Tag Archives: family history

December 15, 2025 · 7:30 am

Five Silver Dollars

by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)

 “Why are we celebrating Hannukah this year?” I asked my mother. “I thought our family never celebrates Hannukah.”

“Grandpa made a special request for this year,” she explained.

“But it’s just a family dinner, right? Like what we have for Passover? Because we’re not religious, because Grandma and Grandpa are atheists, right?”

Even though I grew up in a Jewish family, the only Hannukah I remember from my childhood was the first time (and the last time) my mother’s family celebrated it. That’s because in our family Hannukah was a minor holiday that we ignored on principle, even though it was the holiday that the Jewish kids at my school bragged about (presents for eight days in a row!). 

“All those bourgeois Jews,” my mother would say scornfully. “They’re just building up an unimportant holiday to compensate for feeling left out at Christmas. Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur are the important holidays, Nina, not Hannukah.”

But on that winter night when I was maybe eight years old, our family of four—my mother, my father, my younger brother, and me—left our house up in the Santa Monica Mountains and headed off to Venice, where my mother’s parents lived, because my grandma was having a Hannukah dinner. 

In those days, Venice was still a Jewish neighborhood—before Main Street became hip and trendy and real estate shot through the roof—where my grandparent’s neighbors spoke Yiddish just like them, where there was Hebrew writing on the fronts of the small shops and Jewish things to buy inside them, and where there was a Jewish temple, the Synagogue by the Sea, right on the beach. Their home was an apartment in a small, nondescript, two-story building that they owned and managed. On that winter night, it looked the same as aways, with a neat green lawn and geometrically trimmed hedges that you might see anywhere, and with only a few large, shaggy palm trees and flame-colored Birds of Paradise that gave the neighborhood a Southern California vibe. 

When we arrived at the front door, my grandmother Goldie greeting us, saying warmly, “Come in! Come in!” and she pressed my cheeks with her soft, warm hands and kissed me tenderly, saying “Ninala!” Once inside, I noticed that the big table was already set up in the dining room, covered with the treasured lace tablecloth and the place settings that Grandma used for every family dinner. As always, there was nothing to indicate which holiday we were celebrating. 

I had always known that I was Jewish. It was my bloodline, my parents told me, and it was even on my mother’s Illinois birth certificate as “Color: Jewish.” But I always understood, too, that my family was different than other Jewish families, especially the families of the Jewish kids at my grammar school, which was in the upper-middle class, predominately Jewish neighborhood of Westwood. This was because it wasn’t just my parents who did not believe in God, but neither did my mother’s parents. Even though both my grandmother and grandfather grew up in Lithuania in Jewish shtetls and my grandmother’s father had been a rabbi, my grandparents both were committed Communists who believed that religion was “the opiate of the masses.” So at that time, I had never even set foot in a temple, and when most of the Jewish kids at my grammar school went off to Hebrew school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I simply went home on the school bus. I had to admit I was very curious about what this “Hebrew school” thing was and sometimes even felt a bit left out, but I was also happy enough not to be going to any more school, whatever the kind. 

After saying hello to everyone, the first thing I did was to walk around the big table, counting the places: Grandma, Grandpa, Mommy, Daddy, Auntie Estelle, Uncle Morrie, Cousin Susan. That meant there were not enough seats at the table for us three kids—me, my brother, Danny, and my cousin Stevie! So we were going to be exiled to a “kid’s table” in the kitchen again! I hated that. I always wanted to be at the big table where the stories and the jokes were told, even if sometimes the punch lines were delivered in Yiddish and when the grownups laughed, I had no idea what was so funny.  

Then I went into the kitchen to verify that, yes, the small red and silver kitchen table was set for three. But what was that next to each of the plates? A small, mesh bag of gold coins! Auntie Estelle walked up behind me, placed her hands on my shoulders, and laughed.  “It’s Hanukah gelt!” she said.

Suddenly I was happy. I’d seen those golden “coins” before in Jewish delis and was fascinated by the candy that looked like money, just as I was by any candy that looked like something else, no matter how it tasted. But these, I knew, were chocolate coins. My grandmother was a renowned cook, who baked perfect desserts that the grown-ups raved about, like mandel bread, poppy seed cookies, and sponge cakes. But those plain desserts were always disappointing. I always wondered: Where were the chocolate chips? Where was the yummy chocolate frosting?  

Then my Grandma Goldie came into the kitchen, put her flowered apron on over her neat navy blue dress, and started grating potatoes for latkes. On Jewish holidays, my grandma always cooked an entire multi-course meal for the family from scratch, making the same dishes that her two daughters and their husbands remembered from their childhoods. I sat down at the kitchen table and watched my lovely grandmother—with her soft pale skin, soft curly grey hair, soft smile, and soft voice—doing one of the things that she did best: cooking delicious food for her family.

Then Danny and Stevie came running into the kitchen but stopped suddenly, eyes growing larger, when they saw what was on the table.

“It’s Hanukah gelt!” I said.

“Oh, boy, candy!” 

“And it’s chocolate candy!”

As the boys scrambled into their seats at the table, I could hear the adults in the other room, saying “delicious, Goldie,” and “absolutely wonderful,” about the chopped liver they were smearing onto pieces of matzoh. I wondered as always how they could possibly love the pungent, rancid, fatty flavor of that unappetizing-looking brownish paste. Then, as they often did, they started to talk about people who were not there. 

I knew that my grandfather, Meyer, who was the oldest son in his family, had come by himself to the U.S. from Lithuania when he was only sixteen, settling in Chicago where there was already a community of Lithuanian Jews. Once there, he earned enough money to bring his father over to join him, and then he and his father worked together to earn the money to bring the rest of the family over to join him, including his mother and the rest of his siblings. That was why Meyer was a hero to his family, and all his siblings looked up to him.

My mother had told me so many stories about what it was like to grow up as part of that extended Davis family—all those crazy aunts and uncles, with their radical politics, vegetarian diets and goat’s milk fresh from the farm, nude swims at night in Lake Michigan, and romantic spats, and the crowd of all-girl cousins who played cards and gossiped and slept together in an abandoned box car on the lake shore every summer. Most of that family was still in Chicago, where I had never been.

My grandmother, who was from a different part of Lithuania than my grandfather, had also come to the U.S. alone at age 18. She had joined two of her older sisters in Chicago, then met and married my grandfather shortly after that. So, although my grandmother’s parents, brothers, and one sister stayed behind in Lithuania, my grandmother, too, had a few relatives the Chicago area. And both my mother and her sister, Estelle, had grown up there, surrounded by a large, extended family, as had Cousin Susan, Estelle’s daughter from her second marriage. 

All those relatives from Chicago—whom I had never even met—seemed to be what the grownups in the family talked about when we gathered together on holidays. For me, in their ghostlike presence, they vastly outnumbered the group of real, live humans sitting at the family table, making our immediate family feel small and incomplete. 

Soon the kitchen was filled with the warm, savory smell of frying onions and potatoes, and my grandmother set the first batch of latkes on the kitchen table in front of Danny, Stevie, and me. She served us each a pancake, along with boiled chicken, cooked carrots, and applesauce. “Eat, children! Enjoy!” she said and then turned back to the stove. And no one, I noticed, was saying anything about Hannukah—there were still no special words about what we were celebrating or why. 

And when the grownups were finally served their dinner, I heard them saying the same two words they always said at the beginning of our dinners, “La chaim!” That simply meant, I knew, “To life!” And those words were not religious, not a blessing, not a prayer, not any kind of grace. But even just that simple Hebrew phrase told me that being Jewish still meant something to my family. Yes, they were all atheists, but they always gathered together on holidays like Passover and Rosh Hashanah that only Jewish people celebrated, where they ate food that only Jewish people cooked—chicken soup with matzo balls gefilte fish chopped liver potato latkes blintzes stuffed cabbage brisket smoked white fish pickled herring tzimmes potato kugel kasha varnishkes kishke noodle kugel rye bread matzo taiglach mandelbrot sponge cake halvah hamantaschen. 

I knew that my grandparents, both Jewish, had married each other, and my mother had married a Jewish man, my dad, and all her girl cousins had married Jewish men, too, and all three of Aunt Estelle’s husbands had been Jewish. I knew that something happened to my grandma’s family in Lithuania during the Holocaust, but besides the fact that being Jewish was something you could be killed for, what else did being Jewish really mean to my family? 

Grandma’s latkes were perfect: crisp and golden on the outside, tender and savory on the inside. And the carrots were slightly firm and deliciously sweet. We three kids quickly polished off our food, including second helpings of the latkes, and then gazed longingly at our bags of Hannukah gelt. Then we had a conversation that went something like this:

 “I wonder what ‘gelt’ is,” I said

“It means ‘money,’ I think,” Stevie said.

“Money,” I said. “Yeah, ‘cause it looks like money. Hmmm. But why is the chocolate money Jewish? And why is there chocolate money on Hannukah? 

“’Cause it’s Hannukah tradition,” Stevie said, “you know, like the menorah.”

“But isn’t the menorah ‘cause Hannukah is supposed to celebrate some miracle of oil burning in some temple for eight days instead of one?”

“Well, yeah.”

“That doesn’t seem like very big of a miracle,” Danny said.

“What doesn’t?” Stevie said.

“Oil for eight days.”

“Well, maybe that’s why it’s a dumb holiday we don’t usually celebrate in our family,” I said.

“Yeah, ‘cause the miracle isn’t very miraculous!” Stevie said. We all laughed.

 “I want to eat my gelt now!” Danny said.

 “I’ll ask!” Stevie said. 

When permission was granted, we ripped open our mesh bags and poured the golden coins onto the table to inspect them. There were coins in three different sizes, each embossed with mysterious Hebrew characters. I wanted to make my candy last as long as possible, so I selected one of the smallest coins to start with. I carefully peeled off the top layer of foil to reveal a flat, round disk of soft, limp milk chocolate, broke off a piece, and inhaled an odd sickly sweet scent that reminded me of Play Doh. When I placed the chocolate on my tongue, I concluded that it was blander, softer, and nowhere near as good as a Hershey Bar, but still it was chocolate, something I never ever had before at grandma’s house. 

As the three of us were focused on taking tiny bites of our chocolate coins, both of our grandparents came into the kitchen and stood together next to the table. I was surprised that my grandfather, who typically ignored all his grandchildren, was now gazing down at us with interest. A tall, thin, handsome man with iron grey hair and glasses, remote and mysterious, he always seemed to be sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette and reading the Daily World when Danny and I were spending time with our grandma.

“Your grandpa wants to give you real Hannukah gelt,” our grandma said. Then my grandpa reached into his pockets and handed each of us five large silver coins. “He made a special trip to the bank just to get silver dollars for you children,” grandma added.

“Happy Hannukah,” grandpa said.

I stammered, “Uh, thank you, Grandpa.”

And the boys chimed in, “Yeah, thank you, Grandpa! Happy Hannukah.”

After our grandparents returned to the dining room, I held the heavy silver coins in the palm of my hand and studied them. I realized then that for this night a special dinner had been arranged just so my grandfather could give us, his grandchildren, a gift. I guessed that giving coins to children on Hannukah was traditional, and that my grandpa had been given them when he was a child in Lithuania because, otherwise, why else would he have given them to us? But it was so difficult to imagine the world from which he and my grandmother had come. There was a religion I didn’t understand, a language I didn’t know, and a feeling of belonging to a group of people I had never seen, yet I was somehow tied to it all, through these two people, my grandparents, and through these very coins they had given me. 

The gift from my grandfather should have been making me glad, so why did I feel so much sorrow mixed in with my happiness, like that time I went swimming in a natural hot springs up in the Sierras, and the strong current of the hot geyser water that was bubbling up from a crack in the earth kept pushing me back out into the icy water of the river of melted snow that was rushing down from the mountains, and I had to keep swimming and swimming just to stay in the warmth?

“Wow! Five whole silver dollars!” Stevie said. “That’s a lot of money. And they’re probably worth even more than just a dollar ‘cause these coins are really old. Look at the year on this one: 1898!” 

“I’m not gonna spend mine,” I said. “I’m just gonna keep them. I’m gonna eat all the chocolate but I’ll keep the real money forever and ever.” 

“Me, too!”

“Me, three!”

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 (see yogafortimesofchange.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. 

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November 24, 2025 · 7:30 am

Chana and Rafa

by Helene Berton (Centereach, NY)

Flipping over the tape, I clicked the play button and smiled when “Modern Love” came through my headphones. David Bowie was the best flying music, I decided. 

After finding the pack of gum in my overstuffed bag, I offered a stick to my mother and then unwrapped one for myself. While chewing exuberantly, I waited for my ears to snap, crackle and pop as we started our descent. Reluctantly, I clicked the stop button as the Sony Walkman couldn’t compete with the noise of the plane. “China Girl” would have to wait. China, my thoughts wandered, was the other side of the world. But then again, so was Israel, and that’s where we landed.

I looked at my mother. Even after the overnight flight, she was brimming with excitement. Why was this trip so important to her? 

*  *  * 

The girls with their machine guns slung across their backs startled me, gave me pause. I snapped a picture of them, lost in thought, winding to advance the film before taking another. 

Like a tourist, I was gaping at them as if an attraction. “Are they in the army?” I whispered to my mother.

“Yes, the IDF,” she replied as we walked down the bustling Tel Aviv street.

“I’m surprised so many girls want to join.”

“It’s mandatory. Everyone goes directly from high school into the military,” she explained to me.

Mandatory? I thought of myself after high school graduation planning my great escape to college. All the stress and drama of roommates, meal plans, and boyfriends dominated my life that summer before I left. I heard my voice complaining that I had to take the bus when most of my friends had cars of their own. Meanwhile, these girls were nonchalantly strolling along with their machine guns, chatting in the sunshine with their cups of coffee. I suddenly felt small.

*  *  * 

“Tell me again who they are?” I asked my mother as we sat down at the round table. The ceiling fan above us did little to cool the restaurant.

“My cousins.”

“How are they related to us?”

My mother looked at me for a moment longer than necessary. Maybe she had explained it already or assumed that I knew. “Your grandfather came to the United States from Latvia when the war broke out. His brother, Uncle Max, went to Israel. These are his daughters.”

I digested this information, trying to form the family tree in my mind. Having no first cousins of my own, I couldn’t relate very well. I felt disconnected, distracted by the heat. I squirmed in my seat, tempted to ask the waiter to turn up the AC. Looking around at the open windows and archways leading into the garden, I realized there was no air conditioning at all.

“That must be them.” My mother stood up as two older women entered the restaurant. 

I was surprised by their age, having pictured them younger. How were these women my mother’s cousins? Realizing that my grandparents had my mother late in life, I put it together. It was as if a generation was missing, but it did add up.

The introductions were made, complete with hugs and kisses which left me feeling awkward, bringing out the shyness I had battled since childhood. I did not know these women, after all. 

I sat quietly as the conversation swirled around me, looking at the food that the cousins had ordered for us. I picked at the unfamiliar meat and sauces presented to me, wishing for a slice of pizza and chips. My mind drifted to the shops we had passed in Tel Aviv as I made my mental list of who would be getting which souvenir. Maybe I would indulge in the boots I saw in the window display or even the leather jacket. I had some money saved from my new job.

Noticing my mother’s sudden look of sadness, I listened in, hoping to catch onto the conversation without embarrassment. 

“I’m so sorry,” she said, as I tried to pull up the dialogue that might still be hanging in the air or my recent memory. 

“Yes, he was killed in the war,” Chana said, looking serious. “He was my youngest.”

Her son? Killed in the war? I brushed aside all thoughts of shopping and started listening. I felt like I should say something.

“I’m so sorry,” I quietly offered condolences to my cousin. 

She looked at me then, and I couldn’t quite figure out the expression. Was it distaste or was I taking on a feeling of inadequacy? I felt like a spoiled child, and I didn’t like it.

After lunch we stepped out to the garden to take some photographs under the archways. I placed my hands on the cool limestone, letting my sense of touch help me file away the moment into my memory. My mother wrapped up the conversation with more hugs and kisses while I took in the views of the rolling countryside. It was quite beautiful just a short drive from Tel Aviv. I hadn’t expected such green lushness. But then again, I didn’t know what to expect, as I really hadn’t done any of the research.

*  *  * 

“Did you enjoy meeting the cousins?” my mother asked me in the cab as we rode back to the hotel.

“I did,” I forced out, with an overly high pitch to my voice. I hoped my mother didn’t notice. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the get together other than it gave me a lot to think about. I was ignorant on too many topics, falling short on contributing to the conversation. 

Looking down at my brightly polished nails and fringed boots despite the heat, I felt foolish. I looked at my mother who carried on a one-sided conversation with me and I started listening. For real.

*  *  * 

Present day…

I bring the photo album and carefully balance it on my mother’s lap as she sits in her wheelchair. My two sons sit on either side of her, their cell phones on their laps but remaining untouched for the moment. I see a glimpse into the future, the day when they both have children, possibly daughters, who would be cousins. How heartbreaking if they never know each other. I finally understand the dynamic of cousins.

They look onto the photos covered in sheets of plastic with their undivided attention. 

My mother points from face to face, announcing names questioningly. 

“Cousin Chana?” she asks. 

“Yes,” I smile encouragingly. 

“And Rafa?” 

“Yes, Rafa.” 

“And this lady?” She places a long fingernail on her own image. “Who is she?”

“That’s you,” I say, not for the first time that day.

Native New Yorker Helene Berton has returned to her love of writing after a long hiatus.  She has two short story collections, Away from Home ( https://a.co/d/czXOPef) and Beyond the Parallel (https://a.co/d/1SViCZj), available on Amazon. Currently, Helene is working on her first novella, Red Means Stop, and a children’s picture book, The Big Race. If you’d like to learn more about Helene and her work, visit https://heleneberton.wordpress.com .

Author’s Note: My story explores the dynamics between mother and daughter, a common theme in my writing.  It was inspired by and takes place during my first trip to Israel in 1987.  There is a bit of a naivety portrayed, which is how I felt as a young American girl visiting Israel (somewhat immature and self centered), but it was a wake-up call.  The trip changed my outlook, inspiring me to fall in love with the country.  I was fortunate enough to visit a second time several years later, and both my sons experienced Israel through Birthright.  It is my hope to return once again.

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July 14, 2025 · 7:30 am

Questions I Never Asked

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

It’s too late now, far too late. Both my parents and

both my sisters are gone. My wellspring of family

knowledge has faded into the mysteries of history.

I was smart with books and sports, but I am ignorant

of my own history, full of regrets and a desire to know

but missing the precious resources that would have

filled the holes, the chasms in my consciousness.

When did they arrive in the U. S.? Why did they leave

Poland and Latvia? What was life there like for Jews?

How did they meet? Was the meeting accidental, 

spontaneous, arranged? How long did they date before

he proposed? Where did they get married? How long

were they married before she had my older sister?

What did he help build as a carpenter (besides the

Museum of the City of New York?). What was her

favorite color? Flower? Song? Pre-TV radio show?

Which members of my family were lost during the

Holocaust? During the pogroms? Did any of them

make the Aliyah to Israel? Who were my living relatives?

Where did they live? What did they do? Why were we

and they so distant? 

Why did she have me 10 years after my second sister?

Was she happy when I was born? Did she feel too old

to care for a baby again? Is it true that she almost

aborted me but changed her mind literally at the final

moment?

Then there are the closer queries to my toddler self:

What did her voice sound like? What did her touch

feel like? Her scent? Her presence? Beliefs: Did she

light Shabbas candles? Did he attend synagogue 

regularly when he was much younger and she was

still a vital presence in our lives? Afterthoughts:

What was his favorite opera? Why did he switch from

being a builder to owning a store? The ethereal gems:

What would they feel about the man I have become,

the woman I married, the children and grandchildren

I had – – – and how little my progeny know about them?

One final question: Why did I wait too late to ask?

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 160 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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July 7, 2025 · 7:30 am

Repairing the World with Chicken Soup

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

Boil chicken bones and chicken parts with water, parsnip, dill, carrot, and celery in a pot larger than your firstborn. Ladle the soup into a bowl and add Goodman’s fine egg noodles if it’s Shabbos or handmade lokshen if it’s Pesach. Form dense matzoh balls with your hands. It’s all right if they’re misshapen. So is the world. Should the matzoh balls sink to the bottom of the pot and your stomach, it’s okay. They’ll soak up the golden liquid that soothes all that ails you and the world. Tikkun olam. 

Having kosher chicken soup from your mama’s stove is like no other. Better than the best kosher deli. Because it contains love like your mama’s kiss on your keppele. You’re all right, it’s the Sabbath, time to end one week and start another fresh and clean. The broth will clear your head, clear all mistakes, fill you up so you can curl up under your featherbed all cozy, warm, and loved.

And maybe this is the best of all. Knowing that your mama learned how to make the soup from her mama, Rayzel Entel, who learned it from her mama, Esther Taube Drewno, who learned it from her mama, Chaja Rojza Mularzewicz, who learned it from her mama, Buna Etla Przestreleniec, who learned it from her mama, Ruchla Herszkowna of no last name, born at the turn of the nineteenth century in Brok, Poland. You are a link in the chain doling out the remedy to repair the world a spoonful at a time.


Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) from Gratz College, where she teaches in the HGS graduate programs. The author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse, her work has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, Tiferet, Minyan, Jewishfiction.net, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Director, Mercer County (NJ) Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center.

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June 9, 2025 · 7:30 am

Folk tale

by Susan Kress (Saratoga Springs, NY)

My aunt died

in the age of letters

and no one told my grandmother

for fear the news would strike her dead.

She couldn’t read

a word of English and

my aunt lived

in another country 

so it was easy to lift sentences

from old airmail letters and pretend

she was still alive.

Years before, when my aunt

had married out of the faith

that no one practiced,

the family mourned.

They chanted prayers, sat on low seats,

folded her away

in a locked drawer—

and for seven years,

until her son was born—pretended

she was dead.

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 28, 2025 · 7:30 am

6:00 am Call from Israel

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

My younger brother, David, and I

have had our differences over

women, religion, and politics,

but the thread that has held us together

is our shared love for the Mets

and deep hatred for the Yankees.

We would get together regularly

over beer and baseball out at City Field

and would scream our heads off

when the Mets dramatically won.

Those were the best times with him.

But he suddenly found religion 

and moved himself, family, and work

to a suburb of Tel Aviv where

he quickly found a job in technology

and developed a quick ear for Hebrew.

We would talk on the phone once a week

but it wasn’t the same thing.

Then the bombs began to fall.

I was constantly worried and scanned

the news for reports of damages.

Exhausted one recent night after a tense 

Mets game, I fell asleep at 11, early for me.

The phone suddenly flooded in light.

“David?”

“What happened?” he asked frantically.

“What happened where?” I said, my voice equally raised.

 “Do you know what time it is?” I shouted. 

“Are you all right? Sarah and the kids?”

I pictured him bleeding on some hospital gurney.

“The game, man, tell me the score. 

The Israeli sports feed went out in the 9th.

I was up all night. Did they win?”

“The Mets won, David. Calm down. They’re in 

the series against Philly. If they win, they

get the Dodgers, tough team.”

It felt as if we were back together at Citi Field,

just like in the old days.

“Good night, David, glad you’re all right.”

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

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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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March 10, 2025 · 6:30 am

My Mother Museum

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI) 

First Gallery

My father lost her cookbook after multiple moves, the black-and-white student’s notebook in which she wrote down her favorite recipes in bold, foreign-looking script. It was the one possession of hers I wanted most after she died.  I relished watching her cook with the ease and flair of a professional chef in our dimly-lit Washington Heights kitchen with a view of another Depression-era apartment building across the street.  Same gold and brown bricks, with an equally ridiculously English name like The Windermere in a neighborhood that had been filled with German-Jewish refugees and was slowly becoming Hispanic.  But the book was unique, my mother as curator.

Second Gallery

The small cameo brooch of a woman in profile must be fifty years old or more but looks brand new because she never wore it.  A friend brought it back for her from Italy is all I remember her saying.  But who?  Was it the Polish man I heard about from a family friend after she died, the man she “should have married,” a socialist from Vilnius like her instead of my born-on-a-farm father?  Why did she keep it if she never put it on/why did she never put it on?  What did it mean to her?  I’m asking these questions too late.  It nestles in its white cardboard box lined with cotton, untouched, pristine, a buoy in a mysterious sea.  

Third Gallery

The cream-colored enameled compact weighs over half a pound, is embossed with leaves and a bird in flight.  Embossed in gold and made in France: modèle déposé, registered design.  There’s room for a lipstick, there’s a mirror inside on the left, there’s a lidded compartment for face powder on the right.  It’s an object out of a film noir, the kind of thing a lustrous femme fatale would use with magical, elegant hands to make herself up while people stared at her effrontery, her chic.  Oh, she was definitely chic.  One of her students from Belgium said “Elle avait du chien“: French for desirable, intelligent, and strong.  I see that in some photos from the late 40s.  By the 50s the look has disappeared and she’s an American housewife.

Fourth Gallery

Hanging in her closet in a plastic dry cleaner’s bag like any ordinary dress was the slave labor camp dress she was wearing when freed by Americans in eastern Germany, April 15, 1945.  Dark gray strips that seem almost purple on light gray stripes.  Thin, grim cotton with a roughly-sewn beige number patch above her heart.  The number helped me access German records of her incarceration in ghettos and camps.  Was this relic kept as evidence that she might not have survived if WWII had lasted longer?  That the crimes she endured were real?  It won’t tell me.  Can you really call it a “dress” or even a “uniform”?  Reality seems too big for such small words, for the bomb lurking there day after day. 

Last Gallery

This particular lined notebook has not been lost, but I wish it had been.  Black-and-white exterior, starker still inside: a record of her deepening dementia caused by years of chain smoking.  Here, instructions are repeated about when to take which pill.  Bits of news randomly copied from the New York Times.  Worst of all, grotesque, are the definitions of “Memory” she transcribed from a dictionary.  Remember, Remember, Remember says every miserable page.   The desperate lament of a mind drifting out to sea, the words of a voluble, witty, multi-lingual woman ordered at first, then scrambled, finally misspelled, broken, gone.  I want to destroy it but I can’t—it’s her anguished Last Will and Testament.

Gift Shop

CLOSED

Lev Raphael is an American pioneer in writing about the Second Generation, a project that he began in the late 1970s.  He’s the author of Writing a Jewish Life, Dancing on Tisha B’av, My Germany and 24 other books in many genres.  His work has appeared in fifteen languages and he’s done invited talks and readings in Israel, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, Canada and all across the US.  Venues included the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Oxford University, and The LIbrary of Congress. Lev taught creative writing at Michigan State University and Regents College in London, and has been invited to teach at Leipzig University in Germany.  Michigan State University has purchased his literary papers and they are available to students and scholars for research.

The piece first appeared in The Chaffin Review and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

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February 17, 2025 · 7:30 am

Jewish Questions

by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)

I’m sorry,” the Danish receptionist said in English. “But I’ll need to search your bag before you go in.”

When we had planned our second trip to Copenhagen, I hadn’t thought of going to the Dansk Jødisk Museum, the Danish Jewish Museum—I didn’t even know that it existed. But it turned out that the fifth-floor apartment I’d rented for our week-long stay in the Norrebro neighborhood overlooked a beautiful, old Jewish cemetery from the 17th century. The first time I stood on the apartment’s balcony, I noticed that in the shade of several very tall, slender trees, there was a cemetery, not the park I had expected. It looked wild and untended, with countless worn, old gravestones of varying sizes, some standing straight up, some crooked, and others lying completely flat, all surrounded by lush, flowering summer weeds. And at the opposite end of the cemetery from our apartment, there was an old brick wall that had a small gate in it. The sense of death, of life, and of history all together left me with a quiet feeling of awe.

However, I hadn’t even realized that Jews had lived in Denmark since the 17th century, and now it turned out there had been enough Jews in Denmark to fill up a cemetery. But, of course, Jews went everywhere, didn’t they? Wandering Jews, they called us in the 19th century because we were always looking for ways to escape oppression, persecution, and violence—always searching for places we could call home. That was what became the “Jewish Question.”

But even after exploring the cemetery itself, which was founded in 1694 and was 13,500 square meters with around 5,500 burials, and then reading up on the history of Jews in Denmark, I was left with many questions.

My husband, Brad, was also intrigued. So, when I told him I discovered in my online searches that there was a Jewish museum in central Copenhagen, he immediately said, “Let’s go!”

It took us a while to find the museum because it was, to our surprise, part of the complex of old buildings surrounding the Royal Palace and the entrance was through a very small contemporary addition to a larger old building. When we walked through the front door into the museum’s lobby, there was just one person sitting at the reception desk and we were the only visitors in the room. The receptionist spoke perfect English, but she was very Danish-looking—blond, blue-eyed, and with Scandinavian features—so she was clearly not someone who shared my heritage.

After we bought out tickets, the receptionist asked us whether we wanted to use one of the lockers before we went into the museum. When we said no, she searched my very small handbag.

The receptionist apologized again after I showed her the sunglasses, sunscreen, lipstick, tissues, and charge cards that I had tucked into my little cross-body bag.

“I understand,” I said. “I’m Jewish so I appreciate you being careful.” Still a wave of unease washed over me at the thought that even here in Copenhagen—where everyone seemed so civilized, so very nice—extra security was needed at any place that was “Jewish.”

When we walked through the doorway into the museum proper, we entered a very unusual space. Although the outer shell of the building, which was originally the Royal Boat House from the 17th century, had brick walls, large arched windows, and vaulted ceilings, the interior was very modern and untraditional. The inner, white paneled walls were tilted and asymmetrical, and they seem to be arranged in some kind of labyrinth. And the wooden floors that guided visitors to the exhibits embedded in the walls were sloping instead of flat. Altogether, the design left me feeling tipsy and off balance.

Then, we noticed a very odd little display that had video images of Jewish people projected into a small model of a two-story house and a companion audio track promising a brief history of 400 years of Jewish life in Denmark, starting with the arrival of the very first Jewish merchants back in 1622. So we sat down together and put on the headphones. And as soon as I heard the narrator begin with these questions — Where are you going? Are you going home? Where is home? — I started to cry.

At first, I felt embarrassed about the tears flowing down my cheeks, but then I thought fuck it, it’s a Jewish museum and I’m Jewish, and if I fucking feel like crying I’ll fucking cry even if I have no idea why. My sorrow felt so primal, triggered instantly from somewhere deep inside me.

As I continued listening to the audio presentation and watching the display, I calmed down. Most of what the presentation covered was information I was already familiar with by then—how the first Jews in Denmark were Sephardic merchants invited by Denmark’s King Christian IV to settle in a new town, Glückstadt, on the river Elbe, in the early 17th century. The story is that King Christian thought that having Jewish merchants living in his new town would bring more business to the community. Later Ashkenazi Jews, like the Jews I’m descended from, also joined the Sephardic merchants.

I even laughed to myself when I saw the video images of actors playing early Jewish merchants in their storehouse with bags of coffee beans and chocolate. Ah hah! I thought. They tolerated the Jewish traders because they wanted all that good stuff those Jews knew how to obtain. But then they showed a short scene illustrating how the Jews back then had to practice their religion in secret, hidden behind drawn curtains and closed doors in their own houses. It turned out that the dispensation made for the Jews by King Christian only included protection, the right to hold “private religious services,” and the right to maintain their own cemetery. I quickly realized that being “tolerated” and “protected” was not the same as being an equal member of Danish society. Same old, same old, I thought.

Eventually, though, in the late 18th century, the King expanded the rights of Danish Jews, allowing them to buy real estate, establish schools, study at the university, and join guilds. Then, finally, a royal decree on March 29, 1814 granted the Jewish people the same rights as other citizens. In contrast, the Russian Empire, where all four of my grandparents were born and where they were restricted to living within the Pale of Settlement, never granted citizenship to the Jews who lived within its borders.

However, for various reasons—the Danish government restricting immigration to people who had money, Danish Jews intermarrying with Danish Christians—the population of Jews in Denmark during the 400 years after they first arrived remained fairly small. And now the population was only about 6,000.

After the presentation was over, we walked through the rest of the museum, which was dedicated to the more recent history of the Jews in Denmark, especially during World War II. We learned that the walls inside the museum were carefully arranged in form of the four Hebrew letters that spelled mitzvah, which is the Hebrew word for “commandment” and also for “good deeds” that fulfill a religious commandment.

The mitzvah that the museum was designed to reflect was the aid the Danish people gave to their Jewish neighbors, over 7,000 in total, during the Nazi invasion, when they helped almost of all them to escape on boats to Sweden, which was neutral during the World War II. Later, after the war was over, almost all the Jewish refugees returned to Denmark, though some then emigrated to Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States. That’s why Denmark had the highest survival rate of Jewish people of any country invaded by the Germans: 95 percent. And two of the people who were saved from the Nazis became well-known public figures. Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, was one of the early refugees who fled to Sweden, and, after he himself evacuated, he helped arrange the mass rescue of over 7,000 Danish Jews. And Arne Jacobsen, an architect and mid-century modern Danish designer, escaped on a small boat to Sweden and spent his two years there creating fabric designs based on Swedish nature. After he returned to Copenhagen, he became world renowned for both his famous buildings, such as The Stelling House and Aarhaus City Hall, and for his designs of everyday objects, including his iconic Egg chair. He is now considered the grandfather of modern Danish design.

This, I knew, was in stark contrast to the fate of the Jews in Lithuania, the country my mother’s family was from, where the Lithuanian people aided the Nazis in exterminating their Jewish neighbors, resulting in the lowest survival rate for Jewish people out of all the countries invaded by the Germans, only 5 percent. The Nazis didn’t even need to move the Jews of Lithuania to concentration camps because the work of taking people into the woods, shooting them, and burying them in mass graves was often done by the Lithuanians themselves. And I knew too that some of my maternal grandmother’s family members who had not emigrated from Lithuania before the war, including her two brothers, Leizer and Laibl, were murdered in this exact way.

“Even though it’s still a bit weird to me to think of Jews living in Scandinavia,” I said to my husband, “They were right to come here.”

As we walked out of the museum into the sunny courtyard, I noticed that what had originally looked like an abstract sculpture outside the museum’s entrance was actually the outline of a ship. And I realized then that with its slanted, uneven floors and its angled walls, the museum had intentionally evoked in me the visceral sensations of walking on a small boat out at sea and the disorientation of a world turned upside down. Those feelings were still clinging to me.

As I found my feet again on the steady earth of the low-lying, flat city and we headed back to the apartment overlooking the old Jewish cemetery, I remembered that—come to think of it—today wasn’t the only time I had cried in a Jewish museum. The first time was in 2019 at the end of our visit to the Jewish museum in Sevilla, Spain, which we decided to visit only because it was just a couple of blocks from where we were staying, which, by chance, happened to be in the old Jewish quarter, now called Santa Cruz, adjacent to the Alcazar. The story was that the Jewish quarter was right next to the royal palace so everyone would know that Jews there were under the protection of the king.

Even though Sevilla once had the largest Jewish community in Spain (around 5,000 people, including doctors, scientists, lawyers, merchants, and money lenders) with 33 synagogues, the Centro de Interpretaction Juderia de Sevilla was small and modest—just a few window-less rooms in a very old Sephardic house. Displayed on colored walls, the exhibit was mainly a collection of manuscripts, maps, and other documents, some from the 1391 pogrom and some from the time of Spanish Inquisition, along with legends about a few of the people who had lived in the Jewish quarter before the Jews were expelled from Seville in 1483 and a small number of everyday objects they had left behind. These all just left me feeling vaguely sad. All those written explanations and stories printed on placards, and old “things” behind glass felt like tales from a distant past that had nothing to do with me. In the last room before the exit, the delicate, yellowed dress of a child who had once lived in the Jewish quarter evoked a small wave of sorrow within me but didn’t move me to tears.

However, when we followed the signs to the exit, which led us in a different direction than the entrance, we walked through a room where there were dozens of large black iron keys hanging from the ceilings on strings. Without knowing what those keys signified, I felt an upswelling of a very powerful but unnamable emotion.

“Wow,” I said to Brad, as I stopped walking and just looked up at all those keys.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s intense.”

Then, after we passed out of that final room and returned to the reception area, I asked the receptionist in English, “What is the meaning of those keys?” She explained that when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, the Jews of Sevilla took their house keys with them because they hoped they’d be able to come back to their homes one day. Living in exile, they had passed those keys down to their descendants, generation after generation after generation, until now, when those very same keys were donated to the museum. And that’s when I started to cry.

When I returned to the US after visiting Copenhagen, I walked to Indian Rock in the Berkeley Hills and climbed up the steep steps that were carved into the rock to reach the top. I wanted to see the panorama that never fails to thrill me—the great San Francisco Bay shining in the sun, with Mount Tamalpais to the northwest, San Francisco to the southwest, and in between the Golden Gate, the entrance to the bay that opens out into the Pacific Ocean. “Is this my home?” I wondered. Of course, I was born in California and lived here most of my adult life, but sometimes I felt like a stranger here on the Pacific Rim, half a world away from Eastern Europe where all four of my grandparents were born. 

All those keys in the museum in Seville were so heartbreaking because of the hopes they represented—for hundreds of years, people held onto those keys on the chance that one day, someday, they might be able to use them once again to open the doors their ancestors had closed behind them when they were expelled from Spain. But I never had that kind of hope. The only relatives of my Lithuanian grandmother who survived the Holocaust were two of her sister’s children, Israel and Leah. After the war, the siblings met up in Lithuania and went back to their old house in Kudirkos Naumiestis. There they found their home was already occupied by Lithuanians who refused to leave. So Israel left for Brazil and Leah made it to Israel. Why would I ever think about going “home” to a place like that?

On the other hand, there I was at that moment on top of a large, volcanic rock on land where for six thousand years the xučyun (Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people) had lived, but which after that was claimed by Spain in 1542, and after that was owned by Mexico when it became independent in 1821, and after that was purchased from Mexico by the US after the Mexican-American war in 1848. I just looked out at the view and took it all in.

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 (see yogafortimesofchange.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. 

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August 12, 2024 · 7:30 am

With love, always

by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

I picture my mother

white shmata cleaning rag

like an eternal light in her hand

seeking to brighten the furniture

in our little used dining room,

shining the up-right piano

I practiced on so badly,

I’ll be loving you, always,

Irving Berlin’s ode to enduring love

always on her lips.

I miss her voice, tremulous, soft,

but always on tune.

I miss her nut cake, her famous

desert that friends, loved ones,

neighbors adored and scarfed down

as soon as it emerged from the oven.

Seven sticks of butter and lord knows

how many cups of sugar

slithered down our grateful throats.

I take out her well-loved serving dishes

when my mahjong friends gather.

Red and white ceramic with pictures

of stately castles in Europe never visible

from the shtetl she came from.

They could even be worth something

but I’d never sell them, I still see her hands

scrubbing their delicate surfaces clean.

We always fought, she and I,

her frame of reference

always Europe and the devastation

of the Jews she left behind.

Mine, trying to dwell

and inhabit this brave new world

of America where she had come.

We always fought and I thought

maybe I didn’t love her enough,

maybe she loved me too much,

always wanting to protect me from

the alien world she found herself in.

I always loved her,

I know that now,

maybe as much as she loved me.

In my mind, she wears a red babushka,

slips it off her grey hair

to wave at the bus we wait for.

signals the bus driver to stop.

She yells, “Yoo Hoo, Yoo Hoo”.

Instead of cringing and looking where to hide,

today in my mind, my lips rush up

to graze her lined cheek, with love always.

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

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