A blog, mostly about my work making Jewish ritual objects, but with detours into garment making, living in New York City, cooking, and other aspects of domestic life.
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The past and the present
The Rosh haShanah meals are followed by ironing season.
This is just part of what I got through yesterday. I still have a large tablecloth and about a dozen napkins left to iron.
This is what our table looked like on the first night of the holiday.
The inside of our holiday challot looked like this.
To be honest, not every slice looked quite this cute.
Dinner this shabbat is more of what I cooked for the holiday but I will be making some gazpacho we we also ingest some vegetable matter.
Yesterday I brought in some boots to be repaired. This
was on the wall of the shoe repair place which is actually around the corner from the address in the calendar above. I loved the term "Dead Storage for Automobiles". It took me a minute but I figured out that dead storage for cars is the opposite of live parking. I guess in 1940 it was economically viable to own a car and store it in a long term garage and just take it out occasionally.
And adding to things I hadn't noticed until today...
I have passed this building a gajillion times since 1982.
I hadn't noticed the lovely ornaments under the windows before.
There were more but the trees in front of the building are in full leaf. I will have to wait until winter to photograph the rest. Yes, the masonry and the ornaments have unfortunately been painted multiple times over the years.
I first learned the song below on an Israeli tape given to my kids. I just found out via google that the text was originally written in Yiddish by Kadie Molodowska, in 1931 in Poland. She was a poet, novelist and teacher of small children. This poem evokes the imagery of the High Holiday season without being too uncomfortably religious for secular Jews. It was translated into Hebrew in the 1940s. I used to use this song when I ran High Holiday services for teeny kids. It exactly evokes how the past the present and the future get all jumbled together during this season.
The song below was a childhood favorite of mine. I am including it here because it gives me joy.
In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
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