Wading in the past

I haven’t been posting all that much because I have been wading through the boxes and boxes of STUFF from my mother’s apartment.

My mother was a big record keeper. She noted every penny spent and on what. My parents kept folders on every piece of artwork they purchased.

Here you see the tags from most of the Persian carpets they purchased.

To save space, I have been pulling photos out of albums and putting them into shoe boxes by decade. My father had assembled folders of photos that had never made it into albums.

This was one of the photos I had found.

Our family with their friend Rifka, just before she and her husband moved to New York. I am about three in this photo.

Here is a photo of my Aunt Dina, and her husband, Uncle Nathan in their home in Rutherford, NJ.

Nathan was like the prankster character you find in classic folk tales. Kids adored him. Adults were often exasperated by him.

Dina helped to support my mother’s family when they fell on hard times during the depression.

The color in the picture had faded. The walls in their dining room were painted magenta. The stairway was painted school bus yellow. The old Victorian house was painted the sort of colors that hippies might choose. Nathan painted his house in the colors that were on sale.

Both Dina and Nathan were pretty hard of hearing. Dina also didn’t see very well. In those days, I assumed that when you spoke to old people you had to TALK LOUD.

Here you see my mother and her older sister with their aunt and uncle. My mother was not quite 5’ 4”. Tanta Dina was teeny.

Unlike my grandmother, Dina and Nathan exuded warmth and love.They assumed that kids wanted ice cream and liked toys. The visit pictured here began with enormous ice cream sodas ( cherry chocolate) that were immediately followed by lunch.

The boxes in my apartment are somewhat fewer. Slowly things are finding homes

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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!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

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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