The following email was sent to Noah, a secular Jew about to marry his non-Jewish fiancee Sheila, by Noah's baal teshuvah cousin Moishe. By an odd and fortuitous chain of events, the email found its way to Jewcy HQ. The people in this exchange are all real but have had their names changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty. In other words, we could not have made this shit up if we tried. That includes the spelling and grammar errors.

Subject: hi noah

So I have some very bad news that EVERY Torah observant Jew shares (not just Moishe) Regarding your plans: You may already know that you Childen will not be Jewish, but I think you are not really aware of what that really means... That means that while biologically you will have children, spiritually you will not. Furthermore, besides it being a punishable (in heaven) prohibition to marry a non-jew, you will not be married spiritually (under heaven.) In other words, you will have a secular marriage, or an invalid fradulent 'religious' marriage, but in any case you will not have a wife, therefore you will not fulfill the commandment to take a wife and as well you will not fulfill the comandment to have children.  Furthermore you will not be able to cook for your goyishe wife or children on Shabbos or on Festival days.

If your goyishe children convert, then they will still not be your children as they will receive new souls, not connected to you.

If you were to lend her money (for even a day, or even an hour) you must charge her interest.
As first and foremost she is a non-Jew, second she will never be your wife in heaven, never.

You will be pretendng to married and it will be to a stranger, ultimately as your souls are truly incompatable in ways you do not experience, because you are distracted by where you have compatability, namely your acting like a King who is enjoying the company of a peasant, which is obviously a very lowly king and so your compatability as the opposite of holy and extraordinary.

Furthermore by going through with this you are thus sending not only yourself but your true Jewish soulmate into Alone-ness

And you will feel it, eventually, mark my words, and when you do, if you disregard everything I am writing and go through with it than G-d help you realize before you ave children, for then you will begin to see what you have done, as they reject you and your mother.  It is said that anti-semintism goes through Mothers Milk, so I pray these Goyishe children, G-d willing that you never have, but if you do that she'll feed them formula for your sake.

Not for the worlds, because they will be weak.

First generation goyishe children off of a Jewish father are always weak.

They are psychologically strong as the Mind goes by father and their ideas can corrupt whole cultures, due to the inherent distortions in their composition, nevertheless they are weak.
Your wife will eventuallly hate you also, or should Moshiach come, as he will very soon please G-d, she may be one of your Goyish slaves and when she is on all fours, not allowed to walk as a human you will see the animal you married.

Continue reading...

Holiday accommodations span far wider than hotels and motels.

Whether a host, guest, family member, friend, neighbor, colleague, or otherwise, the holidays are a time when we are all brought together under many circumstances, and required to deal with each other in ways unlike most other days. It brings out the best and worst in everyone. For me, it often feels like these decisions define me. I have always struggled in balancing truth with tact, and tend to be either far too blunt and direct or completely spineless. And of course I also struggle with wanting so very much to accommodate without compromising my principles or even identity.

An example from my own experience. One Passover, a couple showed up, stoned, and presented me with a cake. Not exactly the Elijah I was expecting. And this was a real, Italian bakery, flour and butter laden, gorgeous cake. I had no idea what to do. Part of me was humiliated, because they know I am observant. Part of me was terrified not to be a gracious host, or to spoil the otherwise wonderful occasion. Part of me (a really big part of me) wanted to slap them silly. So what did I do? I put it out on a non-Passover plate and kicked myself for the rest of the holiday. Not my greatest moment.

There are other dilemmas. What do you serve for Thanksgiving? Do you send holiday cards? Do you attend Christmas parties or invite non-Jews to your Chanukah gatherings? Is a cookie exchange acceptable? Do you nibble on the catering at the company holiday party? I feel like November and December are fraught with these kind of decisions. And while the actual choices are very important, often the process and conversation are equally if not more significant. If you refuse that holiday ham, can you do it in a way that does not offend? How do you not break bread without breaking faith? What can you offer to mitigate your refusal?

I'd like to hear more of your stories. How do you accommodate for the holidays?

Anya Liftig expresses her desire to overcome failure by living entirely on Triscuits and having people pour glue all over her naked body.

She's also a nice Jewish girl.

With a mamma from backwoods Kentucky and a father from a super-Jewish neighborhood in Connecticut, Liftig draws inspiration from her family history to create a performance narrative called Jewbilly: An Exploration into Identity. It has a profound "sense of dislocation...[a] sense of being pulled in a lot of directions."

Liftig approaches the stage with an other worldly presence, attempting to connect with an audience while obviously remaining separate physically. This is a central theme to her work:

"A lot of my work is about failure...and trying to overcome failure--the space in between things where things are failing to meet up. And...one reason why I was compelled to do this piece is that it explains where that comes from. If I wasn't an artist, [these issues] would plague me as a person."

With a screen behind her flashing still photos of her family, images of dead grandparents, family vacations, childhood memories and the scenery of her two worlds, both Christian and culturally (though not especially religious) Jewish, Anya Liftig takes us on an adventure that starts in the old world and winds up in her world. More a reading than a performance, Jewbilly is hilarious, depressing, insightful and entertaining all at once.

Is it hard to live in two worlds? According to Liftig, it's about how you are raised. "[My parents] would show, by example, that they were interested in each other and that whatever differences they had were actually similarities."

And what about the grown up Liftig, who remembers having a menorah and a Christmas tree? "I culturally identify as a Jew although I am very non-religious. The idea of questioning is at the heart of Jewish inquiry and I think is very much related to artistic inquiry."

Perhaps this is the great strength of Jewishness: that the Jewish life, in a way, is performance art. It's about how you live; the way you live the identity that is both created for you, and subsequently reinterpreted by you. And we should be proud to have someone like Liftig to set this example.

 

www.anyaliftig.com

 It finally makes sense. After months of traveling in the East with an Israeli and being witness to the very low social boundaries Israelis have with one another, it finally makes sense.

No matter where they are or whether they know each other, Israelis greet one another as old friends and break into full conversation within minutes about whatever is relevant. If we happened to be in Vietnam, the conversation would be about which guest house was the best and least expensive. If we were in Australia, perhaps advice would be dispensed about which caravan park had the nicest kitchen or which company offered the best dives. As an American in these dialogues, I smiled, tried to understand the conversation, and then usually zoned out. I was always aware, though, that Israelis claim ownership to something English speakers and people from most other languages do not; because Hebrew is spoken by so few in the world, when you happen upon a Hebrew speaker outside of Israel, brotherhood is immediate and unquestioning.

On a particularly hot day in November in Cairns (northeastern Australia), Oded and I decided to check out the public lagoon in the center of the city. Upon arriving in Cairns, we couldn't help but notice the lagoon, a large swimming pool type arrangement adjacent to the shore. It was open to the public and free, a perfect way for two poor travelers to waste the day. We made our way from the sandy concrete to the center of the lagoon, only waist deep in water. We swam, relaxed, floated, and inevitably heard Hebrew. Oded swam closer and with nothing more than an, "Alan, ma koreh?" we had a new friend and were cooking dinner and drinking beers in Uzi's guest house hours later. We spent a few days with Uzi and his friends before moving on north and west. More than a month later, we walked into a backpacker in Sydney, and there sat Uzi. The reunion was that of old friends, replete with hugs, kisses and stories of where we had all been the last weeks. If Oded and Uzi were replaced in this scenario with two Americans, say Mark and Greg, this meeting would look very different or not at all. They would most likely never approach each other, and for good reasons. First, most Americans never take a trip like this and therefore would never even be in this situation. Next, English is not a rare commodity and does not serve to connect its speakers. Most importantly and the reason for this examination, is why Americans, and I venture most other nationalities, do not create the same connections as Israelis. 

Continue reading...

For those of you as-yet-unaware of the Duggar family, they are a rapidly-expanding clan of fundamentalist Christians and reality stars based in Arkansas. They are also the future.

When Jim-Bob Duggar and Michelle Ruark got married, they were a typical Southern Christian couple. They had a few kids, and then Michelle suffered a miscarriage. Their doctor told them that Michelle's miscarriage was caused by their use of birth control pills in the past. Saddened and horrified, they then vowed to eschew all forms of family planning and let the Lord choose how many children they would have. [The Duggars are reportedly followers of the ultra-evangelical Quiverfull movement, but they deny it when the cameras are on.] Now, they're expecting their nineteenth - yes, you read that correctly - child in the spring. Each of those children has been given a name that starts with the letter J, for continuity purposes. These names include the ordinary (Jennifer, James, Jill), the oddly repetitive (Jana, Johannah, Joy-Anna), the painfully old-fashioned (Jeremiah and Jedidiah, who are twins), and the just plain mean (Jinger). 

Last night, the Duggars, veteran parents, became first-time grandparents. Their oldest son Josh, who married Anna Keller last year after a "courtship" that allowed handholding but no kissing or going anywhere without a chaperone, is now a dad. Anna gave birth to a daughter last night. The child, whose younger aunt or uncle is due around April 2010, was given a unique and rare privilege - a name that starts with a letter other than J. The new addition, Mackynzie Renee, will be the subject of her very own special episode of the Duggars' TLC reality series, 18 Kids and Counting, next week.

Why, you may ask, is this news? It's news because they're outbreeding us. I may dislike kids, but every time I hear about the Duggars popping out another sprog I start thinking I should procreate just to balance them out. Despite my dislike of their lifestyle, the Duggars seem like pretty nice people. They remind me of a lot of the evangelicals I grew up around in the South. To be honest, they're probably more fond of Jews than they are of, say, Catholics. That's not to say I'd like to strap on a prairie dress and join their clan - they adhew strictly to gender roles, eat tons of processed food, don't believe in evolution, and are homophobic. [Side note: one of my favorite games during an episode of 18 Kids and Counting is trying to guess which kid is gay. I mean, look - statistically speaking, the odds say there's at least one or two. I have my suspicions.] There are plenty of reasons to have a child, but building an army of automatons for Jesus shouldn't be one of them. Are the Duggars, with their apparent child hoarding tendencies, better or worse than my yuppie friends who spoil their only children with $27 a can organic baby food and handmade satin onesies? Perhaps part of the national fascination with the Duggars, the Gosselins, Octo-Mom and the rest is that they are the result of a country who worships childrearing to the point of fetishization. When we praise people for simply giving birth, what is there to discourage them from stopping? When we love watching outsized families on TV so much that a woman willingly implants herself with nine fetuses in the hopes not of having a happy family but landing a lucrative reality TV contract, what's to stop anyone else from having the same idea? When America finally tires of the let's-stare-at-these-huge-families craze, what will happen to the kids who were conceived solely to become breadwinners for their parents? Something tells me we'll wind up with a lot of children in therapy as they learn how to be regular people without cameras around and new, cute siblings at the ready.

Maybe, instead of trying to force my uterus to compete with Michelle Duggar's, I should just wait for some of the kids to jump ship. Hey, little Jezebel or Jehosophat: if you ever want to run away to New York City and become an evil secular liberal, give me a call. There's a couch - and a barstool - with your name on it.

One of the greatest things I discovered as I collected family traditions (see yesterday's post) was the diversity of Jewish families that are out there today. My own Eastern-European family acquired a Brazilian infusion courtesy of my husband and in-laws, leading my friends to dub our daughter "the Jewzilian." Our holiday celebrations now routinely include cachaca (a particularly potent sugarcane alcohol) and have increased in decibels from merely "loud" to "eardrum-shattering." On the flip side, my Brazilian-born father-in-law now regularly uses the word "machetunim" and has developed an obsession with mandelbrot.

One of my best friends, Susie, has the distinct pleasure of being nicknamed the "Jewmaican," as testament to her Jewish father and Jamaican mother. Her family regularly celebrates Jewish holidays with the traditional...rice and peas? It may not be Jewish traditional, but it's Jamaican traditional. They fused their cultures to create a tradition that recognized all aspects of their family, and I love that.

Food truly is a great connector. It connects us not only to other cultures but to our own as well. As most of us know, the Jewish religion emphasizes the act of inviting people into your home for meals. I can't even begin to tell you the amount of non-Jewish friends I have who were just as excited as my tribe members about JCBC. I mean, is there really a better comfort food than matzo ball soup?

One of the most powerful stories in the book comes from Nancy Ratzan, an incredible woman who is the current President of the National Council of Jewish Women (and who happened to write a beautiful foreword for the book). In her position she often travels around the world, meeting with other religious and political leaders. In 2003 she found herself in rural China, investigating the role the UN plays in Chinese family planning. As she went door-to-door in an area where the annual family income is less than $300, she was invited into a multi-generational home of a local family and asked to stay for lunch. Though she politely declined, they insisted she stay to taste a bite of their freshly baked food. With her first bite, Nancy turned to the translator and had him explain that it tasted exactly like the popovers her Eastern-European Jewish grandmother used to make. Through the translator she exchanged recipes with the Chinese grandmother. They were the same.

If that's not an incredible connection, I don't know what is.

 

In honor of my "Jewzilian" family, our favorite drink...

Caipirinha

Makes: 1 drink

1 lime

4 teaspoons sugar (or 2 1/2 packets Splenda or other artificial sweetener)

Ice cubes

Cachaça (or Vodka)

 

 

TIPS:

• Cachaca is very easy to find these days (51 and Leblon are both good brands) and comes in Kosher form for those who need it.
• If cachaca's not for you just sub in vodka (also easily found in kosher varieties) and your caipirinha becomes a caipiroska.
• You can use anything from a tumbler to a highball to a goblet to make this drink, but be sure your glass has a thick bottom and plenty of room for ice.
• Caipirinhas (and Caipiroskas) are best when very cold, so as your ice melts, continue to add more ice to keep your drink cold.

 

1. Cut the lime in half lengthwise and squeeze the juice from each half into a glass, using a lime squeezer.
2. Take the remnants of the lime and cut each side in half and then into thirds, and add them to the glass.
3. Add the sugar or Splenda. You can add more or less sugar depending on personal preference.
4. Use a masher or wooden spoon to mash the sugar into the lime wedges as you stir.
5. Eyeball the amount of liquid now in the glass, and add a little less than that amount of Cachaça.
6. Use your masher to continue mashing the ingredients while stirring.
7. Fill the glass with ice and let the drink sit for a few minutes to chill.

I was raised in a small town in Connecticut and while I was surrounded by many Jews, I didn't know any Orthodox Jews. I learned how they live in dribs and drabs, with a bunch of rumors thrown in. Like the one about Orthodox men and women having intercourse through a hole in a bed sheet. I was horrified. Of course the laws of Judaism are in favor of good, healthy sex between husbands and wives, so, barring some weird linen fetish, forcing a sheet into the picture would be pretty counter to the cause.

I remember in my twenties hearing that Orthodox men and women could only "do it" at certain times of the month. I did a little research and found that Talmudic law says separation should be maintained between a man and wife for twelve days per month (five of those days being her period if she's an Ashkenazi Jews, four if she is a Sephardic Jew). Then she immerses herself in the mikvah, a bath designed for ritual immersion, on the evening of the final day. At that point, the couple can go to town. I was bothered by the idea of a woman being considered "impure" (in a state known as niddah) during those twelve days, and having so much time spelled out for her when she couldn't have sex. How sad, how patriarchal.

Now at age 40, married with a four-year-old daughter, I see things differently. I know it sometimes feels like a herculean effort to get sex on the calendar without a deliberate plan and focus. Not because I am no longer interested in it or because my attraction to my husband has waned. I, like millions of other married couples, am just bone tired at the end of the long day that involves working, day care pick-up, making family dinner, spending quality time with our daughter and getting her to bed. My husband and I often want to just sit on the couch holding hands and watching Lost until we climb into bed and pass out. The idea of physically maneuvering our bodies into intriguing configurations can seem daunting.

So I get how Orthodox women might enjoy the rule of having no sex for patches of time each month. I also understand that there is nothing that makes us crave sex more than not being able to have it. This followed by a quiet night of preparation where one escapes into a soothing pool of water without ringing phones and crying kids sounds positively sensual.

In Rachel's Daughers: Newly Orthodox Jewish Women, the author Debra Renee Kaufman interviewed ba'alot teshuva, women who gave up their secular lives and turned to Orthodox Judaism, asking them about family, feminism and gender. When it came to talking about the enforced separation and mikvah, here were some of the responses:

"Over the years it is building a cycle for me; it's a rhythm that is related to me and my body alone."

"It is even more than the anticipation of making love but the whole secret sharing of it with other women, the friend I may meet at the mikvah or the friend who might take care of the baby when I go, that make it all more, I don't know, sort of sexy."

"Most men don't know how to talk things out but since approximately one-half of my year is spent in niddah, I found that were are forced to talk about things more and that he has learned to show his love in ways more important than physical contact."

Makes sense to me: Increased communication, adding in an exotic ritual, finding ways to build intimacy beyond physical sex, and tossing in an element of taboo are just plain hot. And yes, I do realize that for these women and their husbands it is also the meaningfulness of in following the traditions of Jewish law and feeling connected to their ancestors and religion. That's just not the angle I happen to connect with.

I think too about what happens when a woman just isn't in the mood on mikvah night and the pressure is on. (It should be noted that women are not legally bound to have sex on this night or any other.) The women of Mayim Rabin-a website in which women comment on laws of purity in a blog format-address this issue. They suggest talking to your husband in advance about not wanting sex if possible (as in before the 12^th night, when he may be "sexually frustrated.") They also suggest "working out a [sexual] compromise so you can both enjoy the night."

I guess all of us are left to figure out how to make sure there is regular physical intimacy going on even when we're tired, played-out and feeling entirely unsexy. It is hard to switch into "lustful" after cleaning spaghetti sauce from the counter and explaining to a child that there are not frogs under her bed. Switching gears requires finding quiet space, mentally and physically. For this I have turned to my own form of the mikvah, easing myself into a hot bubble bath surrounded by candles. It's a good start. Maybe there's something to be said also for not feeling guilty on the nights when we don't have sex and reserving more time to thinking about it on the nights before we do.

 

 

This piece appears courtesy of Jewcy's partnership with 614, magazine of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

 

This is the third installment in the saga of Noah, a secular Jew who is happily engaged to a non-Jewish woman, and his baal teshuvah cousin Moishe. Moishe emailed Noah to express his displeasure with Noah's choice of a bride, and Noah wrote back basically telling his cousin to go play in traffic.. Now, Moishe has emailed his own mother ("Mother") and Noah's mom Rachel, hoping to pull them into his battle for Noah's eternal soul.As before, not a single word or misspelled word has been changed.

Subject: hi HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

This is a special birthday message to you to give you a very great present- namely coaching on this very important matter to give it the proper focus and energy and intention it deserves!!

I have timed things perfectly as I have now successfully 'tilled the soil' sufficient enough for you each to share your true feelings with Noah.

The truth is before one sews seeds one must take a perfectly goo dpeice of land and rip it up quite a bit and so now the ground is soft for you to plant our delicate seed Rachel, please do so with care.

Rachel,
I recommend, especially after seeing his having written that you could care less and you don't believe in G-d, that you tell him the truth about how it saddens you, and weakens you, and that you don't feel good at all about supporting the endeavor in any way and that you were only merely resigned to having to say 'what can I do'

Mother, I recommend you tell Noah the truth about your loss, my lack of a Father, your lack of a husband and that you admit that had your parents or grandparents been clear to you about not supporting you to go through with it, that you likely would not have as you respected your parents and what they told you.

Furthermore, I recommend you get clarification as to what Noah meant when he made the claim as to the 'crazy women that raised me' what he meant by that.

Continue reading...

Last week, we posted an email sent to "Noah," a Jewish guy about to marry his non-Jewish girlfriend "Sheila," by his ultra-Orthodox cousin "Moishe." Moishe vehemently - and inarticulately - disapproved of Noah's choice and sent him an email encouraging him to break off the engagement. Here is Noah's response.

Moishe,

While I was saddened by this email, sadly I was not surprised. I'm going to let you in on a little secret.  You've always sort of been a family joke.  That wacky cousin, who could never keep a job and kept looking for meaning in his life, bouncing from false hope to false hope (think about how much time you wasted on EST, seriously, how stupid do you have to be to believe in that crap.)   Everyone sort of humored you and thought it was funny, while wondering when you would actually grow up and start acting like a man.  I understand it was difficult without having your father involved daily in your life.

Let me be perfectly clear, I don't believe in god.  I'm culturally Jewish, I honor and appreciate the traditions, but I am not religious in any sense of the word.   So you can continue being the family joke as long as you want.  As a relative I wish you nothing but happiness.  As a man I shake my head in disgust at your utter lack of substance and accomplishment. 

Continue reading...

Question: "Doesn't he want to get out of the army?"

Today my daughter spent an hour at my side, pushing, pulling, and punching springy, yeasty dough. Her mouth watered for the ending, the brown hot challah that would fill her small belly.

"When will it be ready?" she asked. I couldn't help but smile at her excitement. And I can't blame her. There is nothing quite like hot, homemade bread. "What if we sing while we knead?" I asked her, hoping to keep her usually fidgety body next to me just a few moments longer.

She ignored me, predictably as most five-year-olds can. But then, as our hands pushed and pulled the dough, she began to sing in her sweet, tiny voice. At first, all I recognized was a familiar tune, and then my heart warmed and expanded as I realized that she was humming a familiar Cherokee tune.

My mind drifted to my home in the mountains. The times my father and mother took us to the Cherokee reservation, determined that we knew our tie to that land. She shares my dark hair, dark eyes. She has the curly hair of her father, but her strong Native eyes mirror my own. I always felt selfish in thinking she needed to know that part of her. My part. But, as I listened to her humming, I began to realize that it is naturally in her to want to know.

I stood next to her, kneading and proud, and then as her humming grew louder and she became more confident, I heard it: her tongue snapping and curling around the consonants and sounds belonging to the Cherokee language.

With little to no way to literally prove my heritage, my family and I have had to settle for checking "white" when white never felt quite right. But what right did I have to a heritage that only partly belonged to me? Why do I have to choose when my eyes shine bright, my nose straight? My straight dark hair aching to know the winds of yesterday?

With my husband speaking Hebrew, it is easy to allow him to take control of our cultural awareness and identity. Linguistically covered for our family's tongue. But as I look at her, her curly, bouncing hair and olive skin, I see his heritage intermingled with my own. I see those same, dark earnest eyes. And Hebrew isn't enough.

I can't cheat either of my children out of the chance to see their other heritage in a rich, beautiful past. So, as my son joins the kneading, the punching and pulling, he begins to sing the words that he, too, is learning.

We roll, braid, and ease our anxiously awaited bread into the oven. We sing together the welcoming night song, paying respect to those who danced, thrived, and walked a trail of hunger, pain, and tears, long before this night of peace in our home. Then we light the candles, count our blessings, and welcome the Sabbath.

Answer: He doesn't want to get out. And I don't want him to, either. It is because of his willingness to fight that our intermingled family can celebrate, sing, and exist in peace. Without him, the flames cannot burn freely.

Shabbat shalom, little ones. Gvgeyu.

Today my guy told me about a bit Jon Stewart did on why Jews argue. Apparently, a "reporter" goes and asks a bunch of Jews why they argue all the time, and they start arguing about who should answer the question and whether Jews argue any more than anyone else.

We both cracked up because, well, I like to tend to argue and my son's father doesn't. I've been trying to stop and it's the hardest thing ever. Way harder than probability and statistics class in high school, and a quibillion times harder than the LSAT I took a few years months ago when I was thinking about going to law school. It's so hard that I've often wondered if I have a neurological tic that turns even the simplest request into a passionate, two-hour debate.

In the beginning of our relationship, I explained it was cultural. It's a Jewish thing, I told my mate-to-be. We have strong opinions about everything. You should see us at the dinner table, I said. No one agrees on anything--where we should sit, whether the lighting is too bright or too dim, if the food is overpriced or genius, if my sister should cut her hair. Our willingness to dig deep over trivial matters is a sign of commitment, I told him. It shows we care enough to engage at a deep level.

Arguing, I said. It's how we love.

To which he replied, I'm not Jewish and I don't like to argue because it raises my blood pressure and I want to have a calm, peaceful life. You can go out into the world and argue your a** off, but for God's sake, when you come home, can't we just get along?

Which, in my argumentative state of mind (tangentially related to Billy Joel's New York Jewish state of mind, btw) sounded like: Jews are crazy, can't you just be normal and not Jewish when you're at home? Which made me mumble something about him being anti-Semitic, which was awful, semiotically inaccurate, and the furthest thing from the truth.

But I was arguing. Who said I had to be rational? Terrible logic, I know. A truly heinous lapse. I'm still apologizing.

But back to Jon Stewart and laughing together about the pop cultural confirmation of what I've been saying all along. No, I wasn't bat mitzvahed. No I don't speak Yiddish or Hebrew. But yes, yes, I argue. So sue me. 

Ironically, it was a great moment. A love moment. A moment of acceptance. A cross-cultural moment. A moment of peace. A, dare I say it, family moment.

Fact: I have four awesome grandparents. This is easily the luckiest thing about my life, particularly considering they are all active, healthy (phoo phoo phoo), smart, funny, generous, and engaging people.

Fact: I am easily the coolest of all of their combined grandchildren. (Sorry, brother and cousins. You know it's true.)

Fact: All four live in Florida in the wintertime, their two houses falling within about a mile radius. I live in Brooklyn and grew up in Cleveland, OH, places people usually like to leave in favor of Florida during said wintertime.

Fact: All of the grandparents have encouraged me and other family members to visit, sometimes sponsoring our trips (thanks, retroactively).

Here's where this gets interesting.  I work as a consultant, and when I'm in between assignments, determined by my firm, I have downtime, which is unpredictable and, paradoxically, appropriate time to take vacation, since I'm not actively working with a client.  So, in an attempt to get all "carpe diem" with my downtime, I checked with one set of grandparents to see if they were free for the next couple of weeks, should I be able to get some days off.

Their response? "Unfortunately, we are all booked up [that week]."

Damn.  I  just got rejected by my grandparents. They are too busy to fit me into their schedule. I, pathetically, cannot necessarily say the same.

Hey, I get that most people, regardless of age, maybe need more than a week's notice to clear their calendar. And ultimately, I am thrilled that my grandparents, in their early eighties, have such full lives, rather than sitting around waiting for the kids to call (though cell phones have been a boon in that regard.)

So, lessons learned: 1) Your grandparents will school you as long as you live 2) Not everyone makes plans last minute via text message 3) Having old people be too busy for you is way better than the alternative.

I flew out to St. Louis yesterday to surprise my grandfather, Norman Bussel, who did a reading here at Left Bank Books last night from his memoir My Private War: Liberated Body, Captive Mind: A World War II POW's Journey (Pegasus Books). It details his benig shot down over Berlin when he was 19 (he threw away his dog tags marked with "H" for Hebrew) and was a POW for a year, as well as the PTSD that plagued him after the war.

I'm honored to have played a role in getting his story published, by encouraging him to write it down and also helping him find an agent, but even more so, to have grown closer to him in the last few years, especially around the topic of writing. For many of my peers, we are the last generation who will have significant adult relationships with our grandparents; unless there are huge advancements in technology, I highly doubt I'll be around to hang out with my grandkids (I'm 33 and haven't popped out any kids yet), and that's a sad thing, both for me and for them.

I've never thougth that simply because people are related by blood they will automatically get along; there is a kinship, yes, but that doesn't mean you will have anything more in common. Certainly, I have plenty of family members who I love but don't feel like I truly know (or vice versa). Thankfully, with both of my remaining grandparents, I do have much more than a cursory connection. The fact that my grandfather is a writer I think has bonded us in a way that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

Out of all the members of my family, he along with one of my uncles, has been the most supportive, adn for that I"m incredibly grateful. I know that while the rest of my family is proud of my accomplishments, the fact that my books are called things like Best Sex Writing 2009 and Spanked is something they'd rather other people not know. I cringe when interviewers ask the question, "What do your parents think about your career?" because I'd like to think I'm old enough to be beyond caring about that.

Lately, my grandfather has taken to asking my advice about his book's publicity and signings: What kind of pen should he use to sign books? Should he hire a publicist? What's the advantage of doing a reading at a library? I don't always have the answers, but I feel honored every time he comes to me thinking I do. That is a sign that even though my writings may be of the more racy variety, it doesn't matter; he respects that I know a thing or two about book pubilcity and promotion, and that is more exciting to me than even the lowest of Amazon rankings (which, um, I check way more often than I should).

My grandfather is also a daily reader of my blog, Lusty Lady, and I'd be lying if I said that hasn't changed how I approach it. I don't obsess over what I post, but knowing that he is readnig often gives me pause, not so much about my dating life as revelations that might make him worry about me. While sometimes it amkes me uncomfortable to know that he has that much isnight into my daily comigns and goings, I'm honored that he cares enough to pay that close attention. He's also given me insight into my relationship with my father, and my father's relationship to him.

My other living grandparent, my grandmother (on my mother's side), is also incredibly special to me. We spent a lot of time together when I was growing up and she'd babysit every week. Now, as an adult, I can see how certain traits I've shared with her have skipped over my mom. My grandmother and I are much more into clothes and makeup, and are more than happy to spend a day at the Danbury Mall (well, my grandmother goes almost every day), while I think my mom would max out on mall shopping in about an hour.

I just spent a few days with her and it was fascinating to see her daily rituals; she (inexplicably to me) loves the show Two and a Half Men and even though she's into fine clothes and jewelery, she extols the deliciousness of McDonalds' yogurt parfait (her daily breakfast treat). I always trot out the fact that she saw The Beatles perform and once helped me dye my hair purple as examples of her coolness, but it's much more than that. She's a gossip lifeline in our family, keeping tabs on all of us and duly reporting the latest news to the others via telephone.

Getting the chance to see my grandparents not as my grandparents per se, but as individuals with their own sets of intersets and histories and quirks is something I'm thankful for. I regret that I wasn't able to appreciate them from a less selfish perspective when I was younger but try my best now to be an active part of their lives, via email, phone calls and visits. While I'm fairly close with my parents as well, these relationships are different. There isn't the same frustration I too often have with my parents, the maddening feeling of automatically being a teenager again. They're both 85, so I know I won't have them around forever, but I am learning from to appreciate and learn from the time we do have.

Rachel Kramer Bussel is the editor of 24 anthologies, Dating Drama columnist for TheFrisky.com, and host of In The Flesh Reading Series in New York City.  She spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy.com.  This is her parting post.

My friend Tyson believes in something he calls the Power of Three, which sounds like some New Age mumbo jumbo, but actually makes some sense when you listen. The premise is that when you get three distinct signs (that's the only word that comes to mind, sorry) leading you to the same conclusion, you need to take action. So, essentially, my friend believes in what the rest of us might call Common Sense.

I've heard all about his theory before, but Tyson has a notoriously bad memory, and recently as we were driving over to Tampa, he repeated his theory about the Power of Three (or POT as I call it), and attempted to apply it to whether or not he should move. I have to admit that I wasn't paying close attention during the conversation. It's not that I don't find him interesting--he is sometimes--but I was distracted, and when he brought up POT, I found myself linking what I thought were simple coincidences together. I present the coincidences here for your consideration. If you have time, would you take a look and then tell me what the universe wants me to do. 

Seemingly Random Instance Number One:

I had just finished reading aloud three sections from Dumbfounded for a bookstore audience. There were maybe forty people in the audience, and I remember thinking that seemed like a lot for a town where I had no connection. Maybe this is why I allowed myself to relax and have some fun. When I do these readings I generally read the same three sections, short excerpts from different chapters, so the audience gets a good flavor for the book. I've rehearsed and timed them; it takes about twenty minutes. Then there's time for questions. 

The last section I read from is a chapter called "Jude the Obscure", and it's the first really pivotal chapter in my book. It's the chapter where I learn, conclusively, that my life up until that point had been a lie. A well-orchestrated lie told for my protection, but a lie nonetheless. It's also the first non-funny chapter, and the first chapter where the reader gets formally introduced to my mother Jude. So I finish reading the chapter and it's time for questions.

I'm expecting some questions about my mother, especially since this last bit I read was about her. People always ask about her. I've come to rely on it. But something strange happens this time, which is why it's lodged itself in my mind. A man raises his hand and I call on him. 

"What about your father?" he asks. 

"My mother?" I say, thinking I must have misheard him. I said nothing about my father in the reading.

"No, your father. Where is he?"

How the hell do I know? That's what I want to say, but I don't. Instead I explain that my father checked out before I was born. I never had to ask about him, because somehow I got the impression that he had slipped into the world of unmentionables.

"So you've never tried to contact him?" the man asks.

"No," I say, "it must sound strange, but I never really thought of that as an option. I guess if I were young today it would have been easier, what with the Internet, but I never really thought about trying. Somehow that seems disrespectful to my grandparents. They were the ones who raised me when both my biological parents developed Peter Pan syndrome."

The man didn't seem completely satisfied with my answer, and I have to admit that I wouldn't have been either. What I didn't tell him was that if I'd kept on reading from "Jude the Obscure" I would have come to the part where my mother tells her friend that my biological father didn't know I existed. I have spent some time thinking about this twist in my story, but I know my mother is prone to exaggeration to garner sympathy and I'm not sure she wasn't lying. Certainly she never said this to me, but I also never asked her about my father.

So maybe it was the shock of the man's question that night--I swear in a dozen other readings before nobody had asked about my father- but for the first time I began thinking about my father.

Oddly Coincidental Instance Number Two:

I'm driving down the road a few days after that reading from Incident Number One and my friend Rebecca calls me. Her book club had read my book, and she wanted me to know that it was a hit. She says that the ladies (it's a girls only affair) were disappointed that I didn't attend because they had lots of questions. Instead they directed their questions at Rebecca, and she did her best to answer them. I asked what kind of questions

"Oh, things like What happened after the book ended to make you want to teach? Whether you and your mother patched things up. But then something came up that I didn't know how to answer...They wanted to know about your father."

Again with this? It's not like I claim to be the product of Immaculate Conception in Dumbfounded. It says very clearly "my father left, never to be heard from again." It's no mystery. But I asked her to explain the line of questioning.

"I guess it wasn't a question. It was more that some people wondered if things would have been different if your father had been around. And they couldn't understand how you could brush him off in a few sentences." 

At first I was insulted. Didn't he brush me off? And for as much as I know, he's never written a book, so I'm not even a footnote in his story! But I was also insulted for my grandparents. Like, really insulted. For someone to insinuate that a totally absent entity could do a better job than my grandparents, who willingly gave up their Golden Years to chase around the little shit that was me, is beyond comprehension. Then I realized that's probably not what the book club meant, and that it was a reasonable enough question. I also thought back to that twist in my story where my mother says my father never knew. I wondered if he did know, or if he was out there somewhere completely unaware.

The seed of doubt.

Okay, Seriously? Instance Number Three:

So I haven't told anybody about this yet.

Maybe three days after that conversation with Rebecca, I got an email from a woman who had read about my book in the Washington Post. Something about the name sounded familiar and she went out and got the book and read it, and then she put somepieces together. She went to my website, found my email address, and wrote, "I know you don't know me, but I think I might know you. I think we're related."

Can you guess how? Well, continues the email, she remembers her mother telling her that before her father left their family, he became involved with some wealthy young woman. She goes on to write that her mother has passed away, and she can't verify the name, but she believes the woman's name was the same as mine and various other components of my story made sense to her as well. Small things, like my red hair. My first hair color was red; my father is Irish. Hers is, too. She has attached some pictures of the man in question. 

The pictures don't really tell me much of anything. Everyone who has seen me recognizes that I look like my mother's family. As my friend Michael commented a few days ago, every year I look more and more like a portrait of my ancestors. That or a Jewish mountain man, but only when I wake up.

Of course beyond the photos she's been nice enough to include the name of her deadbeat father (for after he left her mother, he basically disappeared) and it is, in fact, the same as mine. I email her back and suddenly we're conversing about a whole family I never knew I had. There's a cousin who impersonates FDR for a living, uncles, aunts, and would I like to meet them? One uncle even thinks he knows where my father is...

So in the car last week with Tyson, his reference to the Power of Three got me thinking. I never tried to find my father before. What would have been the point? What good would it have done? But now I'm wondering, maybe it's time. What do you think?

Matt Rothschild, author of Dumbfounded, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

For a time, Christmas felt like a kind of kryptonite, in all its various colors and effects. Christmas carols, lights, Santa Claus, and even the inexplicable Stollen, produced in me various levels of discomfort, confusion, and even a little misplaced nostalgia. I grew up a very secular Jew, and while we acknowledged that Christmas had come and gone, like most Jews we basically kept our heads down until it was all over. I watched the surreal animated puppets in Santa Claus is Coming to Town with the same hunger that any child watched the annual television show that let him stay up late. I once even sat on Santa’s lap in the mall. But even then I knew I was only a visitor in a foreign land. Santa was a Christian, and his workshop didn’t employ any Jews.

Who needs a crackling fire on Christmas: When you've got the glow of neon?Over the years I took on more Jewish observance, and surprisingly my relationship to Christmas changed, even deepened. I looked forward to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as moments to define myself against what I wasn’t. I sat in empty coffee shops, went to the movies with friends, and had Chinese food. The cold air and the deserted streets were glorious. I loved the lights in the trees and the darkened windows of the stores. Christmas meant lovely isolation and I felt deeply Jewish.

I would give my friends Christmas presents, but none of those people were really Christian. The obligation felt weird. If they didn’t believe Christ was really born on this day, why weren’t they all in Chinatown with me? My only devout Christian friend eschewed really owning anything. Whenever I gave him a gift he looked at it with the discomfort of a man struggling with a live fish He seemed to worry about it flopping on to the floor. I secretly hated his devout Christianity that was ruining Christmas. What else was I supposed to do for him on this day? There was no way I was going to eat Stollen.

Hanukkah, on the other hand, was always a letdown. The attempt to match Christmas in spirit seemed contrived. I would feel irritated when the local mall would put up the obligatory menorah next to the Christmas tree. I didn’t want Hanukkah to have to compete with Christmas. It couldn’t. What is winter without Christmas, without the blinking lights, without the giant plastic peppermint sticks covered in snow? Like this year, Hanukkah sometimes comes so early it doesn’t even feel like winter yet.

But then I married a gentile and everything changed.

My wife came from a family even more secular than my own. They never talk of God or Christ, and I have never heard them mention the Virgin Mary or the manger. But they celebrate with the fervor of postulants.

I grumbled my way through the first few years. I would read The Forward while they busied themselves with wrapping presents and keeping the fire going in the fireplace. I looked out of the corner of eye for any sign of a baby Jesus so I could leap up with an “Ah-Ha! I knew it!” Eventually Johnny Mathis and the smell of the tiny pine cones used in decorations got to me.

Take your holiday cheer: and stuff itWhat finally undid me, however, was the joy they took in giving. Stockings stuffed to overflowing, the old family photos lovingly framed, just the right sweater, all the perfect books. I would have called it out as obsessive consumption and ugly consumerism, but they always had wonderful things for me. (On Hanukkah, my non-Jewish friends always gave me “Jewish” things, as if Hanukkah presents are supposed to be about Hanukkah.)

As I began to embrace Christmas as part of my wife’s tradition I realized that Hanukkah was also special for me as a Jew. It’s just a coincidence that Hanukkah and Christmas fall around the same time of the year. My mistake was thinking that since Hanukkah is really a minor Jewish holiday and didn’t have anything about it that was distinctly seasonal, it wasn’t worth making a big deal about it. But Hanukkah is a Jewish day, and it marks, like so many other Jewish holidays, the sheer fortitude of the Jewish people. Over and over again we survive. Our lights keep burning, even when they are not as nearly as bright as my neighbor’s giant automaton reindeer.

And so for the last few years, Hanukah has been another time to mark being Jewish. In my home, we don’t celebrate the two holidays together, but go by where they land on the calendar. And secretly, I hope when I light the shamash and the first candle of the menorah that it will start to snow, and that it will be snowing all winter, especially when one year I take my family to Chinatown, and show them how Christmas is really done.

Think your family is dysfunctional? Meet Uncle Monsterface, Redyellow Nose, and Captain Smarm of the sock puppet clan. Their creator, Marty, sells their adorable portraits online and at Union Square in Manhattan. The tiny portraits make a great gift for your own family. Maybe now they'll finally be nice to you.

[We asked cousins Mimi Asnes and Ben Keller to cover yesterday's peace conference at Annapolis, Mimi from the outside and Ben from within. This is their first post. Read all their coverage here.]

When our great grandfather Akiva Holtzman landed in America and changed his name to Maurice Goldsman, he was 24. He had fled the pogroms of Byelorus and conscription into the Russian army never to see home again; he traveled some 6,000 miles across Russia on the TranSiberian railroad and worked in China and Korea until passage to the Land of Opportunity was obtained.

Akiva’s brother Shmuel had different plans. A hard-core political Zionist, he believed that the solution to persecution of the Jewish people in the Pale of Settlement and elsewhere in the world was the establishment of a Jewish homeland. He too tried to escape the Russian army and was caught and jailed once before succeeding in smuggling himself and a friend out on a ship bound for Mediterranean shores.

Akiva-now-Maurice married his first cousin Bluma and they settled in Maryland. They bore three children; the eldest one was Celia. Shmuel met a young woman who remembered his family from their chicken-raising days in Russia, and they settled in Israel; they too raised a family and awaited the day when Israel would be a true country.

On my bookshelf, I have a leather-bound volume that Shmuel sent to his American brother in 1951, just after Israel’s War of Independence. It is a commemorative volume telling, in high literary Hebrew, the story of the Jewish refugees arriving in Haifa and Tel Aviv, the brave battles with the hostile indigenous Arab population, the odds against the Hagana in 1948 and the incredible victory and unfathomable loss of that war. Most arresting are the pictures, pages and pages of sparse landscape, nascent cities, broken and resolute people. “I hope this will help you understand how hard we struggled, and what we have won,” Shmuel wrote to his brother in an inscription on the title page. He wrote not in Yiddish, the language of their childhood, but rather in Hebrew. This is my life now, the writing says. This is who we were meant to be.

My grandmother, Maurice’s eldest daughter, sits today not far from Annapolis in an elder care home in Silver Spring, MD, the town where she raised her own children and grandchildren. She has dementia, which is why she doesn’t know that the Israeli Head of State Ehud Olmert is here to ostensibly try and broker peace with the Palestinian Authority amidst representatives of the countries that fought Israel in 1948, 1967, 1973. She struggled mightily during her more active years in support of the new State of Israel here in the diaspora, co-founding Pioneer Women and leading initiatives with the Labor Zionist organization Na’amat. She kept attending meetings long after she could remember anyone’s name. She sent her children to Labor Zionist summer camps and to Israel; she supported the family there and saved money for her international phone calls and trips to the region.

Perhaps my cousin Ben and I will go visit Grandma after today’s conference is come and gone. He will tell her how it came to be that he is sitting inside the US Naval Academy as a technician for a major international newswire, brushing past heads of state, ministers and dignitaries and honing his skills as a photographer. I will try to explain to her why her eldest granddaughter speaks Arabic as well as Hebrew, and how my two years of living and traveling in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Israel have led me back to the United States with the slim hope that it is as an American, not in spite of being American, that I can contribute to internationally responsible polity in the Middle East.

I know exactly what she will say. “I’m confused.”

“It’s okay, Grandma,” we will tell her.

“I love you,” she will answer.

My Mother's Art: My mother was an artitst. Johanna Liebman remarked that it showed none of the horror of most survivor art.In my search for my mother, I have both sought knowledge and intentionally avoided it. For example, the Leo Baeck Institute is one of the leading German Jew research centers in the world, and it's only 50 blocks from my home, but I've not been able to bring myself to go there.

Honestly, I'm afraid. I know how difficult I became to deal with while writing, and therefore reliving my failure in business memoir. And that was just about losing $4 million and people being put out of work. How will I face the world trying to put myself in a time of millions killed?

That said, one night I Googled relentlessly on a town my mother may have lived in, Karlsruhe. This is how I found Johanna Liebman at the Queens College Holocaust Center.

And so, I share some of her story, which is likely very similar to my mother's. (The very formal style of the interview is because my girlfriend is both a wonderful person to document it and a lawyer. So it does read a bit like a very very scary Law and Order.)

On Saturday, July 9, 2005, David Silverman (“DS”), Carol Silverman (“CS”) met with Johanna Liebman (“JL”) at 10:30 a.m. at the Holocaust Resource Center (“HRC”) at Queensborough Colllege in Bayside, New York. JL recounted her experience at Le Camp de Gurs (“Gurs”) in 1940.

Life In Germany Before the Deportation

JL said that life in Germany for the Jewish population started going “down the hill in every way” in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. First, the Jewish population began to lose its privileges as citizens. For example, the cities took away Jewish citizens ability to have phones in their houses and to have radios.
Additionally, JL said that the Germans were using propaganda to teach the children to be prejudiced against the Jews. JL showed us a book called “Do No Trust The Fox In The Meadow And The Oath Of A Jew,” published in 1936. This book was a picture book depicting horrific caricatures of Jewish men as compared to the angelic blonde Germans.
CS asked JL why she thought that the Germans blamed the Jews. JL said that “Jews are used to that because we are always the scapegoats. We are thought of as poison that should be destroyed.” Then CS asked what the Jewish people thought about how far the treatment of Jews would go. JL said “I don’t think anyone had enough imagination to see how far things would go.” In fact, JL said that Jewish people were deported in Steltin (now part of Poland) outside of Berlin in February of 1939, but the Jewish population in Karlsruhe did not think it would happen to them. Still, JL recalled that she was horrified when she saw synagogues being destroyed every day.

It's a long story, but I felt it was worth being posted in its entirety, so more below.

Continue reading...

Watching Ken Burns' documentary on the War, I note that it's been ten years since my mother died.

When she was alive, her defining features were her inability to locate her reading glasses (which were usually on top of her head), her strong desire that I eat healthy (including "hiding" wheat toast on the bottom of a tuna sandwich topped with a disguise of white toast), and her inability to throw anything out (her modus operandi was to rifle through the refrigerator and pull out items with the plea, "Quick somebody eat this before it goes bad!").

After she died in 1997, I found her secret cache of documents in the basement. Among them were 4 postcards from France. (Apparently mail from the camps continued throughout the war.)

Postcard From Camp De Gurs These postcards were from the Nazi concentration camp called Gurs in the Pyrenees mountains. She had never told me she had been in a camp. She'd never even told me she wasn't born in Queens until I was in high school.

When I had come home from 7th grade history class asking if she knew what had happened in Germany, she peered at me through those big glasses and "I remember a fence we had run under and some men got made at us." And then she had returned to folding the laundry and I knew not to ask more, but not why.

Before the postcards, my mother was amusing, annoying, and doddering. Afterwards, she was what now? A holocaust survivor? But she didn't have a tattooed number. She hadn't been to Auschwitz. And what about me? Was I the son of a survivor? How could my mother, who made banana Jello and packed me and my father lunch everyday be a survivor?

I didn't understand, and I still don't, and a blog entry is too short to figure it out. But what I do know is that what my mother tried to protect me from still shaped my life, if just through that act of protection. And that I must, in the end, make sense first of her love.

The high holidays are a time for new beginnings—a kind of reset button on whatever you’ve gotten wrong in the past year. Services take care of your spiritual crimes, allowing you to wash all the grime off your metaphysical windows and start over fresh. But what about the more literal, practical, day-to-day mistakes you’d like to erase? Kol Nidre can release you from any number of vows, but not the one you made to your credit card company to pay back that $1500.

Hence Jewcy’s guide to starting over. We’ll tell you how to clean up past messes and prep for future successes in six categories:

Sex, love and dating | Health | Friendships | Family | Money | Work

Consulting myriad websites, books, and experts, we've pulled together 26 separate ways to start the year squeaky clean. Click the links above to get to each section, and remember: If Madonna can reinvent herself every few years, so can you.

My father used to say to my sisters that I was the sensitive one. “Like a deer in the woods who hears a twig snap,” which I guess meant I had a kind of high strung alertness. I learned this after he died, twenty four years ago. And in my own personal mythology, that alertness is manifested in my “spirituality.” And so here I sit in a heated car, on a hill just beneath his grave, on a fairly normal, heartlessly gray late afternoon in Milwaukee. I have come here to accuse him, pre-Shabbos, of the sin of anger and dying young, two things I sometimes fear will take control of me as they took control of him. That’s why, as a strategy for survival, I became a rabbi. I’m just being honest. Yes: those fears propelled me, practically against my will, into the rabbinate, after his anger and heart shot him from life on a heartlessly gray day in Milwaukee twenty four years ago. That’s 2 x 12 Tribes years ago for you crazy mystics out there. And so I stand with freezing feet in the snow, heart broken in accusation. I try to heal it by singing him the Kabbalat Shabbat, a rest and comfort against loss. I see his name, etched in stone: Monas S. Bachman Father, Brother, Son I sing to him of Shabbat and my favorite Psalms. It closes the loop from the only Hebrew he taught me—well, not quite Hebrew but the vague shapes of the letters I watched him trace for me when I huddled up against him and a borrowed tallis in synagogue on the rare occasions that he took me with his own father to say Kaddish for the dead ancestors I never knew. “Thank you father for teaching me that there is a form to our language. A linguistic structure I filled in at the Universities I attended in Madison and Jerusalem. It was in those cities that the replacement fathers were found After you collapsed on your bedroom floor.” In the Mishnah these new fathers, Avot, are rabbis, and those were the fathers (and one mother) I sought and found over the course of the last twenty-four years. And slowly, one by one, they all died too. First there was George Mosse. And then Irv Saposnik. And then Arthur Hertzberg. And now Lisa Goldberg. Each a teacher. Each a conveyer of wisdom. Each an exemplar of some aspect of the kind of life I wanted for myself, for Rachel, for the kids. This is the first time that I stood above my father’s grave, with the stark reality of my own mortality staring me in the face. No image on the grave, no Russian icons looking back in my direction. Just a name—BACHMAN—an accusation in its own right saying, “Sentenced to death, eventually.” I say, “You’re gone, Dad. George is gone. Irv is gone. Arthur’s gone. Lisa’s gone. It’s all down to me. It finally happened. It had to, eventually.” That’s right. We will all die one day. And the measure of each of us is how honest we are, how good we are, how generous we are, in the every moment of the every step we take. And in this prayer, in the cold, with hot tears of anger and sadness overwhelming me in the Milwaukee snow and the background hum of East-West commuters moving down the freeway that abuts the cemetery, I understand another level of my own anger: That we live and die is so obvious as to dictate, for those who can grasp it, why certain pretensions of power and authority are ultimately absurd. So that’s why you want to change the world! It’s absurd NOT to! When you’re younger, you’re supposed to buck against the bridle of authority. That’s part of the natural growth process. But what happens to those who keep staring death in the face, whose lives are made up of visiting the sick, of burying the dead, of listening to questions about God and the meaning of life? Are we supposed to put on suits and act the part of Men Who Are Together? Or do we stare into the grave and discover a greater freedom from it all? What happens when your teachers die and you’re left standing at the grave, singing songs? Who teaches me what to do next? Who says, “Keep on fighting, son?” Is there a book for this? A leadership training seminar I can take? Psalm 92, A Song for Shabbat: It is good to give thanks to the Eternal. To sing praises to Your Name Most High. To speak of Your Lovingkindness in the morning. And Your faithfulness at night. If I had a harp or a lute I’d go on; but I’m freezing my ass off, so I head back to the car. To my wife and kids and Shabbat.

As Memorial Day fast approaches, I decided to take a minute to think about what the holiday means to me. I'm not a veteran, nor do I know anyone who died serving our country. (Although, I should note that my grandpa served on the Pacific front during World War II.) Either way, I'm not sure that it matters.

If you think about it, though, what good is a day of memorial in the eyes of the dead? Very little. Memorial Day is a holiday of mourning and, as anyone who's ever experienced true loss knows, "mourning" is primarily an exercise for the living.

This weekend, if you have an extra day or two off like many of us do, even if you can't make a trip out to see your loved ones, consider making a phone call that you might not otherwise have made. Of course, we shouldn't need a special day to remember the important people in our life, but life rarely works out the way it should.

Spend some time thinking about the important people you've lost, those who lost important people, and all the things you have to be thankful for because of the sacrifice of others. That ought to get you in an emotional mood. Then you can call the 'rents and it won't seem forced. Brilliant! As for me, I'm going upstate tonight to see my parents. See ya in a few, mom.

By most measures, my great-uncle Lawrence was a hippie. He ate vegetarian, grew his hair long, preached pacifism, fasted in the woods to find his purpose in life, and eked out his living as a painter. But, Lawrence lived during the 1930’s and 40’s. So, when he explained his anti-violence to the draft board, they didn’t peg him as a tie-die wearing follower of Abby Hoffman. They just thought he was nuts.

Dig the paint-spattered background: My great grandfather Sam painting.

My whole family falls along this vein. Take my great grandfather, Sam Rothbort, recently mentioned in the Guardian as “an amateur artist” in Jules Olitski’s obituary. In fact, he was anything but. His work hangs in the Smithsonian. Booted from Russia in 1905 for being involved in the proto-communist Bunde, Sam made the unwise financial decision to open up a no-kill chicken farm during the Depression. He later opened up the Rothbort Home Museum of Direct Art, a rather gorgeous display of his neo-impressionist paintings that became a stop for class fieldtrips for years. He was convinced that it competed with the MOMA. Sam hated war, was a committed vegetarian, and strongly believed that his letter to Eisenhower halted the conflict with Korea.

Other family members were similarly bohemian, like the Stanislovsky-trained Ethel (who posed for a series of photos dressed as a tree), or my great-aunt Vivian, who followed the Baba. My great-uncle Jack walked across America on a diet of nuts and berries. Legend has it that when he reached New York Mayor LaGuardia presented him with the key to the city, but that he kept walking to Boston before his feet would let him stop. Though, given the chronology, I think this might just be my aunt Ida embroidering.

They were all clearly Jewish, but not the least bit orthodox, believing instead in notions like the “group soul” and “summerland” (genuine quote from a theosophist cousin’s letter.) Sam, towards the end of his life, painted hundreds of watercolors of his schtetl childhood. The Jews they show are observant but earthy. He was just as likely to paint a child being wormed as a glorious synagogue ceiling.

So, when people ask me if my family disapproves of my naked-posing, scandalous drawing, day job shunning existence, I can say no. In the Rothbort history, I scarcely stand out. In fact, I feel like I’m joining the family business.

You know that game ‘Two Truths and a Lie’? When I play I always cheat and make up all three stories to see which story people can’t bring themselves to believe. I’m interested in what people want to believe, which I guess is part of why I’m in a fiction writing program.
I Heart Lies: It's kind of my job...
Last night I was thinking about the ways that we lie to people, and why we do it. It occurred to me that generally, when I lie, it’s so I can tell people what I know they want to hear. This is especially true in religious settings. If I’m in a super-frum environment I automatically switch into a false persona. I play by the rules and imply that I’m always that way, which of course isn’t the case. I do it for a few reasons, I guess, but mainly because I want to be taken seriously and not preached to. If I admitted that I kiss boys and wear pants and daven in a minyan without a mechitza I would horrify everyone, and subject myself to all kinds of lectures I don’t care to listen to. (And I’m not talking about lies of omission, here. I will straight up tell people that I’m much frummer than I am.) I’m not saying it’s okay to lie in this scenario, but I do it, and don’t anticipate stopping anytime soon.

So when is it okay to lie? There are only three instances where Jewish law sanctions lying:
1) You’re supposed to lie to an ugly bride and tell her she’s beautiful even if she’s hideous.
2) If you stay with a friend, and afterwards someone asks you how well you were treated you’re allowed to lie and say it wasn’t good so that the friend won’t be inundated with guests.
3) If a prestigious Torah scholar asks if you’re familiar with a certain text or idea you’re allowed to lie and say you aren’t so that you have an opportunity to learn with the scholar even if you’ve already studied the section he or she wants to discuss.
What’s interesting about this is that in all three cases you’re lying for someone else’s benefit (the third is questionable, I admit, but definitely the first two). If telling the truth is going to cause someone to feel bad about themselves (“Your wedding dress makes you look kind of fat”) or is going to cause someone else major inconvenience (“You should stay with Rivky! She made me breakfast in bed, and threw a party for me, and makes the best brisket…”) then we’re supposed to lie. It’s pretty tempting to use this to justify all kinds of lying, under the guise of, “She’d be so hurt if she knew the truth.”

Unfortunately, lying can also be considered theft, and one of the major categories of theft is the theft of knowledge. Lying can be thought of as stealing information.

So if my little cousin asks if I’ve ever dated a non-Jew, is it stealing information if I say no? Or is it saving her (and her mother) from being all upset about how poorly I’ve turned out?

My mother and I made a deal. I would get tested for the breast cancer gene, and in exchange, she would go to therapy for at least six months.I was at a weak point when it all went down. I’d just had a cyst removed from my nether regions, and I was convalescing in her giant bathtub. I was grateful to her for wrangling an appointment with her extraordinarily busy doctor, for taking care of me long past the age when I should be taking care of myself. I felt very lucky to have a mother just then, so I wanted to repay her. With one string attached.

Daniel Mendelsohn's resemblance to his great-uncle Shmiel, who died in the Holocaust, is so stark that young Daniel could make his relatives weep just by walking into a room. Should it come as a surprise that this writer is so obsessed with identity?

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million has been one of the most critically lauded books of 2006 (you’ll find it on every major list), not least for the fact that it reinvents the shopworn genre of the Holocaust memoir. It never confines itself to a single terrain, be it literary or geographic. Mendelsohn alternates his investigation – which takes him from Poland to Scandinavia to Australia – with rich discourses on Cain and Abel and the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah. His subjects are love and death, rootedness and Diaspora, and the protean nature of narrative itself.

Trained as a classicist, Mendelsohn rejects the trappings of what he terms "Holocaustiana" by refusing to see his subjects as "puppets to be manipulated…for the movies or magical realist novels." The twentieth century was enough of a deus ex machina; it doesn't need a curatorial sentimentalist to intervene on behalf of its victims.

The Lost, as a result, is firmly "anti-redemption," a stance that will hardly win its author fans of the Schlinder's List tendency. Not that he minds much.

The Lost was completed fairly recently but occupied you for at least five years. What is the date you recognize as the book's beginning?

The Bolechow Municipal Storage Facility: Formerly the synagogue where Mendelsohn's grandfather and Shmiel were Bar Miztvah'd The first 75 pages of my book are an attempt to answer this question, to describe in considerable detail how the search, and hence the book, began. Despite the fact that I'd always been possessed by family stories and histories, and had always hoped, in some vague way, that it might one day be possible to find out what happened to Uncle Shmiel, things didn't really get moving until I had the idea late in 2000 or early in 2001. That’s when I decided to go back to Bolechow and see if there wasn't anyone around who might remember Shmiel and his family—just walk around and talk to people and find "traces" of them.

So I and two of my brothers and my sister went to Ukraine in August 2001, an experience I subsequently wrote about as a cover story for the New York Times Magazine in July 2002. I should also emphasize that when I went on that trip, there was no notion in my mind that this might become a book. What made me feel strongly that there was a book to be written was what happened subsequent to our return from Ukraine—my being contacted out of the blue by one of the few Jewish survivors from our town, now living in Australia, and the consequent realization that there were these people still alive who had been intimates of my lost relatives and could help me learn about them.

Naturally, at the starting point, I had no idea of what stories would develop, so it was a bit of a crapshoot. But as it turned out, I got so much more than I could ever have dreamed of.

I always wanted to make the “search" the armature on which to hang a narrative that was complicated and rich in a way that I enjoy as a reader myself, and (more important) that allowed me to talk about many issues that have always been interesting to me: history versus narrative, family romances, storytelling, and so forth.I always thought of The Lost as referring not only to these six people who were murdered, but to a lot of things: A certain interwar European culture that has vanished; the world of people like my grandfather, European immigrants at the turn of the century through the 1920s, whose experiences as immigrants made them into a very specific kind of person that doesn't exist any more; a certain kind of Jewishness represented by those people; the kind of child I was in the 1960s who grew up around those people; the survivors I came to know, who although they survived had "lost" so much of themselves; and so on.

All those things are now "lost," I feel, and I wanted to find a way to write about all of it, from the start, and knew that the investigation, the search for Shmiel would, somehow, provide me with a structure from which I could hang the things you refer to – the circling digressions, the mini-histories, the reveries from childhood.

Piecing Together the Story: Frances Begley, who lived close to Bolechow as a young womanAs to the book’s being "as much about me as about the six "lost"': I feel strongly that the book is about me only in as much as it needs to be in order to illuminate the issues I'm interested in, about family, about how people relate to the past (a subject as interesting to me as a classicist as it is to me as a Jew or a relative of Holocaust victims), about how one becomes the kind of person who is a searcher or scholar.

I am not interested in, and not a fan of, books about personal experience per se, even when they lead, as they almost inevitably do these days, to "redemptions" that readers will identify with or derive solace from. As both The Elusive Embrace and now The Lost should make clear, I'm anti-redemption. I'm suspicious of using the world to make ourselves feel better. Feeling good about oneself is, I think, a fairly low ambition.

You have already mentioned that you wanted, not surprisingly, to write a book that you would want to read. In pursuit of that, what Holocaust-themed books did you read?

Strange as it may seem, I'm not in any way what I call a "Holocaust professional." I don't particularly seek out Holocaust books – or films or whatever – as a rule, simply because they're about a subject I've been connected with. I suppose I've read all the usual books, starting with an electrifying encounter with Anne Frank when I was a teenager (mostly because of the teen-love stuff, if I recall, which is as it should be). Primo Levi is admirable for the moral rigor. Naturally, I read Hannah Arendt at some point, although I have to say after working on my book all these years, I'm not so sure evil is so banal after all.

Over the years I have read this or that if it seemed good or was well-reviewed. But I am not and would never claim to be a scholar of the Holocaust, and while writing my own book I actually avoided reading Holocaust lit in general. For the purposes of writing my book, I had this feeling that I wanted to be cocooned in my own story, and wanted to avoid "static" from other writings.

I just wanted to go out into the world and listen to these Bolechowers talk about the occupation in their town, the way I used to listen to my grandfather tell stories about the town, and to piece together a story of what happened that way. (The Homeric, oral narrative, as it were, rather than the Thucydidean, written one, the history.) Because it was so important to me to focus scrupulously on just six people, as if one didn't know any of the rest, and in that way to recover a sense of what was done – done to people, as opposed to done to the Jews – that I avoided lots and lots of Holocaustiana during the writing of this book.

It's odd, because it's precisely the opposite approach I normally take when preparing to write something, which (given my philological training) would be to read every word written on a subject before sitting down to write a single word of my own.

I think it's probably fair to say that I'm far more interested in certain aspects of Central European Jewish and non-Jewish life from the turn of the last century up until the Holocaust. That’s a subject I'm happy to seek out books about. I'd much rather read Joseph Roth's The Radetsky March – a truly great book – than Schindler's List, any day.

In beginning of the panoply of narratives that is The Lost, when and how did you decide to adopt this ring-like Greek story telling style?
Family Narratives: Bolechower Adam Kulberg and grandaughter Alma in Copenhagen
There was no conscious decision as such to adopt a style, since, as is already evident in my first book, this is the style I've always had when writing about family narratives (since it is the style of those family narratives, as I describe in the book.) So it wasn't as if I sat down and said, "For this book, a bissl ring composition!"

When I write in my "book mode," as opposed to my critic mode, to some extent I'm channeling my grandfather's storytelling voice. Indeed I think I'm writing often as a kind of transcription of a basically oral narrative, if you know what I mean: the long winding sentences, the circling back to the starting point after digressions, etc. I started writing this book on Labor Day, 2004, and as I wrote these stories down, the sentence and paragraphs and sections just sort of happened that way: it was all, from the start, big, circling, and broadly arced. And I just went with it.

Is your role of family historian self-appointed or assigned? Though you end the book poetically by not looking back at Bolechow, you wonder about how your children will apprehend this story.

The kids have certainly been aware of my research, the search, since it involved my being away for large chunks of time. I have explained to them what it's all about, and certainly my older boy is old enough to be told, in a limited way, what World War II was about. But to be perfectly frank, I suspect that, like most writers' children, they will be blithely indifferent to my books and never read them until much later in life.

I asked about your kids because soon the history and memory of the Shoah will be mediated exclusively through secondhand accounts. Despite your mother's appeal to "genug ist genug" as well as your own insistence that the book is over, the fact of a next generation suggests maybe it's not. I point to an aside late in the last chapter when you meet Francis Begley's granddaughter and wonder to yourself about writing a book for her generation. Did I read that incorrectly?

Well, of course I am a fervent believer in the necessity of carrying over the testimony to future generations. In a way, the central obsession of the book is: How do you become responsible for other people's narratives? And I think I spend a great deal of time worrying that question (not worrying about it: worrying it, the way a dog worries a rag doll.) I go to great lengths, I think, to articulate this notion that my generation – the "generation of the grandchildren," as I call it; the grandchildren of those who were adults during the Holocaust—is the last on earth who will have had the opportunity to know people who were survivors. I grew up going to family events attended by people with tattoos on their arms; my children won't. I keep referring to my generation, therefore, as the "hinge" generation, because we are the last ones who'll have been living receptacles for the stories of those who were in the event itself; and I'm acutely conscious, obviously, of what it means to be someone who becomes the "transmitter" of another's stories, another's past.

As for genug ist genug: I do think that this pull in the opposite direction – the impulse to forget about the past and live in the present and future – is worth bringing up, because as we know, it's possible to get so obsessed with the past that one becomes unable to live in the present.

Awwww: But noIt’s “holiday” time, which means credit card debt and family horror shows and nice, friendly reminders from your parents’ friends that you’re a total loser.

We here at Jewcy do not understand what the impetus for a Family Holiday Newsletter might possibly be. Could your close friends and family not have heard about little Johnnie’s triumphant Emmy win or the breathtaking wedding you threw Jane and her new lawyer-husband? Do you think the arrival of little Sophie/Molly/Abby really calls for formal announcement? Do you not realize that infants wearing ribboned headbands look like fucktards? Do you really think anyone but you and Elliot Dorff give a flying fuck what your total “Grandchild Tally” is this year??

Are these insufferable newsletter freaks just that colossally insecure? Do their kids not call them often enough? Is it possibly a cry for help? Does it not occur to the braggarts that they sound very much like they’re trying to convince themselves everything’s awesome?

A friend of mine is terrorized annually by a Family Newsletter so fat, so obnoxious, so glaringly self-satisfied and inane that it somehow renders her entire existence momentarily meaningless. She calls me weeping every year. Is her life not a little irrelevant in the face of these smug, tangible, black-and-white laundry lists of life-cycle triumphs?

Every year, we wonder:
Are they trying to make us feel bad or is it just your garden-variety narcissism?
If their lives are so fucking great, why the hell are they spending so much time/energy trying to tell us how great their lives are? Shouldn’t they just be, oh I don’t know, busy enjoying?
And finally, aren’t “Holiday” Newsletters a little, um, goyische?

At the end of the day, if your life is fantastic and your family is intact and flourishing, it might not occur to you that many people have failure and disappointment and loss somewhat fogging up their figurative holiday windows. Be a mensch and don’t make it worse, why dontcha.

Share with us the most hateful, passive-aggressive, bullshit snippets from this year’s batch of newsletters. Read between the lines: what do these suburban yentas not realize about their own progeny in these euphemism-laden reports? When does “Bob and Marcie just celebrated their tenth anniversary!” actually mean “Bob’s fucking his raquetball partner and Marcie’s still struggling with body-dysmorphic disorder”? When does “Jakey will graduate from Brown next semester and is weighing his options for what’s next!” really mean “Jakey didn’t get into medical school and we’re terrified he might be gay”? Extra points if you sell out your own mom/grandma.

Bring it, Jewcers. We want to wince.

If you haven't read this story at Haaretz, which is sad (and bewildering) on so many levels, you should check it out! (Of course, the death of any human being is upsetting, but this has other kinds of sadness to it too)

Eighteen kids???

As a woman, and also as a new mom, I'm trying to get my head around this lifestyle. I understand the "every baby that arrived was a blow to Hitler" aspect, and I've heard it before. But this quote...

"These women give birth out of righteousness. Such a woman is considered saintly in society, and they feel that they devote their souls to follow the mitzvah. The society speaks of them in adoration. They receive respect,"

...breaks my heart a little. Because it implies that the children are the cause for such respect, which should of course be given to every woman simply for being a woman.

The story goes on to say...

...the basis to the mitzvah of many births is not as is commonly believed the commandment to be "fruitful and multiply," for according to halakha it is sufficient to have a boy and a girl to achieve it. Rather, this stems from a phrase in the Gemara that has been interperted by the Haredim to say the Messiah will not come until all souls have passed through a body.

Now, I don't know how I feel about the messiah (another topic for another day) but this strikes me as insane. Just fucking nuts.

Of course, any woman should be able to have as many babies as she wants, but this phenomenon seems so clearly rooted in a kind of psychological oppression of women by the ultra-orthodox culture. What about a woman who cannot conceive? Is she a useless hunk of flesh, incapable of helping bring the messiah?

Can anyone help me understand this? I know I'm simplifying it... but as a mom, currently nursing, who was just told to STOP nursing her child because I've been unable to kick my 4-week-long bronchitis (and have lost 12 lbs in 3 weeks), and "need my own nutrients"... I'm just so sad to think that these women have NO inner resources for themselves.

And why? Why are the super-religious always so backwards? What is it about strict observance of faith that makes us unable to think as individuals? Why are individuality and devotion so problematic to each other?

(Just in case you don't have enough to think about today)