sarah in nyc

My neighbor had dropped off her etrog the other night. We had one of our own. Sometimes, after Sukkot I make marmalade inspired by my friend Miriam's mom Rachelle, a truly impressive cook and an old buddy of my mother's. I only had two etrogim, but I did have a gallon sized bag in the freezer that has been filling up with orange peels. My brain is still not quite up to par. I did have enough brain power to cut up a pile of citrus rinds.As I cut up the peels I thought of the many jars of Dundee Marmalade that got consumed in my childhood home. I thought about how all of those jars boasted that the marmalade inside was hand-cut. It's important to boil off the bitter oils that live inside the citrus peels ( and especially in the etrogim). Rachelle's recipe involves many days of soaking in water and changing that water. I use a method I have seen in other cookbooks of repeatedly boiling the peels for a while, dumping the water and then repeating the boiling of the orang...

My beloved nephew is getting married in a few weeks. This is a big deal.  I do own a rotation of black tie optional  appropriate dresses. The good and bad news is that there have been many weddings in our family in the past few years.  My dresses have been danced in at several family events. It was time to make something new. I had spent a fair amount of time virtually shopping with my sister, the mother of the groom. She has chosen a beautiful dress for herself that will exactly suit her body and the occasion. I needed something for me. I found this dress on the Norma Kamali site. It ticked a whole lot of boxes for me. It suits my body. It looks comfortable to dance in. It looks like regular clothes but it is made in a fancy fabric. I don't have to buy any special underpinnings to wear this dress. The price tag did not tick any of my boxes. The dress is also somewhat showier than I want to wear at this event. Several months ago I had purchased  this em...

The High Holiday season drew to a close this week, but unfortunately my cold has decided to hang on.  Between the truncated work weeks with only three and a half available workdays and my body needing to nap often, fitting in work was a bit of a challenge. I began work on Alice's tallit,  embellishing  the ribbon that will become the stripes on her tallit. This is what the ribbons look like right off the roll. I began working on the red and black striped ribbon. First I embroidered an orange cross stitch.  The I added a gold star stitch.  For some reason the roll of red checked ribbon decided to go into hiding. I can't find that roll of ribbon anywhere.  Rather than panicking, I unpicked the same ribbon from a tablecloth I had made a while back.  Normally, undoing stitching is a job I loathe, but being sick leaves me with a very tiny brain. My tiny brain is exactly the right size for unpicking a mile of stitching. I now have e...

 I have been sick with  a slow moving cold since right after Rosh HaShanah. Like everyone else, I have friends with real and serious illnesses. It's just a cold but I stayed home all of Yom Kippur because I wasn't feeling well enough to be at services. I love the high holiday liturgy. I love the prayers that build on a theme of God as the one who listens, or forgives and follows that thread through biblical history and down to the widows and orphans sitting along side of us. But as much as I love the liturgy and coming back to those same texts year after year one of the most profound parts of the season isn't in the prayer books at all. I have been attending high holiday services in the same synagogue since 1982. I have been sitting in the same seats since probably 1986. As I sit through the long days of prayer there are people some of whom I know well, some of whom i know only by name and others that I know only by face and year after year, decade after decade I expe...

For most Jews, Yom Kippur ends with a giant surge of joy. Many Jews wear their kittles, their shrouds during the entire holiday. all through the holiday we pray for our very lives. At the very end of the last service, we recite the verses that are recited for us, with us, as we take our last breaths and then we all realize collectively, as Monty Python put it...We are not dead yet. That rush, the joy of being alive carries us through the next  several days. But I remember every year dear friends for whom this day is not a day of joy but a day of great pain and sadness. I have two  very dear to me sets of friends who each suffered a profound loss on the day after Yom Kippur. The death that took place ten years ago was the end of a horrible month long decline of a young man about to be married.  Each year the text of the Yom Kippur liturgy have me re-living those hard moments in an almost minute by minute way. יום נורא ואיום Five years later, the d...

There are many Jewish family names that are matronymics. We know people with the family name Sorkin- Sarah's child, or Mirkin -Miriam's child or Dvorkin- D'vorah's child. When I taught daycare the family circumstances of the kids I taught were often complicated. A child might be living with her parents or with her father and his girlfriend, or her mother and her new husband or have two moms or two dads. I solved my problem of how to refer to the parents by calling  the adults in the child's life Mr. Child's Name or Mrs. Child's Name no matter what the exact relationship to the child was. Mr. Joey was Joey's male adult that I was speaking to no matter what his relationship was to the constellation of adults caring for that child. The same went for Mrs. Joey. my solution was at the same time exact and inexact. I was surprised at how many of the children's names I remembered in this photo. Once I had children I was faced with what my children...