewelry store in Ottawa

and confirmed at the Sweet Sixteen

luncheon you made for me.

In fact, I think it would please you to know

I use that china every day.

Whenever I take a plate from the cupboard

I share the meal with you. It’s easier now

since you’ve become my guest.

An internationally published poet, essayist, and former theater director, Linda Albert is also a certified Jungian Archetypal Pattern Analyst and communication coach with a Master Certification in Neurolinguistics, and in recent years her work has focused on conscious and creative aging. Linda’s poetry is influenced by her interest and academic training in those areas as well as by her Jewish heritage, the changing roles of contemporary women, and her personal joys, struggles, and insights.

Author of Charting the Lost Continent: Poetry and Other Discoveries (https://bit.ly/ChartingtheLostContinent), her awards include the Olivet and Dyer-Ives Foundation Poetry Prizes and the Atlanta Review’s International Merit Award for poetry. For more about her and her work, visit: www.lindaalbert.net.

“Bone on Bone” first appeared in Voices Israel 2015 Anthology and is reprinted here with permission of the author. 

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June 29, 2020 · 7:16 am

no sunlight, no healing

by Robert Feldman (Maricopa, Arizona)

out here in the promised land

10 helpless clay-baked goloms are bathed

in thick, koshered Dead Sea mud,

while Nazarath weddings blast saxophones and accordions just up the road,

and the passion of a hundred Tzfat hora dancers

toast along with the other tribes,

all the while beckoning to Haifa salt Mediterranean scholars

hustling Haggadahs on shakedown Ramalah Rumla Reza Street

out here in the promised land

while holy Jerusalem just nods to this music and her maternal knowing,

Mt. Bental’s brilliant sparks of light effervesce the night sky,

opalescing enlightened orange and date trees,

while Be’er Sheva’s golden desert doors

and Tel Aviv’s  hip hoppers down on Contemporary Road

harvest and garland yelloworange buttercups and purple pansies,

waving the bouquets up and back down these consecrated roads,

where yarmulked children hopscotch way past midnight,

dressed in innocent pigtails and peyus

their paisley sneakers swinging,

where bees become birds

become cherry trees

become exquisite, tender offerings

sharing salutary bonds etched in stone:

“all this is bestowed upon my people…

you have been given

the tears and the laughter of four thousand years,

endless sunlight to forever heal, 

King Solomon’s stone and shekels,

oil and olives

dates dipped in tahini

honey dripping from pregnant rosebuds…

chipped austere cups brimming with cool sweet water”

Inspired to write poetry by iconic members of his hometown Paterson’s literary tradition, most notably Allen/Louis Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams, Robert Feldman helped found the Bisbee Poets Collective and facilitate the annual Bisbee Poetry Festival while residing in southern Arizona. He continues to write, publish, and present his work (including “Hineni” 2018; “Sunflowers, Sutras, Wheatfields and other ArtPoems” 2019), make fire paintings, & play tabla. You can find more information about him and his work on his website: www.albionmoonlight.net 

Note from the author: “This piece was first composed while sitting early morning at an outdoor coffee shop at Shuk HaCarmel in Tel Aviv; the energy around me was invigorating and transformative, the comings and goings of the venders and shoppers…everybody was there all at once, and translating all that into this poem was pure simcha!”

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June 15, 2020 · 6:30 am

Honoring your mother and father in lockdown

by Jay Prosser (London, England)

‘How about salmon stir-fry?’

‘Yes, weather warm and dry.’

I realise my parents are once again having a parallel-universe conversation.  This is the result of mutual increasing deafness, not helped by the depressing news virus updates at more-than-background volume.

Sitting between them at breakfast every morning, I’m often required also to translate between them.  The experience is similar to watching a movie with them.  ‘What are they saying?’  ‘I haven’t seen her before.’  I’m tempted to do sign language on the movie.

It would be one thing if I was 16, or 21, or even 30.  But it’s quite another if you’re a man in your 50s — with your life, job, and partner left behind in another city — to spend the lockdown months with parents in their 80s.  Neighbors have been very kind, and my parents relied on them before we could get online groceries.  But this is not The Graduate, and I’m definitely not Dustin Hoffman.  The neighbor’s wife is charming, but we bond only over tomato plants and coordinated deliveries.

Eleven weeks ago, my catastrophic worrying – the world is going to end – for once, proved the wise response. Just before lockdown, I packed my car with jars of halech (Iraqi Jewish date syrup), fermented beetroot and horseradish (it was just before Pesach, can you believe), piles of books so I could continue to teach, albeit remotely, at my university, and drove the 200 miles to be with my parents.

This week’s parashah includes the mitzvah about honoring your father and mother, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the extraordinary relevance of the 5th  commandment in lockdown.

The Hebrew word, kavod, translates as ‘honor’ or ‘respect,’ but its root, kved, carries the sense of heaviness, of a burden.  Our ensoncement has definitely not been easy.  We’ve had a series of domestic catastrophes.  The washing machine broke the day I arrived, releasing a flood that would have drowned Pharaoh’s horses.  Then the dishwasher broke.  The vacuum cleaner. The internet.  The landline.  It felt like a trial by ordeal.  I missed my partner.  My friends.  My ordered, other life.

The verse in Exodus, ‘Honor your father and mother and I will arrange your days on the land which your God gave you,’ is about commitment to your parents and their home, clearly meant to be Israel.  But returning to maintain my childhood home for my parents, the mitzvah has a different resonance right now.  My parents are fit for their age and definitely more social than me.  Their week is normally a cheerful merry-go-round of ballet and golf; French and tai chi; croissants and coffee; and, ever more occasionally, synagogue.  But since they’ve not been outside for ten weeks, I’ve been their lifeline. I’m living in the studio in the loft and admiring my parents’ resourcefulness and stoicism – really respecting them — as they do their 50 circuits daily around the 100-foot garden (about 1.5 miles), weaving in and out of each other’s way, as if performing a coded bee dance.

The Talmud says that to honor your parents is like honoring God, because along with God you owe your existence to them.  We learn that there should be almost no limit to honoring one’s parents, so that if our father was sleeping and we needed the key from under his pillow to unlock the chest and sell the contents that would make us a large fortune, we nevertheless shouldn’t disturb him.  We hear of the rabbi who willingly bends low so that his elderly mother can use him as footstool to get into bed at night.  But we also learn that all such actions must be done with a good heart and the right sprit: that we can be punished if we serve our parents a ‘delectable fatty bird’ resentfully.  This latter, at least, is not my problem.  I find it truly heart-warming to see my parents tucking into my easy-peasy roast chicken dinner.

Honor, the Talmud says, includes making sure your parents have provisions.  I’ve summoned this to mind as I help my mother with her online grocery order, explaining that, yes, you do have to pay when you get to the checkout, because you’ll lose your slot if you don’t — not always succeeding at keeping my head out of my hands.  Honoring one’s parents also includes providing for other needs.  I’ve planted salad greens in their garden to encourage my father to move more often from his chair to water them.  I’ve been baking (no one appreciates my challah more).  I’ve accrued gadgets to make their life easier in the enforced absence of their home help.  A secret joy is watching my mother gently order and nudge the new Roomba as if it were a small dog.

Jewish law even has something to say about honoring and dementia:  that we should continue to care for our parents until we absolutely no longer can, and only then should we delegate.  We learn Kaddish in order to honor parents after their death.  And the greatest honor we give them is by continuing to perform good deeds even when they won’t be here to witness them. As I’ve adjusted to my parents’ rhythms, I’ve realised what an honor it is for me simply to be here:  listening to their stories; watching their favourite film . . . which leads to the story of how they met; and I’ve heard that story a thousand times.

But in the end, honoring your elderly parents by spending lockdown with them is — unlike the normal filial fleeting visit home — not about you.  It’s about them and seeing the changes they’ve really gone through – their ageing process. It’s about realising your parents are mortal, fragile, vulnerable, especially to this virus.  It’s about carrying on the story from generation to generation.  And it’s about honoring all those who’ve come before you, and thereby keeping traditions alive.

And, yes, it’s about translating at the breakfast table.

Jay Prosser, a reader in humanities at the University of Leeds, has published his Jewish-themed writings in Tablet, Jewish Renaissance, and elsewhere, and has written and edited several academic books on various subjects. At the moment he is working on a book about his Asian-Jewish family.  For more information about Jay and his work, visit: https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/1076/dr-jay-prosser

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June 1, 2020 · 6:54 am

“What do you want?”

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)
Unscathed, I live comfortably in hibernation, 
my larder stocked, my outlook optimistic.
The morning air wafts through my open window,
and I can hear the call and response of birds
punctuated by the screams of ambulances.
Then there is a knock at my door.
It grows louder, and, finally, I say,
“What do you want?”
I peer out my window and go downstairs 
and see a strange man dressed all in black.
“I have some terrible news,
about your friend, Tony, I believe.”
“Tony?”
“Yes, I see you and Tony at the diner most days.
You often eat breakfast together. Is that not true?
And he’s a paramedic and loved by many?”
“He is a good friend. What’s wrong? Tell me!”
“He is in the hospital with Covid-19.”
“Oh, my God, Is he OK?”
“I’m sorry to say he’s on a ventilator.”
“Which hospital? Can I see him?”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. Can I come in?
Perhaps we can pray together.”
“No, no, go away. You’re scaring me.”
“But there is more.”
“Don’t tell me he’s gonna die.”
“Most probably, but there is even more.”
“Are you coming for me?”
“Yes, possibly, and quite soon, I might add.”
Panic-stricken, I double-lock the door and shut the window.
I collapse in a chair and start praying for my friend,
but, upon reflection, I begin to say Kaddish for myself,
somehow hoping these words might save me.

 

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 18, 2020 · 10:08 am

Uncle Leon

by Marden Paru (Sarasota, FL)

Uncle Leon (Label) came to Phoenix in 1947 and lived with us. 

He was the youngest and now the only survivor of the Parubansky family, barely a teen when he was sent to a concentration camp, and one of the very few out of several thousand prisoners to survive a Nazi death march to the Czechoslovakian border. 

HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) took care of Uncle Leon in a displaced person’s camp after the defeat of the Nazis until he was able to connect with American relatives.

At the time that Uncle Leon arrived, we were a growing family of seven living together under a single roof. My parents built an addition to the house since, with only one bathroom and a shortage of bedrooms, we were bursting at the seams. So, a large dorm-like room with clothes closets and a bathroom was added, along with an evaporative cooler, which was installed on the new roof. Suddenly, our Culver Street house seemed huge and spacious to a child of seven.

With no knowledge of English, Uncle Leon was aided by my father in finding a job and subsequently learned a new marketable skill. At the poultry market where Dad worked as a shokhet (a butcher trained in kosher slaughtering), Leon learned to candle eggs. The skill was in how to locate blood spots in the yoke within the shells of the eggs, then discard those eggs and pack the remainder by the dozen. This led to learning Spanish, the primary language among the Mexican employees of the poultry establishment, and driving a truck to deliver eggs by the gross to local supermarkets and bodega grocery stores.

In the mid-50s Uncle Leon went east to find a Jewish wife and married Aunt Sally in 1959. The chuppah (literally canopy/the wedding ceremony) ironically took place in the Vilna Shul in Boston, a landsmanshaft synagogue founded by recent Lithuanian post-war immigrants who’d  settled in Massachusetts. 

Uncle Leon became an expert candler and did this for the remainder of his working career, which lasted sixty years, most of which were spent later in the Boston area, where he was reunited with family cousins and was also in the company of Uncle Joe and Aunt Esther, though they lived several towns apart. 

Marden Paru is currently the Dean, Rosh Yeshiva and co-founder of the Sarasota Liberal Yeshiva, an adult Jewish studies institute, and a  former instructor at the Sarasota-Manatee Jewish Federation’s Melton Adult Mini-School. He attended Yeshiva University, the University of Tulsa, and the University of Chicago, and was a doctoral fellow and faculty member at Brandeis University. Marden and his wife Joan are members of Temple Beth Sholom and Congregation Kol HaNeshama. To read more about Marden and Joan, visit: https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/news/newsletter/Hornstein-alumni-articles/My-1966-Computer-Arranged-Jewish-Marriage-by-Marden-Paru.html

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May 4, 2020 · 9:04 am

The Genuine Article

by Herbert J. Levine (Sarasota, FL)

My father’s grandfather, in photographs always an old man wearing a long black coat, his white beard gathered in two points, was the genuine article, the Jew who had never passed through Western Europe’s ordeals of civility. Because he loomed large in his grandchildren’s life, Peretz Satran of Sered, Romania and Winthrop, Mass. became the stuff of family legend, as exotic to me as his one-foot-high silver-covered spice box, which he, a dealer in scrap metal, had assembled out of the base of a lamp and other metal odds and ends and decorated with little copper bells hanging from the bottom of the two silvered tiers. At the top there was room for three small glasses–– for a l’chaim toast, I suppose, at the end of Havdalah. 

Sitting atop that huge spice box, engraved in Hebrew with the names of the patriarchs and matriarchs and the twelve tribes, he had placed an American Marine Corps eagle, for after all, had not God carried our ancestors on eagle’s wings out of their slavery in Egypt, and here was Peretz in yet another exile, where the trolley conductor sent him to Arlington Heights, seven, eight miles away, when he had plainly asked, so he supposed, for Orient Heights. After this misadventure, his grandchildren sought to correct his pronunciation to save him from getting lost again, but he said back to them in his best King’s English, “kiss mine hass, did I said it right?” 

In his synagogue, he may have been the only mystic. The story goes that he was so deep in the Shmoneh Esreh prayer each Shabbat, that he never noticed the little boys throwing sticky, purple cockle burrs into his beard, which they had collected from bushes growing just outside. A parallel story is that the birds wouldn’t leave him alone either, but this time he took action, tying tin cans on a rope hung in his beloved cherry tree; morning and evening, he would go out to shake the cans and scare them away from the maturing fruit. 

When this eccentric patriarch announced in 1928 that he was leaving America and going to the Holy Land to die, no one was surprised; the surprise came when he returned two years later in the midst of Arab rioting, saying, “you can get killed over there.” So he chose America after all, where I see him standing in his sunflower-covered booth on the eve of the Sukkot holiday, surrounded by two daughters and their children, holding the brimming wine cup that he is about to bless. The intensity of his gaze is not lost on me, even knowing that this image was posed by a photographer from the Boston Record American to show that some Jews in America still observed the ancient customs they had brought with them from over there. 

When his Hasidic rebbe was moving from the West End to East Boston and needed to set up a mikveh, the ritual bath collected from flowing waters that women use after their periods so they can resume having sex with their husbands, Peretz Satran traveled in his cart and horse to Walden Pond and there collected a large block of ice. I like to see him in that cart on the long road from Concord, transporting the frozen water of Walden Pond––which our transcendentalist sage, Henry Thoreau, likened to the eye of all the world, as sacred in its own right as the waters of the Ganges––and delivering that small block of eternity to a narrow house in East Boston, where it would be placed in a room dug out of the earth, melt into purifying water and set the stage for still another sacred rite, bringing husbands and wives together to produce new generations of Americans like you and me. 

Herbert J. Levine published his first book of poetry, Words for Blessing the World, at the age of 67. His previous books were scholarly treatments of Yeats and Psalms. To learn more about Herb and his work, visit:https://benyehudapress.com/books/words-blessing-world/

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April 20, 2020 · 9:00 am

Standing on the tram this morning

by Tina Oliver (Sale, England)

Standing on the tram this morning,

looking down at people’s feet,

I can think only of the holocaust trains.

I think of seeing no gaps. I see 

lime on the floor and for a brief 

moment I long for a seat, long not 

to have to hold on but I can think 

only of the holocaust trains.

I think of standing for four days.

I see arms held high. A father, 

mother, their children, jostling 

and laughing huddled together. 

I watch this family but I can think 

only of the holocaust trains.

I hear no laughter but see gasps 

for air. I look out the window to

see greenery rushing by but I can

think only of the holocaust trains. 

I think of a barred window

but see no light. A passenger 

gets up and out to depart and 

I watch him but I can think only 

of the holocaust trains.

I think of a guard. I see lines 

to the left. I see lines to the right.

I hear silence. I think only of 

the holocaust trains.

Tina Oliver was born in Connecticut and now lives with her family in Sale, England. Although she has no Jewish roots, she has always felt a deep connection to the Jewish people. Recently, she heard one of the survivors on the Anniversary of the Liberation speak about how “a thought becomes an idea, an idea becomes a habit, and to never allow an injustice to happen before your eyes.” These words moved her greatly and inspired her to write “Standing on the tram this morning.”

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April 6, 2020 · 6:16 am

The Ultimate Truth

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

At a recent and joyous Orthodox wedding,
surrounded by dancing men all dressed in black
with most stylish hats, I was asked by a young scholar
why was I not singing in Hebrew.
“I don’t know Hebrew,” I said, embarrassed,
owning up to my lack of Jewish education.
“So why don’t you learn?” he said,
“The words are  the ultimate truth, the one truth,
the word of God given to His people.”
“But don’t other religions have their truth?” I countered.
“Spoken like an American,” he said. “Ours
is the only truth. We know this for thousands of years.”
Hard to argue with someone so convinced
of the certainty of his belief, while admitting to myself
I was jealous of his steadfast conviction.
Better not, I thought, to get so engaged
into such a theological discussion while
celebrating with cheers the bride and groom.
The search for truth continues for me
long after the final toast is offered.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and 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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