sarah in nyc

We left New York yesterday for Cincinnati. Airports tend to look remarkably interchangeable. But the view from the airplane before we took off was pretty spectacular. Our flight stopped in Washington DC, and again we were rewarded with a great view. I was struck this morning by the visual similarities between the landscape I saw outside the plane window and the beautiful windows in the chapel at Adath Israel. What a nice morning minyan with incredibly welcoming people, and breakfast too.

It’s Elul, the month that precedes Rosh Hashanah. Elul is traditionally a time of introspection. For me it is especially so.   My father died on the fourth of Elul. The year after my father died my rabbi asked me to be one of the shofar blowers for Rosh HaShanah. My father was our shul’s shofar blower.  My father was a barrel chested man and would blow the shofar with great gusto and power. His face would turn entirely red as he blew the blasts. I was always worried for my father as he blew shofar, would the sound be a good one? would he keel over from the effort? I was very touched when my rabbi asked me to blow shofar.  I had never done it it public before but I figured that with practice I could produce a good sound. So starting that year after my father died I used to call my mother  and have her listen to my practice. Especially as she grew less verbal, it was a way to connect to her in a deep way. Often when I picked up the phone after I had finished ...

Today is my father’s seventh Yahrzeit. When I was little I used to pore through the photo albums that then lived in the basement. Perhaps because we didn’t talk to most of our relatives, I used to study the photos in the albums as if they were my families Rosetta stone.   Here is my father with his twin sister Irene. I’m guessing they were not yet two when this photo was taken. Here they are about a year or so later. While my father and his twin looked nothing alike as children, I their old age they looked remarkably alike.  Irene is still alive. My father grew up in Miami and came to New York to attend the Jewish Theological Seminary. My father used to say that when he got to JTS he felt for the first time that he was among people who were like him. Is that not a great tie? My father’ first pulpit was in Halifax, NS.  I believe this photo was taken during my parents’ first visit there. I think it’s a law that all visitors to Halifax must be brought to...

This is probably going to be the last Shabbat our family will be all together for a while. Our youngest will probably be going back to college during the week. Our daughter and her boyfriend are joining us tonight for Shabbat.   I started  tonight’s cooking with my new favorite summer food, pickled vegetables. For tonight it is a mix of carrots, cabbage, turnip and cauliflower. The final result is halfway between the bowl of pickled vegetables you get at an old fashioned Jewish deli and one of the salatim you get at an Israeli schwarma restaurant. One of the things I love about pickling vegetables is how vegetables that are kind of terrible, like turnips, or not that interesting like cabbage or cauliflower become completely transformed by hanging out all day in a mix of vinegar, sugar salt and spices. It’s the vegetable version of an extreme makeover of the homely into the fabulous.  This was a challah baking week. My foodie friend’s Czernowitz challah was incred...

Today’s post is a jumble of thoughts, a blog salad if you will.   Yesterday was the Yahrzeit of my mother’s friend Rachelle. I think they met in college. My mother kept  very few of her pre-marriage friends. Rachelle was one of them. Rachelle’s daughter Miriam was in my class in school. She was unfailingly nice to me in a place where kindness was a rare experience for me. I went to several of Miriam’s birthday parties. At one of those parties, Rachelle served not the regular frosting topped birthday cake but a Dobos  Torte.  I have eaten Dobos Torte exactly once, at Miriam's birthday party in 1969, and I still remember that hard caramel topped  many layered cake. The cake was a wonder to look at it it’s thin layers of cake and frosting. It was a sophisticated thing to serve to elementary school kids. I remember that Rachelle warned us that it was rich and we shouldn’t eat too much of it. I ate two slices.   In 1978, Rachelle published this cookboo...

I have some friends who never ever cook and are easily impressed no matter what I make. ( My mother in law was one of those people, but she was also suffering from dementia so I tended to discount her enthusiasm and assume that it was just a nice side effect of the dementia). Tonight’s guests though are serious foodies. Alan has been making a study of yeasted vs. sour dough challah. He is making tonight’s challah.   I began my Shabbat dinner adventure last night with a rectangular plum pie. I cut up an insane number of plums and covered them with brown sugar to let them weep a bit. I also made a nut crust. Here it is ready to be baked blind for a bit before I filled it. Don’t ask me exactly what I put into the crust. I can’t exactly remember, and I might not even remember if you interrogated me with bright lights shining in my face. While the crust was baking, I added some flour to the weeping plums and also a whole lot of chopped ginger and some brown sugar. I wa...

Someone recently asked me what it’s like to see with an artist’s eye. I replied that I didn’t know how to see any other way. I have taken to taking my camera with me and taking pictures of the things that catch my eye as I go around the neighborhood. I live in a visually rich place. I had once spent the summer in the Texas Hill Country. It was so bare there you looked at the spaces between things to make sense of your environment.   Here you see pattern on top of pattern. Shapes on top of shapes. There is always something to catch my eye. One’s eyes are always full here. There is so much to take in.