by | August 26, 2013 · 7:57 pm

Rosh HaShanah in the Pines 2 – A New Year’s Poem

Since 1999 I have served as Rabbi of Congregation B’nai Olam.  B’nai Olam is a unique and special congregation in Fire Island Pines, a beautiful summer community on Fire Island, a barrier island off the Coast of Long Island, which meets only  for Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur.  In 2007 I began writing a new poem every year for Rosh HaShanah.  Here is the second one, from 2008.  Shanah tovah u’metukah.

Rosh HaShanah in the Pines, Fire Island 2

                                                            2008/5769
IMG_3095This late in the season

decks are bare,

houses closed up until next summer.

Torsos are covered,

tattoos and piercings remaining undisplayed

until the cycle repeats itself next year.

Geraniums are gone,

eaten by deer weeks ago,

leaving gray-weathered boards

brightened only by blue tarps

of now-covered pools.

 

IMG_3159Scrub pines

rooted deeply in sand

offer occasional shelter

from the scouring late-September gusts.

The sea laps a lullaby against the shore.

 

Holy days arrive amidst autumn’s pumpkin

and apple harvest.

We make our own stark beauty

on this strip of sand

cleansing our souls in this pared down paradise.

Late this year, but never too late.

 

Copyright © 2009 Hara E. Person

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under High Holy days, Judaism, Poetry

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | August 23, 2013 · 12:02 pm

Rosh HaShanah in the Pines 1 – A New Year’s Poem

Since 1999 I have served as Rabbi of Congregation B’nai Olam.  B’nai Olam is a unique and special congregation in Fire Island Pines, a beautiful summer community on Fire Island, off the Coast of Long Island, which meets only  for Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur.  In 2007 I began writing a new poem every year for Rosh HaShanah.  In these days leading up to Rosh HaShanah, I will be sharing these poems here.  Shanah tovah u’metukah.

IMG_0248

Rosh HaShanah in the Pines, Fire Island, 2007/5768

Slanted light filters through pine trees,

sweet smell of resin stickiness,

rough wood of the boardwalk

— careful to avoid the nails —

moist breaths of salt air,

rusted sliding doors open grudgingly onto decks.

 

The new year comes amidst

heightened senses,

grains of sand between toes,

nearly empty gray blue beaches,

autumnal monarchs alighting on end-of-season purple buds.

 

One more year.

Who is missing from the congregation?

My father gone now four years,

the kids taller,

grumbling teenagers who crave attention.

 

An orange sun setting over the bay.

Phosphorescence outlines each crest of waves.

Flashlights in the dark

guiding us home.

 

© 2007 by Hara E. Person, originally published in Bridges.

1 Comment

Filed under High Holy days, Judaism, Poetry

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | August 22, 2013 · 6:31 pm

A Generational Blip?: The Last Name Question

14355_176717805821_592730821_2748490_7989462_nThe fact that my youngest child is about to leave home and go off to college, and that my oldest child will shortly turn the magical age of 21, is making me weirdly reflective.  It’s amazing to realize that this huge part of my life, this stage that has so greatly occupied me for twenty-one years, is about to be over.  Done.  Believe me, I know that parenting doesn’t stop when they leave home, but still, all that thinking, all that angst, all that decision making about child-raising, it’s over.  No more agonizing over those tough questions around nursing on demand or gender-based toys or how much allowance at what age or when they can walk home alone from school….  The list goes on but I’ll stop there.

That part of my life is firmly behind me.  My kids got through babyhood, and toddlerhood, and tweenhood, and even most of adolescence, relatively unscathed.  They weren’t ruined by the toy soldiers given by a babysitter who didn’t know our no-war-toys rule, or the Barbie given by the well-meaning aunt who didn’t know our no-Barbie rule, or by the comic books or sugared cereals or inconsistent naptimes that all happened despite our best efforts.  They’ve come out pretty okay.

But there is one question from those angsty early days that still feels fresh to me: The Last Name Question.

To change one’s name or not when getting married? To hyphenate or not? And that’s only Part A of the question.  Part B is, what to do with the kids and their last names?  These were questions that occupied a good deal of my thoughts years back, but they’re not questions I’ve dealt with much in recent years.  And yet, the questions, and the implications of the decision, still feel quite alive and relevant.

I did not change my name when I got married.  I was who I was.  It was both a feminist choice and a practical choice.  Besides which, I have a cool last name.   (If you’ve seen the recent fun time-wasting game about creating your public radio name, I’m the one whose name is already odd enough that I could go on NPR as is).

And yes, I admit, keeping my name made my father extremely happy.  When my husband and I got engaged, my father actually told my husband that it was okay with him if I didn’t change my name.  Seriously, with a straight face.

And then there was my mother, who of course changed her name when she got married in 1960. Later, she regretted the choice and took her original last name as her middle name, to be used on book covers and business cards.

But what about the kids, people asked.  Well, what about them?  Young and childless, we were sure we’d figure it out.  In 1990, when I got married, most women I knew were doing the same thing at the time, so really, this was not a big deal.  And what if you hyphenate, people would ask, and then they marry people with hyphenated names?  What then?  Horrors.  Whatever.  They’d figure it out.

At dinner a while ago with the parents of two of my son’s close friends, I looked around and noted that all three of us moms had names different than our husbands.  We are typical of our generation and demographic.  The list of names in my son’s high school graduation program showed that more than half of the mothers of his classmates had different names than their spouses.  The list of parents at his religious school confirmation two years ago showed only one mother who had the same last name as her spouse.  At a reunion dinner of his preschool class right before graduation we realized that every mom there had a different last name than her spouse.  This is the norm in the world in which he has been raised.

So, what about the kids? Well, among my kids’ peers a certain percentage were given hyphenated last names.  For the unhyphenated crowd, in straight families most kids have their father’s last name, and many (like my son) have their mother’s as their middle name – in the gay families with no gendered fall-back position, it’s often a toss up which name is in the middle and which is last, but most kids have both one way or another.  Other parents have come up with all kinds of combinations, including in some cases a brand new family name.  In other words, lots of solutions to the last name dilemma have been found, beyond the traditional solution of “one family, one name.” And never mind what divorces and remarriages and nontraditional family configurations have done to last names in families.  When my kids were born, there were all kinds of solutions to the last name question.

For my parents and my grandmother, who were cheerleaders of my decision not to change my name, women keeping their names was a move in a new and good direction.  They saw it as a sign of progress.  So it’s quite interesting, and yes, surprising, that my cohort of mothers may turn out to be just a generational blip. From a completely unscientific and ancedotal point of view, it seems that keeping one’s last name at marriage is not longer the norm.  Most young women seem to be  changing their names.

I realize there are many good reasons to do so.  Perhaps they want the fresh start represented by a new name.  Perhaps they didn’t have a good relationship with their father and don’t want to keep his name. One friend of my sister’s grew up with a hyphenated name and couldn’t wait to get rid of it when she got married.   That all makes sense and I understand.  But one idea I often hear cited is that they want their family to unified with one name.  I nod respectfully, but honestly, having a mother with a different last name never made any of my cohort feel that we were any less of a unified family.  And if you must choose one unified name, why must it be the man’s?  But I digress.  If feminism is about women having the agency to make a full range of choices, then choosing to change your name is as much of a feminist choice as choosing not to change your name.  I get it.

And yet I admit that I don’t entirely understand.  I’ve been told that it’s too cumbersome to have a different last name than a spouse. After 23 years of having a spouse with a different last name, and children with a different last name, I can safely say, no, it’s not cumbersome.  Not at all.  All these moms in my cohort are used to the occasional minor inconvenience.  We’re used to calling pediatricians offices and explaining that we’re so-so, mother of this-one or that-one.  It’s not really a big deal. People can deal with it.  Sometimes they need some education, but they can learn. (Okay, there was that one time at passport control, but it got quickly resolved).

When my then-to-be-husband and I discussed last names early on, we were in agreement about having different last names.  Though we did briefly discuss finding a new, original, name, our ultimate decision was an expression of core values of egalitarianism and family history.  It was about the importance of partnership between parents, and about preserving women’s identities and history and aspirations alongside those of men.  I chose to do that by keeping my own name and giving my children my family name as a middle name.  An imperfect solution, but it’s worked.  And in all fairness, I know that some other families who share those values find other ways to transmit them.

So then back to the question of what will our children do, those poor children burdened with all those extra names. My children are not yet at the life partner stage, so it  remains to be seen what they’ll do then.  For a while in high school, my daughter took on my name and hyphenated it with my husband’s last name, which I admit I loved, but it didn’t last too far into college.  As for my son’s hyphenated friends, by this stage, the end of high school, most (though not all) of the boys have dropped their mothers’ names and go only by their fathers’.  That’s a little sad, given the intention behind the choice at the time, but it’s their choice to make.  I look forward to seeing the creative solution my kids and their peers will choose when the time comes, and I’ll do my best to be respectful.

Amherst-College-Campus2It’s strange to think that after all the deliberation and intentionality that went into the decisions about our own last names and those of our children, we may well just be a generational blip.  As I looked around the table at our dinner that night, I realized that of course all of this is about much more than whatever name one chooses to go by, or what names we give our children. Whatever last names they carry, the fact is that all three of the boys at dinner that night are going to be attending their mother’s colleges this fall.  That’s an interesting generational change of a different sort.

10 Comments

Filed under Feminism, women

Tagged as , , ,

by | July 13, 2013 · 3:42 pm

My Great-Grandmother’s Abortions

knitElected officials across this country seem to believe that they have the right to control women’s reproductive health. We have a seen a dramatic rise in lawmakers who think they know better than we do, and better than our doctors do, to make decisions about our health and our bodies.  The reality is that no matter what legislators would like to believe, there are limits to their powers.  Abortion exists because it is sometimes a necessity.  Banning abortion, or putting increasing limitations on women’s abilities to obtain an abortion, is not going to make the issue go away.  All these laws will do is imperil more women’s lives, and thus threaten the very families these laws purport to protect.

Abortion has been around for a long time.  For all kinds of reasons, throughout history women have sought to end pregnancies.  Sometimes the reason was poverty.  Sometimes the reason was the youth or stage of life of the mother.  Rape, incest, and illness also factor in.  Today, with modern pre-natal technologies, sometimes the reason is the health, or lack thereof, of the fetus.

Whatever the reason, desperate women have gone to incredibly dangerous lengths of end pregnancies that threatened their lives, whether physically or emotionally, and the lives and stability of their families.

I know this not only from reading the New York Times.  I know this from talking to physician friends about their patients.  I know this from talking to friends about their own abortion experiences – one who had an abortion as a terrified college student, another who aborted a tay-sachs fetus, and another who could not possibly support one more child given her precarious financial situation.

And I know this also because abortion is woven into the fabric of my family history.  My very pro-choice grandmother raised me and my sister on the story of her mother’s kitchen table abortions in the 1910’s.  It was very important to her that we knew these stories and understood how lucky we were to come of age in the post Roe v. Wade era.  Thankfully she is not alive today to see how that hard-won battle is being fought all over again.

Lina's sewing machine.

Lena’s sewing machine.

My great-grandmother Lena was an immigrant from the Poland/Austria region.  Her story is typical of so many of her time and place.  She arrived alone at 16 and set out to find work and a new life in a new country.  She married my great-grandfather and had four children.  They lived in a Lower East Side tenement (if you’ve never been, go to the Tenement Museum and get a sense of how tight those quarters were).  They scraped by, but barely. Lena took in piecework that she did at home on her Singer sewing machine.  She also cleaned houses for extra money – her husband, who delivered milk, wasn’t much of a provider.

Quarters were cramped in their apartment.  The three brothers had the bedroom.  The parents had the front room.  My grandmother, the only daughter, slept on a bedroll in the middle room, the kitchen.  And she remembered that twice she was asked to go and sleep with her brothers.  Curious, and probably disturbed by what she must have heard, she peeked into the kitchen and saw her mother on the kitchen table, having an abortion at the hands of a local “expert” with a knitting needle.  She remembered seeing this twice during her childhood.

These were acts of desperation.  The struggle to feed four growing children was a daily battle.  My grandmother remembered many lunches that consisted of a slice of pumpernickel bread and a pickle.  They were hungry often.  She was undernourished enough to qualify for a school program which provided her with a glass of milk every day.  This was before birth control was legal, safe, and widely available.  In fact Lena was a supporter of one of the great heroines of her era, Margaret Sanger, the birth control crusader and founder of what later became Planned Parenthood.  (Legend has it that she used to translate Sanger’s speeches into Yiddish for the neighborhood).

These memories stayed with my grandmother, and she passed them down to my mother, and then to us.  My great-grandmother Lena survived these experiences, and lived a long life.  She was one of the lucky ones.  Women all over the world die from poorly performed abortions every day.  And the ones who don’t die are often damaged for life due to infection, punctured uteruses, and perforated bowels.

My grandmother rejoiced that my sister and I would grow up in a world in which reliable, safe birth control was available, and in which abortions were safe and legal should they be necessary.  Gone were the days of coat hangers and knitting needles.  She understood how many more educational, professional, and financial choices were available to women once they could make safe decisions about childbearing.  If she was alive today, she would be shocked and appalled at how these basic rights enabling women to determine their life choices are being undermined by elected officials, and we should be too.  The anti-abortion and other reproductive  related legislation being proposed and voted into law around the country today sets us back decades, and dangerously imperils women’s lives and futures.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | June 14, 2013 · 11:58 am

A Father’s Day Poem

STP baseballFather’s Day is one of those days that got dropped from my personal calendar when my father died almost ten years ago.  It’s not that I don’t want to honor fathers in general, and I encourage my children to find ways to celebrate their father.  But it lost some resonance for me when I became fatherless.

It’s not exactly that Father’s Day pierces my heart when it rolls around every year.  It was never a big celebration in our family when I was growing up, and for that matter neither was mother’s day.  I miss my father much more on his birthday, which he enjoyed with the glee of a little boy, or on his yahrzeit, always a day of sadness and what-ifs.  And I miss him on important family occasions where his absence is especially felt, like my kids’ bat and bar mitzvahs, college acceptances, high school graduations, and the like, where he is glaringly absent in the family photos.

But still, when Father’s Day rolls around there is a feeling of sadness, and emptiness.  So in honor of Father’s Day, and in memory of my father, here’s a poem about him that I wrote a few years back.

To My Father, 1934-2003

The World Series

 

While machines flashed red numerals

hope, despair, hope

your long graceful fingers

reached up from your ICU-induced sleep state

to trace figures in airborne columns of debits and credits.

 

Yiddish was your first language

but numbers were your native tongue.

Balance sheets spoke to you of nuance,

challenges mastered and tamed,

the stories and dramas of the universe.

 

Numbers talked,

and you answered.

You wrote your life story in their epic language

of plusses and minuses.

 

Ebbetts Field was your princely realm,

a boyhood kingdom in which

the beauty and order of stats

kept the chaos away.

 

“Peppy” they called you in high school

because Pepsi’s kept you sharp.

The reliable math of poker and

the clean geometry of pool sharking

provided cool cash

stored always in serial number order.

 

Becoming an accountant

provided an arithmetic solution

to the sum of your first-generation yearnings.

Controlling the figures in ledgers and spreadsheets

supplied the way to amount

to a man of substance.

 

You would have loved tonight’s game

a four-of-four sweep for my son’s team.

As we watched, his eyes on the screen and my eyes on him,

he held forth in that language of

stats and averages, innings and outs,

that I haven’t heard since your numbers went still.

 

Copyright © Hara E. Person

July 14, 2008

Leave a Comment

Filed under Judaism, Poetry

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | June 5, 2013 · 8:29 pm

Fish Forks and Beer Mugs: Choosing the Right Technology for Publishing

fish forkThe nature of the book has changed dramatically in recent years. From the old standard of signatures of paper, in multiples of 16, 24,or 32, bound between covers and filled with typeset text, we now have ebooks, and PDF’s, and audiobooks, and apps – and that’s just for starters.

There are so many choices about how to produce a book. And yet, the essence of a book in many ways remains unchanged. They remain transmitters of ideas, containers of human experience and expression.

As a publisher, I’m often asked about how we will use technology with any given project. My answer is very simple: In as many ways as possible. For while it’s true that the technology presents us, a publisher using Hebrew text, with real challenges, and while it’s also true that we also have real financial limitations, our goal is always to create as many different versions of a book as we can, taking into account what makes sense for that particular content. For even with all the options we have available today, publishing should not be driven by technology, but rather by content development.

Publishing is no longer focused on the physical manufacturing of objects. But just as has always been true in publishing, content has to be developed carefully, thoughtfully, and creatively. That is our central goal at the CCAR Press. First we need an idea that is right for our core market, an approach that aligns with our mission, and the right team of editors and/or writers. Each project has different specifications and uses, and so allows for different formats. There are technological options we can consider today that weren’t possible last year. Surely that will be the same next year as well, and so on. Some projects, like the Daily Blessing App, are not physical books at all. Some projects, like Mishkan T’filah, exist as a physical book, an App, and in Visual T’filah, and we will continue to develop other versions as technology and finances allow. Mishkan R’fuah: Where Healing Resides, is both a physical book and an ebook. And so on.

iT'filahThere’s a lot of talk in the publishing world about how people are choosing to read today. Publishers carefully study stats about how people are reading, and which demographic is doing what in which medium. But I’m not convinced it’s a competition between formats. Rather, it may be that the more formats, the more we can customize our personal reading experiences.

The other day I was listening to a book on Audible and the voice in my ear said, “In this audiobook you will learn…” which I found rather jarring. For me, the experience wasn’t about listening to an audiobook. I had simply chosen to listen to this specific book, rather than read it. I hadn’t shopped for an audiobook, I had shopped for this particular title. The fact that it was an audiobook was insignificant. The audiobook aspect of the experience was a doorway to step through, on the other side of which was the content of the book. What mattered ultimately was the content, not the format.

Growing up I learned that salad is eaten with one kind of fork, and the main course with another. Dessert might be eaten with yet another. Later I learned that fish has its own kind of fork, and even later was introduced to such specialty items as pickle forks and olive forks.  Think too about glasses – this kind for water, this kind for white wine, this kind for red, and a frosted mug for beer. Each was created to best serve the experience of imbibing that particular food or drink, but in the end, the purpose is all the same: to convey the food or the liquid to your mouth.

So too with different book formats in this age of multiple choice. As a reader, I find myself choosing different formats depending on the content and context. I prefer printed books for poetry, for Torah commentaries, and for cookbooks. Yet I read fiction almost entirely on my iPad. I listen to non-fiction business books on my phone. It’s not a competition between the formats, but rather a matter of which one I prefer for the particular content.

The questions about how to best use technology in publishing are challenging and enormous. Publishers of all shapes and sizes are required to constantly keep learning new skills, and consider new options. But the core of publishing is still about content. For publishers, technology is not the goal, it is merely the means.

This blog also appeared on RavBlog, the blog of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Books, Judaism, Poetry, Publishing

Tagged as , ,

by | May 17, 2013 · 10:46 am

Good Books: Some Suggestions for Summer Reading

IMG_0193What’s a good book?  Seems to be a question I discuss a lot.  People are always asking me for recommendations.  And there’s almost nothing I like better than sitting with a fellow-reader and talking about books – what we loved as kids, our all-time favorites, what we’re reading now.

But what makes a book “good”?  I read many different kinds of books.  They’re all good but they’re good in very different ways.  Because my days are filled with liturgy and nonfiction, in my free time I read mostly fiction and poetry.  I read a lot, but my list of books read in any given month do not make a lot of objective or easily classifiable sense.

There is fiction I read because the language takes my breath away.   These books push me to become a better writer.  They inspire me to think more about language.  The characters are complex and the writing is smart, poetic and challenging.  The imagery is dense and well-drawn.  The dialogue and the relationships are thick and multi-dimensional.  Sometime there isn’t even that much of a plot to this kind of book, but oh, the writing.

There is other fiction I read where the writing is perhaps a little more pedestrian, a little less lush and gorgeous, but the plot is captivating.  With these books it’s all about the story.  I read these books when I want a story to sink deeply into, when I want to get caught up in a before and a during and an after.  I read these books to find out what happens next.

And then there are mysteries, one of my (not-so-entirely-secret) pleasures.  A good mystery is a puzzle to solve, along with some satisfying story-telling and compelling characters.  The “why” and the “how” are much more compelling than the “who”.  And yes, they’re fun.  Sometimes I need a little fun, even if it comes with a side dish of murder.

So if you’re interested in some good books for the summer, here’s a recommended list of books culled from my reading list over the last month, with titles from all three of the groups above.  They’re not all literary masterpieces, but they’re all good books.

Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver

The View from Penthouse B by Elinor Lipman

The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

Schroder: A Novel by Amity Gaige

The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler

Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear

The Book of Killowen by Erin Hart

A Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths

1 Comment

Filed under Books, Publishing, Stories, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

by | May 12, 2013 · 11:01 am

For Mother’s Day: Thank You for Making Me a Reader

little-house-on-the-prairie-original-coverI come from a long line of reading mothers.  Forget mom and apple pie – for me it’s mothers and books that go together. All of the mothers in my life, past and present, are (or were) huge readers and all have helped shaped me as a reader.

No one influenced my love of books and reading more than my mother.  A former children’s librarian, and then later a professor of education specializing in literacy, my mother turned me on to books from birth.  Language, stories, and books filled my childhood.  She read to me for years, and introduced me to beloved classics. One of her childhood favorites was Heidi; I insisted on drinking my milk from bowls after being introduced to the mountain dwelling Swiss girl and her adventures. Of course I loved the picture books of early childhood, but my real loves were chapter books that allowed me to take my place in new worlds – The Borrowers, the Little House books,  All-of-a-Kind-Family, the Narnia series, Little Women, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Anne of Green Gables, The Little Princess, and The Secret Garden.

I didn’t just read those books, I lived those books; I was those characters.  It didn’t matter that, at a year younger than my classmates, I was shy and somewhat immature – I had my books and the worlds contained within them.  I didn’t need a whole lot else.  There was a period of time when I went to school wearing hiking boots and a long pioneer-like pinafore with a sash, my hair in long braids, à la Laura Ingalls Wilder.  These books contained different worlds and experiences from each other, but they all featured strong, smart characters, mostly girls, who came out ok in the end, no matter the hardships they endured. Those stories reassured me that I too would make it through.

My mother did occasionally have to tell me to put down a book, like when I was crossing a street, but most of the time she just encouraged me to read, read, and read more.  Once in a while she made an attempt to get me to look out the window at the cows (when on car rides) or to go outside and get some fresh air (whatever for?), but mostly she just let me be.

There were also the Holocaust books. It is subject that fascinates her even today.  If a new Holocaust book comes out, she reads it.  As a child I was given a constant stream of holocaust books like The Upstairs Window, When Hitler Stole Pink Blanket, and of course Anne Frank.  It could be argued, lovingly, that there was some excess in this area – I read them hungrily but I’m not sure that for a child growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960’s and 70’s it was normal to occasionally wake up in the middle of the night from Holocaust nightmares.  But she wanted me to know my history as a Jew, and I did.prideandprejudice2

I do have to admit though that I have never come to love my mother’s absolutely favorite book of all time – Pride and Prejudice, but in an attempt to better understand her devotion to it I did take a class in Victorian Fiction in college.  Though Emma turned out to be my top pick from the curriculum that semester, I did gain a better understanding of the genre and can now appreciate, if not share, her passion.  And though we don’t see eye to eye on P&P, we are a great source of recommendations on new titles for each other.

My grandmother, z”l, was also an obsessive reader.  There was always a book in her hand or right nearby.  It didn’t matter where she was – at the pool, at a restaurant, at work, drinking a glass of white wine or a cup of coffee.  She loved biographies, mysteries, and epic (often melodramatic) multi-generational family dramas.  I picked up my late night reading habit from her, or maybe it was just passed down genetically – chicken or egg?  Either way, from her I learned that it was normal to stay up late at night in bed reading, regardless of what time you had to wake up the next day.  A good book took precedence over everything else.  When I got married her counsel to me concerned the importance of a reading light on the nightstand – that way I could stay up late reading without bothering my husband, thereby making for a conflict-free marriage.  If only she had lived to see the solutions provided by Kindles and iPads.

And then there’s my mother-in-law.  Another lover of books, she shares my taste in literary fiction.  We have swapped books for years as I’ve introduced her to American fiction, and she has introduced me to writers from South Africa and other parts of the British empire.  Thanks to her, my world has enlarged to include Doris Lessing, Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and many more. Where would I be without The Golden Notebook, one of my favorites of all time?  

It would not be fair to end this piece without mentioning that both my mother and my mother-in-law are not only readers, but also writers.  They have both published multiple books, including my mother’s magnum opus, The Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, and the book that we wrote together, Stories of Heaven and Earth: Bible Heroes in Contemporary Children’s Literature.

All these mothers shaped me into the reader that I am today.  Thank you for that amazing gift.

1 Comment

Filed under Books, Stories, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , ,

by | April 14, 2013 · 6:11 pm

A Poetry Review for Yom HaAtzmaut

51O+uzorYgL._AA160_If you love modern Hebrew poetry, the book These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam (The Toby Press, 2009), translated and with an introduction by Linda Stern Zisquit, must be a part of your collection.  This volume is the first time that a book-length translation of the poet’s work appears in English. As such, this new book makes an important contribution to contemporary Hebrew poetry available in English. Readers should be especially grateful that the publisher, Toby Press, continues to publish volumes of translated poetry that contain both the original Hebrew and the English side-by-side. This dual-language presentation adds depth even for those with only minimal Hebrew skills.

Rivka Miriam, born in Israel in 1952, is a child of Holocaust survivors who became a published poet at the age of fourteen. Her earliest poems were inspired by what she had learned about the Holocaust and her family’s experience. She is similarly influenced by Jewish texts and religious and theological ideas, some of which seeps into and infuses the poetry.

Rivka Miriam’s poems are deceptively simple at times. The language is straightforward, yet worlds are contained within it. Some lines come directly from Biblical or liturgical texts, while others could be everyday speech.

Biblical characters are featured in many poems, as in “The Stripes in Joseph’s Coat” which employs an economy of language to paint a rich history of Joseph’s whole ancestry. “The Song to Jacob who Moved the Stone from the Mouth of the Well” is a powerful, moving interpretation of the relationship between Jacob and Leah, told from Leah’s perspective, which contains the lines, “Flocks of sheep hummed beneath our blankets,/ tent-flies were pulled to the wind,” and ends with the lines, “And he didn’t know I was Leah/And flocks of sons broke through my womb to his hands.” This poem functions as modern midrash, which gives Leah a voice and adds a perspective missing from the Biblical text. God, too, appears frequently in the poems, an intimate presence with whom the poet is in relationship, as in “Still,” in which God knocks on the window and enters the room.

Many of the poems use maternal imagery such as breasts and nursing, as in “I Nurse a Very Old Woman,” or “Oh My Mother.” Sometimes these images are comforting and nurturing, but they can also be quite disturbing, as in the images of children suckling ash and leaves in “Never Will I Be Like the Mother in the Picture” or fire asking to be nursed in “The Fire, Blushing from Fear.”

The land of Israel is also a common theme in Miriam’s poetry. She writes of a mystical connection to the land, markedly different from so many of her Israeli peers who respond with irony when exploring a connection to the land. Hers is an unironic relationship, one that is deeply physical and sensual. The land in her poetry is a living being, a friend and sometimes a lover. In “These Mountains” the mountains sit in armchairs and eat cake like comfortable visitors while in “Lest it Be Revealed” in which “Only when my land is asleep/spread out before me/I whisper whisper her name/and she moans.”

There are references in this poetry to the pain and trauma of the Holocaust that Miriam’s family experienced. The two related poems “Chaya’s Unborn Child” and “And Shalom, Chaya’s Husband” speak of violence and loss with poignancy while avoiding any hint of sentimentality. These poems are disquieting, disturbing. There is a sense that the poet cannot help but bring forth what her legacy has bequeathed her, and that she is continually trying, over and over, to make sense of her family history of European suffering and the struggle of modern Israel.

Linda Zisquit has done a masterful job in these translations. She manages to convey both the directness and the richness of the Hebrew, while making the poems read as if they were always meant to be read in English. I can only hope that Miriam and Zisquit will continue to collaborate for years to come, and bring forth many more such volumes of achingly beautiful poetry. This volume includes an interview with Rivka Miriam, notes, and a translator’s note.  Go, fast, order it now!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

by | March 31, 2013 · 9:32 pm

Disruption and Revelation: The Road to Sinai

IMG_4451Passover is a disruptive time in my house.  We clean out cabinets and fridges, we get rid of some foods and stock up on others, cook and eat different dishes than we do the rest of the year, put away plates and take out other ones, move the good silver out of storage and get it polished ’til it shines.  We shift furniture around, carrying couches and other living room furniture to different parts of the house while bringing in rented tables and chairs.  So many chairs.  We welcome great numbers of guests throughout the week and see friends we don’t often get to see.  And then at the end of the week, everything has to be moved back, put back in place, returned to whence it came until the next year.

Our regular routine becomes disordered.  It’s wonderful, it’s exhausting, and it’s messy.

My Passover dishes are made of blue glass.  It’s a family tradition that started with my grandmother in the 30’s, and I love the idea that it’s been carried forward.  These plates speak to me of Passover.  When they come out of the cabinet, in their vinyl storage cases, it’s an unmistakable sign that Passover is about to arrive.  And seeing them on the set table, against the white tablecloth, a few hours before guests arrive is a beautiful sight.

IMG_0427It’s a big job getting them out of the cabinet, which is hidden behind the side of the stove and difficult to reach.  There’s a reason we only use that cabinet for Passover dishes.  And there are a lot of them – a lot.  Every year I swear that I will find a way to make it all work more smoothly next year.  I will figure out how to cut down on the amount of work involved.  And yet here we are, all over again, looking at piles of blue glass Pesach plates that, with some effort, will go back into storage in another few days not to emerge again until next year.  And that’s not even to mention the furniture – the couch has to be moved back into place and the rest of it has to be carried down from upstairs – and everything else that has to be moved back into place.  It will be a while before the house is back to normal.

And yet all this chaos makes sense. Looking at a map we marvel that the ancient Israelites should have journeyed from Egypt to the Promised Land in a matter of days or at most weeks.  But the road to redemption is not a straight line.  Figuring out who we are as individuals and as a people is complicated, and complex.  Those forty post-Exodus years of wandering in the desert teach us that becoming a mission-driven people united in covenant with God is a messy prospect, full of road blocks and obstacles.  It’s a disruptive, disrupting course that requires intentionality, not being on automatic pilot.  Choosing to be in covenant means making thoughtful, proactive choices, over and over as we move forward.

Passover throws us off course, every year, all over again.  The cycle of the calendar turns again and here it is, to jolt us out of our routine once more.  To remind us not to take our routines for granted.  To move us out of complacency.  So we move the furniture and change our diets and switch our plates.

Shaken up, pushed out of our comfort zones, we’re then able to begin the journey toward Sinai that culminates on Shavuot.  Passover gives us the chance to clean out not just our cabinets but our souls.  It reminds us to rethink our assumptions, and to clear out our heads by venturing off course.  The change in routine enables us to remember and rethink what matters, what motivates us.  Suddenly the view is different and we’re forced to recommit to our core values and our deepest aspirations.

I have a lot of reorganizing to do in the next few days.  But all those piles of blue glass plates are more than just a Passover inconvenience.  They are signposts on the path to revelation and rededication.

1 Comment

Filed under Judaism, Passover, Shavuot

Tagged as , , ,