ברוך דין האמת

This has been a week tinged by sadness. Those of you who are regular readers here may remember the posts tagged "Vivian treasures".

Vivian was a member of our synagogue community. When I first moved to New York and became a part of the synagogue, the demographics of the synagogue were probably 80% exactly my husband's age, about a dozen years older than I was. Vivian was one of the first people I met who was roughly my age.

Vivian was vivacious and funny. She loved accessories. She worked at the jewelry counter of a wonderful vintage store about ten blocks south . This was before her long career in the city's department of urban planning.

Many of us in those days---who were in our 20s were someplace between being students and starting on our real lives. For many of us there were marriages, children and careers that took place between then and now.

Vivian for a constellation of reasons stayed in that suspended space between adolescence and adulthood. Vivian was in many ways wonderful but was also completely exhausting.

Vivian died alone in her apartment a week ago.

Her funeral was Tuesday. Over the last few years, Vivian, who used to wear all color, began to wear turquoise nearly all the time. She loved turquoise so much that she wore a heavy line of turquoise eyeliner on her eyelids nearly every day.

Normally at funerals people wear sober colored clothing. At Vivian's funeral so many of the attendees wore turquoise. I wore a turquoise lace skirt. My husband wore a turquoise kippah. So many women wore earrings or necklaces or pins in the color that Vivian liked best. No one had suggested that we do it, but we all knew that it was the right thing to do.

That evening there was an evening of Shiva at our synagogue. A dear friend from those early years in New York was there. I think of my friend as being my roommate-in law because she married one of my housemates from the giant group apartment I live in just before I got married. My friend brought an envelope of photos from her Sheva Brachot thirty five years ago. I was heavily pregnant with my first and completely moon-faced. My husband looked so young. And there was Vivian, dancing of course, looking so young and so beautiful.

After Vivian's parents died Vivian had the difficult task of cleaning out her parents' apartment. She gave me bags and bags of old textiles because she knew that I would love them. So many of these treasures have become a part of my life.

I have learned so much from these bits of textile history, each one with with it's own personal history of mends and repairs.

While there are many bits of truly spectacular bits of handwork in my giant stash of Vivian treasures there is one small piece that I am particularly fond of.

It is a little tray liner. It was probably made by someone, perhaps a child, learning how to embroider. It is so very pretty and yet every single thing about it is just a bit off kilter . The piece isn't exactly round. the design itself is off center and every carefully stitched eyelet is a different size.

In the past when I used this piece I used to think of the child who made it struggling to get things right. Now this piece will remind me of Vivian, so beautiful, so vibrant and trying so hard.

ברוך דין האמת

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

Search This Blog