A Deep Dive Into Nostalgia

 I have lots of thoughts in my head right now and I am trying to figure out how to turn them into a coherent post rather than feeling like a five year old's disjointed and incomprehensible description of a dream.

Many of those ideas rolling around in my head are about nostalgia and my ties to the past, so let's try that on as an organizing idea for this post.

Our friend, Charley, Shawna's husband, joined us for Shabbat dinner. He told us about The Kadimah Movie a movie made about the Young Judaea camp founded in Nova Scotia in 1943. My parents had often told me that the camp was founded so that Jewish kids from around the Maritimes would meet one another and form relationships and marry one another. Most Jewish camps were founded post WWII. Camp Kadimah was founded during the Shoah.

Many of the Jewish settlers of the Maritimes were all from one village, Dorbyan, Lithuania. Typically in North America, particularly in the large cities Jews came from a wide array of places. They spoke Yiddish with different accents, there were variations in how and what people ate and even in the melodies used in prayer.  In Halifax and in the other towns and cities in the Maritimes that nostalgia for the alte heim, the old home, was very often exactly the same place.

I didn't understand until I watched the film that Dorbyan was just five miles from the North Sea. The harsh  North Atlantic weather would feel familiar. 

Camp Kadima  would bring kids from teeny towns all over the Atlantic coast together for six weeks each summer. For those six weeks those kids werent the only Jewish kid in their class but were among landesman, and often distant or not so distant cousins.

I have worked at two different summer camps. Typically there is one visiting day per session. At Kadima, visiting day took place every other Sunday.  Those interviewed in the movie kept mentioning that while parents reunited with their kids, the parents also reunited with their friends.

As I watched the movie I saw photos of my parents' friends from the 50s. There was Shawna's sister, and her mother. There was the granddaughter  (now a great grandmother) of the wine nut cake my mother made every Passover. 

I never lived in Halifax. I was born four years after my parents had moved to Quincy. My husband asked me why I feel so tied to Halifax? I explained to my husband that it is a bit like the biblical Isaac's ties to Haran. He wasn't born there and didn't live there but it was the place that formed his parents.

Continuing on this nostalgic note, when I was little, there was a nice women's dress store on Hancock Street in Quincy. I remember bring in the dressing room with my mother when she tried on a summer dress. It was a summer sheat dress with a turquoise floral on a sapphire blue ground. I loved the two shades of blue next to one another. I thought that it was spectaularly beautiful.   My nmother bought that dress  and wore that dress for many years.

When I was in my 30s my mother gave me the dress. After a few years I got too big for the dress. No, I didn't listen to Marie Kondo and I just kept the dress because it evoked so many memories for me. I have lost some weight and I tried the dress on a few days ago. It fit! but it was too short on me. My mother was about four inches shorter than I am and I think that she may have shortened it a bit more in the late 60s or early 70s.

I  took the hem down. 

All of the color had faded  from the hem fold.

I rehemmed the dress and covered the white fold line with dotted turquoise grosgrain ribbon.

It is supposed to get hot today. I will be wearing the dress..

 It's only sixty years old.

Now I need to get back to work on the wedding tallit, another deep dive into  memory and nostalgia.