January 20, 2014 · 9:43 am

Minkowitz and Me

by Judith Fein (Santa Fe, NM)

When I was 10 years old, while other girls were playing with dolls, I was obsessed with the shtetl, or village, my grandmother came from. I begged my parents to take me to Brooklyn, so I could sit next to her, feel the softness of her skin, and ask her about her village in Russia.

My grandmother was not forthcoming. Nor did she know exactly where her shtetl was located because it was an isolated village, and the only time she ventured any real distance from it was to come to the United States when she was 17.

“Grandma, where do you come from?” I would ask.

“Far.”

“What was it like?”

“Feh.”

The less she said, the more my imagination went wild, conjuring up images of a dark, mysterious place in Russia with sinewy alleys. I was awed that my grandmother, the woman who was my mother’s mother and called me “mamaleh,” lived in such a place and knew its secrets.

“Please, Gram, tell me.”

“It’s better to forget about it.”

She never spontaneously talked about Minkowitz, and I never gave up questioning her or trying to find out about her life before she came to America, before I knew her. Who was she before she was my grandmother?

“Tell me what you ate there, Gram.”

“Food.”

“Where did you buy it?”

“There was a market once a week, on Tuesdays. We had beans, potatoes, beets, corn….” her voice trailed off. She went into the kitchen to stir the chicken soup, and I watched the yellow chicken legs float to the surface and then disappear.

“Are you hungry, mamaleh?” she asked.

When I nodded, she opened the refrigerator and took out a jar full of schmaltz—rendered chicken fat—that was speckled with burnt onions. She spread half an inch of schmaltz on a piece of rye bread, and handed it to me.

“Did you eat schmaltz in Minkowitz?”

She nodded yes. I took a huge bite of bread, relishing the schmaltz, because it linked me to my grandmother’s village.

I was never very interested in religion, but I loved everything about my grandmother’s culture: the Yiddish newspaper that was folded up on an overstuffed, upholstered armchair in the living room; the front parlor, where I slept, and which looked out over the street; the pantry closet which smelled vaguely from matza. Most of all, I loved that she came from Minkowitz. It sounded so exotic. It was somewhere across the ocean, in a vast country called Russia. She wasn’t born in America, like I was. She came from a mysterious place and she was a foreigner with secrets. I felt about her the way the ancients must have felt about travelers who arrived in their midst; they wanted to hear stories, to learn about how people lived in faraway lands. The slightest details that my grandmother divulged about Minkowitz became indelibly imprinted on my brain.

“Gram, did you go to school?”

“No, mamasheyna.”

“Why not, Gram?”

“We weren’t allowed to.”

“Why couldn’t you go to school?”

I was like a little prosecuting attorney, and my grandmother softened on the witness stand. She got a faraway look in her eyes.

“I stood at the bottom of the hill, looking up at the school where the Russian girls studied. They wore blue uniforms. I wanted to be educated like them.”

“But you couldn’t….?”

She shook her head no. I wrote down everything she told me, and thought about it until the next time I saw her. Then I started asking questions again.

“If you didn’t go to school, what did you do all day in Minkowitz?”

“When I was 10 years old, like you are now, I was working.”

“What kind of work?”

“I dried tobacco leaves in the field with the women.”

I had never seen a tobacco leaf. Why did they need to be dried? I wrote down what my grandmother told me, and mulled it over until our next conversation. My mother said I was making my grandmother crazy. I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong. I loved my grandmother. I was just asking her about her childhood.

“Tell me about your house, Gram. What did it look like?”

“The floor was made from goat dreck.”

Goat shit for a floor. Were there clumps of dung? Who spread them out? Did they stink? What happened if you walked on the floor with bare feet? I clung to each tidbit, marinating it in my mind and imagination, repeating it to myself as though my life depended upon my remembering it.

On one visit, I was playing with cans of food in my grandmother’s hall closet, stacking them, and unstacking them, using them like big tin Legos. She walked by and patted me affectionately on the shoulder.

“Where in Russia was Minkowitz, Gram? Do you know the name of the biggest city in the area?”

“Oy. Always Minkowitz. The biggest city was Kamenetz Podolsk.”

Again, I wrote down every word she said. I thought I was getting ancestral gems, but later, when I looked at the content, it was paltry indeed. No stories. No slice of life anecdotes. Just six facts about my grandmother’s life in Minkowitz. That was it. The weekly market was on Tuesday. When she was 10 years old, she dried tobacco leaves with the women. She lived at the bottom of a hill. The Russian girls went to school on top of the hill. The floor of the house was made of goat dung.  Kamenetz Podolsk was the big town. I repeated the scant facts over and over, clinging to them, imagining what they looked like, felt like, smelled like. It was so vivid that I felt as though I had lived in Minkowitz too.

I knew that in Minkowitz they spoke Yiddish. I started trying to imitate the sounds of the language since I couldn’t speak it. Instead, I invented a sort of fake Yiddish. I would call my grandmother, and, when she answered the phone, I would cheerfully ask, “Grandma, vus habastups-du?”

“Judie,” she would say sadly, “I don’t understand your Eedish.” That’s how she pronounced it: “Eedish.”

The next time I called, I greeted her with the bogus, “Grandma, hoison boisin galempt.”

“Judie, I’m sorry. I just can’t understand your Eedish.”

When I was 19, bedridden with mononucleosis and hepatitis, I didn’t have the energy to roll over or kick the covers off when it got too hot. My grandmother got on a train in Brooklyn, which was unusual for her, and came to see me in Queens. She sat next to my bed, on a folding chair, and informed me that she finally figured out why she didn’t understand my Yiddish. “Because you go to college and you speak a very educated Eedish.” If I had had the energy, I would have leapt out of bed and hugged her.

Judith Fein is an award-winning travel journalist who has written for more than 100 publications. An acclaimed speaker and workshop leader, she is also the author of Life Is A Trip: The Transformative Magic of Travel and the just-released The Spoon From Minkowitz: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands, from which this piece is excerpted and reprinted with the kind permission of the author. Her website is http://www.GlobalAdventure.us

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January 6, 2014 · 10:25 am

Jerusalem, 1976

by Michelle Edwards (Iowa City, IA) 

I apologized a lot the summer after I graduated from college. Easily the worst waitress in the seafood restaurant where I was working, perhaps even in their entire chain, I apologized for the wrong orders I delivered, the forgotten bowls of butter, and the length of time it took to bring, what seemed to me, an endless and unnecessary quantity of extra plates and silverware. The tips I earned waitressing, many times, generous tips given out of pity, allowed me to make the bundle of money I needed.

I had big plans. I was moving to Israel and starting a year of studies at Bazalel, the art academy in Jerusalem. It was 1976 and I was twenty-one years old. Near the end of my first year in Jerusalem, through contacts made at Bazalel, I landed a plum job printing etchings and lithographs for other artists in a studio affiliated with the Jerusalem Museum.

Living in Jerusalem I was always aware of my accent, my grammatical mistakes, and the countless ways I was identifiably American. Being foreign kept me on my guard. There’s a comfort in the familiar, what we know so well, the streets of our hometown or sounds of our mother tongue. I had left all that behind, without regrets. But it would have been an impossible treat, just once, to unexpectedly bump into a long lost pal from camp, or school, and, in English, joke around and share memories. That comfort was what I did miss. Regretted not having.

My father had died a few years before, and in my hometown of Troy, New York, my mother was busy raising my then teenage brother. My older sister was newly married and lived a few towns over. They were not great candidates for visiting me.

Back then, in the days before cell phones, a long-distance call was something you thought about carefully, planned for, did infrequently, and then, only in the late evening hours, when the rates went down substantially. Overseas mail was slow, and a trip to Israel, an expensive journey. Any traveler going there—neighbors, family friends, friends of neighbors, a grammar school classmate’s parents once, acquaintances even—would call me with a message from home, or maybe drop by my modest digs for coffee and cake. Sometimes with a letter or a small present from my mother. Being so far way, even our remote connections drew us together.

I write about all of this here to give an idea of how much it meant to me when my college friend, Laura, wrote asking if she might visit me in Jerusalem. Back in Albany, in our student days, Laura was my knitting buddy. Once, she had taught me a speedy afghan pattern, using three strands of knitting worsted on super jumbo needles. I still use a variation of this pattern for baby blankets. Knitting had been a love of mine since childhood. Now, with all that it took to live and work in Jerusalem, I was often too busy to knit.

Laura was living abroad, too, on the Greek island of Larnaca. Almost in my neck of the woods. More letters were exchanged and plans were made. I managed to get a few days off from work so we could travel together. Laura was interested in archeology, that was the reason she was in Greece, and we intended to go to Meggido and other sites. My job, printing etchings, dealing with other artist’s demands, was hard physical, and sometimes, emotional work. Having Laura come would give me a chance to vacation, to be carefree for a while. We might even knit, companionably again, outside at a café while sipping our cappuccinos and nibbling on a pastry.

Laura was due to arrive later in the day. I left work early; stopping at my apartment first to shower away the ink and solvent, the sweat and grime that come with being a printer. Clean and refreshed, I headed to Jerusalem’s central bus station.

Israeli buses were unreliable at best in those days. So I had allotted extra time for the eventualities that were sure to occur. Meeting a guest at the airport, being the first to welcome them to the country, was an important part of receiving visitors in Israel. I had wanted to do this right, to be there to say, “Shalom,” to my friend Laura.

The first bad sign was the lengthy line. The second one was really the third, fourth, and fifth ones as well; all buses to the airport came to the gate packed. Loaded. Full. They dribbled off a few passengers and boarded only a couple from the very front of the line. I was afraid to guess how long I would have to wait for my turn. I had miscalculated. The big cushion of time I had allowed for this kind of occurrence no longer seemed generous enough.

Anxiety was creeping into what was supposed to be a special afternoon. A bunch of folks around me began discussing sharing a sherut, a taxi, to the airport. I usually associated taxis with tourists, not working gals like me, but this was an emergency. I was desperate. With a bit of luck, I might make still be able to greet Laura as she left customs and joined the flow into the main greeting area. Squeezed in the middle of the back seat, the ride was suffocating and slow. Did I mention the heat?

When we got to the airport, I discovered Laura’s plane had landed early. Before its scheduled time. Who would have guessed that? I could hardly believe it was even possible.

I looked around for Laura. The airport wasn’t a big place. But I couldn’t find her anywhere. I headed to the information desk and had her paged. Three times. With instructions to meet me there. I waited and waited.

Nothing had gone right that day. This was a part of living in Israel I was still getting used to; much of what I took for granted when I lived in America, like buses and telephones, couldn’t be counted on there. Because of this, getting to places—work, the market, or the movies—and making plans of any kind, was complicated. The stress of the missed buses, the uncomfortable ride, and the afternoon heat had me frazzled, unhinged. And now no Laura.

Israel was and is a country that daily received and reunited the dispersed and separated, family and friends. The airport greeting area was an emotional arena. And that’s without including the pilgrims to the Holy Land. This was the day I was going to be a part of that show. The day I wore the badge of truly living there.

So where was Laura? Was she still in customs? It could be a lengthy process, and had occasionally, been so in my experience. Sometimes security arbitrarily selected a passenger for an extra thorough exam.  I checked by there again. Everyone on her flight had cleared through and appeared to be gone. Her name was on the passenger list, but that didn’t convince me she had actually been on the plane. Could be another system that didn’t work. After an hour or more, of paging and searching, I had to finally acknowledge that Laura wasn’t in the airport.

I jotted my phone number down on a piece of paper and left it with the information desk clerk, even though I knew she would never ever call me. The paper would be lost, and even if she did try, the phone in my apartment might not work that day. Defeated and disappointed, I did not even consider taking a bus home. Or a sherut. This time, I took a private taxi. It was an uncharacteristically, wildly extravagant gesture, and if I could have, I would have paid the driver extra to carry me up the stairs to my apartment.

On the ride back to Jerusalem, I had decided I’d return to work the next day. We were in the middle of printing an edition; it was the responsible, mature thing to do.  I’d tell everyone at the shop what had happened and gather up all the sympathy I could from my coworkers. There probably wouldn’t be much sympathy to gather, though. This was a country where the guys my age were just finishing their army service. Overreacting to life’s little disappointments was very American, a euphemism for being spoiled. Israelis were dealing with the big issues, like war and survival, not missed buses.

So what had happened to Laura, I wondered.  Did she get sick at the last minute? Break a leg? Was she called back to the States for an emergency? I hoped it was something more romantic, like she met the love of her life, hours or minutes before she was to come, and couldn’t bear to be parted from him. Exploring all these possibilities didn’t prepare me for what happened when I opened my apartment door.

There, sitting at my kitchen table, was Laura, smiling and sipping tea with my roommates, who had already taught her a few Hebrew words.

“Shalom,” she said.

Surprised, and relieved to find her at last, we quickly exchanged our stories of missing encounters. While I was stuffed in a sherut, Laura had zipped through customs; the usually busy airport had been momentarily empty.  Not finding me anywhere at the terminal or lobby, she was not distressed. No apology needed. She assumed something came up and I was unable able to make our meeting. An independent and seasoned traveler, she grabbed her luggage, hailed a taxi, and gave the driver my address.

I was amazed. It had never occurred to me that all the systems might function and deliver. The plane, customs, taxis.  If I had thought to save up a pocketful of asimonim, the Israeli phone tokens that could only be purchased from the post office, and were very often sold out, and if there had been a pay phone that actually worked, I could have called my apartment and asked my roommates if they had heard from Laura. But I hadn’t thought I would need to call.  And it didn’t matter now.

My guest had arrived. I needed to be a host. It was time for dinner. Maybe we went into town with my roommates and grabbed a falafel, or walked up to the makolet, the little grocery store in my neighborhood, and picked up some yogurts and fruit. I’m pretty sure we stayed away from the buses. The delight of having Laura with me, had helped shake loose the fury and strain of the day. Still I felt limp, washed out, and beat. Not long after eating, we settled into my room. Resting on my bed, I watched Laura unpack her bag.

“I knew that I couldn’t come and visit you without something to work on,” she said.

Laura had brought yarn, a crochet hook, and a shawl she learned to make from the women in the house where she lived. Sold to tourists, the shawls were lacey, with a delicate flower pattern that bloomed across the widest part.

I was a knitter with a very basic knowledge of crochet, mostly self-taught. The shawl was something new for me to try. Something beautiful to make. Every part of me was waking up, alert, anxious to turn my mind, my hands, and the wilted parts of my being, over to learning how to master this pattern.

Hours went by. The two of us sat and stitched, talked and laughed, probably preventing my roommates from having a good night’s rest. Laura guided me through the tricky sea of new stitches. Much, much later, right before dawn, it burst forth. The flower part of the shawl opened up. To this day, I can remember the amazed and exhausted buzz I felt. This is what I had been stitching for. It had all come together. In my hands was a gift of comfort and joy.

They say there are two Jerusalems. The spiritual one of mystics and true believers, where the holiest walk. And the other, the everyday one, where dinner is cooked, jobs are worked, and perhaps, where shawls are made.

That morning, long ago and far away, I learned a pattern was something I could believe in. My fumbles and mistakes could be frogged, taken out, and fixed. If necessary, I could double back and start again, because making the shawl was about trust. Putting my faith in wool and hook and trusting that after a hundred, or a thousand, or a million stitches, a flower will blossom.

Michelle Edwards is the author and illustrator of many books for children, one book for adults, and nearly one hundred essays and cards for knitters. Her titles include: CHICKEN MAN (winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and A KNITTER’S HOME COMPANION (an illustrated collection of stories, patterns and recipes). Michelle grew up in Troy, New York and now lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she shares, with her husband, a house full of books, yarn, and the artifacts of their three daughter’s childhoods.  

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December 23, 2013 · 2:42 pm

Christmas Eve

by Richard Epstein (Washington, DC)

I wore socks on my hands as I played
kick-the-can in the middle of the cobblestone court.
The neighborhood kids asked me to sneak
some of my mom’s potato kugel and mandle bread.
They promised to trade pierogies and kielbasa
the next time we play.

No one asked about the flickering candles
in the front window of our house.
No one asked why we didn’t have
a Christmas tree. That night, I sat
on the parlor floor in front of the tall
Philco radio, while mom darned socks
and dad fell asleep with the newspaper
held high in his hands.

I listened to Buffalo Bob to see if Santa
received my letter. I asked for a Red Flier
and Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Ring.
Grandma stopped rocking and looked up
from her knitting when she heard Buffalo Bob
announce my name on the radio.
“Vas es daas?”  she asked.

We listened to the Lone Ranger, Jack Benny,
the Shadow and the Creaking Door.
After every one was asleep I tip-toed
down the creaky stairs and left a glass
of milk and cookies on top of the radio.

I shut my eyes tight and made a wish
for Santa to bring me a something other
than a wooden dreidel, a cap and bag of socks
from my Aunt, Chanukah gelt
and a shiny lump of coal.

Richard Epstein lives in the Washington DC area and is active in the Warrior Poets sponsored by Walter Reed Medical Center, the Veterans Writing Project and he hosts an open mic venue for veterans and friends of veterans on the National Mall in Washington, DC every Veterans Day and Memorial Day.

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December 16, 2013 · 9:22 am

An Unexpected Discovery

by Laurie Rappeport (Safed, Israel)

Several years ago I became involved in guiding a group of students who were studying the history of the American Jewish Experience through music. The kids were examining Jewish America of the 21st century.

Toward this end they explored the traditional liturgy and music of successive waves of immigrants who made their way to America’s shores over the past 400 years. It was probably one of the most interesting subjects that I’ve ever tackled with a group of students.

The project first brought me into contact with the Milken Archives of American Jewish Music, which provided the students with a significant percentage of our research material. Much of the Milken material relates to the first Jewish immigrants who arrived in South Carolina from Brazil in the mid-1600s. These people were refugees from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions and, after fleeing to South America, were forced to run again when the Inquisition reached South America.

The students had a wonderful time and I put the experience in the back of my mind until recently when I suddenly discovered that the history of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain and forced to wander the world, looking for sanctuary, was, in fact, my own history.

Until that time, as far as I knew, I was a bona fide gefilte fish and kreplach Jew with roots in Poland, Belerus and Lithuania. However, it turns out that one of my grandfathers, who hailed from England, was the descendent of Dutch Jews who were almost certainly of Spanish origin.

In 2008 I received an email from a man in New Zealand. Geoff had been born in Birmingham England and immigrated to New Zealand in the ’50s with his father and brother. However, recent documents had come to light that indicated that Geoff had, in fact, been adopted, and that his biological father had been Jewish.

In following through the family history that my family knew, as well as the history that Geoff had been able to determine, we were able to ascertain that Geoff and my mother were second cousins. A subsequent DNA test with my mother’s brother confirmed the relationship.

Throughout the following year Geoff showed great interest in his Jewish ancestry. Still living in New Zealand, he read voraciously about Judaism and Israel and contacted me on Skype several times a week to find out my take on the things that he was reading. In 2009 Geoff and his wife, Jenny, came to Israel to meet the family and attend my son’s wedding.

Geoff and Jenny continued to research our family’s history but they were also fascinated by Judaism. They returned to Israel the following year to celebrate Rosh Hashana with us and in February 2011, under Israel’s Law of Return, made aliyah. To say that no one was more surprised than I was is an understatement!

Geoff and Jenny joined an ulpan course to learn Hebrew and completed a formal conversion program in February 2012 with a giur and a Jewish wedding celebration as a new Jewish couple. The story of their return to Judaism was featured as a Friday spread in Israel’s largest newspaper. They bought a home and now live a 20-minute walk from my house in Safed in northern Israel.

Geoff has continued to explore our common genealogy and discovered a number of interesting details of our family’s life in England. The majority of England’s Jews are, like America’s Jews, descended from Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (One interesting note: many of these immigrants had intended to make their way to America but, when the ships docked on the eastern shore of Scotland or England, were tricked by the sea captains into thinking that they had arrived in America and never completed the train ride that would have taken them to the western shore and their second boat to America.)

What Geoff discovered was that, in at least two lines of our family, our lineage can be traced back to Dutch Jews who were welcomed to England by Oliver Cromwell in the late 1600s. (Jews were expelled from England in 1266 and were not allowed back into the country until Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, invited them to return.)  The majority of the Jews in Amsterdam during that period were descendants of Jews who had fled Spain in 1492.

Suddenly, my students’ project took on a whole new meaning as I realized that the art, music, traditions and customs of the Mediterranean and Sephardic world comprised my own heritage as well.

There’s still much left to determine about our family’s history, but access to the increasing availability of both English and Dutch records may open the door to new discoveries. One far-flung cousin was able to find her ancestor’s ketubah in Italy while another break-away branch of the family has been located in Australia and New Zealand. It turns out that one of their descendants lives up the road from me in the Golan Heights!

In the meantime, Geoff and Jenny have become core members of our local synagogue. (Geoff arrives every Shabbat morning at 8:00 am. I told him that, in my entire life, I’d never made it to shul before 10:00 am.) Their latest project is wine-making, which they undertook so that, when they spend time in Italy (which they do every summer), they’ll have plenty of kosher wine.

Laurie Rappeport is originally from Detroit. She is an online educator who works with Jewish day school and afternoon school students to teach them about Judaism and Israel. She frequently uses the Milken Archives as a resource for historical studies about Judaism. 

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December 2, 2013 · 9:21 am

Escapee

 by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

I could have been one of them,
made to stand in an open trench,
hands in the air, too young
to be embarrassed by my nakedness.
I could have been one of them,
made to walk in line
on my way to the showers,
with my mother whispering tensely to me.
I could have been one of them,
made to augment  the round number
of 6 million who were never heard of again.
Yet because of luck and/or God,
I made my way to American shores,
unaware of the horrors I had left behind.
That was my gift outright.
Second-hand survivors’ guilt
flicks at me now like fires from the ovens,
illuminating the ancient question of whether
I am worthy of such largess.

I could have been one of them.

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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November 18, 2013 · 9:28 am

Bearing Witness

 by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

I never knew my grandmother.
I never knew why she left her Polish shtetl.
I never knew why she was Austro-Hungarian and Polish at the same time.
I never tasted her stuffed cabbage with raisins in white sauce.
I never ladled the cholent she left on the stove all day for her boys.
I never ate her boiled hot dogs on a bun on Market Day.
I never went by two buses with her to the Prince Street Market.
I never sat on her knee while she kibbitzed with neighbors by the front window radiator.
I never appreciated her generosity as she doled out clothing after the celluloid explosion of ’33.
I never rang her cash register.
I never witnessed her haggling with New York City wholesalers.
I never saw her hold fabrics between her fingers to decide what to sell in her store.
I never scolded her for wearing such thin flowered dresses.
I never noticed the flash in her eyes before a belly laugh.
I never beheld her penetrating gaze or fell victim to her caustic words.
I never addressed envelopes in English to her sisters in Europe.
I never spotted worry lines on her face with three sons in the U.S. Armed Forces.
I never accompanied her to the Joint to sponsor her only surviving relative to America.
I never visited her, wracked with cancer in the hospital.
I never felt her joy when her brother arrived from the DP camp.
She never knew me.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Poetica Magazine, Jewishfiction.net, Nimrod,Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Minerva Rising, The Copperfield Review and others. She teaches creative writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey. She is the author of Discovering Your Jewish Ancestors (Heritage Quest, 2001) and the forthcoming Goldie Takes a Stand! (Kar-Ben, Fall 2014), a tale of young Golda Meir. You can read more about her at her website www.barbarakrasner.com and her blog The Whole Megillah – The Writer’s Resource for Jewish Story.

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November 11, 2013 · 10:13 am

On Transformative Works

by Rachel Barenblat (North Adams, MA)

1.

My first experience with writing liturgy came when I was in college. A group of women gathered in a dorm room where we argued passionately over words and metaphors. The question was how to retell the Passover story — the central narrative at the heart of Jewish peoplehood — in a way that would speak to us.

What were the critical pieces of the original haggadah text that we wanted to preserve? Where did we want to make radical changes? How would those radical changes sit with us, year after year? One year we excised all of the God-as-king language, preferring instead to use feminine God-language in both Hebrew and English. Another year, we shifted all of the language of sovereignty to metaphors that reflected immanent power rather than transcendence: instead of King or Queen we wanted to celebrate our source, wellspring, creator.

The Williams College Feminist Seder Project is only a memory now. The college community there doesn’t feel the need for a specifically “feminist” seder anymore… though I’ll bet the standard seder they do there now is still shaped by the ripples my era of students set in motion. (That’s how it goes with third-wave feminism.) But the work of creating my own Passover seder has shaped the way I think about Pesach, and about liturgical language, and about creativity, and about my place within the broader sphere of Jewish life.

I’m grateful to the women of the Williams College Feminist Seder Project, because they taught me how to take up the tools of transformation in my own liturgical life. Transforming the text of that beloved ritual was transformative for me.

2.

In the years after college, I didn’t belong to a congregation. I hadn’t yet found Jewish Renewal, and my dreams of the rabbinate seemed improbable at best. But I wanted a connection with Judaism.

Because the feminist seder project had been so formative for me, I tried my hand at writing other pieces of liturgy. I wrote a seder for Tu BiShvat, the New Year of the Trees. I wrote prayers for Sukkot and for Chanukah. I wrote, and then performed, a baby-naming ceremony for the son of two dear friends. When my sister became pregnant with her second child, she asked if I would write and perform a baby-naming for him, too.

Writing my own prayers and ceremonies helped me feel engaged. I was shaping my own quirky, idiosyncratic Judaism. I started writing about the fact that I was doing that, and encouraging other unaffiliated Jews — other Jews on the fringes: intermarried folks, queer folks, those who didn’t have a congregational home or who felt that there might not be a place at the Jewish table for them — to write their own liturgies and prayers, too.

I took my MFA at Bennington. At the end of my time there, one of my beloved advisors (the poet David Lehman) suggested that I try my hand at writing prayers and psalms. Although I’d thought I was keeping my Jewish self and my writerly self somewhat separate, he saw right through that flimsy divide.

Active Jewishness is a writerly thing. We’re obsessed with texts, and our tradition includes the strong expectation that each of us will be in conversation with those texts all our lives. Sometimes that conversation takes highly creative forms, so there’s a sense that creativity is a legitimate way to respond to the texts we hold dear. All of this was fermenting in me in 1999, the year I was first introduced to fanfiction and fanvids: transformative works of a different kind.

3.

I was working at The Women’s Times in those days. I planned issues of the newspaper, hired writers, wrote articles, and helped women in my region tell our stories. Meanwhile, I was also beginning to engage with womens’ stories via the creative community of media fandom. (More on media fandom, and fanworks, in a moment — stay tuned.) Maybe because women’s voices were central to my professional work, and maybe because of my collegiate experience with the feminist seder project, media fandom — as a “predominantly female community with a rich history of creativity and commentary” (Our Values) — felt immediately like home.

In 2000 I left The Women’s Times to found Inkberry with Emily and Sandy, two dear college friends. Inkberry is a literary arts nonprofit organization which still offers writing workshops and a reading series to the Berkshire region. Before we launched the org, the three of us sat around my living room and argued about the wording of our mission statement as only a trio of committed writers could do. In the end, we settled on this: Inkberry’s mission was to strengthen the connections between writing and life, and to help every writer to find their own unique voice.

Our central theory was that everyone can write, that everyone can become better at writing if they work at it, and that writing can be life-changing regardless of whether or not one ever publishes the Great American Novel or makes it into the Yale Younger Poets series.

What I remember most from those early years are the people who entered our team-taught introductory mixed-genre workshop saying things like “I’ve never shown anyone my writing before” and “I’m not sure I’m a writer,” and emerged with confidence in their writing abilities and the value of the unique stories they had to tell. The act of writing was personally transformative for them.

4.

During the Inkberry years, I was also writing poems and doing liturgical work. I created a wedding for two dear friends; wrote other lifecycle events, prayers and psalms. I started studying Jewish liturgy, wanting to know more about the tradition of which my creative liturgy was a part. In 2002 I attended my first retreat at Elat Chayyim, where I found Jewish Renewal.

In Jewish Renewal we talk a lot about Paradigm Shift ([pdf]). The term has its origin in science, but Reb Zalman (and others) saw it unfolding in Judaism. Moving from Biblical Judaism (based around sacrifice of animals on the Temple mount) to rabbinic Judaism (based around study and prayer and a set of texts which are entirely portable) was an enormous paradigm shift. A lot of folks in Jewish Renewal argue that we’re in the midst of another paradigm shift now, from rabbinic Judaism to whatever comes next. The next turning of the spiral.

I see the groundswell of creative liturgy work as part of this paradigm shift. In today’s world we presume that everyone has the capacity to add our voices to the conversation, whatever that conversation might be. On today’s read/write web, (almost) anyone can start a blog, post photos to a flickr feed, participate in online culture. Why would we be any less proactive in shaping our religious lives than we are in shaping our relationship with the news or the blogosphere? People who are writing our own prayers and psalms, our own wedding vows and our own baby-naming blessings are taking the tradition into our own hands, shaping it as we allow it to shape us.

Of course, the work we do wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the broad base of the classical tradition on which we build. And that classical tradition matters a lot to me. I cherish the texts in the siddur as they’ve evolved over the centuries; I thrill to the melodic motifs of traditional nusach as they shift over the course of each day and week and year.

But I might never have realized how much I love the classical tradition if I hadn’t started writing my own prayers, and been drawn through that into learning more about the deep structure of the liturgy as it’s been handed down. I think that creative liturgy work has the capacity to enrich and enlarge that tradition, even as it also enriches and enlarges our own spiritual lives. Writing liturgy is an act in which both the pray-er and the prayer are transformed. Writing liturgy is transformative work.

5.

Judaism has long been a read/write tradition. (Indeed: one of the last commandments in the Torah is for every Jew to write a Torah scroll — see Deut. 31:19.) Most of us don’t have the intense training and focus required for sofrut (the scribal arts), but we can fulfil the commandment by each adding her own voice and interpretations to the body of tradition.

At the heart of Jewish life is the Torah, and the shell of commentary which surrounds it, and concentric circles of commentary and conversation which surround that. It’s entirely reasonable for an author in the sixth century to be engaged in a conversation on the page with an author who lived four hundred years before, and for a twenty-first century author to cite (and argue with, and respond to) all of them at once.

Torah has often been termed The Law, and yeah, there’s a lot of law there. But there’s also a lot of storytelling, and the Jewish textual tradition mixes the two all the time. Halakha and aggadah (law and storytelling) are like yin and yang. They complement and complete one another.

When I say storytelling, one of the things I mean is midrash, the body of exegetical stories which seek to delve into loopholes or explain idiosyncrasies in our holy texts. There’s a vast body of classical midrash, of course, some of which makes astonishing and delicious assertions. (I’m partial to the teaching fromMidrash Tanchuma that the Torah is written in black fire on white fire; the “black fire” can be understood as the plain text and its basic meaning, while the “white fire” is found in our interpretations, the ways we creatively read between the lines.)

There’s also a growing body of contemporary midrash, including feminist midrash which aims to restore women’s voices to the tradition. All of this arises out of and often comments upon the classical material, which in turn is arising out of and commenting on the Torah texts. Like an infinite set of Matryoshka dolls, with the Sinai theophany at their ineffable heart.

It’s possible to be a Jew without engaging in this infinite conversation. But from where I sit, the conversation is the fun part. Reading, writing, talking back, using stories to make arguments — this is the fabric of Jewish life. And it’s also the fabric of fandom.

6.

Just as Jews create community through engaging around our shared stories, so do fans. But instead of writing stories or essays or making short films which offer exegeses of Biblical or Talmudic texts, fans write stories and essays and make short films which explore pop culture texts. We respond and re-purpose, turning and turning all kinds of stories to see what might be found inside. Often what we find there — what we foreground, or what we add — says as much about us as it does about the book or movie at hand. That’s part of the fun.

Fanfiction is fiction which takes an existing story as its starting point and then goes somewhere new. (This happens outside the fannish world, too. You could think of Jo Graham’s Black Ships as Aeneid fanfiction, or the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as Bible fanfiction — part of the rich tradition of contemporary midrash.) Fanvids are short amateur films which use found footage and music to tell a story or make a point. (See What is vidding?, part of a series of short films on vids and vidding; if you want to learn more, read Remixing Television.) Historically, these are womens’ arts. In crafting fanworks together, with and for one another, we create community.

My years in the community of media fandom have helped me feel empowered not only to savor stories, but also to respond: with love, with criticism, with new stories which build on or diverge from what I’ve received. Learning to put on these lenses, to encounter story with/in this interpretive community of friends, has enriched my reading and my writing alike.

Creating fanworks transforms us from consumers to producers. Instead of just imbibing stories, we become part of the cultural conversation. It’s like the paradigm shift of remix culture and the read/write web, only we’ve been doing it a lot longer than even the most old-school of bloggers. (Media fandom has been around since the 1970s; the broader term fandom has been in use since 1903. And, of course, generating creative work in response to existing creative work is about as old a practice as I can name; just ask Cory Doctorow.)

Fandom is very like Judaism in a lot of ways. And fanworks are transformative work.

7.

Full disclosure: “transformative work” is a technical term, and I’ve been using it in a slightly creative fashion to mean two things at once. The primary meaning of transformative use is a use which, in the words of the Supreme Court, “adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the (source) with new expression, meaning, or message.” (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 1994.) I think my customized liturgies and homegrown psalms fit that bill, as do fanworks writ large.

The other kind of transformation I’ve been talking about here isn’t a legal matter, it’s an internal one. In the four-worlds paradigm I reference so often, the legal definition of a transformative work is an assiyah issue, relevant in the world of actions and physicality. But I’m most interested in how transformation plays out in yetzirah (emotions), briyah (thought), and atzilut (essence.) I’m committed to supporting the kind of transformation we work in ourselves and in our communities when we allow our work to transform us in those realms. (Then again, legalism and storytelling do go together like chocolate and peanut butter in my tradition, so maybe the dichotomy isn’t so stark afterall.)

It seems to me that whether we’re writing rituals and psalms, or writing poems, or creating fanworks, the net result is both transformed works and transformed individuals. It’s a two-way street: we transform works, and the work transforms us.

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat was ordained by ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal in 2011. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is author of three book-length collections of poetry: 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011), Waiting to Unfold (Phoenicia, 2013), and the forthcoming Open My Lips (Ben Yehuda, 2014), as well as several chapbooks of poetry. A 2012 Rabbis Without Borders Fellow, she participated in a 2009 retreat for Emerging Jewish and Muslim Religious Leaders in 2009, and in 2014 will serve as faculty for that retreat. Since 2003 she has blogged as The Velveteen Rabbi; in 2008, TIME named her blog one of the top 25 sites on the internet. She has been an off-and-on contributor to Zeek since 2005. She serves Congregation Beth Israel, a small Reform-affiliated congregation in western Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband Ethan Zuckerman and their son.

This piece first appeared on The Velveteen Rabbi (http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/) and has been reprinted here with the kind permission of the author. 

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November 4, 2013 · 10:01 am

Navigating Between Two Worlds

by Bruce Black (Sarasota, FL)

When my friends and I entered our synagogue for Shabbat services or for Hebrew school during the week, we were required to cover our heads. A pile of yarmulkes was kept in a large wooden bin standing by the door to the sanctuary.

Back then we didn’t call them kippot but yarmulkes, a Yiddish word meaning skullcap, which linked us more closely to our roots in Eastern Europe than to the new seeds that had been planted in Israel in the 1940s and 1950s and were beginning to sprout in America in the 1970s. Yarmulkes were made of soft velvet or scratchy nylon. They sat perched, rumpled and creased, on top of my head and on the heads of my friends as we bent over our Hebrew primers or sat bored out of our skulls waiting for junior congregation services to conclude. Yarmulkes looked like small rags or tiny handkerchiefs that my grandfather might have taken out of one of his dresser drawers. Kippot, on the other hand, were usually small, round, knitted or crocheted head-coverings that fit snugly to the back of one’s head, often held there by two or three bobby pins.  Young, modern Orthodox Jews wore kippot, while mostly older men wore yarmulkes. We weren’t modern Orthodox Jews, so my father and my brother wore yarmulkes, and I wore one, too, no matter how silly I thought it made me look.

The only other time during the week that I wore a yarmulke was on Friday night. We gathered in our dining room around a table set with fine china plates and crystal glasses. Mom lit the candles to welcome Shabbat, and Dad raised his wine goblet to recite the blessing over the wine. Standing at the head of the table, his prayer book open in one hand, a silver Kiddush cup filled with wine in the other, his reading glasses balanced at the end of his nose, Dad would read the Hebrew words with the slightest of accents, a holdover of the Eastern European-accented Hebrew that he’d learned as a boy. I’d watch his body tilt slightly forward, as if in the shape of a question mark, and noticed his hand tremble slightly. My eyes were fixed on the Kiddush cup. I watched to see if he’d accidentally spill any wine onto the white tablecloth.

On those Friday nights, the yarmulke on top of my head felt odd. It made me feel like an alien. How could a flimsy piece of cloth perched precariously on the back of my head make me a better Jew? Besides, it was distracting. How could I concentrate on the words of the prayers if I was worried about the yarmulke falling to the floor whenever I shifted my head from one side to the other? Even though I sat perfectly still while Dad recited the Kiddush and then the motzi, the blessing over the challah, I had trouble thinking about anything besides how foolish I felt wearing the yarmulke. I don’t think that I ever felt comfortable wearing one, but I never considered removing it. I’d been told that wearing a yarmulke was a sign of respect for God, and I wanted to be a respectful Jew, even if I didn’t fully understand all the prayers or rituals, or why wearing a yarmulke was a sign of respect.

Each time I reached into the bin as a boy to select a yarmulke and set it on my head, I felt as if I’d found a magic talisman with mystical power, a symbol of being Jewish which made me feel as if I’d stepped inside Jewish history, linking myself to all the Jewish men who had covered their heads throughout our people’s history to show their faith and loyalty to God. Someone—a teacher, my father, or a friend—must have told me that I needed to cover my head when observing Jewish rituals or stepping inside a synagogue. At baseball games, though, when we sang the National Anthem, we had to remove our hats. In contrast, in temple we kept them on. It was confusing, this business of being Jewish. Each time I put on a yarmulke, I felt this confusion. It was disorienting to make the transition from one world to another.

As incredible as it may sound now, I wasn’t fully aware of living in two different worlds as a boy, except during the month of December. Every year, from kindergarten through sixth grade, I dreaded the week after Thanksgiving when the custodian placed a 6-foot tall, freshly cut pine tree in the school’s central foyer signaling the start of the Christmas season. The tree gave off the sharp, tangy scent of a far-away forest, and I loved that smell but felt guilty for liking the tree so much. Over the next month the scent of its pine needles filled the hallway and classrooms, and, like my non-Jewish friends, I became excited at the sight of the red-and-green lights blinking on and off in its branches. On the night of our school’s Christmas concert, shiny gifts wrapped beneath the tree made it look as if Santa Claus had just dropped them off his sleigh.

Our music teacher was a skinny woman with toothpick-thin legs, eyes the same shade of blue as a robin’s eggs, and hair as straight and silky as the gold tassels that hung from ears of corn in July. Each year she lined us up in rows according to height on the half-dozen shallow steps in front of the tree. And every year I felt more and more uncomfortable standing next to the tree in the back row, worried people in the audience might mistake me for a Christian singing Christmas songs, afraid God, in his disapproval, might see fit to punish me for not standing up for my faith.

During those concerts I barely opened my lips to sing. I trembled with the certain knowledge that if I sang the name of Jesus aloud, God might send a bolt of lightening to end my life. Instead, I stood in the back of the choir pretending to sing, and hoped none of my friends standing on either side of me, or any of the adults sitting in the audience, would notice my silence. Nobody seemed to care about my Jewish identity or about my feelings as a Jew singing in a Christmas concert. For weeks after the concert, long after the last notes of the songs had faded away and the tree had been taken down and tossed into the incinerator room, I felt as if I’d betrayed my people and my God.

As a young boy, I didn’t realize how many seemingly inconsequential choices, such as putting on a yarmulke or singing in a Christmas concert, I had to make to navigate through the shoals of forming a Jewish identity. Nor did I recognize the larger, more significant choices that I had to make to help solidify my connection with Judaism and my link to the Jewish people. Somehow I made these choices—keeping kosher, attending Hebrew school, preparing for my bar mitzvah—without resenting them, even though I must have offered some resistance. Was it my father who insisted that I attend Hebrew school? Or was it my mother who gently pushed me into making these decisions? Or perhaps I was nudged quietly by my own conscience?

Now I can see how these choices added up to create in me a sense of being Jewish. But then, as I was making these choices, I was confused, uncertain about which path to follow. I had no way of knowing, except for some internal compass that was nearly impossible to read, which choice would lead me closer to my heritage and which might take me further away.

Bruce Black is the founder of The Jewish Writing Project. His work has appeared in The Jewish Week, The Jewish Exponent, Reform Judaism Magazine, and The Reconstructionist, as well as in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Cricket and Cobblestone magazines. You can read more about his book, Writing Yoga, here: http://www.rodmellpress.com/writingyoga.html

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October 28, 2013 · 8:40 am

Scenes from a Movie

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Three nuns are bouncing on trampolines.
Why are they bouncing on trampolines?
It’s a parody on leap of faith.
And that, my friends, is the sticking point.
Either you have faith, or don’t, or hedge your bets,
caught between the chasm of doubt,
and the certainty of belief.
Current events test my faith;
senseless murders torture it.
I would love to believe that God has a plan,
but lately I have been coming to the conclusion
His plans are rather arbitrary.
Yes, I know man has free will,
but I wonder if that gives him too much license.
I have read that faith heals when
family and community come together in prayer.
Small comfort for tragic loss, I feel.
All great religions posit a higher power,
but in the certainty of my doubts,
there is no trampoline I can jump
to reach the upper vaults of heaven.

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 a new 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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October 14, 2013 · 8:45 am

Numbers On My Arm

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

In Israel,
grandchildren wear their grandparents’
concentration camp numbers on their arms,
at once a strike against Talmudic law,
and a sign to future generations to never forget.
The numbers sit,
not on my arm,
but on my soul.
Who am I to declare such legacy?
What chutzpah I must have
to stand in line with those
who were marched to the ovens.
I am haunted by my escape.
What or whom
has given me license to live?
And why?
Why am I so blessed?
Or cursed?
You say I am not qualified to grieve?
How could I possibly know?
I know, I know.

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 a new 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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