sarah in nyc

This past Shabbat I received a giant box from my aunt.  In the box, there was a studio photograph taken of my father in the late 1950's, there was also this certificate. In addition, my aunt included the talk she gave at the bar-mitzvah. I was, as you might imagine, completely tickled by this gift. I decided to do a Google search on the rabbi who signed the certificate. That led me down a terrific internet rabbit hole. I found the entire run of  The Jewish Floridian  which was a weekly newspaper that was published between 1928 and 1990. The paper seemed to have covered news of interest to Jews in most of the state. There is a mix of international news ( including news of worsening conditions for Jews in Europe, as well as the moves towards establishing a Jewish state)national and local news and social news as well. I started my search in The Jewish Floridian in June of 1940 hoping to find an announcement for my father's bar-mitzvah. Her...

Tonight, one of our guests comes one of the branches of the family where there was a long rift. I am delighted that she is joining us. She is a vegetarian so tonight's meal is dairy in her honor. I decided to make Lokshen mit Kaese , noodles, and cheese. In this case, the noodles were hand rolled black pepper noodles. I didn't do the upper body portion of my morning workout today because I knew that rolling the noodles would more than make up for it. An old-fashioned way to cut noodles is to roll each sheet of noodles into a roll and then cut the roll with a knife. It speeds up the cutting but then all of the noodles need to be unrolled. Doing all of the tasks involved in noodle making can be tedious. Luckily my younger son was around and he took over the task of noodle unrolling.  His are the ones that are neatly stacked. After all of the noodles are cut and unrolled they are ready to be boiled. They cook up really quickly in a matter of minutes. You drain ...

The other day I came home and my doorman handed me a box marked "To Sarah from Esther". Esther came into my life through my cousin Bonnie. Esther was a co-worker of my cousin's. Esther had a new baby and Bonnie thought that I would know of a good family daycare in the neighborhood. Esther called. It was the first of many conversations. Her daughter went to the same family daycare my oldest attended as a toddler and then to the same daycare center my boys attended and overlapped with both of them and then to the same elementary school as my boys. There are people from those years of being the mother of young children where you have an intense relationship for a few years and as life gets in the way, it becomes hard to schedule time together and eventually you drift away. Esther has remained a friend, despite having moved to the burbs.  We usually get together when she has her haircut back in the old neighborhood. We generally meet for lunch and talk about our kids ...

Perhaps because I read so many cookbooks and sewing books from the early 20th century which are text only I had assumed that my text-only description of how to transform a man's shirt into a woman's peasant style blouse would suffice. I realize now that we live in a different world than our grandparents. Photos or illustrations really do make explaining some tasks a bit easier. My son had inherited this shirt from our neighbor. He has been wearing it for a few years. It has a bit of a bleach stain on the back yoke near the collar. Since my son has so many really beautiful dress shirts, I told him that I was claiming this shirt for transformation. I marked where the shirt needed to be cut, for you my dear readers. Left to my own devices I would have just cut with no guidelines.   Both the front and the back of the shirt need to be cut. You can see the bleach spot near the collar. There are some pleats in the shirt back so when you cut the collar and the yo...

My husband and I belong to a small paper-the-house ticket subscription service. That is, we pay an annual fee and then get to see shows and performances for $4.50 per ticket. We tend to see lots of theatre. At that price, we are willing to take a flyer on something we hadn't heard of. Often the things we get to see are Broadway shows or off-Broadway shows. We have seen some pretty spectacular things using this service. You need top to be willing to take a gamble. At $4.50 there is lots of room to gamble on an evening. My husband selected tickets for last night for a musical revue on the Lower East Side. This was in the subway station at Delancey street. I  stopped to admire the mosaics, take photos and then continue on my way to the theatre. Across the street from the theatre was this old shul; that has been restored. We had some bubble tea before the show. The show itself is what happens when excellent performers with fabulous singing skills and n...