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. 

The Weekend Not in Scotland

So we were supposed to go to Scotland.  Why Scotland?  It's never been high on my bucket list.  What do I know from Scotland?  I like bagpipes.  I liked Brigadoon.  I liked Nova Scotia, which means "New Scotland," and where descendants of the original Scotsmen still play bagpipes. I like Pendleton wool plaid.

On the other hand, I hated Braveheart. And for sure, I have no use for Mel Gibson, although I imagine he has no real claim on Scotland.  No, the real reason we picked Scotland was that we wanted to go somewhere, we hadn't done any particular research or planning, and our daughter, who had been there not long before, said that Scotland was "magic."   Our neice, who had spent a semester at Edinburgh, was equally encouraging.  And I figured I had all these other years with which to check off places, at least the high ones, on my bucket list.

I'm a bit less sure about that last part now, because it turns out I didn't go to Scotland; instead, I developed a very painful knee a few weeks before the trip and hobbled around on crutches for a while, convinced I had torn cartiliage and needed arthoscopic surgery.  Turns out I probably don't need surgery now -- just NSAIDs and physical therapy -- but I cancelled the trip to Scotland.

Instead, as a consolation prize, we took up the invitation of a postcard we'd gotten just this past week, to the Community Open House of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.  A mailing with so little notice that it couldn't possibly have drawn anyone from as far away as New Jersey, unless those people just happened to have cancelled other plans for that week.

Now the National Yiddish Book Center was a place on my bucket list, and cheaper to reach than most -- just about three and a half hours away by car.  So I fired up the old seach engine to find the nearest hotel with at least a couple stars that we could stay in for under $130.  It being peak foliage season, that turned out to be the Springfield Sheraton. That's where I'm blogging from tonight, after a beautiful autumn day at the center, which sits in an apple orchard next door to Hampshire College.

Built in 1997, I think, the architecture of the National Yiddish Book Center evokes the low wooden roof peaks of a shtetl.  But the sensibility, while thoroughly Jewish, is also thoroughly northeastern liberal artsy.  The interior is light and airy, the buildings that give an appearance of forming a village are really all interconnected, and the rescued Yiddish books -- the extra copies that you can buy -- sit in a huge library space with the light and colored banners and light-colored Danish modern woods and staircases that bring to mind the late-model children's science museums you take the kids to on vacation in New England.

For those who don't know, the National Yiddish Book Center is the brainchild and life's work of Aaron Lansky, who describes its founding in the wonderfully written Outwitting History.  Go. Get. Download. Read. It tells the story of a 23-year-old grad student who, upon realizing a serious shortage of Yiddish books with which to study for his advanced degree, puts out a call for local Jews to call him before dumping or abandoning their Yiddish libraries.  And how this leads to whole apartment buildings full of Jews entrusting to him the books their children cannot understand or appreciate, and how he has to sit down to a glass of tea, cake and conversation with most of them, and how it eventually leads to a network of dedicated collectors and the amassing of 12 times the Yiddish books that anyone thought were ever in existence, from NYC, and then from Boston, and eventually Buenos Aires, and Zimbabwe, and azoy vayter (etc.)

To avoid a) bringing his parents' house down under the weight of so many books and b) the infighting among Yiddishist academics that prevailed in New York City, Lansky eventually relocates his collecting enterprise to bucolic Amherst, where his undergrad alma mater, Hampshire College, sells him the apple orchard parcel of campus on which the center gets built.

Lansky, who I've tremendously enjoyed reading and also heard once or twice in person at NJ venues, has come to share this mission with a couple generations of new Yiddishists by now, as well as the older generations that sent him or called up his dedicated zamlers to give their books a home or rescue others  from dumpsters.  Steven Speilberg and others have donated the funds to digitize a large percentage of the works and make them available over the web, so that now anyone can make a page or a whole story of Sholem Aleichem or hundreds of other Yiddish writers come out of their very own printers, in Yiddish, on regular printer paper.  20 years ago, this took a trip to a specialized library, to borrow or just read there a book too old and delicate to subject to a copier glass.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I can make up for weeks of not blogging with this one goldene weekend, so I'm going to see if I can post this with my mouseless iPad before ikh gey shlufn, and save the rest for later.

Two Days' Driving West

I have recently been away as far as I've ever gotten by car.  Since I didn’t grow up in a long road-trip kind of family or do the post-college cross-country trek,  it only takes Indianapolis, IN and Louisville, KY to hold that record.  That's IN and KY in the oddly named Midwest, scarcely more than a quarter of the way across America.  Two days of two-person driving, with an overnight halfway at a conveniently situated cousin in Pittsburgh.

Behind a rest stop along Route 70 in Ohio

We drove out to visit our first-born, now inconveniently situated 700+ miles inland.   The rest of our immediate three generations are nicely lined up along Route 95, from Cambridge to Washington DC, but not Daughter #1, not since she left Portland, Maine. 

The landscape didn’t get markedly different. Much like New Jersey, with the same trees, only in different percentages; fewer pines, oaks and maples, maybe more tulip trees and that tree (Mimosa?) with the frond-like leaves that grows everywhere. 

This may not be Louisville's suburban
Hancock Fabrics store, but this is what it looks like. 

The businesses were the same, with the same six or seven fast-food franchises all along the interstates. In the malls, the same damn quick-serves, Olive Gardens, Outbacks, Applebees, Paneras and Chipotles.  The same dozen big box stores, too, making every suburb and much of every downtown reflect the same megalo-martification.

From western PA through eastern Ohio the hills were smaller than I'm used to, before they flattened out entirely.  But we're still not talking Kansas, as I've seen it described. Lots of nice rest stops in Ohio without the food courts of the damned -- just rest rooms, maps and brochures, vending machines and perhaps a church group selling coffee to raise funds.

We really didn’t get a chance to feel the storied monotony of a transcontinental road trip, not in two days, and not with Radio Lab podcasts to play from my iPad. I also traded at least half a dozen work-related emails on the smart phone. Too many entertainment options and way too much connectivity.

Thinking the Heartland was a place where women still sewed, I expected to rediscover (and shop in) the small-chain fabric stores that had abandoned New Jersey over the past 20 years. But, no, we were road traveling, not time traveling. The same Joann’s is all I saw on Yelp searches, plus the one other surviving national chain: Hancock Fabrics.  In Louisville, KY, I enjoyed Hancock, which is nowhere near me in NJ and has a better selection of real sewing stuff. A woman who worked there could recommend no other places, besides the local Joann’s; “everyone’s buying online,” she said, sadly.

And if not buying online, at least finding on-line. Yelp and the smart phone levels the playing field between longtime resident and just-arrived. Do you need a present on the way home for your cousin’s new dog? Just turn on your smartphone and Yelp or Google your way to the Petco within the next three exits. A new bath mat for your kid? Find the Bed Bath & Beyond.  Gluten-free cereal? The local Trader Joe’s. 

In homogenized retail America, you need suffer no dead ends, no delays and no surprises.  Maybe smaller towns are different.

On the way home, we decided to seize the opportunity to see a few cities we would probably never have seen otherwise; Louisville and Cincinnati. When I next get around to it, I’ll describe a few things we saw that you can’t find in NJ.

A (Yiddish) Street Fair on Madison Ave

Last Sunday my husband and I drove into Manhattan to meet friends at Yiddishfest, billed as an event of Yiddish music and social justice causes. These two things often go together, as fans of Yiddish have an historical predilection for underdogs, workers' rights and socially progressive movements.  (Actual surviving native speakers of Yiddish, on the other hand -- Hasidim -- have a historical predilection for rejecting public school budgets and voting en masse for whichever conservative politician gives them the best multi-family zoning variances.)

Needless to say, there were no Hasidim or even visibly Orthodox Jews at Yiddishfest.  There were not that many people of any kind, and most had just happened upon the Yiddish element by chance, while walking past the outdoor stage on Madison Ave. between 47th and 48th. 

Some literature tables broke up the long lines of
tchotchke vendors at Yiddishfest

The stage sat in the middle of the advertised ten streets of Yiddishfest, nine tenths of which turned out to be a generic street fair: the same old stands of gyros, zeppoles  and smoothies, "Murano-style" glass pendants, made-in-India summer dresses, sheet sets, socks, miscellaneous kitchen gadgets and grooming tchotchkes.    

Also, it was raining. It wasn’t too bad; we had umbrellas and the performers had cover. Pete Seeger's Walkabout Clearwater Chorus sang union songs, leaving the union-themed Solidarity Singers, a group my husband occasionally sings with, to do their political parodies.  The man I heard singing Yiddish standards -- starting with "Romania" -- was a Sean Mahoney -- "No Baloney!" (Ever see Jimmy Cagney’s Yiddish clip on YouTube? Priceless.) Totally convincing, he was lead singer of the Goldenland Klezmer band.

 I wandered off in search of a nice Jewish gyro.  Some Jewish organizations still clinging to the left had literature tables interspersed among the food and tchotchke vendors; I noticed HaBonim Dror, the Anne Frank Center, and the Workmen’s Circle (they of the afore-blogged Circle Lodge).  Not one trinket or smoothie being sold all around these organizations could possibly have been union made, an irony certainly lost on the vendors.

Back between 47^th and 48^th, a tall woman with long brown hair approached me with her iPhone, asking me if I knew how to take video with it.  She had just gotten it, she said, and wanted some video of the singers. I told her I had an Android, but I knew how to take video on that and I'd take a look to see if it worked the same way.  

"It's not in English," she said, as she handed me the phone. It was in Hebrew.

 “That's good, too,"   I said, in Hebrew.  I hadn’t detected an Israeli accent and sure enough, this Devorah had been born and mostly raised in New York, and had lived in Israel for most of her adult life. 

An interior designer, mother of three grown men, a divorcee and the widow of a famous soldier shot down over Lebanon in 1982 -- “that’s my yichus,” she said --  she was treating herself to a trip for her birthday.  She deserved “a little peace and quiet," she said, and admitted to being almost exactly my age.  I told her she must've stayed out of the sun all those years.  

I got the rear-facing video camera to work. We showed each other pictures of our kids the way people do nowadays, on our phones, chatted in Hebrew and of course switched to English. I was just thinking about giving her my card when she suddenly said goodbye, wished me a good day, opened her umbrella and walked away.    

Still using our phones, we also met up with my friend Mark and his significant other, a sweet man he's been with for 12 years.  Recently unemployed at 60+, Mark was pretty miserable.  Merely underemployed myself, I sympathized. Mark and I go way back and have several core things in common, including a good eye for the absurd and a strong but unmonetizable ear for languages.  We had both taken shelter in IT jobs soon after college, he veering off into training and tech writing, me into trade journalism and technical marcomm -- all Internet casualties, to one degree  or another.

We continued this New Yorky day in kind -- with the new Woody Allen movie in its first

View from Roosevelt Island -- UN is at left

weekend.  A line of my people stretched around the block.  If we hadn’t bought tickets online with mobile Fandango from 12 blocks further south, we never would have made the 2:45 screening.  After the film, in a moment of mad impetuousness and with Woody Allen's Manhattan vistas still in mind, we hopped a Roosevelt Island tram over the turbulent East River. Then with help from Yelp, we found the Japanese restaurant of this tidy little island refuge.  And it was good!

We trammed and then hiked back to our car, which was parked and neither molested nor ticketed at the end of Dag Hammerskjold Plaza, borderline distance from a pump. We stole back into New Jersey, feeling lucky.

My Life in Air Conditioning

Most people my age probably remember a time before air conditioning.  Before central air, anyway.  My first  memories of air conditioning are all tangled up with ancient resentments. We lived in an attached house on a tree-lined street in Queens, but the house belonged to my grandmother.  The first of her two children had gotten married and brought their spouses home to live under their parents' roof for a couple of years, before buying a house a few blocks away, Italian-style, and producing grandchildren.  My father, the baby, did the first part, but some time between bringing his bride home and getting me started, his father died. 

That may or may not have made the difference.  I arrived, named for that grandfather. A few years later my sister arrived. We never moved out till we left home.  

The first air conditioner to move in went into my grandmother’s bedroom, which, being largest and in the back, with a double window onto the back yard, was the most comfortable to start with.  Huge, it went into a sleeve they built into the back wall. Her children from the other two houses often visited her there, if not downstairs, and that’s where she used to watch Divorce Court, the Defenders, and Queen for a Day, on the second TV. 

Of course, being a lot older than anyone else, my grandmother probably had more need of an air conditioner than the rest of us, but I didn’t quite see it that way.  For me, it was just one more proof of our relative unimportance to my father.  On hot nights my sister and I sweltered in a room not much larger than our bunk bed, while a small metal fan clanked back and forth.  With our window and the bathroom window open in the back, we theoretically had what my parents called “cross ventilation.”  They also must have relied on fans in the second bedroom, without cross ventilation.

But when it was miserable enough, I could also sleep on a mattress on the floor in my grandmother’s room, between her bedframe on one side and the bullion fringe of her grey upholstered chair on the other. Heaven! Comfort! Crisp, non-clinging sheets! And a nice even thrum of the AC to drown out any potential snores.  I think I was the only one to take this option.  I don’t recall if resentment kept me from sleeping there more often, at the time, or to whom I might have directed it.  I do remember the blessed relief of entering that room. And the draining heat of leaving it.

My sister and I eventually moved into the cooler basement room, half underground, after the tenant moved out. My grandmother died a few years after that. Her bedroom furniture lay in state for a year or so until my aunt finally took it, and my parents moved in. And some time before any of these things happened, they put a sleeve in the dining room back wall and air conditioned the downstairs.

The first house my husband and I bought in NJ, back in 1983, had an in-wall unit labelled "Vornado." This was a brand once sold by Two Guys, a department store, like Bambergers, that my NJ aunts shopped in while my New Yorker mom shopped at Macy's and Alexanders. I felt more rooted to New Jersey by virtue of that old air conditioner, which for many years after Two Guys had closed still did an ok job of cooling down the living and dining room and kitchen. It didn't reach the bedrooms too well, though.  We had a separate window unit for our bedroom. Also its switch no longer worked; we operated it through the circuit breaker downstairs.

Central air was a must-have for our second house.  Relief comes now from the humming outdoor enclosure and an octopus-like contraption in the attic whose tentacles reach the vents in every ceiling. Sanctuary, the moment you step in from the garage or the front door. The freedom to move from room to room in consistent comfort.  But wasteful; I wish I could seal off an unused bedroom or at least have two-zone control. We close off the laundry room and half bath just so we can visit the true temperature from inside and appreciate the difference. And as soon as the heat wave relents, we open the windows and turn on the paddle fans.  

Circle Lodge

We're going up to Circle Lodge tomorrow.  Here's something I wrote about the place two years ago, on a similar trip. 

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You can’t find Circle Lodge, the Dutchess County, NY resort established by the Workmen’s Circle in 1927, on Trip Advisor. I’ve tried and failed to add it there, in an attempt to forestall its imminent passage into American Jewish history.  

It would be a major mitzveh.  You only need enough people under 75 to find kindred spirits among the guests you meet there today – the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Arbeiter Ring’s Yiddishist, socialist founders.  With that fresh blood, the place could and should survive a bit longer, embracing a few more generations in its liberal, worldly Jewish literacy. 

They had a little fire in an air conditioning unit the last time
we were at Circle Lodge. We got to see some of Dutchess
County's Finest. Nobody was hurt. 

The food is great; you can gain just as much weight here as in the Catskills, which are on the other side of the Hudson and further north.  Come to think of it, Circle Lodge has outlived the Catskills that we non-Socialist Jews knew; those resorts all having closed or gone super-Orthodox.

Circle Lodge’s entertainment and cultural programming are secular Jewish, humanist and global in outlook. The lake is nice (once shared with a Jewish camp that leaned further left; they didn't speak to each other), the cottage rooms from another age but decently maintained, with screened in porches for reading and mah jongg.  And the guests, many 80-plus, are great role models: outgoing, intellectually active and curious, still sharing experiences and laughs over the table after careers spent as teachers, doctors, and other socially useful occupations.  The resort’s golf carts continually zip them from registration to cabin and up the hill to the dining hall and folk dances, movies, lectures and bridge games.

On our last two visits there, we were comped with a lakeside cabin; my husband came to give talks on topics of Jewish historical or linguistic interest.  This July about half that day’s guests attended, the rest having come for Bridge week. Yiddish Voch (Yiddish Week) is the biggest draw, a week devoted to Yiddish classes at all levels, literature and music.

The resort’s wooden buildings are large, decorated with murals and full of camp sports and cultural history, named for literary and historical greats and Workmen’s Circle luminaries known by previous generations.  The library, theater/social hall, gazebo, waterfront and one of the pools are shared with KinderRing, the children’s camp born out of the same secular Yiddish political and cultural outlook, also in 1927. 

This year I met Barnett Zumoff, 85, who had served as camp physician for over 50 years; the infirmary on the KinderRing side is named for him.  Today he’s still playing tennis and translating Yiddish poetry.  I also re-met Zisl Slepovitch, recently from Minsk and under 40.  Zisl has a Music PhD from Moscow, teaches at Brandeis and other places, speaks English, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish, and served as musical director of the latest show running in New York’s Folksbeine, the only surviving Yiddish theater in America.  

I’d first met him a month earlier, while riding Folksbeine’s float in the Salute to Israel parade down Fifth Avenue.  He was playing a mean klezmer clarinet.  I also met Helen Bloch Cooper, a pretty almost-90 actress on the Yiddish stage, who needed some help getting her email from one of the Circle Lodge computers, in the room next to the snack bar.  Most of the PC users are foreign KinderRing counselors, here for the summer, who Skype home to parents and friends.  After they sign off, the computers boot up with Cyrillic interfaces.  

An Irish-born counselor gamely tried to help Ms. Cooper get her AOL mail – she couldn’t remember her password – while she alternately showered him with thanks and apologies for her failing memory.  But the counselor wound up registering her to a whole new account, and she feared that all her messages were lost.  After he left, and with the help of AOL’s Indian tech support, I proved to her that her old account still lived.

Also at my table: two middle-aged women from Jackson Heights, Queens, who spoke Spanish and seemed a little self-conscious.  We got to chatting; one of them turned out to be the widow of a former Circle Lodge cook. She still thought it a fine place to spend a few days’ vacation, with trips to nearby Hyde Park (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s family compound) and the Culinary Institute of America.  Also a couple, he 100, she 95, brought for the whole month of July by their 70-something daughter and son-in-law.  While the food is served buffet-style, the dining room staff served Max and his wife. Everyone, guests included, were eager to offer help he didn’t want. 

You also typically find a few Russian Jews.

This being a Yiddishist place, at least historically, the buffet room is decorated with posters of YiddiShpeil, the Israel-based Yiddish-language troupe. When I first came, over 10 years ago, program director Michal Baron  started our day at breakfast with a news summary in Yiddish. Michal and his wife are still working here, but this has been discontinued.  With a few holdouts, the fluent Yiddish speakers were today’s guests’ parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.  But the 80-somethings’ children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren come as well, many of them KinderRing alumni.

Since I married into the Jewish left, I have no history or relatives among the regulars at Circle Lodge. But I did study Yiddish, in college.  So I know something of the philosophy and enjoy striking up conversations and poking around, in the library and at the wall hangings. 

Mothers, don't let your children grow up to be writers...

So... I write. This was a fine thing when I was six, and sent my first-grade teacher skipping into the next classroom with my composition book to show her fellow teacher my phonetic precociousness.  Somehow by six I had figured out that “tion” was “shun,” but hadn’t gotten the hang of “qu,” so in a composition about a field trip, I had written that we children had asked "kwestions."

It was nice when I was 10 or 11 and wrote poems for my summer camp session booklet (I remember my grandmother being particularly encouraging) or a few years later when a friend and I serialized stories on a homeroom blackboard, or my senior year in high school when I wrote a lot of the parodies for senior sing.

That's where I peaked. That's where somebody should have put a lid on the simmering ego stew. Someone (me, I guess) should have insisted I pursue a more definable and profitable occupation. Instead...I vaguely intended to turn this ability to string words together into a livelihood.

That didn’t work out too quickly after college. A strange ethnic weekly here, a mostly administrative spot in a PR firm there, where a press release parody made a hit with the client... I eventually noticed that on any given Sunday you could wallpaper a two-car garage with the NY Times' programmer classifieds.  Longing for a seller’s market, this led me to take two Cobol courses at night at NYU and a five-year detour programming for banks and other companies, back in the days of mainframes. My friends at these workplaces tended to be former social workers or rehabilitated language majors.

When I returned to writing I traded on my programming years, convincing employers that I had amassed the technical fluency to edit and write for user manuals and computer publications. By staying on the technical side I made more money than a generic reporter or your classic dreamer sort of fiction writer, but far less than programmers of the time. (Of course, truly gifted dreamer writers can and have spectacularly outearned programmers, but that’s extremely rare.)

Per pure kilowatt of mental energy, few things pay worse than writing.  For every lawyer suppressing his or her inner scribe, there must be at least an equal number of writers wishing mom or dad had pushed law school harder.  Or plumbing.  Or auto mechanics.

The rise of the Internet, where writers outnumber readers, has made a bad situation much worse, as anyone who's been following the media knows.  The whole raison d’etre of trade pubs, in which an editorial staff brought new products and trends to the attention of marketplace readers, was pretty much destroyed with the advent of the search engine.

The slow death of true journalism, let alone trade journalism, is a well-worn rant. To have been cut loose from an editorial spot after fifty is another all-too common and unhappy story.  The years since then… and there’s been a good handful of those… have included a few fat years writing for technical PR firms and companies, followed by years that take far too much pumping to keep up workflow.  

The “content marketing” drumbeat -- Do you hear it? -- is the sound of those PR firms and their ex-staff,  now contract writers trying to hang new shingles in a marketplace in which every company can be its own publisher. The old trade media intermediary has been forced to stop pretending to be written for readers, and today baldly advertises itself  as simply a marketing vehicle.

“Custom publishing” tries to look and smell like independent research and reporting, while being produced and directed by the companies that once bought advertising; ads that were clearly identifiable as such. Ads that once supported whole floors of editors, writers and graphic artists now let loose upon the freelance marketplace, thick on the ground, working from home, or gone to greener pastures.

The point of all this kvetching?  Mostly it’s for kvetching’s sake. By if you’ve come this far, let me just offer this tool in your efforts to dissuade your children from thinking of becoming “writers.”   And with that, the only good news and consolation: Some amazingly bad writing is perpetrated by some astonishingly well-paid and highly placed people.  If you can add writing ability to the kinds of practical educations they had the good sense to get, you will probably get to exercise those writing muscles and enjoy a better standard of living while designing circuits/reading x-rays/ selling insurance/ fixing cars.

Seders, Sewing, Running Threads

Traditionally, there is no time for sewing between Purim and Passover.  No, I’m not all that traditional… not one of those competitive-cleaning Jews who start at the furthest point in the house from the kitchen and just keep sweeping and scrubbing in the direction of the breadbox for a solid month.  But somehow, between the shopping and planning and complaining and the cleaning I do, and the switching food and dishes around, no sewing gets done.

Authentic Grandma Dishes

At this point the average American Jewish reader raises an eyebrow and thinks… “switching dishes? Not traditional? Excuse me?” Well, yes, it’s out of scale with the rest of my relatively skim religious observance and rare among non-Orthodox Jews, but I started switching the kitchen around ever since I helped my grandmother fetch her Passover dishes from over the fridge 20-something years ago. I stood on a chair in her tiny kitchen, she and I wrapped them in late-eighties pages of the Star Ledger, put them in the carton and I took them to my home with all the storage space. 

Vogue 8772 and
 this week's breading

They’re a little chipped and veined and were never fine china to begin with. But what else could I do but give them a good, kosher-for-Passover home? Like Brigadoon, they come out into the light one day a year, looking traditional on the Seder table and reminding the over-forties of my grandmother. (Actually, Brigadoon was one day every hundred years, but who’s counting.)  They then go back into hiding for another year in the old kitchen cabinets that hang in the garage. The rest of the Pesadik dishes, the pots, pans and silverware, the placemats, oven mitts and the napkin holder spend the rest of the week.

Day before yesterday, on the first Saturday after the Seders, I indulged in a trip to Joann’s, ostensibly for buttons
(50% off), and fell prey to three bolts of fabric (30-40% off).  Yesterday I cut out another McCalls 6579 skirt, same fabric as the first, to sew and send daughter #1 in Indianapolis.  I also cut out the Vogue 8772 blouse again, for myself, this time in a bright cotton print that’s probably meant for quilting. 

Since I had the first shirt made already, I thought I might perfect the fit by learning how to insert more ease in the armhole. Looked for relevant video instruction in this Craftsy online course daughter #2 bought me.  Instead I found the instructor slicing patterns up and taping them together again, drawing lines and moving darts around, which looked like way too much work for a blouse that already fits fine as long as I don’t raise my arms like Horschack. 

Blouse or Quilt?

My sister and I and our spouses have Seder production pretty well in hand by now, having taken the baton from our mother and aunt maybe 20 years ago.  My sister’s is remarkably traditional, her husband being remarkably qualified, for a non-Orthodox, non-professional Jew, to do a very good job of leading, complete with fluid Hebrew, nice melodies, and supplemental readings that he refreshes every year. He can also carve turkeys, which comes in handy twice a year.

Our Seder reflects my Jewishly mixed marriage; my husband being a fervently Secular, active Jew paired with my mainstream Conservative upbringing, fortified with immigrant grandparents who I saw on half the Sundays of my childhood.  We read the blessings, some of the Haggadah text and the highlight songs, but we also actually insert the Exodus story -- something the Hagaddah doesn’t do -- and we throw in Go Down Moses, the Partisan Song that’s the anthem of traditional lefty Jews, and a few Yiddish songs and readings, too.  

In our own ways, my sister and I both run steadier Seder ships than the ones we remember from home, where one aunt was always nibbling the haroset from the Seder plate by the fifth page, an uncle was getting too far ahead in the wine cups, the text was straight Maxwell House, and everyone tended to ignore and talk over my father, who stumbled along in slow, mistake-filled Hebrew. (My mother’s cooking got the respect it deserved, though.)

  

We had 15 this year.  I miscounted and only set for fourteen.  I explained to the non-Jewish guests that in our tradition, the Seder starts with a round of musical chairs.  No fooling them, though.  Actually, there’s little left to teach the Episco friends and the presumably baptized nonbelievers. They’ve all been to other Seders already, and this isn’t their first with us, except for Fred’s new girlfriend.

It’s been painfully long since there were any children among us to introduce anything to. Having not procreated myself until past 30, I cannot point the finger at my kids.

The chairs that have been left empty by departed relatives are being filled not with new little Jews, but by non-Jewish friends and boyfriends.  The good part is that these are friends whose company we like, whose interest in our Seder is a compliment to our program and my cooking.  Then there’s the whole ecumenical thing, the openness, the sharing.  We also behave better when it's not all family. The bad part, of course, is that we're shrinking in the numbers by which we -- at least up till my generation here -- count ourselves. 

Somewhere between good and bad is a new self-consciousness about what's in the text, if we hear it through non-Jewish ears.  My brother-in-law, for example, as part of his annual commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising -- which took place on Passover -- had his daughter's boyfriend read aloud this long sad list of pogroms and exiles from the beginning of Jewish recorded time.  And Josh, being direct, finished reading it and said, only half joking, "I'm feeling like the bad guy here."  

Now of course a) he’s not the bad guy but b) the list is quite personally true, despite our own safety and comfort. My brother-in-law’s own mother made it out of Vienna on the second-to-last boat leaving from somewhere in Europe. We are missing all this old-country family whose pictures and even letters we have; people we might have known, visited and even brought here or at least Skyped and spoken Yiddish/Russian/English with, if not for that terrible history. But I wonder if this long, much-recited litany of persecution is what makes the world so eager to catch Israel discriminating against others.  To unseat us from our high horse. To say, see, it's what countries/people do. 

Either that, or I’m falling into the all-about-me trap, again.  Other peoples have histories of loss, escape, victimization.  On the third hand, they all try to memorialize it.  Is our list just longer?  Should we skip a few?