Sarah’s excellent adventure at the Met, with her son

It’s hot out, really hot. We needed to be out of the house. My son suggested a museum trip. he wanted to see the new Art of the Islamic world rooms at the Met.

We saw these doors for a raised lectern from a mosque.

Some wonderful rugs including this one.

I loved some of the pieces from a room of contemporary Iranian art.

I loved how this mosaic mirror piece used both traditional forms and techniques in such a cool way.

I don’t know if this shadow piece can be conveyed in my photos. but it was a laser cut piece of either silk or poly, about the size of a large wall rug..and displayed with light shining through the piece…the shadow was part of the work. The artist is part Zoroastrian, part Jewish. It seems and appropriate way to show who she was in Iranian culture.

We also visited a related exhibit about the Byzantine world. of course I was most interested in the Jewish pieces in that exhibit.

This was from a synagogue in Ashkelon, Israel.

I loved this primer from the early 13th century.

My first grade primer had exactly the same first lesson. My mother laughed at how old fashioned the book my teacher was using was. I don’t know if my mother realized quite HOW old fashioned it was. ( My mother had taught me how to read Hebrew when I was 3 using a far more modern methodology) Interestingly, this book from 1227 is completely readable, and the type face is far nicer than the book my first grade teacher used.

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Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

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A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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