sarah in nyc

 Yesterday, the tallit that I was mending got picked up. All of the bits that get touched in normal wear  just got worn out. I backed the edges near the atara with silk chiffon and just stitched and stitched away with silk thread. One sees this kind of work on really old garments from the early 20th century. The fabric was just too fragile to stitch by machine. hopefully I have strengthened the material enough so the tallit can be cleaned and then worn  for the big family event coming up in a couple of weeks. Yesterday  we went on a little adventure to  Little Island . It is an island constructed on a series of plant like cement pods on stems planted into the Hudson River. from outside of the island it looks like a completely artificial man made folly. While on the island it feels like a series of sloping bits of wildlife. It's both very beautiful and really silly. There is an amphitheater space within Little island and some dancers were rehearsing. While we wat...

 Many of you know that I have been researching my family history for quite a while now.  Several years ago, (while my mother was still alive) the search engine at Ellisisland.org  yielded up a surprise. We had known that my mother's mother came to New York with her mother and her younger sister Vechne, known in the family as Becky. Looking at the ship's manifest I found another sister named Feige. Now, my mother had always assumed that she was named for her father's sister Feige Tzivia who had died tragically young after giving birth to her second son. My mother was so touched to learn that she was named not just for her paternal aunt Feige Tzivia Siegel but her maternal aunt Feige Weisglass as well. A bit more digging led me to learn that  Feige Weisglass had died at age twelve less than a year after arriving in New York. We remembered a story my mother's older sister had told us about one of my grandmother's sisters' dying after she fell out of a window.  As m...