Tag Archives: mothers and daughters

July 28, 2014 · 3:24 pm

Inheritance

by Bonnie Widerman (Irvine, CA)

There is a hole in the fabric of my Jewish childhood,
something missing, gone, nowhere to be found,
though I’ve searched my childhood home high and low—
Not for a beautifully crafted Tallit left behind.
I was never given one—no girl was in those days.
Not for a handmade Challah cover,
embellished with my awkward scrawling and designs.
Surely that fell apart years ago.
Not for my mother’s Shabbat tablecloth,
white patterned fabric with a neatly scalloped edge.
All her tablecloths lie exactly where she kept them
when she was alive.
No. The treasure I inherited and lost all at once
was the very fabric of my mother’s Jewish life,
embodied in her Shabbat candlesticks—
A wisp of white smoke threading through the air
from an extinguished match.
A blessing in two voices, intertwined.
Two dancing flames casting shadows on the wall,
knitting our family together in Sabbath peace.
After my mother passed away, her candlesticks vanished
as if they were that matchstick smoke.
When I stand in her kitchen and look up at the shelf
where those pillars of blue-green enamel and brass once stood,
I feel the weight of their absence—and hers—in my heart.
I cannot bring back what is gone.
But the pattern of lighting candles with my mother
week after week, year after year,
is woven into the fabric of my life.
It unfolds into blessing every Friday night
as I light Shabbat candles at my own family’s table
with my daughters by my side.

Bonnie Widerman is the Director of Marketing & Communications for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, a national non-profit organization. She has been a professional writer and corporate communicator for more than 20 years. In her free time, she writes stories and poetry and her work has appeared in Ladybug magazine and Fandangle. Bonnie is currently editing a manuscript entitled, Her Kaddish: A Jewish Woman’s Journey through Mourning, which she wrote during the year she spent saying Kaddish for her mother, and which she hopes to share with others facing a loss.

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June 16, 2014 · 8:36 am

Unlocking the Past

by Shira Sebban (Sydney, Australia)

We did not expect to find the diary. A non-descript, navy-bound volume, it had been stashed away in a drawer of the massive wooden study desk at which our late mother had worked for so many years. Perhaps she had simply forgotten writing it? Or perhaps she had chosen not to share her youthful passions and agonies with her daughters… We will never know.

I had long abandoned any hope of uncovering more details of my mother’s past, her memories having been gradually extinguished by Alzheimer’s disease, which had afflicted her for the last decade of her life. Now, as I turned the diary’s yellowed pages filled with her distinctive script, I felt grateful for the opportunity to discover her anew, albeit in a younger form, becoming acquainted with the person she once was before I was born.

Written in English in the mid-1950s, when a postgraduate traveling scholarship had taken her back from Melbourne, Australia, to her birthplace of Israel for two years, the diary provides a glimpse of what life was like then for a single, 20-something woman. Attractive and bright, she was courted by a host of mostly unsuitable admirers, although occasionally, one would become the focus of her hopes and dreams. After all, as she notes, her mother had advised her to “secure a future” for herself, urging her to work hard to accomplish her purpose: in other words, “get married”.

Part-travelogue and part-social commentary, the diary reads like a film script, the vividly portrayed characters flitting in and out of various settings. One moment my mother is at a party or concert, describing the dating scene: “Noticed some very good looking men in the audience. Wonder where they usually hide.” The next, she is on a crowded bus, discussing the four young Yemenite girls seated behind her: “probably recent arrivals to the country. Full of joy of life, laughing and continuously talking in high pitched voices, cracking small black seeds and throwing shells on the floor of the bus.”

A picture builds of what life was like in what was then the recently established State of Israel. Many of those she meets are keen to move elsewhere, believing there is more opportunity overseas. A certain unease lurks behind the pages too, and on one occasion, she even has to identify a suspect at the police station after an elderly woman is raped across the street from her home. More often, however, she is scared to walk alone in isolated areas, having heard about “some unpleasant and unfortunate encounters with Arab infiltrators”.

The term, “infiltrator”, with its connotations of menace, danger and evil, has recently been revived to refer to African asylum seekers to Israel. Its origins date back to the early 1950s, when there were several attacks on Israeli settlements, resulting in around 100 casualties and culminating in the “Prevention of Infiltration Law” of 1954, which defined those citizens of surrounding Arab states, as well as Palestinians, who entered Israel illegally, as “infiltrators”, punishable by law, especially if they were armed or had committed crimes against people or property.

Emotions certainly ran high within Israel itself too. On a morning walk through the Carmel market near the family home in south Tel Aviv, my mother describes police arresting an “old Arab who was selling baskets… He was yelling his protests. Bystanders said he was allowed to sell his products in the main street, but not in the market.

“Further on I heard terrible cries, saw a young fellow who had slashed his own throat in protest at having had his cart full of vegetables taken to the police station. Apparently, he too had no permit to trade in the market.”

I had long known that after leaving Israel, my mother had undertaken an epic sea voyage to Italy, also visiting Paris and working in London before deciding to make her way to Montreal, where she would ultimately meet her future husband and my father. Until now, however, I had thought that those often-recounted stories had been buried with her. So imagine my delight to discover that the diary also contains a record of the first part of the journey she undertook by ship from the northern Israeli port of Haifa to Venice via Greece and then on to Milan by train.

Penniless, she could only gaze longingly at the elegant Italian shop window displays, but could “afford nothing no matter how cheap the prices were”. Arriving in Milan and not wanting to stay on her own, she was on the verge of boarding the night train to Paris with nothing to eat bar a box of biscuits, when she finally managed to contact the aunt and uncle of one of her best friends in Tel Aviv, who invited her to stay with them. Successful furriers, my mother writes, they had “made a name for themselves”, their shop frequented by “a good class of clientele”, including members of the aristocracy and movie stars.

Although most of the numerous names that appear in the diary remain unfamiliar to me, the family name of my mother’s good friend stood out. Hadn’t I gone to school with a boy of the same name?

It so happens I had been reminded of that particular family at the beginning of this year – before we discovered the diary — while on holiday in Israel, when I had learned that Michael, my old school friend, was staying in the same hotel. We spent some time catching up and also exchanged contact details.

Now, as I turned the pages of the diary, I realized that the characters so vividly depicted by my mother included various members of Michael’s extended family. My mother’s friend was Michael’s aunt, meaning the Milan furriers must have been his great aunt and uncle. I sent an email to Michael, who immediately put me in touch with the Italian branch of his family and all was confirmed. Even better, his elderly and frail aunt in Tel Aviv could still remember my mother and recalled the deep friendship between various generations of our families.

As it transpires, our familial ties date back at least a century to Poland via Tel Aviv and on to Australia: A tale of friendship and support, harking back to the days of our great grandparents, with the diary key to piecing together the puzzle of just how we are connected.

The ravages of Alzheimer’s disease had prevented my mother from recounting her memories long before her death last year. Her diary provides a portrait of her, as I never knew her: a young, passionate woman searching for intelligent companionship and the man of her dreams. It provides the key to unlocking a part of her past with which I was unfamiliar, a past that I thought had been lost forever.

Shira Sebban, a writer and editor based in Sydney, Australia, worked as a journalist for the Australian Jewish News. She previously taught French at the University of Queensland and worked in publishing. She also serves as vice-president on the board of  Emanuel School, a pluralistic and egalitarian Jewish Day School. You can read more of her work at: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13636, as well as https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/category/australian-jewry/ and http://shirasebban.blogspot.com.au/

 

 

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April 7, 2014 · 8:48 am

My Olympics

By Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

I didn’t think I had remembered. Or perhaps it was something I had wished to forget over the many years since it had happened.

But then the sight of the five interlocked Olympic circles, the flag-bearing gymnasts marching into the crowded spectator-filled stadium, the familiar melody of the Olympic hymn sounding through the television screen brought back a long-forgotten memory best not remembered.

In the summer of 1936, Berlin experienced an uncommon heat wave not usually felt in this temperate European zone. Earlier that late spring, as an eight-year old, I had suffered a heat stroke while playing in the school yard. As a consequence I was forced to spend the many days until summer vacation at home, dizzy and nauseous, lying on the bed in my darkened, spinning room, with a wet cloth covering my head.

Like everyone else in the city I hoped to be well again by the time August came around.

Then the much-awaited Olympic Games were to start in Berlin. The capital city was looking forward to become the site of a world event.

I had the fervent wish to be a part of it. To walk through the avenues flagged so splendidly with the banners of the Olympiad and Germany, its host country. To be in the crowd welcoming the many top sports champions from all over the world. To see them perform, perhaps. To witness their receiving the medals for which they had all struggled so hard.

How I would manage to achieve my dream I did not yet know. Nothing in the real Germany of the day favored the daydreams of a small Jewish child.

And yet…hadn’t I heard of things loosening up in the anti-Jewish world around me? Even from the hushed sound of voices in my parents’ living room rumors reached me that most of the fashionable restaurants in town were starting to remove the signs in their front windows, signs that spelled out Jews Not Welcome. “Even Dobrin and Kempinsky are among them,” I heard them mention two of Berlin’s top cafes. Many friends of my parents looked for every possible sign that the icy spirit of Hitler’s Germany was thawing before the eyes of the world.

Not many days later the sob-filled telephone call of my father’s secretary informed us that he had been arrested right within his office and that we had better not expect him home that evening because she assumed that he was taken right to prison. She had no idea what the charges were.

It took my mother several days of frantic investigating to discover that the charges were “bicycle theft” and were brought by an unknown party.

This type of “denunciation” had become a standard procedure in our day. Anyone with a grudge was using it to get “even” for an unknown slight. Especially if it was against a Jew.

However, it seemed particularly ridiculous in the case of my father. Even I knew that he hardly needed to stoop to such a crime. While we still lived in Hannover, prior to moving to Berlin, he had been a successful businessman driven by a chauffeur; my mother, a fashionable, artistic lady whose household had included a cook, cleaning maid, and a laundress. Why then, bother with such a lowly accusation?

A clue emerged a few days later when my mother received a letter from the police. She opened it with shaking hands, only to drop it with an outcry of horror.

“You are hereby informed to report immediately to the Olympiastadion in Grunewald where you are required to help in the construction of the “Reichssportfeld” by doing Feld-Arbeit clearing the grounds for the upcoming Olympic Games.

“This action is required in reparation for the charges incurred by your husband’s prison sentence and subsequent costs borne by the German government.

“Heil Hitler!”

I, of course, had not the slightest idea what all this meant. All I knew was that at last we, my mother and I, would be traveling to the site of my dreams, the Olympic Stadium in the Grunewald. And I was overjoyed!

Every morning of that summer of 1936 my mother and I boarded the U-Bahn (subway) at our stop in Charlottenburg and rode to the end of the line in the Grunewald Forest. Since no one was at home in our family, my mother was forced to take me along every day of her work. Each day she carried a sandwich for me and a bottle of water, plus a sunhat and appropriate clothing for me to wear during the heat spell. After all, I had already experienced one sunstroke.

This area was to be the future home of Berlin’s 1936 Summer Olympics. It had been designated long before, in 1912, by the International Olympic Committee.

The First World War had prevented any games from taking place. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, the party decided to make the most of the tremendous propaganda occasion by using the Olympic Games as a showplace for the upcoming progressive world of the Third Reich.

The plan was the construction of the Reichssportfeld, a huge arena that was expected to take two years to build.

One of the sites included in the field was the Waldbuehne, an amphitheater with the capacity to seat 25,000 people.

It was this location which would require the labor of my mother and the many other women who were forced to convert the area into a showplace.

I had no idea of any of this when we arrived for work the first day.

With other women who had shared the train ride we climbed up the subway steps. A huge rock-strewn field of weeds awaited us at our destination.

I held my mother’s hand with one hand and carried my sandwich bag and a book with the other. We were met at the top by brown-clad SA men who registered us and turned us over to matrons who led us to a nearby cabin. There the women changed their dresses into more appropriate attire for the work ahead. Before each person left the cabin she was handed a rake and a hoe.

I do not remember any other children present. My mother settled me into an available chair, said that she would check on me whenever she could, and told me to be good.

And then she stepped outside into the burning sunlight and was assigned a stretch of the large field.

I could see her from my chair inside, although she was out of reach of my voice. In the stuffy heat of the cabin I saw my pretty mother chipping away at rocks or bending down to pull out the weeds she had loosened. It was an unreal, nightmarish view I wish I did not have to witness. It may well be the reason I have tried to forget this episode for a major part of my life.

So began each long, hot day, boring and tiring and far from my dreams of the Olympic experience. It was not until the sun began to set that the hoped-for hour of going home arrived.

August 1 arrived, and with it the opening of the 1936 Olympiade.

It was a time before television brought events into every home. I was not able to view the grand episodes I had hoped to see.

Eventually I saw pictures of the rock-strewn weed-filled field, which was now a lush green carpet terminated by a beautiful amphitheater named the “Dietrich Eckhard Buehne.” Another area of the terrain housed the special box of honor where Adolf Hitler greeted his guests. Everything was grand and splendid and politically motivated. The “Fuehrer” was shown bursting with pride, just as another evil dictator named Vladimir Putin would posture unsmilingly in a similar situation in another country many years later.

The sound of the Olympic Hymn in 2014 brought it all back. How little things have changed!

Born in Germany, Ellen Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel. Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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January 21, 2013 · 7:29 am

Touched

by Bracha Mirsky (Jerusalem, Israel)

In Memory of Itka Rochel bas Shmuel z”l (1930-1974)

I’m a proud third-generation Canadian. I grew up in Ottawa the capital of Canada; the winters were long and cold. I remember the snow banks were higher than I was. Although my father was born and raised in Ottawa, by the time I was growing up most of my dad’s family had left the city. My mother was from Montreal where she had a large close-knit family she left to raise a family in Ottawa. We would visit and embrace the warmth of our family in Montreal as often as possible, but in Ottawa my mother was as isolated and lonely as if every day was winter.

I remember my grandparents’ towering gray stone house in Montreal. Even now, I can see through the eyes of a child and feel the warm wonder of the sights, smells and sounds of Pesach:  sweet gefilte fish, chicken soup, matzoh, grape juice, spilling the drops from our cup …to lessen our joy at the memory of the suffering of our enemies. I have fond memories of my grandfather, uncles, father and brothers at the head of the table singing. I looked forward to examining the drama of Pesach in pictures in a small, brightly colored Haggadah. My mother was a quiet woman; her attention was always focused on her children, ready with a kind word and a hug. She would help my grandmother prepare and serve the meal.

I’m nine-years-old.  I shyly ask my bubby, “Can I help too?”

“Of course,” my bubby replies. “What a big girl you are now. A shayna maideleh!”  I would help serve the gefilte fish and collect and wash the cutlery. I would bask in the glow of my mother’s pride in me.

My mother loved us so much! She was the emotional core of our family, yet we had no idea that in her quiet way she was instilling so much in us. She was a stay-at-home mom, with six children — that was no easy task! Dad worked hard but it was always difficult to make ends meet. There was no money for Hebrew school and so I went to the local public school.

As a child the world was puzzling to me. I could not connect the dots that others seemed to have no problem with; the world did not make sense.

“Dad, no one likes me, they won’t play with me, they’re mean and always try to get me in trouble.”  His only reply was, “Make yourself a small target.”

“Mom why do they call me a ‘Christ-killer’?”

“Just ignore them; they don’t know what they’re talking about.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was hard to ignore them while the boys were beating me up after school as the girls watched. Canada, 1968, I was 11-years-old.

“Where are you going Mom?”

“There is a protest to free the Soviet Jews.” My mother never missed a rally or any event to try and win the freedom of a fellow Jew. This woman who loved children and her people so much, who would not hurt a fly, always put a heavy wrench in her purse before each rally. Just in case the KGB tried to break it up, she intended to take a good swing at one!

I can still see Mom lighting Shabbos candles and the whole world seemed to glow in that soft light. With my mother at my side, the world was at peace.

Shul — a place to sing! Awesome! Reading the stories of the Bible, imagining what it would be like to have such faith. I already knew that God was everywhere and I could talk to him whenever I wanted. Talking to God was easy, understanding God was the hard part.

“Mom, are you not feeling well again?”

“No dear, don’t worry I’m OK.”  But she wasn’t. Visiting the hospital, not understanding, “When will Mom get better?”

“Soon dear, soon.”

It seemed so gradual, I didn’t even notice it. Mom could do less and less and I did more and more. I’m 16, my two older brothers are away at university leaving me, now the eldest at home, to look after and cook for my father and three younger siblings. My youngest brother is only six- years-old.

I visit Mom in the hospital every evening with my dad but she looks worse and worse, no one says anything. A wall of silence, we didn’t know…how could we not know? She kept the truth from us, it was cancer.

Waking up erev Rosh Hashanah, I can hear my dad talking on the phone “…last night…” I stiffen in my bed, my body rigid, waiting, but no one comes. I get up and go down to breakfast; Dad acts normally and sends us off to school.

It’s erev Rosh Hashanah.

I sit at the back of the school assembly hall right up against a wall. In that big darkened room with only the stage lit up I’m in a tiny corner all alone, feeling with every part of my being that my whole world has come crashing down and no one else notices it, their world hasn’t changed at all. Yet I still try to deny it, I repeat to myself, “I must have been mistaken, Dad would have told me if anything happened, therefore nothing happened,” I say this to myself over and over again. Surrounded by a sea of people, I’m all alone in the dark.

That afternoon I begin my slow walk home from school with a heavy heart, thinking to myself, “It’s erev Rosh Hashanah.”

I’m about half-way home, alone as usual, when something softly brushes my cheek. I stop and stand still. My hair is tied back in a ponytail, there is nothing near me. Again, something softly brushes my cheek. My heart leaps out — NO! It can’t be! It’s not you, you’re not dead! It must be the wind!  I turn to face the opposite direction. The same soft touch brushes the same cheek. Then I knew…she was gone.

Stunned, I sit on a nearby rock, I don’t know for how long. Now numb and beyond pain, I accepted the truth. Then I began to wonder at the strength of my mother, to come to me and give me this gift. To reach out and touch me to say goodbye.

It’s erev Rosh Hashanah.

My mother taught me many things. She taught me about family, to be a proud Jew and to never stop caring. In her last moments on earth she taught me that God is real and that nothing can stop love, not even death.

* * *

I look after my father and siblings for three years until I’m 19 and then it’s my turn to go away to college. I become a nurse and meet my husband. We are married in a lovely ceremony in an Orthodox shul. I miss my mom, but I believe she is happy for me. I could not have anticipated the surprises that were in store for me.

I married at 23, and two years later I give birth to triplets, two boys and a girl. Oh! How my mom would have loved this! Never have I missed her so much as then. For the first time since her passing, I can see her in my mind’s eye, holding her grandchildren, and the joy from her face is blinding!

Public health services provide a really sweet woman to help out for the first few months, but after that initial period I am on my own. I am told by the supervisor, “No one can manage on their own with triplets; you’ll have to hire some help.”

“Really?” I say, “We’ll see…”

God, fill our hands with your blessings. In this, I am truly my mother’s daughter. Five years later I give birth to twin boys. Life is busier and happier than ever!

They grow, the years pass and they develop as proud Jews who know their God, and they are very proud of their people and love every one of them. I know exactly who they got that from. All the Bible stories are real to them, they love going to shul, singing and giving me joy.

And their mother tells them stories of a special soul, the bubby they never knew.

Mom, pray for them.

Bracha Mirsky is a mother of triplets and twins, Registered Nurse, Labour Coach, Certified Parent and Infant Consultant and Diabetes Educator. She has worked as a member of the St. Elizabeth Nurses Maternal and Infant Care Team as a specialist and with her local Family and Child services, assisting families with parenting issues. Bracha is a guide to parents through classes, as an advice columnist and as an author. Her book, What Makes Kids Tick? Giving parents the tools to shape child behaviour, is based on the counseling she has given parents and her own parenting journey, filled with stories of the challenges and rewards of raising multiple children and the insights the adventure has given her. Bracha can be reached at www.whatmakeskidstick.com. She has recently made aliya.

This story was reprinted with permission from Living Legacies: A Collection of Writing by Contemporary Canadian Jewish Women, Volume III, edited by Liz Pearl. For more information about the book, visit:  http://at.yorku.ca/pk/ll3.htm

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November 12, 2012 · 9:10 am

Caring for My Mother: Burden or Responsibility?

by Shira Sebban (Sydney, Australia)

I am my mother’s advocate. Together with my sister, I manage her household, supervise her caregivers, pay her bills, and run her errands. Most importantly, we champion her rights, providing her with a voice at a time when, tragically, she can no longer stand up for herself due to the decade-long ravages of Alzheimer’s disease.

My mother used to be my role model and my best friend. Passionate, strong, courageous and intelligent, she was a brilliant scholar and a loving parent and grandparent, the person I could turn to for advice and companionship at any time.

Now the tables have been completely turned. The child who started out entirely dependent on her mother has matured to become the one on whom her mother depends.

Since my mother has been afflicted by illness, I constantly feel her absence like a gaping hole in my life. She may still look like my mother and remain physically near, but mentally and spiritually, she is no longer there for me.

When someone has Alzheimer’s, there is plenty of time to say goodbye. Deterioration occurs slowly, with changes almost imperceptible at first and then becoming only gradually more noticeable. Alzheimer’s is a cruel illness, as my late maternal grandfather noted, telling my mother when, sadly, he was in the throes of the disease himself, “I am losing my I,” by which he meant that he was losing what made him whom he was as a person.

Moreover, gradually much of the world forgets its sufferers. Many friends stop writing or visiting; it is almost as if people are too embarrassed and don’t know how to deal with someone who can no longer respond except with a smile, a look or a touch.

Yet, already in the third century, Talmudic Rabbi Joshua ben Levi had pointed out that just as the fragments of the first set of tablets of the Ten Commandments shattered by Moses were placed in the Ark of the Covenant along with the new tablets, so too should we “be careful” to respect “an old man who has forgotten his knowledge through no fault of his own” (Babylonian Talmud: Berakoth 8b).

Even earlier, the second century BCE Jerusalemite scholar Ben Sira wrote in his Book of Wisdom: “My child, help your father in his old age, and do not grieve him as long as he lives. If his understanding fails, be considerate. And do not humiliate him when you are in your prime” (3:12-13).

We are taught that we are meant to “honor” and “respect” our parents in the same way as we revere God as partners in the creation of life. Yet, the first century sage, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, acknowledged that this Fifth Commandment was the hardest of all to obey (Tanhuma Ekev 2). As Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Dr Albert Micah Lewis says, this Commandment  “teaches that even though this kind of caregiving may not feel natural or even fair, it must be provided”(Person H.E. and Address R.F. (eds) 2003, That You May Live Long: Caring For Our Aging Parents, Caring For Ourselves, URJ Press, New York, p10).

Judaism values behaviour over thoughts and feelings. The Talmud lists the actions we need to perform in order to fulfil the mitzvah (good deed) of respecting our parents. “What is honor? Giving food, drink, dressing, covering, leading out and bringing in, and washing face, hands and feet” (Tosefta Kiddushin 1:11). In other words, children are required to ensure that their parents’ basic needs are provided.

While most Jewish sources insist upon children personally caring for their parents themselves – and with the right attitude – the medieval scholar and physician, Moses Maimonides, made an exception for children with parents whose minds were severely affected: “If the condition of the parent has grown worse and the son is no longer able to endure the strain, he may leave his father or mother, go elsewhere, and delegate to others to give the parents the proper care” (Mishneh Torah: Hilchot Mamrim 6:10). Chosen caregivers, however, must be able to cheer the patient up (Regimen sanitatis: The Preservation of Youth: Essays on Health, chapter 2).

Long ago my sister and I promised our mother that we would never put her in a nursing home. And we have honoured that promise, convincing her early on to move to the same city where we live and striving to ensure that she continues to reside with dignity in her own home. As card-carrying members of the “sandwich generation,” we have chosen to juggle her needs along with those of our own young families.

While that may not be the right decision for everyone, it has certainly proven to be the correct option for us, and we are fortunate to have had the freedom to be able to make that choice. Our mother can no longer thank us, but I know that she is grateful. Before she lost the ability to speak, she was expressing her gratitude to everybody who helped her, and I am sure she would still be doing so today if she could.

The debate over whether children should provide for their elderly parents from their own income or whether parents need to fund their own care also dates back to ancient times. Scholars were seemingly divided, with rabbis of the Jerusalem Talmud advocating that even poor children must raise the funds to support their impoverished parents (Jerusalem Talmud, Kiddushin, 1:7). As Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said: “’Honour your father and mother,’ even if you have to go begging in doorways” (Pesikta Rabbati 23). Rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud, on the other hand, maintained that the parents should provide the money, while the children should give their time (Babylonian Talmud, Mas. Kiddushin 31b-32a).

Maimonides argued that only when parents had no money were their financially independent children obligated to support them according to their means, and could even be coerced into doing so by a Bet Din (rabbinic court of law) (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Mamrim 6:3).

If the children have money but refuse to spend it on their parents, Jewish law allows them to use funds they would otherwise have given to charity, but immediately “curses” them for “humiliating” their parents: (Babylonian Talmud, Mas. Kiddushin 32a). Others go further and compare such a refusal to murder, maintaining that such a comparison is warranted by the fact that the two Commandments, to honor one’s parents and not to murder, follow each other (10th century Midrash, Tanna Devei Eliyahu).

Broadcaster Sandra Tsing Loh said earlier this year on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation that the “daughter track is far more open-ended [than the mommy track] and has no rewards at the end except for death” (29 February, 2012).

No rewards?

Even though I would give anything to have my mother back again as she once was, I know that caring for her has taught me to be kinder and more patient, especially in the last few years, when I no longer know if she even recognises me. Sometimes being patient is a struggle in the flurry of everyday life, as I force myself to slow down to my mother’s pace, watching as she chews each mouthful of the meal that has been prepared for her.

As Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman of Congregation Shaarei Shamayim in Madison, Wisconsin, has said, “just by her being, she teaches us the highest form of compassion” (8 October 2008, “Aging and Caring for Elderly Parents”, http://www.shamayim.org/). Renowned Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal Movement, has wisely advised: “You may just want to sit and hold the hand of the parent with Alzheimer’s. Communicate on the inside. Something is going to happen in the silence. There is a being behind the brain” (September 2012, “From Age-ing to Sage-ing,” Front Range Living, http://www.frontrangeliving.com/family-health/rabbi-zalman.htm).

Indeed, even though she has forgotten her language, my mother often tries to communicate when she sees me. The other day, one of her longtime caregivers told her she was leaving to return to her homeland. “She looked at me,” the caregiver said, “and I knew she understood.”

Caring for my mother has also given me an opportunity to set a good example for my children, teaching them to be decent human beings. As my 11-year-old son said, “We owe it to our parents to look after them in their old age. They care for us when we are young and then it becomes our turn to care for them.”

If everything else fails, fear can be a strong motivator, as is understood by the Torah: “You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord” (Vayikra (Leviticus) 19:32). Respecting our parents is the only Commandment accompanied by a reward, which can also be read as a veiled threat: “Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, that you may long endure, and that you may fare well, in the land that the Lord your God is assigning to you” (Devarim (Deuteronomy) 5:16; see also Shemot (Exodus) 20:12).

Not only should our fear of God influence how we treat the elderly, but we should also behave towards others as we would like to be treated ourselves. Indeed, on Yom Kippur morning, we pray “Do not cast us off in our old age; when our strength fails, do not forsake us!” (from Psalm 71:9). According to Rabbi Harold Kushner, “if we show honor and respect to our parents when they are old, we will be fashioning a world in which we will not have to be afraid of growing old, a world in which length of days will indeed be a reward and not a burden” (Foreword, xvii to Berrin S. (ed) 1997, A Heart of Wisdom: Making the Jewish Journey from Midlife Through the Elder Years, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing).

Meanwhile, I feel rewarded that I am providing my mother with a good quality of life from which she still derives some enjoyment.

Yes, despite everything, she still gets some joy out of life. Contrary to popular misconception, advanced Alzheimer’s sufferers are not vegetables. Although the illness may cocoon them from feeling the full brunt of life’s emotions, they still experience pain and pleasure, peace and agitation. My mother continues to appreciate good food, especially dark chocolate, music, flowers, massage and the warmth of the sun. She may be confined to a wheelchair, but she is not confined to her apartment, attending an adult day care program twice a week, going on outings and visiting with her family.

She is still a human being – even if she has lost her “I”.

Shira Sebban, a writer and editor based in Sydney, Australia, worked as a journalist for the Australian Jewish News. She previously taught French at the University of Queensland and worked in publishing. She also serves as vice-president on the board of  Emanuel School, a pluralistic and egalitarian Jewish Day School. You can read more of her work at: https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/category/australian-jewry/ http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13636  and at http://shirasebban.blogspot.com.au/

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October 22, 2012 · 8:17 am

Ring of Defiance

by Ellen Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

Recently I lost a gold band off the ring finger of my right hand. The ring is a plain gold band, and I use it as a guard to keep that hand’s main ring, a lovely garnet I once bought in Jerusalem, from slipping off.

The gold band had been my mother’s wedding ring, and I wore it  constantly, not only as a reminder of her, but also of an episode that has meant an increasing lot to me over the years.

I have never forgotten the day in May of 1939 when my mother and I had reservations at the Hotel Bremer Hof , a well known hotel in Bremen, for the night before we were due to board the North German Lloyd liner EUROPA for our emigration to the United States.

When it came time for dinner Mimi (my pet name for my mother) called room service for some food to be brought up for Pips, my Scotty, who had been certified to travel with us. Pips even carried traveling papers stamped with an official swastika clearing him for the voyage.

Pips’ food arrived and hit the spot with the dog. But it was the slip of paper on the silver tray that left the message I remember to this day. It read in elegant typescript: “Our Jewish guests are requested to refrain from entering the dining room for any meals.”

The next morning my mother and I stood on the Bremerhafen pier undergoing one last bodily inspection before boarding the S.S EUROPA.

Two fat bosomy matrons in white uniforms had already searched all orifices of my mother and me (I was all of 11 years old) looking for gold, diamonds or other treasures which we might intend to smuggle out of Germany. Not having found anything they were looking for one of the heavy females spotted my mother’s wedding ring and demanded: “Hand it over!”

With a rapid, but calm, movement my mother slid off the ring, moved a few steps closer to the edge of the pier and tossed the ring into the harbor water between the pier and the ocean liner. Too young to know what the dangerous consequences of her action might have been I admired my mother’s courage that day

The S.S.EUROPA left Bremerhaven early that evening. The shipboard band played “Muss I denn, muss I denn” (a German folksong beginning with the words “why must I leave this little town?”)

There were tears in my mother’s eyes as we stood at the railing watching Bremen fade into the distance. I did not understand why she cried, but I was very young and did not have her memories of better German days.

It was an enormous feeling of satisfaction to visit Pips at his kennel on the top deck. Twice a day a German sailor, black-white-red swastika emblem pinned to his uniform blouse, walked my little Jewish dog around the upper level of the ship to do his “business.” Even this eleven-year old somehow found this to be an act of poetic justice.

Soon after our arrival in Louisville, our new American home, my mother requested my father, who had managed to arrive ahead of us, to buy her a new wedding ring. She did not feel married without it, she said.

And it was this ring, which I wore as a guard on my right hand, that I’d lost.

Fortunately this episode has a happy ending.

After a few hours of frantic searching, the Ring of Defiance reappeared. It had slipped off my finger during a session on the computer and awaited discovery right under the keyboard.

Of course, it is not the original Ring of Defiance, but even as a replacement I am very happy to have it back on my hand where it belongs.

Born in Germany, Ellen Norman Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel.  Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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December 26, 2011 · 9:48 am

Bubby’s Menorah

by Janet Ruth Falon (Elkins Park, PA)

I never scrape off the melted wax
on my mother’s mother’s menorah.
I like the layers of color
and the textures of time
and underneath, the tarnish of greying age.

My mother, when she visits,
picks it off with her varnished fingernails
and the probing tines of a fork,
and then polishes the menorah with pink wax,
to a sparkle that again reflects flame.

Janet Ruth Falon, the author of The Jewish Journaling Book (Jewish Lights, 2004), teaches a variety of writing classes — including journaling and creative expression — at many places, including the University of Pennsylvania. She leads a non-fiction writing group and works with individual students, and is continuing to write Jewish-themed readings for what she hopes will become a book, In the Spirit of the Holidays.

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November 8, 2010 · 8:36 am

On Transmitting Family Trauma to the Next Generation

by Suzanna Eibuszyc (Calabasas, CA)

It is said that in every survivor’s family, one child is unconsciously chosen to be a ‘memorial candle,’ to carry on the mourning and to dedicate his or her life to the memory of the Shoah.  That child takes part in the parents’ emotional world, assumes the burden and becomes the link between the past and the future.  I realize now that my mother chose me to be that memorial candle.

My mother was forever haunted by her loved one’s images. She saw them starved and frozen in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto. She saw them in the cattle cars that took them to the Treblinka death camp. My mother never forgave herself for leaving to save her own life and abandoning them to the horrible deaths that followed. She never stopped mourning.

My parents’ huge losses were more than I could fathom. In time I came to realize it was impossible to recover from such a tragedy.  They carried on with their lives, but the Holocaust was being played out in their minds on a daily basis. Understanding this became crucial in my understanding of myself.

I grew up in a home where my sister and I lived, day by day, with my parent’s experiences.  I sensed my mother’s abandonment and helplessness and felt her fears and resignation. I lived with her rituals, where every crumb of bread was important, where fear of being cold was magnified, and where suspicion of others, and secretiveness and mistrust ruled everything she did.  Her scars became my scars.

Growing up in the shadows of the aftermath made me a witness to what had happened.  Sometimes I was sympathetic. Other times I was filled with contempt.  I was angry, and overwhelmed for being connected to my mother’s ongoing grief.

I tried to understand how my parents’ family could just be gone, completely gone.   My mother visibly mourned her five nieces and nephews, repeating often, with emotion, “so young and innocent, they should be among the living. They were all taken away and murdered.” And I grieved with her although I had never even seen any photographs.

In truth, I could not comprehend how her family could just be gone.  I have never seen any concrete images that my mother once had an extended family.  I was frightened, confused and ashamed that I did not believe my mother. In my heart I was sad but in my mind I decided her family had never existed.

I was also envious of my mother’s incredible adventures.  Overwhelmed by the tragedy, I found that I could feel safe when I focused on her Russian stories.  I loved the glimpses of hope and excitement that my imagination turned into exotic tales.  I pictured her living in a foreign place, in the desert, under a hot sun and riding camels.  I never imagined her going hungry or being sick.  From those early childhood stories I decided I wanted to be like her, to travel and visit unusual and far away places where she was heroic and a pillar of strength.

I also did not understand my mother’s fearful and anxious behavior.  I remember her being especially intensely anxious and fearful during Christian and Jewish Holidays.  She seemed to want to make us invisible.  This was a time to stay indoors, to be mistrustful, afraid of a possible mob mentality.  The baffling, unexplained, anxious behavior only intensified the fear in my child’s imagination.

In Poland, where I grew up, people had a deeply rooted belief that Jews were responsible for killing Christ.  Jesus’ birth at Christmas and his resurrection at Easter was a time of great fear for Jews.  The Jewish holiday of Passover was a time of anxiety too.  The wide-spread rumor was that matzoth was made with the blood of Christian children.  It was not until I got to the United States and was in college that I learned that Jesus was a Jew who was crucified by the Romans.  To this day I do not have any emotional attachment to holidays, but now at least I understand how this disconnection came about.

* * *

My very first memory is the sensation of fear.  I believe I was born being afraid.  I believe the Holocaust left in its path a darkness and despair that enveloped both survivors and their children’s consciousness.  I am convinced that the fear my mother experienced was passed on to me through the sinewy strands of chemical inheritance known as genes.

As a child I had an abnormal fear of people.  When people came to our home I hid under the large kitchen table covered with a linen cloth that reached to the floor.  I refused to come out until the guests departed.

I remember the trauma when I was five years old and our town held army maneuvers in the city square right in front of our house.  Although I understood that they were just exercises and celebrations for showing off what the Polish army could do, I was inconsolable.   I often wonder if my over-sensitivity that day to the sharp sounds of gunfire and tanks rolling through the streets had anything to do with my mother surviving the bombing of Warsaw.

I was six years old when my mother took me to an art exhibit that had come to our town.  My sister was in school.  The exhibit was a tribute to mothers and children who suffered during the war.  The art showed SS soldiers ripping children from mothers’ arms and killing them, mothers being killed and mothers begging for mercy.   I remember how my mother cried when we walked through the exhibit.  I was overwhelmed with both her tears and because the art was frightening. When I think back to that day, I realize my mother had no idea the exhibit would be as traumatic as it was. She also probably thought I was too young to really understand.   Her tears were enough for me to see and know the horror of what the work depicted.

The next morning as I was waking up I had a hallucination.  An SS soldier was standing on each side of my bed. I was not allowed to move.  If I did, they had orders to shoot me.  I remained motionless, afraid to take a breath until my mother came looking for me. I never burdened her with my terrifying waking dream because I remembered how she cried that day.

I was seven when I learned that being Jewish meant that I was different from my Polish friends. On September 1st 1958 I attended my first day of school.  It started happily enough.  My mother allowed me to approach the school alone.  As I got closer I was confronted by some of my future classmates who proceeded to taunt me. “You are Jewish, Poland is not your country, and Palestine is where you belong.”   I didn’t understand. This was the first time I’d heard that my home was in Palestine.  It also was the first time I realized that being Jewish and Polish could not be combined. Suddenly that day that began so happily for me dragged on.  I could not wait to run home.

I remember that I was crying as I opened our kitchen door. I needed an explanation. My mother sat with me by the kitchen window and explained what it meant to be Jewish.  I can still remember the sadness in her voice and the tears in her eyes.  At the time my mother’s reaction was not important; it was eclipsed by my amazement.  Our true homeland was in Palestine.  My response was a simple one, ‘let’s go where we belong.’

I still remember going to the train station on so many occasions to say good-bye to friends and people we knew.  It was always someone else leaving for Israel or America.  I could not understand why it was not us.  I was intensely angry with my parents because it seemed they had chosen to stay behind.  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out my parents secret and why we could not leave Poland.  We had to stay until my father died in 1961; he was only forty nine years old.  He died of the tuberculosis he had contracted in Saratov in 1940.  As Jewish families were leaving for other countries we were denied entry because of his illness. Even Israel would not accept him because of the advanced stage of his tuberculosis.  My parents concealed the seriousness of father’s health.  My sister, who was four years older than me, was able to finally figure out the reason. I never did. In my anger I saw them as weak, indecisive and helpless.

My father, Abram Ejbuszyc, was silent about his past. He never uttered a word about what happened to him during the war or even about his life before the war.  I cannot help but wonder if this was a form of self-imposed punishment.  Studies have shown that there are two kinds of parents among survivors: those who can not connect and those who can not separate from their children.  My father detached himself and didn’t talk, as if afraid to make a close connection and lose loved ones again, as if to contain his trauma within himself and spare his children.  He lived behind a wall of silence. That was his shelter.  He took his burden to his grave.

* * *

In New York, in order to survive, we each went in different directions, and the family that we had been in Poland disintegrated.  Our lives became turbulent as our notions of how things should be collided.  My mother worked in a factory. She got up at six in the morning and took the one-hour subway ride from the Bronx to Manhattan. With an address scribbled on a piece of paper, she managed to ask for directions and got to work and back home again. She was a fighter and a survivor.  She was not going to succumb to her fears.  She was determined to make the best life possible for herself.  And so, at age 50, after working in a factory all day long, she enrolled in night school and soon became fluent in English. I watched her navigate through her new life, never giving up.  She did not burden us with her fears and problems, she buried those deep inside her.  Two years later she was working in a bank.

I took classes at City College in the department of Jewish studies.  One of my professors was the famous writer and survivor Elie Wiesel.  It was in Professor Wiesel’s classes that I realized the importance of my mother’s story.  I persuaded her to write about her tragic life.  My mother listened.  She understood the importance of history and of remembering, not just with regard to the Holocaust but also for the Jewish legacy in Eastern Europe.  She wrote her story in Polish.  My huge regret was that I did not get to translate her memoir while she was still alive.  Somehow we never had the time to journey and emerge together from her trauma as adults.

I went back to Poland in 1972 when I became an American citizen. I was still haunted by the memories of our departure from Poland when my mother was inconsolable.  I had to return.  I was looking for something, a piece of me I believed I had left behind.  The rationale for going back had to do with nostalgia for my homeland, and the belief that my father was calling me back to the tiny, overgrown Jewish cemetery where he was buried. The ghosts of my past were clamoring for some attention.

I traveled through Europe and Israel. I lived in the desert, under the hot sun, in a tent.  By 1979 I moved to the West Coast, far away from my mother in New York. I saw her a few times a year and we talked on the phone every week.  I often remembered that when I was a child all I ever wanted was to follow in my mother’s footsteps.  I wanted to go to exotic and far away places.  I turned her stories about surviving in Russia into heroic journeys.  Traveling made me feel courageous like my mother.  She passed down to me her pessimism about life, suspicion of others, and assumptions about everything turning out for the worst. However, traveling always put me in touch also with my mother’s strengths. It temporarily wiped out the negative themes that played on in my mind.   While on the road, surrounded by unusual, new places, I was happy and at home. At the same time I had an overwhelming fear of putting down roots.  I did not want to have them severed in the same way my mother had.

The trauma of loss, the disconnection from community and my frightened family influenced how I chose to live my life.  Like other children of survivors, I developed a self-preservation defense.  I built a wall around myself to protect me from the traumatic home that I grew up in.  I was torn between letting go and staying connected.  At times my mother’s gloom was almost too intense for me, but I continually found myself being pulled back into her world anyhow.  My conscience would not allow anything else.  With my mother’s death, remembering carried a deep and sacred meaning.

* * *

I feel that it is not only my obligation to remember the Holocaust, but also to carry the burden.  I was raised in its shadows, inheriting my mother’s trauma which in turn shaped my personality, and will continue to burden my daughters who grew up with my emotional experiences of loss and abandonment.  My daughters knew about my Jewish Polish history, but years went by before I shared with them my family’s dark secrets of surviving and perishing in the Holocaust.

In the summer of 2008 I took my two daughters to Poland to keep our Jewish history and heritage alive. They were twenty-one and eighteen.  I wanted them to see the country of my birth and where I spent my childhood and teenage years.  We went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz had been turned into a museum and it does a credible job of telling what happened to our people.  When you enter Birkenau you go into shock.  The sheer vastness of the place, with the train tracks in the middle, made me gasp for air.  It was the reality that the Nazis intended and almost succeeded to annihilate the Jewish people in Europe.  My mind saw the trains coming and going, the selections taking place, the gas chambers and ovens working.  I heard the cry that went unheard. I saw the guns, the dogs, and the killing machine going at full speed.  In Auschwitz-Birkenau alone millions died, ninety percent of them Jews, among them my father’s family.

We went to my mother’s city of Warsaw, my father’s city of Lodz, and to visit his grave in the city of Klodzko.  We went to Poland to pay homage and ended up mourning.  I went to remember what my family had lost, to face my own exile and my need to reconnect to my roots. It was only with my mother’s death that I truly understood the magnitude of the loss and suffering she and her generation endured, and the importance of never forgetting.

Born in Poland, Suzanna Eibuszyc graduated from CCNY where she took classes in the department of Jewish studies with Professor Elie Wiesel, who encouraged her to translate her mother’s memoir, Bashert: It Was Meant to Be, into English. You can read an excerpt of Bashert in an earlier posting on the Jewish Writing Project: https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/devotion-to-faith/

This essay is an edited version of a longer chapter, “Afterward/Epilogue – Our life in Poland after the war and my insights about family trauma and how it is transmitted to the next generations,” which appears in Bashert: It Was Meant to Be.

All rights reserved “On Transmitting Family Trauma to the Next Generation” by Suzanna Eibuszyc.  No part of this work may be used or reproduced without written permission of the Author/Translator/Rights-Holder. For more information about the work, write to: suzanna_eibuszyc@yahoo.com

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October 25, 2010 · 8:54 am

Keeping it Kosher, Local Style

By Lorraine Gershun (Oahu, Hawaii)

My oldest daughter occasionally stays after Sunday school for a youth group event or Purim play practice or other extracurricular activity. On the days that I am not driving for the carpool and cannot pick up lunch and bring it to her at noon like the good Jewish mother that I am, she  takes a sack lunch.

This requires a bit of forethought and planning.

Growing up in Hawaii means growing up eating the local food and in that respect she is totally  a “Local Girl.”

Lunch on the go translates to: Spam musubi or manapua.

California roll, fried noodles, Cup Noodles or maybe a Hot Pocket are also acceptable choices.

A peanut butter, or even bologna, sandwich is not the status quo.

This presents no problems on a regular school day or for the occasional field trip. I insist she add in some healthy items like fruits and vegetables and we strike a decent balance.

But when she goes to temple, none of these are acceptable.

We are Reform Jews and choose not to keep kosher at home. But we do respect the general kosher style that is observed at our temple: No pork, shellfish, or combination of meat and dairy foods.

When she realized that Spam musubi and manapua are filled with pork, California roll has imitation crab (which seems disrespectful in my book), Cup Noodles contains dried shrimp, and Hot Pockets are usually a mixture of milk and meat (at least the ones she likes,) she was shocked.

I chuckled. “This is a good lesson for you,” I told her.

The bagel and cream cheese I offered or the humus and pita she often likes at home were not deemed  reasonable substitutes. (Did I forget to mention that she is 13 and at that age nothing is a reasonable substitute for your first choice that you cannot have?)

We had to come up with alternatives.

Luckily, she is not completely unreasonable and I have some decent problem solving skills.

Not only Spam and fake crab meat go well with rice. You can make a tuna fish salad hand roll or a plain cucumber maki. She likes both of those. Hot rice with a package of roasted seaweed also makes the cut.

Instead of char siu in the manapua, you can buy them with chicken or vegetables. I know, it’s not the same, but it is a compromise.

Bottom line, I can’t resist telling her, “You should be happy to have food in your mouth.”

Of course, she agrees. And, in a pinch, a peanut butter sandwich will do just fine.

Lorraine Gershun is a nice Jewish mother who lives on the leeward side of Oahu. She taught secondary English and Journalism for over 20 years and has recently taken some time off to take care of her two lovely, semi-adolescent children and pursue opportunities in writing. After several years of free lance writing for local news publications, she launched her own blog this summer called “Being Jewish in Hawaii” (http://beingjewishinhawaii.wordpress.com/), where this piece first appeared.

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August 2, 2010 · 8:35 am

Shiva

by Leslie LaskinReese (San Rafael, CA)

Lori asked if we would sit shiva and  I said no, who would come that knows Mom?  That was my knee jerk reaction.  Raised a Jew but not trained a Jew.  We never sat shiva growing up. I didn’t even know what it looked like when I was young.  But the day after Mom died I realized I needed to sit shiva.  When I told Dad he sounded almost relieved.  Or maybe I was imagining things.

We are Reform Jews.  Orthodox Jews sit shiva for seven days.  That’s what shiva means: seven.  Reform Jews sit shiva for three days.  I don’t know who picked three.  Officially shiva begins as soon as the funeral finishes.  I checked in with my friend who is studying to be a rabbi and she said shiva can begin when I need it to begin.  So my shiva began on Sunday.  My dear dear friends brought lunch and dinner and spent time with me.  They let me talk and they listened.  They made me sit down and they fed me.  They gave me room to breathe.

Last night and tonight we had a service at home.  Our wonderful cantor and my friend who is almost a rabbi officially, and is clearly a rabbi in every other way, led beautiful services and gave me room to pray and remember and cry surrounded by friends who will wrap themselves around me and my family.  It gave me a place to begin.  I stopped holding my breath.  And I told them about Mom.

So yes, I did sit shiva Lori, and it was amazing.  Thanks for asking.

Leslie LaskinReese is a writer and restaurant designer living in Northern California.  Leslie’s writing can be found at something’s burning (http://leslieedie.wordpress.com/) where this piece first appeared.  When she is not writing, Leslie is either designing restaurants  or tending her family.  Someday, Leslie will have the courage to seek print publication for one of her many writing projects.

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