Tag Archives: mothers and daughters

January 6, 2025 · 7:30 am

I Heard My Grandparents’ Voices

By Esther Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

My grandparents stared from the portrait

Hanging on the wall — dead eyes, expressionless

I used to fantasize that they were somewhere 

Still out in the world, lost, but rescued at the

End of the war, not murdered horrifically, lost in

The mingled ashes at the hell that was Auschwitz

I dreamt that they were survivors who would

Miraculously be found so we could be reunited

Leave it alone! My hope was the naivete of a child

And then the discovery more than half a century later,

My mother’s papers:

Letters from Vienna during the war from

My grandparents to their children and a brother and 

Two sisters caring for my mother’s 

Mother — a tragic figure old and lost

My great-grandmother, an invalid with no words

She couldn’t speak English and I am

Not sure she even knew where she was

From my mother’s closet, several letters from

Her parents, hidden from us in her lifetime

Being read at our behest

In the vocally halting translation by a woman who

Struggled to decode the high German no longer in use

I heard the voices of my grandparents trying to

Encourage the Jewish children they had sent to the safety

Of loving arms in America

They spoke, sending regards to other relatives and friends

I knew well

Having grown up with — making my family suddenly full

Our two central figures included

Finally, part of me in a way that I could keep them forever

They had saved me too by sending their children 

To America…

But they were hiding behind window shades

In their once comfortable Vienna apartment

In terror they were suppressing while making small

Talk about daily life revealing true devotion to 

Each other and their children — hoping to be saved

Knowing they would do what they could to survive

Even as the chessboard of history was countering

Their moves, it was too strong

They used parental injunctions to their boy and girl

To behave and study well and to thrive

And there I sat and met my grandparents who were

Calmly discussing their household management

One time as if at a séance with spiritual intervention

Their tones alive with love; it was in that fractured moment

As if my dream had come true if only for that one–time

Visit — as if they had been merely misplaced in the fog of war —

As if they had survived

Esther Munshine started teaching when she was 20. Her career spanned 50 years, with a generous interruption to raise her family. In 2019, she began writing poems in earnest.  During the pandemic, she met online regularly with other writers sharing their work, safely at a distance. She was an invited featured poet to the second annual National Baseball Poetry Festival in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2024, where she read “Take Me Out” and “First Baseball Game for First Grandson”. “I Heard My Grandparents Voices” is an experience that their grand-daughter is still processing and she appreciates having the chance to share that experience with the community in the Jewish Writing Project. If you’d like to read more of the Esther’s work, visit: https://www.baseballbard.com and Reflections in Poetry and Prose 2023 https://www.uft.org/chapters/retired-teachers-chapter/retiree-programs/reflections-poetry-and-prose

4 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, German Jewry, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

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.

3 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , ,

May 27, 2024 · 7:30 am

First Snow

by Susan Michele Coronel (New York, NY)

It’s mid-January, nearly a month after Hanukkah 

ends, when I notice the first appearance 

of white flakes in 700 days. I celebrate 

the return of predictable winter joy, when ice 

slicks sidewalks, & fluffy blankets shroud 

windshields, press their weight into branches. 

I scrape my van after a spot of freezing rain, 

loosen snow & ice from door handles 

before temperatures plunge into the teens. 

On Facebook, I skim photos of my daughter’s 

campus, where kids haul cardboard rectangles 

up scenic slopes, clock tower behind, dots 

of city lights below. It’s the same campus where 

a professor said he found the Hamas attack 

in Israel “energizing” and “exhilarating.”

A British friend reports snow’s arrival with

photos on WhatsApp, streetlamps casting

a ghostly glow over parked cars & hedges.

He says he just checked on his sister,

who has poor balance due to cerebral palsy.

On my side of the world, darkness advances.

Trump wins the Iowa caucus without a sneeze.

The night before, I watch a documentary about

a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor visiting

Warsaw with her adult son. She recalls how

Jewish policemen beat ghetto Jews with clubs

to get them onto trains—if successful, they’d

spare their own lives. They wore the same

boots as Nazis, crisp black against the snow.

Outside my window, flake by flake, snow

tapers & stops. A few neighbors continue to

shovel or salt walkways. Maybe a few–

like me–look outside & gape in wonder

at a lavender sky that sheds white sparkles

over our ordinary lives. We are like candles, 

gazing through curtains at the ever present dark.

Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. She has received two Pushcart nominations and won the 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem Contest.  Her poems have appeared in publications including Spillway 29, Plainsongs, Redivider, and Fourteen Hills. In 2021 her full-length manuscript was a finalist for Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize, and in 2023 another version of the manuscript was longlisted for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

2 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , ,

August 21, 2023 · 6:30 am

Something about the rugelach

by Carol Coven Grannick (Evanston, IL)

Something about the rugelach…

they bring her to mind 

the word rolling out like pastry dough

spreading smooth and silky, caressed then cut

they bring her to mind 

as part of the duet with Dad during nighttime travel

dark-lit stars, Yiddish lullabies in the language of then 

the word rolling out like pastry dough

with tastes of comfort and warmth and now

tenderness of hugs still desired this long time later

spreading smooth and silky, caressed then cut

fondled, filled and curled with tenderness then baked

now infusing my mind with the delicate aroma of my mother’s memory.

Carol Coven Grannick is a poet and children’s author whose award-winning novel in verse, Reeni’s Turn, debuted in 2020. Her poetry for adults and children appears/is forthcoming in numerous print and online magazines, and she has received two Illinois Arts Council grants and a Ragdale Foundation Residency for her work.

2 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , ,

March 20, 2023 · 6:30 am

Hineni

by Jane Hillson Aiello (Denver, CO)

Raised between the transom

Of women’s lib and balabusta

No chance for ritual

No push to excel

No college application

Instead, a cross country trip

In Chevy’s version of a Conestoga

Landing in foothills

A place beyond knowing

Mamaloshen faded

Who am I      who am I

Echoed in the valley

My mother died before my poetic voice sprouted

Even though it was she who helped plant the seed

I will see her again one day

Beyond the heavens

In a field of fresh mown grass

She’ll be leaning on her Fairlane 500

As blue as the Colorado Sky

A scarf around her reed thin neck

Jackie O sunglasses

Cigarette in her right hand

I will call out to her in the ancient language

Of daughters

I am here mom 

Right here

Jane Hillson Aiello is a lifelong intuitive poet. Raised in a loosely conservative Jewish family in the suburbs of New York City, she calls the Front Range of Colorado home for more than forty years.  She also writes essays and memoir vignettes. Jane leads poetry workshops for Kavod on the Road and other organizations in the Denver metro. She has four poems featured in the soon to be released anthology Unplugged Voices. 125 Tales of Art and Life from Northern New Mexico, the Four Corners and The West.  Jane is a member of Poetry Society of Colorado. Read more of her work on her blog:  Poetry, Prose and Prattle 

Author’s notes: Hineni – Here I am; Balabusta – a good housewife; Mamaloshen – Mother tongue

3 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

August 8, 2022 · 6:30 am

Erratics

by Anne Myles (Greensboro, NC)

—Spirit Mound Historic Prairie, October 27, 2018

In 1804, Lewis and Clark trudged sweltering

up Paha Wakan, supposed by all to be a place of Deavels—

but found just birds and insects, herds of buffalo below.

As I approach it now—singular upheaval

on an island of east Dakota prairie—

I check my phone by habit, read the news:

eleven Jews just massacred in Pittsburgh. 

On the trail to the summit I see a boulder

of tombstone-gray granite.

A sign explains it as a glacial erratic:

a rock unlike those native to the region,

carried by the force of moving ice,

scoured and thrust for hundreds of miles perhaps.

Erratic from errare, to wander.

It reminds me of the long migrations of my people—

what drove us to places we could not imagine,

to places we believed we knew.

And I ponder this life in which I left New York 

to end up a dweller in the strange Midwest,

imagining the word my grandfather called my mother,

Yevreika—Jew-girl—rolling across the generations.

My country lies spread before me.

From the top we beheld a most butifull landscape—

which I gaze on to the horizon, wondering

how much blood has watered the fields I see

to feed the prairie grasses that rustle now

as a pheasant startles up within them

and rockets sideways into sun and wind.

Anne Myles’s work has appeared in On the Seawall, North American Review, Split Rock Review, Whale Road Review, Lavender Review, and other journals. A recent transplant from Iowa to Greensboro, NC, she is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa, and received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has been nominated for a Pushcart and was co-winner of the 2022 ellipsis… Award, judged by Carolyn Forché.

1 Comment

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , ,

March 14, 2022 · 6:52 am

An Invitation

by Linda Laderman (Commerce Township, MI)

Invited to a friend’s grandson’s Bar Mitzvah I am divided,

directed to sit behind a gauzy white screen in the balcony.

My Siddur lies on my lap open to a random page.

Ancient words in a language that still feels foreign to me.

Yet I stand on command, a stranger in my old house.

Near the end of a long hardwood pew by the exit

I watch a round-faced woman, young enough to be my

granddaughter, hair hidden under a shiny black sheitel.

A bevy of blue ribboned ponytails nestle their restless bodies

close to her. In a meditative moment she stands and presses

her back against a wall. Eyes closed, she rests her fingers

in the sliver of space between her breasts and burgeoning belly,

then turns and gazes at the five fresh faces looking at her.

Each one returns her gaze, leaning toward her like a chain of flowers.

She pulls a fistful of candy from her pockets & passes pieces

of the sweets down the row, then beckons her girls closer.

Locking arms, they rise and follow her out to begin the long-skirted

walk home. Too late to catch her eye, wishing I could have told her how

I once sat & fished rock candy from my mother’s pockets, my tight

ponytail pulling at my forehead. I think of what it is to want and not want,

to separate from what is given. Boxed & bowed, waiting for me to open

the lid to take what’s there, a package I have been unwilling to unwrap.

After the last prayer is recited, I hurry down the stairs. For a minute,

I imagine I have time to catch up with the mother and her five Shana Maidelas.

 Linda Laderman grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where she has wonderful memories of walking to services and sitting in the balcony with her mother and grandmother at the old B’nai Jacob Synagogue. She earned an undergraduate degree in journalism from the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Her news stories and features have appeared in media outlets and magazines. She returned to school in the 1990’s graduating with a Master’s of Liberal Studies and a Juris Doctor degree from The University of Toledo. Her memoir piece, “Grandmother’s Warning” was published in the summer 2021 edition of the Michigan Jewish Historical Society Journal, and later reprinted in the Detroit Jewish News. Her poetry has appeared in The Jewish Literary Journal, The Bangalore Review and The Sad Girls Literary Blog and is forthcoming this spring in The Scapegoat Review, The Write Launch and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. Linda currently lives in the Detroit area. For the last decade, she has volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center, where she leads adult discussion tours and is a member of the Docent Advisory Committee. 

1 Comment

Filed under American Jewry, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

February 14, 2022 · 7:56 am

Shevat—the month that makes my soul ache

by Carol J. Wechsler Blatter (Tucson AZ)

Shevat, it’s the month that makes my soul ache, my heart hurt. It’s a cruel month, usually cold and bleak, sometimes damp and dark. Rarely do the rays of sun seep through my windows and lift my spirits. It’s during this month that I light three yahrzeit candles–one candle on 2 Shevat for my mother, one on 9 Shevat for my sister, and one on 13 Shevat for my father.

***
It was on January 16, 1965 that my mother, sister, aunt, uncle, and I were present at the burial of my father, Albert, in the oldest Jewish cemetery in Middlesex County, NJ, Mount Lebanon. It was a frigid, snow-covered Sunday morning in central New Jersey. Rabbi Yakov Hilsenrath (of blessed memory) gave a very brief eulogy. Over my down winter coat he pinned a black ribbon cut to simulate the physical act of death ripping me apart from my father who, from that time forward, would only be in my memory.

I remember how bleak and alone I felt losing my father. I was only twenty-two years of age. I was angry. I felt cheated at not having a father. Even when my father was alive, he worked so much to provide for us that I had very little time with him. He had grown up with minimal emotional support, love, and self-esteem, and as a result he was unable to be supportive and complimentary. He was an expert in delivering put-downs. Yet once he was gone, I imagined that if he had lived longer, things would have been different between us. How could I have fooled myself into believing he would have changed his ways and been more fatherly to me? Yet, despite his flaws, I still miss him. After all, he fathered me and, in his own way, he loved me.

***
It was on January 2, 1986, twenty-one years later, that my husband, my sister, my brother-in-law, my brother-in-law’s mother, and I were present at the burial of my mother, Bertha, in Indianapolis. Rabbi Dennis Sasso spoke about my mother and described her as a powerful, intense, and passionate woman filled with love for her family and her heritage. “You could agree or disagree with Bertha,” said Rabbi Sasso, “but you could never be indifferent to her.” I was forty-three.

Unlike my father, my mother supported, nurtured, and loved me. She was always my cheerleader and made certain that I had every possible opportunity to be successful. It was a shock when she died to find that she was no longer at my side. It was very hard to let her go.  

***

And it was on January 14, 2019 that I lost my sister, my life-long friend, who died unexpectedly of a catastrophic brain hemorrhage. Although we had a minyan prayer service in her memory in our home in Tucson with our rabbi and many congregants, we were unable to attend the service and burial in New York. I never had the opportunity to say goodbye to my sister. I never had the opportunity to put shovelfuls of dirt over her coffin. I never had the opportunity to sit shiva with other family members. This has left an emotional gap in my life and an unfillable hole. There is one thing I do, though. I keep on my bed a tiny green velvet embroidered pillow which she gave me which says, Sisters Are Special.

***
As long as I can remember I have sensed God’s presence, as a supreme being who governs my life in unexplainable and unknowable ways. It’s as if God beams a light leading me to insight so I can glean what had been until that moment unseeable and unforeseeable. I feel that God is — and will always be — my protector.

But is this the same God who allows death? How can I praise God, I ask myself as I recite the mourner’s Kaddish prayer with a broken heart? And I tell myself it’s because I also believe that God is not all-powerful. God cannot prevent death. This is not God’s job. Death is not about blame. Death is what death is. It is my job to accept death.

***
The Kaddish prayer is always said in the presence of ten adults, a minyan, and a community of worshipers. As part of a minyan for eleven months after the death of each of my parents and my sister, I reaffirmed and praised God’s presence in unison with other mourners.

Healing took place slowly.

Day by day.

***

Now I’m seventy-nine years of age. I am acutely aware that my time on earth is limited. I am here only for an extended visit. Some day I know I will die. So I am trying to make each day count. I am trying to be fully present, especially when I arise at all services, on Shabbat, and on holidays, and say my prayer:

I give thanks before you, O God living and eternal, for You have returned within me my soul with compassion; abundant is your faithfulness!

_____

Carol J. Wechsler Blatter is a recently retired psychotherapist in private practice. She has contributed writings to Chaleur Press, Story Circle Network Journal, and One Woman’s Day; stories in Writing it Real anthologies, Mishearing: Miseries, Mysteries, and Misbehaviors, Pleasure Taken In Our Dreams, Small Things, & Conversations,The Jewish Writing Project, and in 101words.org; and poems in Story Circle Network’s Real Women Write, Growing/ Older, and Covenant of the Generations by Women of Reform Judaism She is a wife, mother, and grandmother of her very special granddaughter who already writes her own stories. 

2 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March 1, 2021 · 8:00 am

A Moment of Truth

by Susan Rudnick (Pleasantville, NY)

      Just days after they had become available, I had snagged an appointment early in January for my first vaccine. I did a little dance in front of the computer to celebrate. The night before I had stayed up till after 1 AM and then had gotten up before 7 to go on both the New York state and city websites, as well as my local Westchester county medical provider’s site. I had stayed with it through the mire of questions and red tape. It had paid off.  Caremount, my medical provider, came through. 

     But the next day a text message abruptly canceled it.

     Caremount was no longer able to provide the shots.  

     My vaccine rollercoaster rolled off the rails. I felt vulnerable, jealous of the friends who had already gotten their vaccines, and ashamed. 

     How come I couldn’t make it happen? What lead hadn’t I followed? Why me? I’m a first-generation child of Holocaust survivors, and that night I woke up shivering from a nightmare about the visa I had which was no longer valid. I was trapped in Germany while others were able to leave. 

     Around 7:30 AM,  the day of my canceled appointment, I woke up to a phone call. Nope, it wasn’t a last-minute call for the vaccine.

     In a supposedly unrelated matter a few weeks ago I had received an e-mail from a second cousin I had never met who lived in Israel. Her sister, Ruth, and I had visited each other several times, both in Israel and NY, and we had become close. A year ago I had mourned her death from breast cancer. But Nomi lived on a kibbutz in the south and for a combination of reasons we had never met.

     Now in her eighties, Nomi was looking to connect with me. Her daughter, living in California, had found me. She mentioned that her mother had health problems and, realizing her time was short, wanted to meet me, and also learn what I could share about our family. We had all gone back and forth a few times about using What’s App and how to meet. But nothing had been settled.

     When I picked up the phone on that morning, I heard a voice that sounded familiar. It was Nomi. Her voice was comforting, and sounded a lot like her sister’s. Her English was not the best, but we managed a lovely back-and-forth conversation about our family. She had met both my parents on their trips to Israel.

      At one point I asked if she knew my parents’ refugee story: how they escaped Germany, made it to Brazil and then to New York while my mother was pregnant with me.

     “Yes” she said, “and how your mother lied about the pregnancy because for some reason at the time you were not supposed to fly if you were.”

     My heart missed a beat.  As a child, and, even now, I loved telling friends how I was conceived in Brazil but born here. But my mother had never told me about the lie. Nomi didn’t remember where she had heard it, but she knew it was true.

     My brave mother! She had lied to get us here. I literally wouldn’t be here now if she hadn’t. She desperately wanted a better life for us in the United States.  My parents had risked everything several times.  On this very last leg of their journey, I imagine them standing on an airport line together, and my mother not hesitating for a second to omit the truth about me in her belly.  

     In that moment I could feel my mother’s strength and wily wisdom coming to me through this fragile phone connection with someone I had never met.

     If I had been driving to get my shot I could not have picked up the call that held this vital fragment, a glorious puzzle-piece of my story that I would certainly enjoy sharing with friends.  

      I didn’t get the vaccine that day.

      But I was gifted with another kind of boost: a testament to the resiliency and creativity of my parents in a far more complex situation than my current one. I would surely find my way through the miasma of hotlines and websites to get my vaccine. 

Susan Rudnick is the author of the memoir: Edna’s Gift: How My Broken Sister Taught Me To Be Whole. It is the story of how her differently abled sister has been her greatest teacher. Susan is a published haiku poet and maintains a psychotherapy practice in Westchester NY. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website: susanrudnick.com

2 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, history, Israel Jewry, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism

Tagged as , , , , ,

January 4, 2021 · 9:22 am

From Russia with Love

by Judith Rosner (Sarasota, FL)

“Take these candlesticks my child,

And when you light the Sabbath candles

In your own home with your own family,

Remember me and the family you came from.”

My grandmother, a girl of fifteen, heeded her mother

And carried these silver twins, wrapped in a pillowcase, 

Across the ocean from old world to new.

As her mother hoped, she faithfully

recited the Sabbath blessing over them

Each Friday evening, her family gathered at the table. 

Now two generations later, these candlesticks 

Still stand tall upon their three-pronged legs

In my home, handed down from my mother.

Grape vines etched upon their stems

Show off hanging clusters of ripened fruit

Amid the dings and dents of age and

Dark spots where tarnish resists polish.

Though weighty to the eye,

Hollow bodies give them little heft,

Light enough to be carried

Across the ocean years ago

By a girl of fifteen,

So that on this Friday evening,

I may light and pray over the candles they cradle,

As did my mother and grandmother before me,

To welcome the Sabbath and remember this story.

Judith Rosner, Ph.D., is a retired college professor, leadership trainer, and executive coach. She has published in the areas of leadership and management, stress and health, and women in the professions. Currently she writes poetry and personal essays. Two of her poems are published in the literary magazine Her Words  (The Black Mountain Press), her poem, “Forest Sanctuary,” appears in the Living Peace 2019 Art of Poetry Anthology and two of her essays appear on The Jewish Writing Project.  Judy and her husband split their time between Sarasota, Florida and New York City.

To read her stories on The Jewish Writing Project, visit:

Y’all Are Different: https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/2016/06/13/yall-are-different/

My First Aliyah: https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/my-first-aliyah/

4 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry, Russian Jewry

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,