Tag Archives: l’dor v’dor

June 22, 2009 · 10:36 am

Remembering Who I Am

By Monica Rozenfeld (New York, NY)

“It’s Friday! It’s Friday!” my grandmother screamed in distress after Mom turned off the lights in the bedroom. “It’s Friday!”

I was sitting there, witness to the mayhem, not understanding why turning off the lights had anything to do with it being Friday.

I thought that my grandmother had hit some sort of syndrome in her old age.

It was several years later when I fully understood that the only syndrome she had hit was nostalgia for a tradition her family no longer kept.

My family is from Russia, now the Ukraine, where it’s no secret that religious practice was not allowed during my grandmother’s youth. Religious schools were closed, and anyone discovered practicing Judaism was punished harshly.

So, my parents did not have an example of Jewish practice to pass down to me.

The secrets of Judaism had been hidden. Only my great grandparents knew them well: Shabbos, holidays, rituals, Hebrew, and history.

I was an oblivious Jew.

But when I started learning about Judaism in college, the pieces started to fit together.

Friday wasn’t just Friday; it was Shabbos. My grandmother knew the word, but was afraid to say it. So “Friday” became her secret code.

Little by little, I unraveled the pieces of my grandmother’s hidden Jewish life.

Her hatred for traveling on Saturday. Her refusal to cook after sundown on Friday. It all began to make sense.

“Oh, my father loved the holidays,” she would tell me in her beautiful Russian accent. “He celebrated every single one.”

Every single one, and I knew nothing of Purim, Shavout, or even Shabbos.

But after she related these kind memories, my grandmother would share little else with me. She was still afraid of the consequences.

“I’m not sure I am allowed to tell you,” she would say to many of my questions.

I’m not sure her fears ever subsided.

During the Holocaust, my mother once told me, she was just one gunshot away from the end of her life.

If that gun had gone off, my mother would never have come into the world, and I, of course, wouldn’t be here.

Before the gun was fired, though, a Russian soldier, speaking in perfect German, demanded the Nazi put down his gun and leave, and he did.

And my grandmother hadn’t forgotten G-d since that day.

So how did I start learning about Judaism?

The truth is, I always had sparks of G-d in me.

I always talked to G-d, and I always felt I walked with G-d.

But I didn’t know it was a “Jewish” G-d that I believed in until I took a Torah class in college. The speaker–a rabbi–said, “You only fall when you forget who you are.”

I was awe-struck, glued to this sentence: I only fall when I forget who I am. I only fall when.. I forget who I am?

Who was I?

The only solid answer that I came up with was: I’m Jewish.

And that visceral response led me on a Jewish path to finding my existence in this awakened identity.

Since then, I’ve become even more curious and engaged and excited to learn.

I want to know everything that I can about Judaism and what Judaism has to do with me. And I want to know how to thank Judaism for the very existence of me.

I just want to know.

Judaism has become more than an identity, a culture, a spiritual retreat. It has become my world.

And as I continue to learn about Jewish history – from our exile to slavery to the gun pointed at my grandmother – I find myself in awe that I am here, today, and, here, Jewishly.

I guess it’s true that we all go on our own soul-search trying to find out who we are and where we belong. I’m sure there have been many times I have been tested, forced to question who I am. But it was when I discovered, maybe rediscovered, all these things my soul already knew, that I figured it out.

Being Jewish is the most unshakable thing about me and what connects me to my past, and hopefully to my future.

Monica Rozenfeld currently works at a Jewish education-non profit and is the founder of TheJewSpot (http://thejewspot.org/). She owes many thanks to Maimonides, a fellowship program she participated in during college, which opened up the doors to her Jewish soul and is the reason she is engaged in Judaism today.

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May 11, 2009 · 8:21 am

Shards of Faith, Reassembled

by Van “Zev” Wallach (Stamford, CT)

I wear a chai — the Jewish letter symbolizing life — around my neck. I’ve studied Hebrew and Yiddish, have visited Israel, subscribe to Jewish newspapers, and have been told I look rabbinical. In fact, my great-great-grandfather, Heinrich Schwarz, was the first ordained rabbi in Texas.

Hearing this religious background, you would never imagine my spiritual journey began as a New Testament-reading, hell-fearing member of the First Baptist Church of Mission, Texas. How the heck, so to speak, did that happen? And how did I return to Judaism?

The story began when my mother’s German ancestors moved to Texas in the 1870s, settling in small towns amidst Christians who enjoyed nothing as much as hectoring Jews until they saw the light. My mother married my St. Louis-born father, son of Russian immigrants, in Temple Emanuel in McAllen, Texas. They moved to France, where their union produced two sons.

As in other spheres, the Russians and the Germans couldn’t get along, so my parents divorced and my mother returned to her hometown of Mission, on the Mexican border. My father remarried and moved to New York, and I saw him one weekend in 10 years, a gap lasting from 1962 to 1972.

Shards of Jewishness lodge in my earliest memories. While my mother had no outward interest in any faith, she had bucked the family trend toward intermarriage and then provided, for reasons I cannot fathom, some aspects of a Jewish home. I like to think that a spark of the neshama, or soul, of Rabbi Schwarz remained in her and she unconsciously passed that along.

Once we went to Temple Emanuel, although my brother Cooper and I didn’t like it. Mom taught us the essential Jewish prayer, the Sh’ma. We had a menorah in the house, the Union Prayer Book, and The Wit and Wisdom of the Talmud, printed in the 1920s. Mom kept a bottle of Manischewitz concord grape wine in the refrigerator, forever skewing my taste toward nauseatingly sweet kosher wines.

I remember Mom sobbing when she watched Judgment at Nuremberg on TV. She saved her ketubah, or Jewish wedding contract. But we never had a Shabbat dinner, nor a seder, nor Hanukkah celebrations. An unexplained rift with the Jewish community in nearby McAllen ended almost all contact with other Jews in the area.

Isolated and indifferent to Jewish practice, my mother left religious instruction to our Southern Baptist neighbor, Mrs. D. Her basalt-hard faith reflected the Baptists’ smothering love of and barely concealed disdain for “the Jewish people” to make our family a natural target for intense spiritual cultivation.

Every Sunday, Cooper and I got carted off to the First Baptist, and in the summer we attended Vacation Bible School. My search for identity in an overwhelming non-Jewish world flowed toward Christian belief. From a young age, the hellfire messages of Baptist preachers terrified me into unease, guilt, and finally acquiescence.

I accepted Jesus to relieve the gnawing fear of damnation and was duly baptized on Super Bowl Sunday 1972. That’s also the day the beloved Dallas Cowboys, coached by Mission’s own Christian gentleman, Tom Landry, beat the Miami Dolphins 24-3. Thank you, Lord!

And yet, we remained the town Jews. My mother’s family moved to Mission in 1925; everybody knew who and what we were. Mrs. D called Cooper and me her “Jew-els.” When golf-obsessed Cooper wanted to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in high school, the adult sponsor exclaimed, “Why, Cooper, you can’t join the FCA. You’re a Jew!”

Meanwhile, a kernel of curiosity about our heritage sprouted in me. I listened to a San Antonio radio show, The Christian-Jew Hour, and read literature from the so-called Messianic Jews to try to square the circle of irreconcilable belief systems.

The circle would be broken when Cooper and I finally visited our long-absent father in Manhattan for a week in 1972. A self-employed engineer with WASP pretensions, he attacked my religious beliefs and most aspects of our small-town Texas upbringing, which he loathed. In his ham-handed way, he showed me I didn’t have to be a Baptist. He pried a few fingers from my death grip on the King James Bible.

Doubts, like weeds, cracked the concrete of my faith. Bit by bit, I became disenchanted with Christianity. It felt less organic, more imposed on me. As a high school sophomore I was nervy enough to talk to the rabbi in McAllen, although I could not admit my Baptist background. I even attended Rosh Hashanah services in 1974, my great act of teenage rebellion.

When I told my mother what I was going, she started crying. “Van, I didn’t know you were interested,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think you would understand,” I said. I was 16 years old.

I stopped church but lacked the strength to start going to temple. By 1975 my identity and belief as a Southern Baptist had vanished. My Jewish self-education started as I read books like This is My God by Herman Wouk and Basic Judaism by Milton Steinberg.

I liked what I read about Judaism, the faith’s simplicity and self-acceptance versus the devouring anxiety I felt as a Christian, where I always wondered if I measured up to perfection, whether I really believed. Trust me on this – Jewish guilt is nothing compared to the fears of a doubting evangelical. The last time I ever attended the First Baptist was to get a graduation Bible as a high school senior in 1976.

I first met Jews outside my family as a freshman at Princeton University. I checked out Hillel activities during Freshman Week and signed up for Hillel classes. But while I had left the Baptists, they hadn’t left me. My heritage dogged me, along with my utter lack of familiarity with Jewish practice and culture (getting the jokes in Annie Hall doesn’t count).

I had never attended Hebrew school, never lit Hanukkah candles, never had a Shabbat dinner, never attended a Passover seder. The Jews at Princeton seemed so East Coast smart and at ease, even jaded, in their faith. I felt shame at my ignorance. Book learning could not replace the experiential void. I yearned to know and be accepted, but I had no way to do that. Like the simple son at the seder, I did not know to ask.

I thought about unburdening myself to the Hillel rabbi, but he intimidated me. Indeed, I feared all Jewish authority figures as echoes of my father who would mock rather than understand me. Christianity remained my cross to bear. While my former beliefs held no appeal, I could not find a niche in Princeton’s Jewish life.

Jewish holidays passed in silence. Nobody invited me home for seders. Had I been more involved in Hillel, able to say those three hardest little words — “I need help” — then maybe I would have been welcome somewhere. I never asked, and nobody ever answered.

That changed in my senior year when classmates Marc and Steve invited me to join their families in Brooklyn and the Bronx for Passover. These friends helped me take my first steps in living a Jewish life. They both did great mitzvot — good deeds — and I will always be grateful to Marc and Steve and their parents for welcoming the stranger in their midst.

The pace of Jewish exploration quickened after I moved to Brooklyn a week after I graduated from Princeton. Synagogue-hopping became my weekend obsession, as I sought to expand my Jewish experiences. I sampled everything from Reform to the Flatbush Minyan and for a while attended the beginners’ services at the orthodox Lincoln Square Synagogue. But I could never talk about the past. I arrived at services eager and anxious, and seemingly from nowhere.

How deeply that past remained embedded in me soon became obvious. I had met a woman, Beth, who was Jewish, jolly, and from Long Island. She invited me to join carolers bringing holiday cheer to Brooklyn. I reluctantly agreed and we gathered one Saturday.

Was the first song “Jingle Bells”? I don’t remember. What I do recall is a sudden choking feeling. A wave of anxiety washed over me as I realized, I can’t do this. The songs all had meanings and childhood associations far beyond secular celebration.

“I’m sorry, I have to leave,” I told Beth as I hurried away.

I called her later to explain. While Beth saw the songs from a distance, to me they reflected a faith I had been raised in, an affirmation of the birth of the Savior. To this day I do not sing or listen to holiday music — whether the topic is Jesus, a white Christmas, or Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.

I finally settled on the conservative Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn as my shul. I still recall my first Saturday morning service. I knew so little about Jewish customs that I recoiled and shook my head when a man offered me the honor of an aliyah during the Torah reading.

During an aliyah, you read prayers in Hebrew before and after parts of the weekly recitation from the Jewish Bible. I had no idea what to do, and I declined. Who was I to deserve this? What if I screwed up?

I had reached an impasse. Spiritually, I was at ease in Jewish beliefs and had no desire to go backward, but I saw no way forward without ‘fessing up to my ignorance and what I viewed as my twisted background. I finally decided to speak with Kane Street’s rabbi, a man I immensely liked. In this Jewish version of a confessional, I came clean – about my parents, the Baptist beliefs, the unguided drift from Christianity to Judaism, my sense of shame at what I had been.

To my surprise and delight, the rabbi was not the least bit shocked. It turned out I wasn’t the first Jew to lack a bar mitzvah or an enriching Jewish upbringing. Imagine that. Our conversation marked my fresh start as a Jew. As the Baptists would say, I got right with God. I felt relief that I had faced the facts of the past and didn’t get laughed at.

Over the last 25 years, I have built my version of a Jewish life. I have studied Hebrew and feel, if not fluent, then more aware of what’s happening during services. I was married at the Kane Street Synagogue in 1989 by a new rabbi, a woman I like to call “Rebbe Debbie.”

Since my divorce in 2003, I have dated only Jewish women, who I find intelligent, passionate, and adorable. The rhythms of Judaism seeped into me, so that I transferred the emotional response I had to Christian prayers and music to Jewish liturgy that I have heard hundreds of times – Aleiynu, Adon Olam, Yedid Nefesh, Ain Keloheynu, Kaddish and Israel’s national anthem, Hatikva.

My adult experiences are catching up to the intellectual leap I made as a teenager. I gave myself the Hebrew name “Zev” (wolf) to use when I have an aliyah, an act that rattles me only slightly now.

While I’ve made peace with my past and current beliefs, I am still aware of the split in my life. My Jewish friends remember childhood seders; I colored Easter eggs. They played with dreydls; I decorated Christmas trees. They hated Hebrew school; I liked Vacation Bible School. My childhood and adult sides are mostly separate.

The chasm yawned whenever I returned to Mission and visited with Mrs. D. My break with the past saddened her. “Could you ever believe the way you used to?” she once asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m happy with what I am now.”

But some shards of faith bridge the distance of decades. I have the family menorah and the Union Prayer Book from Mission, and books that mention that hardy Prussian on the prairie, Rabbi Schwarz.

The chai around my neck? Mom gave that treasure to me for Hanukkah 1979, four years before she died of cancer. While a Baptist preacher presided over my mother’s funeral in 1984 and she was cremated, her older sister Charlotte, a fervent Baptist, placed Mom’s tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Gonzales, Texas, next to their parents’ graves.

Whenever I’m in McAllen, I attend services at Temple Emanuel – where I feel most welcome. And I still say the Sh’ma every night, the way my mother taught me.

Van “Zev” Wallach is a writer based in Stamford, Connecticut. A native of Mission, Texas, he holds an economics degree from Princeton University. Van writes frequently on religion, politics and other matters. His interests include travel, digital photography, world music and blogging, which he does at Kesher Talk http://keshertalk.com/, where this piece originally appeared.

“Shards of Faith, Reassembled” is reprinted with permission of the author.

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February 16, 2009 · 7:31 am

The Sabbath

by Sandra Yoffee (Sarasota, FL)

My visits with my grandparents were always treasured times, especially when it included the Sabbath.

This was a day joyfully observed each week since my Grandmother, Bubbe, and Grandfather, Zedeh, were devout Orthodox Jews.

On Friday evening before sunset, Zedeh would change from his shabby work clothes into his steel-grey wool suit and snowy white shirt accented with a muted maroon tie.  In his weathered black shoes, he then walked to the nearby synagogue to welcome the Sabbath with prayers.

Bubbe, who remained at home, would light the Sabbath candles and put the finishing touches on her day-long task of preparing the Sabbath meal.

“Come here, my child, and watch as I welcome the Sabbath by lighting the candles,” she said.

I watched as she circled her wrinkled hands around the flames of the candles. With her hands placed over her closed eyes, she sang the blessings for lighting the candles. The beautiful candelabra, etched in silver, resembled a small tree with branches that held six candles. When all the candles were lit, the room was bathed in the glow of their flames.

When Zedeh returned from shul, we sat down at the dining room table to enjoy a delicious Sabbath meal.

After the blessing over the wine and challah, we would feast on steaming chicken soup with feathery light kneidlach, succulent roast chicken, and luscious kugel.

After dinner Bubbe and I sat in the darkened living room on the brown mohair sofa with only the shimmering light of the Sabbath candles.

She told me stories from the old country, and, while the Yiddish flowed, I listened until my eyelids grew heavy and I fell asleep.

On Sabbath morning, we dressed in our finest clothes and walked to their synagogue, B’nai Moshe, on Fifth Street in South Philadelphia.

The synagogue was a beautiful building with many stained glass windows that, through their pictures, told the history of our Jewish heritage.

Bubbe took me upstairs to the balcony where we sat with all the women.  She introduced me to her friends and told them I was her “shaynah aynecal,” her beautiful granddaughter.

With the sound of the women’s whispered prayers in my ears, I leaned over the railing and watched my Zedeh pray in the sanctuary below.

The men, covered with prayer-shawls, swayed front to back as they prayed.

The melodies of their prayers still linger in my memory.

Whenever I go to synagogue today–if I listen quietly–I can hear echoes of those prayers.

The simplicity of their lives, intertwined with their religious practices, forever remains a beautiful part of my memory of them.

Thus my grandparents instilled in me my pride and joy of being Jewish.

Sandra Yoffee was born in Philadelphia, PA, and moved with her husband, A.G., in 2002 to Sarasota, FL, where she is a member of “The Six Pearls,” a writing group dedicated to memoir-writing.

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February 9, 2009 · 8:19 am

Digging in the Dirt: Gardens, Blessings, and Tu B’Shevat

By Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

With Tu B’Shevat coming, I’ve been thinking about the holiday–it’s the new year of the trees, the end of winter, the beginning of spring– and about our attachment to the land and its fruits. Living in New York City for the past 25 years, it’s so easy to feel disconnected from the holiday. This year, however, is different. My father has taught me to be a gardener.

Gardening has given me another perspective on produce and how it gets from the ground to the table. I grew up in Connecticut and now live in New York City, where it’s easy to think that vegetables come from the Food Emporium or Fairway, and that they really do grow with that shiny spray stuff on them. It’s easy to forget that produce comes from the dirt.

I’ve never been a nature girl and wanted nothing to do with my father’s garden for many years. But I became interested about two years ago as I watched my father work in his garden and saw the look on his face. My father welcomed me into the garden. He taught me how to smell the soil to see if it is good, how squash should be planted close together in a circle and then thinned out, how cucumbers need to be planted near a fence because their tendrils need to climb, and that parsley can last until January or February if it’s covered at night when the frost hits. We worried about what would happen if there was no rain or too much rain. And many times, we were in the garden speaking to the plants, urging them to grow, or just sitting on the lawn watching the garden, and talking about our amazement at how sometimes in the sunlight it seemed we could see the plants growing.

My father taught me that I had to get my hands in the dirt. He said if I wore gloves I wouldn’t be able to feel it. He showed me how to feel the connection between the earth and me. It took time to get used to that. I was constantly on the lookout for worms, snakes, and bugs, but once I made peace with that fear I couldn’t wait to wake up early in the morning, go to the garden, and see what had happened the previous night.

When I was back home in New York, I would call my father, and we’d discuss how the plants were doing in the garden, especially one small, faltering eggplant in the south corner which we finally agreed we couldn’t save and had to pull out. Even when I wasn’t there, the garden was present in my life.

My father showed me how to hill and weed around the plants as they were growing, and I began to feel like a kid again, covered from head to toe in dirt. I began to re-connect to those experiences of seeing things for the first time. My heart jumped when I saw the seeds push their way up through the soil or when the first purple of an eggplant appeared. I ran screaming into the house when we began harvesting the plants to show my mother the first carrots, the first red tomatoes, and ears of corn. I began to understand why my father was always in his garden, and I wanted to be there too. I enjoyed being in the dirt. I looked for work in the garden. If there wasn’t something to be hilled, weeded or planted, I was disappointed.

Before becoming a gardener, I would recite a bracha over food but it didn’t contain much meaning for me. I could recite the blessing in the morning: “Blessed are you, Sovereign of the Universe, who dresses the naked” because I knit and know the amount of work that goes into making a garment. As I put on my clothes, I could relate to the seriousness and intention of this blessing. I don’t want to recite a blessing in vain, and I think the fact that I couldn’t connect to an experience with the earth made it hard for me to consistently recite the brachot over food.

And then the garden got me thinking about figure eights. The more I gardened, the more I saw and felt the growing process, the more I saw how brachot are related to experience, and how experience is related to brachot and how they are truly inseparable. I understood how brachot and experience constantly flow back and forth, into and out of each other. I think that’s probably what the rabbis had in mind when they created brachot.

My experience with brachot has been enriched because I made the connection that the rabbis were trying to teach. I don’t mean to say that one must have a deep experience in order to recite a bracha. That’s not possible every time, and one doesn’t need have to have my type of direct experience either. I don’t have a spiritual experience every time I recite a bracha. But what I hope for is that a bracha, which is really an acknowledgement and doesn’t need to always be formal, will sustain me, will relate to an experience, and I hope that my experiences will make me want to acknowledge them with brachot.

This year I plan to celebrate Tu B’Shevat at a seder (a kabbalistic invention modeled on the Passover seder) with four cups of wine and different types of fruit. Even though it is winter and I am far from the garden, I know that the experience of reciting brachot at the seder will take me back to the garden and that the garden has brought me to a new understanding of the land, its fruits, blessings, and brachot.

Janet R. Kirchheimer, a poet and teaching fellow at CLAL–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, is the author of How to Spot One of Us, a collection of poems about the Holocaust.

This essay, which previously appeared in e-CLAL, CLAL’s weekly webzine, and in various Jewish newspapers, is reprinted here with the author’s permission

If you’d like to read a sampling of poems from How to Spot One of Us, visit the online magazine, Babel Fruit: http://web.mac.com/renkat/Winter_07/Janet_R._Kirchheimer.html

And if you’d like to learn more about the book, visit: http://www.clal.org/sp137.html.

For more information on Janet, check out the CLAL website: http://www.clal.org/clal_faculty_jrk.html

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February 2, 2009 · 7:49 am

Ask Your Father and He’ll Tell You

By Ruchama King Feuerman (Passaic, NJ)

My father is getting older, weaker. I had been pretending it wasn’t so, ignoring how slowly and consciously he walks to the fridge, how it takes weeks to recover from a cold, how he keeps asking me to repeat what I’m saying because he can’t hear so well. And then there are the new bottles of pills that join the old ones on his night table. I’d been overlooking that.

It’s not that he’s faded completely, not by a long shot. He still has a full head of hair which is pretty amazing for a man his age. He makes astute comments on politics, wry observations about human nature, and knows just the thought-provoking question to ask on the parshah that makes me realize I’m not half as smart as I think I am.

And yet, and yet. While his memory is all there, the vividness of certain memories isn’t. It strikes me as a loss. He is, after all, the repository of the memories of his entire generation. His life was vastly different than mine, and he was there as I began to experience my own life. His life stories shaped mine.  Why should they be lost?

I could kick myself for all the things I didn’t ask my grandparents when they were alive. For instance, my grandmother was always insisting she was related to a famous rabbi. Though we respected our grandmother, for some reason we thought she was exaggerating. Everyone we knew claimed to be related to a famous rabbi. Her last name had been Ziv, which didn’t ring any bells back then. By the time I was older and put together that Ziv and the Alter of Khelm were one and the same family name, my grandmother had already died. I didn’t have enough genealogical information on hand to make a real connection to the Ziv dynasty and I probably never will. Gone. A beautiful piece of family history down the tube. Not to mention the memories she carried with her of a previous generation.

I find as my father ages, I’m seized with urgency. I am hungry for details of his life, the small, seemingly trivial memories that shape a man and his personality–the names of his boyhood friends, the games he played, the after-school jobs he took, the teacher who believed in him, the principal who didn’t. Then there are the big memories that are part of a cultural narrative of what has been called the greatest generation: rationing in World War II, playing marbles at his friend’s house and hearing a radio bulletin announce “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor,” gas and butter rationing during the war, scrap metal collections, having to give up his bedroom every weekend to the Jewish soldiers his parents hosted at their home.

I was so influenced by my father’s memories growing up that I sometimes felt I was right there, observing the single great tragedy of his life, when a car knocked off his ear when he was a young boy. I see him going to school, wearing a bandage on the side of his head because his Depression-era family couldn’t afford to buy him a prosthetic ear. I ask my father everything: how he got kicked out of high school for poor grades only to earn a full merit scholarship a year later to William and Mary College; how twenty-nine relatives all lived in one small house in the 1930s, the whole crew subsisting on Grandpa Sam’s single salary as a tailor; how he became religious in his late twenties and so set in motion a generation’s return to Judaism. I write down everything, and in my father’s retelling of his life, I see an image of Yaakov wrestling with an angel, for just as Yaakov had been maimed and yet emerged stronger, so had my father. I want to know it all, even his failures, the parts where he didn’t vanquish his fears. But not too much failure. It’s hard for a daughter to hear.

They say a photograph is worth a thousand words. We love our photo albums for the memories they hold, but pictures will never capture the who said what to whom and why–the special fragrance of a Pesach cholent, the feel of a Borsalino on a yeshiva bochur’s head, the young daughter who at every Shabbos meal would plan in great detail the kind of wedding she wanted, the certain niggun that made everyone turn pensive. I know now that photos are not nearly enough, that these memories will not carry over unless they are written down.

I search out the details of my father’s life in a way that makes it new to me. He was born in Washington , D.C. and speaks with a Southern accent. As one who found Judaism later in life, he is filled with religious enthusiasm, constantly quoting his rabbi or the Torah in what I call Southern-Israelite speak–he can’t help sounding like a gospel preacher sometimes. His favorite verse from Tehillim is:  “Hashem has granted me joy according to the days he has afflicted me,” and, boy, I see how that verse has played itself out in his years.

He is too weak these days for walks or even to hear details about my children’s life, but he’s never too weak to talk about his own. He gets comfortable on the easy chair. I ask a few questions and he starts speaking. I’m a fast typist (and he speaks more slowly than he used to). I see it’s not the first question I ask that gets him going. It’s the second question, that’s a response to the first. The “Really? And what happened when you said that?” or “Hmm. That sounds pretty terrible.” And he’ll interject, “No, actually it wasn’t,” and he’ll set me straight until I get it all down the way he remembered it and he saw it and knew it. I’m riveted to his words. He doesn’t use any flourishes or metaphors or fancy language. It’s plain, plain, plain, and yet I’m under the spell of a master storyteller. He knows how to pause and make me physically ache for his next phrase. “Nu, so what happened?” I urge. I’m at the edge of my seat. He’s not only telling his story, but my story, too. Because what happened to him is ultimately my story as well. My father’s sense of himself entered me and is part of who I am today, but unless I write it down, my kids won’t understand me, and certainly not him. And every generation must understand the previous one.

At certain points I say, “Dad, did that really happen?” He nods. Uh huh. Or a few times he’ll shake his head, “Don’t put that part in.” I don’t include it, though I can’t understand what he finds so raw or objectionable. Still, they are his memories and he can decide. Sometimes in the middle of speaking he nods off to sleep. I say, “Dad.  Da-a-d?” He gives a start, blinks a few times and says, ‘Where was I?”  “The part where your bubbe was apoplectic because she thought the Irish policeman was going to arrest her,” I prompt. “Oh, that part.” He pauses. “I thought we passed that.” “Nope.” So he obliges and fills me in.

I can hardly believe what he has endured. There have been so many car accidents, aside from the first one. The next accident took place in his early twenties. A car collision threw him fifteen feet from his car and he landed on a huge spread of red ants. Those red ants softened the hard ground and thus, saved his life, but his face blew up afterward like a beach ball. He was laid up in a hospital for six months. There were more accidents that followed and many illnesses. At any point in the year he could walk into a hospital and be admitted. There were financial catastrophes and death struggles to make a living. There were petty betrayals and the deeper disappointments of not fulfilling one’s potential, big mistakes and bad choices. He says it all in a bland voice. He is beyond any requests for pity. It’s like it happened to someone else. Thankfully he rounds it out with the good stuff, the shining moments, the heroism of supporting a family, his religious renaissance, his outrageous chessed and volunteer work and his position as gabbai in shul, the connections he made with people which lifted him to a different plane entirely, the love he instilled into his family. The totality of his life hits me. I type and weep, blow my nose and type some more. He seems surprised to see me cry, and then I can’t help notice a look of gratification on his face. Here at the computer, I am bearing witness to his rich, difficult life.

I’m not alone in this. In the writing workshops I lead, I see more and more people writing about their parents and grandparents. They are more than witnesses. They are creating treasures, word heirlooms to pass down to the next generation. I’m not telling anyone to write about their parents. It just happens. Cousins get thrown in and great uncles and aunts, and neighbors too. Such stories. The bubbe who sped off on a horse to a different village in her eagerness to make a shidduch. The Munkach Hassid who used his famed humor even at the pits, and how some Jews escaped while the Nazis, y’mach shmam, were literally rolling with laughter. Such stories. Sha’al avicha v’yagecha, zkainecha v’yomru lach. “Ask your father and he’ll tell you what happened….” (Deut. 32:7) Hearing these stories, I feel richer. Even if they aren’t my own parents’ stories, they still feel like mine. I feel the scope of another human being, another Jew. Any Jewish life is an event, a reason to sit up, notice and take notes.

Ruchama King Feuerman is a novelist and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times and numerous publications. This story is reprinted with her permission from her recently published anthology, Everyone’s Got a Story. (www.judaicapress.com/product_info.php?products_id=614 – 65k –)

Feuerman, who lived in Israel for ten years studying and teaching Torah, now resides in Passaic, New Jersey, where for the past fifteen years she has taught writing workshops. She recently was awarded a 2009 Artists’ Fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

To find out more about her upcoming writing workshops, visit: http://www.writetogether.typepad.com/

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December 7, 2008 · 4:00 am

From Fancy Rosie’s Needle

By Ferida Wolff (Cherry Hill, NJ)

Grandma Rose lived with us when I was a kid.

She wasn’t a chatty sort of person, but she did tell my sister and me stories. Often they were cautionary tales.

I particularly remember the “Don’t run with…” story. It could be don’t run with a pencil, or don’t run with a fork in your hand, but usually a pair of scissors prompted it.

“Don’t run with scissors,” Grandma Rose would say, and a story would begin.

“When I was your age in the old country, we didn’t have anything. We had only the clothes on our backs and a little bit of food, if we were lucky.”

Grandma Rose’s stories always began that way (and I always had a lot of trouble imagining her as my age).

“One day,” she’d continue, “a neighbor’s boy found a pair of scissors in the road. Now this boy would never listen to what was good for him. If his mother said, ‘Chew slowly or you’ll choke,’ he gobbled and ended up with hiccups. But that’s another story.

“Well, he was so excited to show the scissors to his parents that he ran home. On the way, he tripped and poked out his eye. So, you listen and don’t run.”

I listened. (I didn’t want my eye poked out.) But I was more interested in how the magical scissors or pencil or fork should suddenly appear in a village that had nothing.

So I would ask Grandma Rose questions about the old country and the people she knew, the family members I would never meet, the pre-electrical and pre-plumbing days in a country I would probably never see.

Grandma Rose would sip from her glass of tea, the spoon anchored by her index finger, and tell me about growing up on the outskirts of Vienna and about her life as a fifteen-year-old immigrant in New York City, where she worked as a seamstress.

Her co-workers called her Fancy Rosie because she made beautiful blouses from the scraps of material on the factory floor.

It was hard for me to picture her as Fancy Rosie. All I ever saw her wear was an apron over a housedress, her head wrapped in a babushka.

Years later, when I had my own children, I started asking my mother questions that would help me understand the genetic traits inherited in our family.

She told me stories where Grandma Rose had left off…of growing up in the Great Depression and of the World Wars.

Through my mother’s eyes I saw a different picture of my grandmother.

And as my children grew, they asked me the same kinds of questions that I had asked Grandma Rose.

I told them about growing up in a neighborhood equally divided between Jewish and Italian families.

I hummed the rhythms that I heard at my Sephardic grandparents’ table on Pesach and on long Shabbat afternoons.

Showing my children ancient and faded photographs, I introduced them to relatives who had passed away before I was born and to those who had played with them when they were too young to remember.

Now I am a grandmother.

My daughter is already telling her son stories–one generation passing along the family lore to the next.

And I find comfort in having a past, fitting in somewhere, being part of the unbroken thread from Fancy Rosie’s needle.

Ferida Wolff’s essays appear in newspapers, magazines, and online at www.grandparents.com and www.seniorwomen.com. A frequent contributor to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, she has written 17 books for children, including her latest picture book, The Story Blanket (Peachtree Publishers 2008). You can visit her website: www.feridawolff.com.

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