Readers: Who's reading from Eastern Europe?

Readers: Who  (or what) are you?

Lately I've been getting a lot of hits to this blog from eastern Europe: Ukraine, Romania, a few from Poland and Russia.

Are you real readers?   There's not quite enough of you, every day, to suggest that an unfeeling bot is merely registering my site as it orbits the blogosphere.  I think you're real. I hope you are.

If you are real, what brings you here?  Do you sew?  I had a pen-pal once, for a short time, who lived in Russia and liked to sew.  I sent her several packages of patterns and at least once, fabric.  I'm sure she didn't receive them all; I'm not sure if any made it to her. I was warned not to trust the mails, but I didn't have much choice.

Sometimes people land here from searching on a particular sewing pattern number.  It's fun to see how McCalls 6844 turns out fitting on a real body, and proud pictures of sewing projects, modeled on surprisingly unstandard sizes, are always being posted online.

Are you hackers?  Eastern Europe is notorious for hackers. A Bulgarian friend who lives here in NJ (I have a few hits from Bulgaria) says that underemployed computer whizzes in his home country amuse themselves by hacking.  But where could you get to from my blog?  I don't even bank online.

Are you Jews?  Or Jew followers?  In my fantasy, you're relatives; my father's mother was born in Kiev, I'm told, and grew up in a little town outside the city called Kopaigorod. His father was from nearby Shargorod.  My other grandparents, similarly typically, came from Poland. But if you were undiscovered relatives you'd have to do some searching to find me, even online, since neither maiden name (fairly common) nor married name (much less so) appear on the site.

On the other hand, if you go to Soundcloud, as I sometimes do to hear clips of my radio-storyteller daughter, I find lots of Pavels and Borises and the like with my husband's Russian-sounding last name. So he (and my daughters) might have distant cousins in Russia whose grandparents made it home from wherever they survived the Holocaust, didn't know the American branch well enough to tell us, and gave rise to musicians two generations later who post on Soundcloud. And maybe you guys just googled yourselves one day and then scrolled all the way down to the fourth page of search results, and there I was. Google knows where to find me, somehow, even though I haven't linked the blog to my Google account.

You could be interested in Yiddish; People bump into this blog from searching on "forschpeis," a Yiddish word (appetizer) that I used many blogs ago.  Obviously this is not a hot SEO keyword. In fact, it's just about the only keyword that ever shows up among reported search terms that lead to my site.  Obviously someone's bidding on all the other words...

You obviously read English.  Even if you don't write English too well, or at all, write and tell me if you're real. And what brings you here?

Body in the Basement

Down in my basement is a limbless, headless tan body shape;  a paper-tape paper-mache of my torso.  It's my own personal dress form, made, per Barbara Deckert's instructions in a Craftsy sewing video, by my sister.  It should be a much more accurate likeness than the dial-a-butt/bust, felt-covered forms they sell in fabric/craft stores.

Wear comfortable shoes and stand on a cushy mat

It takes a good friend or a close relative to make this for you, as it involves dunking and pressing long and short strips of pre-pasted brown tape all over your body.  Three times over, for three layers, over a t-shirt.  You have to be able to stand still for well over an hour as it dries, although you may -- and you will -- laugh. You can also move your arms during this process a little, as we're not trying for sleeves.  You can help pat down your own boobs and belly, reaching left with the right and vice versa. Trying for your sides is going to raise your shoulder; we don't want that. We want the relaxed, straight-standing  clone of you that you need for fitting clothes you sew for yourself.

You have to sacrifice the t-shirt, because after it dries (do this on a low-humidity day and pool your blow driers) your mummifier has to carefully cut you out of this hardened shell, up the back.  She should lay her hand between the blade and your back wherever possible, and try to angle the scissor blade away from your spine if she can't.  My sister wound up cutting a hole in my exercise shorts (they were old) and underpants (they were newish), but not my skin.  

You should hear a nice crisp cracking going on behind you, like the sound of walnut shells, when your form maker cuts through shaped and hardened tape and t-shirt.  Then you carefully back yourself out of the body cast, put on another shirt (and shorts, if necessary), line your cut ends together (get help with this, too), and tape it back closed. Insert a padded hanger through the bottom and hang in a sunny bay window, to let finish drying.  It makes a great murder mystery prop when seen from the outside.

My sister did a good job.  When my form was done I was fairly dismayed to see how much space I take up, particularly from the waist down.  Looking inside the hollow bottom, I could see that my internal organs had much more room than they needed.  If we kept it in the kitchen I'm sure it would keep my nibbling in line much more effectively than a photo on the fridge.  It would be... not quite the elephant.. but undeniably surplus me..... in the room. 

I love this wrap dress.  I made one
for the first-born in Indy, too... w/ the
wider seam binding the pattern
actually calls for

I mailed it to the second-born
at work... she had to put it on
and show me right away,
hence the wrinkled hem.

It took me over a month to get this pasted tape from an art supply store. (The stuff at Staples has nylon threads in it, which makes it no good.)  During that time I tried, vainly, to shed a few pounds. Then  I kept the tape in the shipping carton for a few more months, sewed for my kids and made the same safe wrap-around dress for myself -- till I finally gave up and went over to my sister's with tape, dunking tray, t-shirt and extra poundage

So this dress form better help me sew for myself; it may make an improvement simply by not sucking in its gut every time it tries on a waistband.  We've taken it down from the gallows, stuffed it with newspaper and impaled it on the only thing we could find that's on a stand and fits -- one of those skinny ionizer oscillating fans.  Now we can dress it up, stand it in the window and make it turn back and forth -- just in time for Halloween.  And if being able to hug myself truly does inspire me to lose pounds and inches,  I will be delighted to hold still for another taping.

I'll get another fan and keep both sizes in the basement.

McCalls 6959

Catskills Brigadoon -- The North American Jewish Choral Festival, Part I

Last month I went to my first North American Jewish Choral Festival, carpooling and bunking with a fellow alto in my choir and her 7-year-old daughter.  I'm catching up gradually to this annual reunion/conference/love-fest; we only stayed one night out of the four, in the refurbished, partly remodeled Hudson Valley Resort and Spa, known by previous generations as the Granite Hotel.  A very multi-layered experience, making all kinds of connections between past and present.

Spontaneous sing-along in the lobby of the Hudson Valley Resort --
 Two guys wheeled out the piano and Dave Schlossberg,
our wonderful accompanist, sat down to play. 

First, it was a Brigadoon-like return to the Jewish Catskills.  The Catskills were long over their peak, so to speak, by the time I ever stayed at one of the big resorts.  That would have been over thirty years ago with my future husband's family at Brown's, when the comedians still slipped in a good shpritz of Yiddish, or a dozen years later at the Raleigh or Fallsview or Concord, on now-treasured winter weekends as an adult with my husband, kids, their grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins.  Maybe I was catching the tail end of the peak when, at five years old, I spent a week with my parents and baby sister at the much smaller Jockey Country Club, in Ellenville, the town with my name.None of those places are still in business; the relatively obscure Jockey Country Club never made it into Catskill legend but today Googles up a few picture postcards on ebay and New York Post advertisements in an online retrospective. My folks made lifelong friends there.

But here, in Kerhonkson in 2014 for the five days in July, was a living, breathing, Jewish gathering of 600 in a  hotel that hadn't gone ultra-orthodox or been left to molder in the woods.  People of all ages, cities, headwear and possibly even politics -- but one love for singing Jewish music and by extension, creative community.

After getting over the initial geshtalt of welcome banner, familiar and unfamiliar faces, I recognized the general layout of your old Borsht Belt hotel. Here was your grandly spacious arrival hall;  the long reservation desk, the grand staircase, the paneling installed by long-gone-and-buried contractors.  The double-height doors to the vast dining room. Off the back of the lobby, the sprawling, unchartable wings of guest rooms,  built in different stages and styles over the generations. The tower, where elevators took you to the most centralized, modernized rooms. Also the theater, where our mothers and grandmothers had once come in cocktail dresses, drinking whiskey sours and leaving children to pooled babyitters.

Of course some things had been remodeled or at least refreshed.   The carpeting must have dated to  this millennium.  The dark oversized couches, arranged into four or five separate conversational squares with  coffee table in the middle, were probably brought in within the past decade, from some closing hotel or furniture outlet.  The conference wing might have been altogether new, added in the property's reincarnation as a meeting place for all kinds of groups that required, or at least wouldn't mind, kosher cuisine. The spa may have been new -- I don't think anyone went there from our crowd. The theater had been partially outfitted with row-long tables, lecture-hall style, and a modern sound board and mikes.  

And of course, there was wi-fi. While some of the couch corrals were filled with schmoozing choir members from far away, sharing snacks and drinks, others were occupied by lone email and Web junkies, or presenters making last-minute changes to their workshop materials. Or cantorial colleagues planning joint programs back home, or just comparing notes.

from the Hudson Valley Resort's site..

Filling the hallways, stage, stairs and conference rooms, was a special subset of Jewish clientele; people who'd come to make and hear music, meet the composers whose names are on the sheet music they practice all year. Also to get to know each other better, to share meals and evenings and workshops instead of just weekly rehearsals, with their own members and with singers and players from all over North America. To perform before an audience of peers.  To celebrate the 25th year of this event, its founders and each other.

We could hear the great sound of the most professional groups -- the Zamir Chorales of New York and Boston -- rehearsing as we made our way to registration.

What Google Knows

The other day I was map googling, looking up Guttenberg, NJ.   And as I should have remembered, it's right on the Hudson River, right north of West New York.  I zoom out for better context, and there's the Upper West Side across the Hudson, with the American Museum of Natural History called out, a major landmark. 

Also called out is Romemu, a Jewish Renewal congregation that meets in a Presbyterian church on West 105th street, and Zabar's, and Ansche Chesed synagogue. 

This strikes me as rather odd.  Zabar's, OK.  Zabar's has been made famous in several New York-loving movies.   It might rate as a tourist attraction.  But Romemu, the shul with the groovy music and meditation?  Not on the radar of your average Googler.  Ansche Chesed?  Even less so.

Strangely coincidental that I've been to

Ansche Chesed recently for a friend's daughter's bat mitzvah. And funny, too, that I briefly considered a bus trip to Romemu with my fellow suburbanite shul members earlier this month.  But I haven't looked either of these places up on Google Maps, that it should remember. 

Then I remember that nothing is coincidental on Google, the Great Correlator.  I must have Googled these two places recently.  Just plain text Googled; not Map or Image or News Googled. Or worse, maybe I just mentioned these places in a Gmail. My own keystrokes put them on the map  -- my map.  Your map has been thoughtfully highlighted with places you've searched on; if they happen to be churches or mosques, probably with little cross and crescent icons instead of little stars of David.

Google now knows our individual places, just as it knows and tells advertisers which display ads to insert among the text columns in our browsers. They ("I was just looking at sergers!") looked like amazing coincidences once, too. 

Consider that the Google/Android smart phone you carry around, beaming location data to all kinds of web application servers, might also tell Google where you go and where you are right now, in addition to places you merely research.  (That's why you may suddenly  get the discount coupon to the store or restaurant  across the street.) 

With my programming, I can't help but think about IBM, filtering Germany's census punchcards for Jewish names at Hitler's request. Even though I know you don't have to be Jewish to be creeped out by what Google knows and keeps learning, from the data crumbs we drop at every turn and click. 

The Weekend Not in Scotland, Part III

I've already posted two installments of the not-in-Scotland October weekend without describing the trip's core mission:  attending the "Community Open House" of the National Yiddish Book Center, following a postcard invitation and the cancellation of our Scotland plans.   Aplologies.  Over six or seven weeks, this task has languished, stopping up the flow of at least four potential posts. 

The main room of extra copies of rescued
Yiddish books at the Center -- waiting for homes

Anyway, the Yiddish Book Center's mission -- propelling Yiddish into present and future generations -- is clear as a bell and visibly passionate, even before you cross its threshold in that apple orchard up in Amherst.  Before going through the front door, you cross a little bridge. The bridge is labelled "Brik."  Instantly I'm reminded of the song I learned so many years ago, "Dortn dortn," whose first line has the words, "ibern vasserl, ibern brik"; over the stream, over the bridge.  Here's a word to keep, before you even get inside.

I love this place for bringing all this Yiddish back to me from long-term storage.  The old books on the rows of shelves, extra copies waiting to be bought and read, are a perfect physical analog to the dormant vocabulary in my head waking up and getting exercised. And all brought back from a time I looked like the young romantics here, except perhaps for the purple hair.

Can you make out the "shrekliche" disaster 
reported on here? No peeking on the bottom!

While I've earned my special affinity by virtue of courses taken decades ago,  the Center also tries very hard to draw in those who don't speak the language a bit.  There are exhibits tucked in among the books; an exhibit of great Jewish moments in popular films and TV shows; front pages of the Yiddish press on historical news days, with translated headlines; old Yiddish linotype machines and their histories; stories behind the translations of great works; pictures and old home movies of an ethnomusicologist's travels through Eastern Europe.    There's also the huge original crate, pried opened with (replaced) books spilling out in a prominent place on the floor, which was sent from the evaporating Jewish community of Zimbabwe.

Who knew? 

There's a sandbox of sorts for playing with Yiddish; a table set with labeled objects and a Yiddish menu.  A phone with recorded phrases to converse with. There's also shelves of good Jewish picture books for children, in English, and comfortable space to read them in.

Exhibits educate the Yiddish deprived.

I love this place for transplanting Yiddish into progressive New England, a place whose trees and fields might resemble the Galicia of my grandparents, but whose sensibility is so modern and world-embracing.   As Yiddish was once, too. A language too rich to starve in ossified Hasidic enclaves, the only place it's natively spoken now.

Once inside, a Yiddish, entre-nous (tsvishn unz)  sense of humor permeates the place along with its eagerness to teach; one of the rest rooms is labeled Vu Der Kaiser Gait Alayn.*

Yiddishist-in-training giving a tour beside
the crate of books from Zimbabwe.

I spend time reading the spines and sometimes even the contents of the shelves, and read the posters and understand a good deal of the song sheets and film clips, even without the subtitles.

I love this place for  memorializing its poets and playwrights on slate squares, in Yiddish and English, over engravings of leaves, among the outside plantings.

The Writer's Garden

English-to-Yiddish is in the works

Beyond the main room of books, there's an auditorium where Dr. Harry Bochner and Professor  Solon Beinfeld, sixty- or seventy-something editors of the new Comprehensive Yiddish-to-English Dictionary, are being interviewed on stage by young Josh Lambert, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center and visiting English Professor at nearby U  Mass.  The dictionary, the first since Uriel Weinreich compiled his back in 1968, has just been published.  These philologists are describing how it differs from its predecessor.  For starters, it has 50 percent more words.  The editors got a great leg up on their project through the efforts of a new Yiddish-French dictionary, whose authors Yitskhok Niborski and Bernard Vaisbrot  created the large corpus of Yiddish words. They say it's also easier to use, without all the cryptic abbreviations.

This volume also includes words Weinreich simply didn't like; his dictionary is famous, for example, for leaving out the dirty words and even "tuchis," one of the best-remembered Yiddish words that ever lived.  It also includes words with the German-type spellings that were favored by socialists.  Adamant secularists, they didn't want speakers to have to refer back to their religious educations to know the original vowel-free spellings of Hebrew words, which keep their original forms when passing into Yiddish.

Linotype machine

The Forward newspaper put up some of the funding for the verterbuch, with the understanding that this lexicon would be used to help readers understand their Yiddish online edition. Some also came from the University of Indiana, whose press is the official publisher. 

The day proceeds with campus tours, including descent into the climate-controlled archive in the basement.  Oddly, they tell us that everything to be digitized is schlepped to Israel for this process and then schlepped back.  And Hebrew-character OCR and indexing, performed pro bono by Assaf Urieli, a computational linguist in the French Pyrenees, will ultimately render the Center's whole collection of books searchable online.

The day ends with a Q and A with Aaron Lansky in the bigger auditorium, followed by a great performance by klezmer duo Debbie Strauss on violin and accordion and Jeff Warschauer on guitar and mandolin. They don't do the Yiddish standards, but gems I've never heard before.

Aaron Lansky

On the way out I buy, for eight dollars apiece, part II of Sholem Aleichem's wonderful Motel, Peysi the Cantor's Son in the original, a Workmen's Circle Yiddish children's textbook from the sixties, and a book of poems in Yiddish and Hebrew. I also buy a copy of the dictionary, just to show support.  Did they know my Rutgers teacher, writer Wolf Younin?, I ask, while they sign the book. Dr. Bochner says he had heard of him.  Later that evening, in downtown Amherst, we bump into him with friends at Moti's, the local middle eastern restaurant. We try to cozy up, even peripherally, with the few families who constitute the Yiddish pillars of Boston. 

*    "Where the Kaiser goes alone." 

Streaming 1963: CBS Brings Back the Four Days of Kennedy's Assassination

• We interrupt this blog to note that I have been spending much of the last 30 hours in November 1963. 
  
  
  Like many boomers and others, I've been watching CBS' as-it-happened livestream of its Kennedy assassination broadcast coverage, just as I stayed glued to live TV in the living room for four days, from the moment I got home from school on Friday, to see my mother crying in the kitchen, to the Monday of the funeral. 
  
  
  The black and white footage brings back a sharp melancholy. It feels like the day the American historical trajectory bent south, no matter what unchivalrous things we've learned about Kennedy since. Some of it's got to be late-middle-age longing for lost youth, but it can't all be.
  
  
  Amazing to see how on that day, television turns into radio for the first 15 minutes.  While we wait  to hear what three shots in Dallas means, and how bad, all we have is a black "CBS Bulletin" screen and Cronkite's voice.  Amazing to see how the network reacts at first, in denial, returning to As The World Turns and dog food commercials after seconds of possibly world-crashing news. And then when they finally switch to video, so heart-breaking to watch Cronkite's face and body language subtly switch from denial and hope to realization, anguish and suppressed shock as the reports, increasingly irrefutable but not yet official, come in. Those thick framed glasses, on and off, on and off...
  
  
  The wall-to-wall coverage is also fascinating for the era it recreates and the people it revives.  Amazing to see how much longer ago 50 years is than I thought.  Here's proof I was born into a different world than the one I inhabited 20 years later. 
  
  
  And here are all the faces and voices I paid attention to and trusted, people who'd come of age themselves under Roosevelt: Eric Sevareid, Harry Reasoner, Robert Trout, not to mention dear old Walter himself.  To my mind then and now, people so much more about the news they covered than about themselves, so different from our Anderson Coopers and Wolf Blitzers.  And so much more earnest. 
  
  
  Was cynicism born that week?  Is that how we shielded ourselves?
  
  
  Eisenhower was still with us.  So was Truman; I forget my life ever overlapped with his.
  
  
  Words I learned that weekend: caisson; catafalque; bier.  
  
  
  People talked differently; someone interviewed on the street referred to a witness or a bystander as a "colored man." Another woman-on-the-street drew some comfort from the fact that this was "a Christian country," and that JFK was a Christian.
  
  
  In 1963, politicians seemed to have bigger vocabularies and were all male. 
  
  
  

  So was everyone else who mattered, it seems.  All the cops, politicians, reporters, dignitaries, newscasters -- all men in suits or uniforms.  Even the CBS orchestra  (television networks had orchestras?), given an hour or so to spell the anchormen putting in marathon, seat-of-the-pants reportage -- was entirely male.  Women were so ancillary, so invisible, except for some street-reaction clips and of course, Jackie herself, central figure as the widow.
  
  
  TV itself was so much younger.  Yes, it's black and white and low definition, and live remote feeds are not so instantly and smoothly punched in.  You also see the news being assembled, wire copy being delivered to Cronkite, people (a few women, even) huddling behind him, phones being answered, developments even being shouted from somewhere across the room.  No time for packaging.  Everything too fresh.  And no screen crawl; no splintering of our attention.  One screen, one picture.  Unified, communal  grief.
  
  
  I don't expect to have another chance like this to time travel.  No other anniversary I'm likely to reach is going to get this thorough a treatment, or have this many living survivors, in contemporary retrospectives, to tell the tale.  Or inspire CBS, once the closest thing to our collective American consciousness, to stream the era back. Thank you, Tiffany network. 
  
  
   

• 
  

The Weekend Not in Scotland Part II

As noted previously, my last-minute Hotwire booking gamble landed us at the Springfield, Mass. Sheraton, next door to the Marriott, and extremely convenient to Route 91. This interstate parallels the Connecticut River up through what the guidebooks call the Pioneer Valley; that part of western Mass. east of the Berkshires, two hours yet from Boston, and full of college students.  With this young, transient population in mind, the signs all up and down 91 beg drivers to ride with a designated non-drinker.

The college towns of Amherst, Holyoke, and Northampton are adorable, in October full of mums and hosta plantings, memorials to famous local long-dead poets, bicycles and cars with reassuringly politically blue-ish bumper stickers, and book stores dispaying similarly inclined, local-author books.  Musicians play at the entrances to their mews, pedestrians wait at every ADA-compliant traffic light. Their storefronts trade fairly in hemp clothes, crafts, body lotions and bubble tea within the solid, ornate, red brick and granite buildings raised around the turn of the previous century by more staid,  carnivorous and vocationally tangible Yankees.

Like I said, we didn't stay in any of these towns. We stayed in Springfield, where our first sight upon parking near the old town center was the annual Zombie Walk. Sporting grievous wounds, young zombies filled the green between city hall and steepled church, where  a band was playing the boomer music that had first drawn our attention. The walk raised funds for good causes, but the sight of all these people applying stage makeup and latex appliances to appear convincingly stabbed, shot, and diseased just creeped me out.  It did turn kind of amusing, though, when a newly married or about-to-be-married couple appeared on the steps of city hall with their wedding party for photographs, and the zombies proceeded to zombie-walk across the street and pose with them.  The new couple took it in good humor.

Springfield has at least two tourist attractions: the Basketball Hall of Fame and the Dr. Seuss sculpture

garden (All his best-beloved characters are there, from Horton to Who, life-size or more, in bronze. So is a bronze Theodore Geisel himself.)  Aside from that, the town is just another largely abandoned  shell of its former industrial, industrious Yankee self. Its downtown has ornate red brick buildings of another era, just like Amherst, but none of the life or refinement.  Where in famously lesbian-friendly Northampton  the old corner banks are given over to jewelry and design galleries, in Springfield they tend to house social service agencies if they're occupied at all.  

At night we walked a few blocks to a place the hotel receptionist assured us was teeming with restaurants.  There was hardly anyone else on the street. The cars that raced down Main Street blared in-your-face, thumping rap lyrics in a vibe diametrically opposed to Northampton's.  We did find the recommended (and expensive) restaurant, though -- 350 Grill on Worthington Street, next to a strip club  --  and the food was good.  We ordered tapas, which were generous.  The waitress was oddly even more generous -- she comped us our wine and dessert.  She assured us that management knew.  

Then there's the breakfast we caught the next morning in the Esselon Cafe, just off 91 in Amherst en route to the National Yiddish Book Center.  A free-standing building with a weatherproofed outdoor area, its clientele's bicycles artfully bolted standing on their hind wheels, it looked promising. We weren't disappointed; in fact, it was obviously THE place the weekending Upper West Side was taking its student children to for brunch. We got there at 10:20, in the nick of time to order and take our number back to a waiting table. Fifteen minutes later the line snaked all around the room and out the door. 

Esselon has coffees and lattes from around the world, colorfully chalked on the wall-sized blackboard behind

the busy barristas.  Vegan and gluten-free options, of course.  A shining, patterned, copper-colored ceiling and gleaming wooden tables, caned and beaded chairs.  Singles at laptops, opened to urban plans and sound files. Couples with Sunday Times in hand. Tow-headed toddlers wearing Red Sox caps, carried on hip. 

Just ahead of us in line, a young man with a neat beard and bright eyes wore a baseball cap with a "Jewish Farming" logo.  "This is the place," he said, congratulating us on locating the independent, beating heart of the visiting parent brunch scene. "And this," he said, pointing to the muffin with what looked like pumpkin seeds on top, "is the muffin." We struck up an immediate conversation, triangulating our eco-contacts until we overlapped on some of our kids' nature camp sites and nature staff personalities.

When our $13 breakfasts came they filled the plates like charming little dioramas; the fresh eggs plumply snuggled in two concentrated bulls-eyes against the avocado-topped salad, the multi-multi-grain bread toasted in two biscotti-shaped slices, the pancakes and berries generous, the yoghurt dressing in its little stainless steel pitcher and the coffee in its logoed white mug perfect.  We'd lost the head start on our pilgrimage, but we didn't care.