Tag Archives: childhood memories

May 5, 2025 · 7:30 am

Passing

by Susan Kress (Saratoga Springs, NY)

I was summoned

by the big girls

at the convalescent home

where I was recovering

from that illness

and I remember

the biggest one

twelve years old at least

sitting cross-legged

saying You think

you are chosen because

you are a Jew

and I could not imagine

how they knew—

maybe the nurse

who said I have a bone

to pick with you

because I’d told

my mother I did not

get the chocolate

in the package she 

had sent—opened

before I ever saw it—

maybe that nurse had

spread the word

and there I was

accused and not even

seven years old

sure I would be shunned

for being different

like my father

even after that big war

so all I said was But 

I believe in Jesus

and perhaps I did

since my school

had taught me all

about him and I sang

the hymns and carols

loving the music

and the words Breathe

on me breath of God

which I could feel

lifting my hair

like a halo

and those big

girls let me go

though not before

enforcing my un-

easy Yes I do I do believe

in Jesus and I could

leave it there

except this was only

the first time I

was afraid and passed

but not the last.

Susan Kress, granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, was born and educated in England and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her poems appear in Nimrod International, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, South Florida Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, La Presa, and other journals. Her poems have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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April 14, 2025 · 7:30 am

My father never offered me

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

My father never offered me, 

in the decades of the ‘50’s and the ‘60’s, 

when our relationship had reached its fullness,

the opportunity to return with him 

to his native Augustowów, Poland, 

to visit relatives (if any had managed 

to survive the forced labor camps or 

mass killings in its ghetto when the Nazis 

controlled the fates of thousands of its Jews). 

He never painted for me a work of art 

or shared words depicting the Netta River

or the town’s canal or spacious marketplace 

or the smiling, gentle people of his youth, 

perhaps because they had ceased to exist,

or perhaps because the agony was great.

Shouldn’t it be the birthright of any immigrant 

to return, if only for special moments, 

or for his or her offspring to walk 

the streets and bathe in the tranquil moonlight 

of the place that was the home a parent knew 

and felt fondness for even in brief moments

many years before?

The difficulty is that when a generation 

suffers massive torture, loss and execution, 

many generations will be forever scarred 

or devoured. Innocence is no defense to 

war crimes against humanity. 

Now I try to envision my father’s happy youth, 

his frolicking with friends and gentle neighbors, 

but the fantasy quickly dissipates into sharp reality 

when I recall the subject not once broached by him, 

rather compelled to dwell in the ash-heap of his memory.

In my old age, it is enough for me to know deeply that

he never offered me knowledge of his Augustowów

because he wanted to shield me from his pain. Even

in his silence, his love for me expressed itself. 

He did not leave his heart in Poland. He brought it to

America and shared it with me in his silence, 

which shouted love when I’d grown

wise enough to hear it.

Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y with both a B.S in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

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April 7, 2025 · 7:30 am

Why I am impatient for peace 

by Miriam Bassuk (Seattle, WA)

Because we once were sisters

and our mothers were best friends.

Because I can still recall the swell of your hand 

in mine, and I miss that warmth. 

Because, though the sky darkens with soot and ash 

and the rip of rocket fire sets my teeth on edge,

I want to sleep through the night near you.

Because the olive trees still flourish.

Though originally from the east coast, Miriam Bassuk treasures her life in the Northwest. Her daily walks inspire her with the teeming life of eagles, herons, and the occasional sighting of Orcas. She has been published in The Journal of Sacred Feminine Wisdom, Raven Chronicles, PoetsWest Literary Journal, and 3 Elements Review, and she was one of the featured poets in the digital portion of the WA 129 project sponsored by Tod Marshall, the Washington State poet laureate.

(“Why I am impatient for peace” first appeared in Consequence and is reprinted here with permission of the author.)

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March 24, 2025 · 7:30 am

America 1955

by Penny Perry (Rainbow, CA)

 My shoes crunch on alley gravel.

A boy calls out “Christ killer.”

I turn see his red hair, freckles.

A brick sails past my head.

Braids slap my shoulders.

My legs tremble. I grab

our back garden gate,

run to my mother.

She drops a trowel, hugs me.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

Weeping in my mother’s arms,

I say, “I’m not a killer.”

The smell of dill in the kitchen.

My grandfather looks up from his 

hot tea in a glass and blinks back tears.

“My granddaughter isn’t safe in America.”

He sips his tea, probably remembering

his own grandfather who encouraged him 

to go to America to learn English and

become a  lawyer.

My grandmother ladles soup.

The carrots are sweet. I’m still 

trembling. My mother paces, says

“Should we call the police?”

My grandfather says “No.”

The bump on his head glistens

in the kitchen light. Cossacks threw

a rock at him when he was a baby.

“We’ll only cause more attention

on ourselves. I will have a civil

conversation with the boy

and his family.”

How can he be so calm? “It’s not safe 

for you, Dad,” my mother says.

Rinsing spinach at the sink, my grandmother 

says “It’s enough the child isn’t hurt.”

“Dayenu” I say to myself. The song

is my favorite part of our Seder.

It is enough that the brick missed me,

thank God. 

It is enough that my grandfather will help,

enough that my mother hugged me, enough 

that my grandmother is making my favorite dish, 

spinach with a hard boiled egg and sour cream.

I wipe my wet face. My grandfather 

slips into his bedroom, steps out 

in his favorite courtroom gray suit 

and purple tie.

The room now smells of baking bread.

In spite of the flying brick, I’m proud to be 

a Jew, proud of our survival, our traditions, 

grateful for God’s blessings.

Penny Perry is the author of two books of poetry Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage and Woman with Newspaper Shoes, both from Garden Oak Press. Her poems have appeared in Lilith, The Paterson Literary Review, Third Wednesday, San Diego Poetry Annual, Poetry International and many other journals. 

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March 17, 2025 · 7:30 am

Tzipa

by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)

“You also have a Jewish first name,” my mother told me. “It’s Tzipa.” 

“Tzipa?” I asked, trying to reproduce the completely unfamiliar sound I was hearing.

“Yes, Tzipa. She was grandma’s sister who died.”

“Oh,” I said “Okay.”

There we were, sitting together on the couch in the light-filled living room of our brand-new house, up on a hillside in a canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles, California, and I was young enough to simply accept the mystifying information that, in addition to my English first name, Nina, I had a “Jewish” first name, Tzipa, without asking any questions. But I always remembered what my mother told me. Even as the years passed and I never heard anyone call me Tzipa (my relatives called me Ninala or Ninatchka), I always remembered that name.

I also believed that no one else I knew had two first names. I didn’t realize then that it is very common for Jewish people to have a Hebrew name in addition to their name in the language of the country where they were living, and that their Hebrew names were not just second names in another language, but they were spiritual names in “God’s holy language.” I missed out on learning that, I think, because my parents, as well as my grandparents, were not religious, so I never went to synagogue or Hebrew school.

So that made me think that it was only me who had a secret name. It was like a magpie surprised me with a gift, dropping a small shiny object at my feet, and having no idea what to do with it but not wanting to get rid of it, I put it in a box with other precious objects. And I took that box along with me with every move I ever made, from city to city and even from one country to another.

I might have learned more about Hebrew names had I married a Jewish man. But, instead, I married a man who, despite being raised by parents from a small Protestant religious sect, the Church of the Brethren, always believed that everything he learned in Sunday school was just so many stories, stories that had no relationship to the world as he knew it. And he and I together raised two children who we brought up just as I had been raised without any religion.

“Do you remember me telling you about my Hebrew name, Tzipa?” I asked my husband recently.

“Tizpa?” Brad said. “No, not really.”

“I guess that name doesn’t mean anything to you,” I said. “But I definitely told you. I think you might remember when I tell you that it means little bird.”

“Ah, little bird,” he said, smiling fondly. “Yes, I do remember something about that.”

When I became an adult, my appreciation for my secret name grew because even though I didn’t like the sound of it, I learned that it means “little bird.” Tzipa, you see, is a diminutive of the biblical name Tzipporah, which is derived from the Hebrew word for bird, “tzippor.” And because birds can soar across the vastness of the skies above us, free from the restrictions that keep humans tied to the earth, in Jewish symbolism birds represent freedom. They also represent the awakening of the spirit and the connection between the earth and heaven, the material world and the spiritual one.

“Did you know that I have a Hebrew name?” I asked my brother, Danny “It’s Tzipa.”

“No, but I like the sound of that,” he said. “How did you find out about it?”

“Mom just told me that when I was a kid.”

“So, you mean that Mom and Dad gave you a Hebrew name?”

“Yes. They named me after Grandma Goldie’s sister who died in the Holocaust. But maybe you didn’t know that because no one ever called me by that name.”

“Okay…. Well, that’s a good person to be named after. It’s a nice way of keeping someone’s memory alive, whether the name gets used or not.”

Then, less than a year ago, my first cousin, Susan, sent me the result of the research she had done on our maternal grandmother’s family, the Levinstein family from Kudirkos-Naumienstis (also known as Naishtot) in Lithuania. And there at the end of the document was quite a lot of information about Tzipa, who she was and how she died.

I learned that Tzipa, who was one of the older sisters of my maternal grandmother Goldie Levinstein, had been born in Kudirkos-Lithuania in the 1890s. And that unlike her three sisters, she did not emigrate to the U.S. but instead stayed in the town where her parents and two brothers still lived. She married a rabbi named Itzhak, and together they had six children, five sons, Haim, Eliyahu, Israel, Dov, and one other whose name and fate we don’t know, and one daughter, Leah.

Then, on June 22, 1941, the Germans invaded the town and set the Jews to work under the supervision of local Lithuanians until a day in early July when a group of Lithuanian “activists,” under the command of Germans, attacked the city. This group ordered all Jewish males above the age of fourteen out to the streets and then took the Jewish men in groups of fifties to the Jewish cemetery. There the Germans and Lithuanian activists together shot one hundred ninety-two prisoners at the edge of pits they had already dug. The women and children were later forced into a ghetto within the town. On September 16, the 650 remaining women and children, and a few remaining men, were transported to the Parazniai forest by armed Lithuanians, who forced them to take off all their clothes and then lined them up and shot them all.

But Tzipa, her husband, and three of her children, Leah, Israel, and Dov, escaped the mass murders. After frantically packing up some kosher food, they ran for their lives. Once across the river, they fled into a more rural area. The first few days there they spent in an open field eating grass and finishing up the last of the kosher food. Then they found an abandoned shack and moved into it.

During those first long summer days, I imagine they must have seen birds of all kinds flying from tree branch to tree branch or high up in the distant blue sky above them and longed to be free like that, to fly far, far away from that place. Because things soon got worse.

Israel and Dov both left, joining the Lithuanian army that was attempting to fight off the Nazis. So Tzipa went away for few days, returning with flour for making bread, which she had purchased with money she received from selling her gold fillings. But her husband Itzhak, the rabbi, refused to eat non-kosher food. So he gradually starved to death. And then Tzipa herself came down with dysentery. 

What must it have been like for her to be dying and know that she was leaving her young daughter—only 14—completely alone?

Dov was killed fighting the Germans in the open fields. Haim was murdered by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators, as was Eliyahu, along with his wife and their two month-old baby. But two of Tzipa’s children survived. Her son, Israel, was badly wounded and became disabled—his hand was seriously damaged, and he lost the toes on one foot—but after the war, he emigrated to Brazil. And her daughter, Leah, also survived. After her mother died, she found a job at a factory where they paid her with small amounts of food. And after the war, she found her way to Israel, which is how our family knows this story.

“Did I ever tell you that I have a Hebrew name.” I said to Quinn, our child who is a scientist now living in Scotland and who strongly identifies with being Jewish.

“Yeah, I remember you telling me,” Quinn replied. “I actually wrote the name out for you in the Hebrew alphabet when I was studying Yiddish.”

“I’m very glad you do remember. What are your thoughts about me having the name of a woman who died during the Holocaust while trying to save her family?”

“Yes, well, I do think it’s nice to keep her memory alive by giving her name to someone in the family, but it’s also some heavy shit because it represents how you grew up with the Holocaust all around you—after all, you spent a lot of time as a child around adults who must have had a traumatic response to that genocidal event.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Even though I didn’t understand much about it at the time, I always had some awareness of it.”

To be honest, I’m still grappling with what it means to me to carry the name of that extraordinary woman. But, at last, I finally know what to do with the gift of the Hebrew name that was given to me all those years ago. I am taking it out of my box of precious things where it has been hidden all these years, placing it in the palm of my left hand, and reaching my hand out toward you, saying, “Here. Look at this.”

Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (seeyogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right. 

This story originally appeared on Nina’s blog, Delusiastic! and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

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December 16, 2024 · 7:30 am

On That Day

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

It rained that day. The gray sky 

matched everybody’s mood

and as my face was pelted 

with large, heavy drops that hurt,

I reassured myself that I would never cry. 

I was almost 10.

I stood lost in the crowd. I didn’t 

have a need to be up front

but someone nudged me, 

pushed me closer to the grave

and I looked down and saw

the plain pale brown coffin 

decorated with a matching 

Jewish star, the place in which

my mother slept (that was the current 

euphemism), and I was numb. 

An old man speaking through 

his beard, dressed in a long black coat, 

a rabbi whom I’d seen in my rare visits 

to Temple Emanuel in Parkchester when 

certain holidays occurred, said words 

I didn’t understand, made noises 

that offered a young child no comfort, 

and sporadically others, most of which 

I didn’t recognize because my family had chosen 

isolation as a way of life. He mumbled what I guessed

were prayers, and all I felt was the heavy rain that

seemed determined to replace the tears that wouldn’t come.

I paid attention to my heavy breathing 

because, I guess, it took my mind away 

from that pine coffin that held what was left 

of the woman who used to comfort and care for me 

when I was sick, who used to cook for me in her 

Jewish-Latvian way, from scratch to tasty,

with the constantly secret sacred ingredient 

being love.

I had been her companion as she prepared the food,

the one who licked the bowl … but what exactly 

was my role now that she was gone? Who would be

my mother? A little child needed a mother, but she was gone.

These thoughts bombarded my defenselessness

while wise men said their Hebrew words and still 

the tears refused to visit me, and the rain kept falling 

and the shovels lifted senseless dirt and dropped it 

on my mother and I felt like screaming and running 

to her but she was no longer there for me. Instead, 

the sounds replaced her voice, those holy sounds 

that meant nothing to a ten-year-old, 

a boy who simply wanted to hear

his mother’s voice again.


Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

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November 18, 2024 · 7:30 am

I Said the Words

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

I said the prayer for a very long year
to remember my mother
(as if I could forget)
to honor her
(as if I needed to)
to show my love for her
(as if that was the so official way
as if that could replace the feeling
fading just too quickly from my mind).

I journeyed to the synagogue
one vacant block from where my father worked
and sat with bearded ancient men
who shared a musty smell
with the hall which they inhabited,
who sought responsibility to guide the child
that I was and would forever be.

I listened to the words of the Kaddish
spoken quite precisely in a foreign tongue
a phrase at a time
and then I found myself repeating sounds
that had no meaning and no substance to me,
but it was my job, as I was told
(as if I had a choice).

And so I went, day by day, and I obeyed
and parroted the words
but never had the chance to say
the words that needed to be said,
about the ties we’d had, my mom and I,
about the caring that we knew
and love and strong security
now shattered — and the joy
of helping her whenever she put on
that apron and began to cook
from European scratch.

I said the words that were my duty,
words so alien to me
with men so distant from my needs
but with each word I mispronounced and mumbled
was the childhood-crafted
realization of what I no longer had
but needed very much.

I said the prayer
but wondered in my elemental way
why any God could be so cruel
to cleave a mother from a child
and substitute the words that had no meaning
to my soul.

Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

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October 21, 2024 · 7:03 am

Dancing the Night Away

by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca (Calgary, Canada)

I was born and raised in a Bene Israeli Jewish family in Bombay, India.  The mezuzah on our door and the menorah on the shelf were to me the sweet and meaningful symbols of my Jewish identity. I lived with my paternal grandparents since the age of ten, and I loved raising my fingers to touch the mezuzah on the door of their home and bringing them in a kiss to my lips. The elders in my family explained that when I made that gesture, it meant that I was taking the name of God as I left the home and when I returned home safely. I felt protected and blessed. I didn’t know then that there was a scroll inside the mezuzah with the words of The Shema “Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” a prayer I recited on waking each morning and going to bed at night. An aunt of mine sent me a mezuzah from Israel and even my husband who is not Jewish, never leaves the home or returns home without kissing the mezuzah. 

On that fateful Saturday in October, I happened to turn on the TV and watched in horror as a young girl, with her arms waving frantically, was calling out for help sitting sandwiched between two masked men on a motorcycle taking her away to where I had no idea at the time. They were shouting the name of their God, a chant familiar to me as there was a mosque just a few steps from my grandmother’s home in Bombay. I had grown up listening to the muezzin’s call to prayer five times a day over the loudspeaker. The neighborhood had Muslim, Christian, Parsi and Jewish families living side by side in peace and harmony. At home we were taught respect for the customs and traditions of each of the different faiths and actually took part in their celebrations. 

Continuing to watch the TV, I soon learned what had taken place and that the young girl was at a dance festival and was being taken hostage.  In Gaza and in some Muslim countries as the news of the tragic events of the day began pouring in, I watched people in the streets rejoicing, chanting the name of their God.  Soon after I saw a clip of a crowd of people marching towards the Opera House in Australia, with banners reading “Kill the Jews!!! Gas the Jews!!!” My mind at once went back to the Holocaust.  The murder of six million Jews was not enough for them. The real aim of the protestors was the annihilation of the Jews, not their support of the Palestinian people.

In India, growing up in the sixties, nobody ever mentioned the Holocaust and there never was any talk about what was happening on such a large scale to the Jewish people in Europe. The Indian Jews were free from persecution and blended in completely with the local population of India, the majority of whom are Hindu.  I entered college in my mid-teens into the Arts stream, and along with other subjects like Logic and Economics, World History was also taught. I cannot recall a single mention of the Holocaust in our textbooks. Only much later, I watched a film on the Diary of Anne Frank, and a movie called Schindler’s List. In fact, the movie had such a powerful impact on me that I watched it twice, weeping throughout the film. I prayed that there would be more ‘Schindlers’ in the world. My mother always spoke about ‘the basic goodness of mankind.’ I believed there were as many good people in the world as there were who brought harm to others.

In the seventies, a discotheque called Blow Up was located in the basement of the Taj Mahal Hotel. That name would be considered taboo in the context of today’s world. Many of my cousins were musicians and played in the bands at the disco. I loved music and loved to dance, often dancing the night away till the early hours of the morning. The waiters would toggle the lights on and off in quick succession, to signal us to leave. A cousin of mine still remembers that I did not sit out a single dance!  The next morning in college, I attended the first lecture of the day with the green eyeshadow still prominently showing up on my eyelids. Those days we didn’t have access to make up remover and the soap we used did not do a decent job! 

The murder of so many innocent young people at the Dance festival touched a deep nerve in me. I had danced freely and without fear, at so many music festivals, it was beyond belief what I was seeing.   My love of dance will forever be colored by the tragic scenes playing out on the TV screen… I was contorted, frozen in that moment, unable to move, let alone dance.

 All I could do was pray…

In a career spanning over four decades, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca has taught English in Indian colleges, AP English in an International School nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in India, and French and Spanish in private schools in Canada. Her poems are featured in various journals and anthologies, including the Sahitya Akademi Journal Of Indian Literature, the three issues of the Yearbooks of Indian Poetry in English, Verse-Virtual, The Madras Courier, and the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, among others. Kavita has authored two collections of poetry, Family Sunday and Other Poems and Light of The Sabbath. Her poem ‘How To Light Up a Poem,’ was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2020.  Her poems celebrate Bombay, the city of her birth, Nature, and her Bene Israel Indian Jewish heritage. She is the daughter of the late poet Nissim Ezekiel.  She currently resides in Calgary, Canada.

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September 30, 2024 · 7:30 am

Hatikvah

by Dennis Gura (Santa Monica, CA)

Back behind the school, under a corrugated

tin awning, propping ourselves up against

the half-filled bike rack, the late spring days

already too hot for most to ride bikes to school,

A.V. and I practice singing Hatikvah off

a transliterated sheet.

We had carefully chosen the place, distant

from the hubbub of our lunchtime recess. 

For the other kids — A.V. was in fifth grade,

me in fourth — would likely have razzed us

practicing a Hebrew song.  We two were the only

Jews in the school, and we kept it on the QT.

We lived on egg ranches with parents

who did not fit the mold of either farmers nor

So Cal rural residents in the 1950’s.  My folks,

Manhattanites, came post-war to California, my 

mother to escape the cold, my father dutiful.

A.V.’s folks, on the other hand, had the more

dramatic story. His mother, elegant and French, 

his father, a Litvak, off to Zion, then to fight in Spain,

barely surviving and repatriated to the Proletarian

Homeland, later air-dropped into Poland.

The two met in, and survived, Auschwitz.  And ended

up in the San Gabriel Valley (LA’s other one!). 

Raising chickens and two kids, and, like my

folks in the ’50’s, keeping their politics —

Left, more Left, yet even more Left — under

wraps in a town whose most famous boast of

the day was as the headquarters of 

America’s only homegrown Fascist group.

Some old Israel contact of A.V.’s dad placed a kibbutznik,

sent to California to help out a local

Zionist-Marxist group, on their ranch. He corralled

as many Jewish children as he could find locally for 

membership.  As the parents were often close to,

or members of, the Party, Zionism was viewed

with suspicion, but, on the other hand (always another

hand), even the most reluctant nationalist Jew in 1960 

was hollowed out by the oh-so recent events, and

thus was scintillated by the stories of pioneers and

survivors creating a state and refuge.  So the 

emissary kibbutznik worked the farm, organized

the kids for the youth group, and encouraged the romance

of redeeming the land and people with discipline and

song.  To earn our membership and the coveted

blue shirt — hultza khula — A.V. and I needed to 

sing Hatikva.  We neither knew nor read

Hebrew, so we worked off the transliteration.

We spent a week at the bike rack, managing 

to memorize a foreign song which only had

a distant meaning, if that.  Years later, I finally 

figured out the meaning of the line that 

cracked us up: Our Hope Is Two Thousand Years 

Old.  The word “Years” was transliterated as

“Shnot.” What’s this song about “shnot”?

What else does a nine year-old think?

That Friday night at our meeting, A.V. and I

sang, likely off-key, from memory, the

words, and didn’t even start laughing

when we got to the “shnot.”

The leaders, only teenagers themselves,

loosely supervised by the kibbutznik emissary,

who could not have been more than in his twenties,

presented us with the blue shirt, signifying

our membership in the youth movement to

build the Zionist future.

Neither A.V. nor I made it to kibbutz life, although

some of our friends did for longer and shorter

durations.  And we’ve lost track of each other,

more or less.  But I learned the words to the song,

and eventually even the meaning, and,

now, especially now, I’m glad I have it

imprinted in my heart.

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

If you’d like to read more of his work, visit his Substack page:https://dennisgura.substack.com

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September 2, 2024 · 7:30 am

Klari’s Cameo

by Ruth Zelig (New York, NY)

Author’s Note: For economic reasons, my father decided in 1958 that he, with my mother, and me at age eight, would leave Israel and migrate to South America where we would wait until the United States allowed us in (1967). His goal was to settle in the United States, but American immigration quotas were too strict, in essence barring our entry. By December 1958, with utmost efficiency, my father made arrangements for a transatlantic crossing, and while waiting for the day of departure, we moved in with his step-mother, Klari.

“Early in the morning I’d look over at the bed and see your three sleeping heads. After you went away, the bed was so empty.”  This is how Klari described to us in her letters the lonely days after my parents and I emigrated from Israel in December, 1958. This is how she revealed how happy she was that the three of us had stayed with her at her one-room apartment for a few weeks after our own apartment was given up, our furniture dispersed, the suitcases packed, and the trans-Atlantic steerage tickets purchased, in pursuit of my father’s dream to migrate to America.

Klari was my paternal step-grandmother. She had luminous light green eyes. And some freckles on her face. Graying wavy hair that sometimes she gathered in a bun behind the nape. At other times worn short. But around her neck there was always a gold locket that opened to a photo. The locket cover was a delicate cameo.

She was my other grandmother, one of three, two of them living, another being my maternal grandmother. Klari married my grandfather, Deszö, in Transylvania in 1949, soon after he lost his remarkable wife, the grandmother I never met, and the two immediately moved to Israel to join my father. So I was lucky, I had three grandmothers, kinswomen shaping the foundations of my life.

The grandmother I never met was a venerated enigma; she was not a babysitter. But Klari provided childcare on occasions. She fed me madár tej — eoufs à la neige — floating islands. A dessert so milky with love, so whipped up with care, so easy to eat, it was like the breath of kisses on the lips. No one could match her dessert, not even the fancy French restaurants in New York City where I’d go chasing a dream more than half a century later.

When my childhood home was no more, and migration was about to turn my world over and revolve in the opposite direction, the few weeks of living with her kept me safe from worry. I did not know yet what loss meant, because she and her apartment were a haven. I continued to go to my old school from her home for a little while longer, walking two blocks to R. Arlozorov to catch the bus that went up the Carmel Mountain to Ramot Remez and getting off in front of the school. My mother had practiced the drill with me so I could do it alone. On the way back from school, after getting off the bus, I passed a beggar woman every day. One day I left her some coins. I had never done that before; I had never been homeless before.

After my grandfather died in 1956, Klari remained the widow who had been fun for me to visit. I watched her rapturously as she lit Shabbat candles and gathered the sacred light with her hands while murmuring the blessing. She loved my mother so much, and her attentive daughter-in-law reciprocated the affection. The year she married my grandfather, 1949, was also the year my two teenage parents wed in Israel. All these people living the second, improbable chapter in their life. It’s startling to think that Klari was married to Dezsö for less than seven years, a blink of an eye for people their age. She didn’t marry him for money; he had none, and he was very sick after years in a Nazi-led Romanian slave labor camp and needed a caregiver. He died aged fifty-nine leaving her a fatigued widow. Most likely a widow for the second time.

When I was with her, she never talked about her life before the calamity. (She did not have a tattoo on her arm.) Taking her for granted, I never asked about her prior family, her maiden name or maybe her prior married name. She didn’t have children. But maybe she had a husband, or a fiancé, who was deported during the Holocaust? There were no other relatives. She hid the pain behind a cheerful manner. I never heard a cross word; never heard a painful expression; never heard anger, wishful thinking, or regret.

How did my elders pick up the pieces and move forward? By getting married again so soon after losing an indispensable companion? By daring to cross the ocean and arrive at a Mediterranean land so alien compared to what used to be home? When the rug is pulled out from under you, when the walls around you are breached and the contents confiscated, when your livelihood is eliminated, when your essence is erased and your figure is spat upon as if you were a demon, how do you dare pick up the pieces? If you’re treated like an animal, you resort to being human.

Her humanity was boundless. Her little apartment on R. Yerushalayim was so pleasing. One room. That’s all a widow needs. A corner with a little icebox and a shelf-top two-burner primus; two small sunny windows with white lace curtains; a back door to a wooden staircase descending to the ground behind the building; a single bed. And an armoire with the prettiest dresses a seven year old girl could imagine: silk-like fabrics with pretty, colorful patterns. I’d riffle through them, feeling the fabrics, savoring the patterns with my eyes, unaware these were styles from the 1940s. I’d rummage through her necessaire de toilette, smitten by the little round orange box of Coty Airspun face powder, the one still sold today unchanged since 1935 when she was a younger woman, with the iconic design of white powder puffs on the box-top. I still delight in this design, it reminds me of her. 

In the middle of the apartment was a dainty Queen Anne dining table with four matching chairs. And a Persian rug underneath, where I’d lie on my stomach and iron the tufting with my fingernails in the direction of the weave, then alternating, learning that doing so in the other direction made the fiber stand up and change the character of the colors, while I was studying the Persian rug pattern with the medallion in the center and the repetition of the pattern in a satisfyingly predictable sequence, a fractal brain-teaser, intuiting that hand-weaving was about symmetry. And symmetry was about equilibrium, predictability, security.

But we emigrated. Equilibrium, predictability, and security disappeared. Life was not a Persian rug. 

My mother and Klari corresponded for years. Thirteen years after we left her behind, after she remarried, became widowed again, had breast cancer and radical mastectomies, a hacking which made her upper arms swell to twice their size, we went to visit her again in Israel, in a different city, a suburb of Tel Aviv. And she took us in again, and we sat at her table eating leben and drinking Nescafe. You had to heat the milk first then mix in the coffee flakes then add hot water. Old women have a way with rituals you shouldn’t challenge. She showed me her scar. She wasn’t shy. She was forthright. With the kind of uninhibited composure that made her survive the Holocaust nightmare, cancer, death, departure, separation, solitude, and foreigners. She never learned to speak Hebrew.  She managed, because there were enough contemporaries who were also Hungarian speakers.

More than anything else, I associate Klari with a cameo. Classically authentic, revealingly bas relief, unassumingly delicate, straightforwardly monochromatic, singularly solitary. She represented a woman comfortable in her own skin, devoted and caring when called upon, repeatedly alone without protest when no longer needed.

Ruth Zelig migrated three times before the age of 20, changing languages (at least five), cultures, and school systems. After earning an MA in Linguistics, she went on to study computer languages and became a computer programmer and systems analyst at IBM. As a mother, she raised her children, spent years volunteering in a NJ community at various levels of leadership, and became the president of her Conservative synagogue. English remains her primary language for writing.  She has written an epistolary memoir, “Letters From Brazil, Reflections on Migration and Friendship,” and  hopes to publish it soon. You can learn more about her and her work at these social media sites:zeligova.substack.com, jewishwomenofwords.com.au/author/ruth-zelig/, instagram.com/zeligova, and zeligova.com

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