13 Cheshvan

My mother died on July 6, 2015. Two years later, the right books came into my life at the right time, and on her yahrzeit, 19 Tammuz, I found solace and was able to look back with fondness and humor at my mother's life and death. 

One of the books was Lesléa Newman's I Carry My Mother (Headmistress Press, 2015). I enjoyed the different styles and the candor with which Newman portrayed dealing with some of the unpleasant details of being responsible for a parent.

As Yogi Berra would have said, "it's like deja vu all over again." My father's yahrzeit is 13 Cheshvan, and this year, on the 23rd anniversary of his death, I read an ARC of Newman's forthcoming collection of poems, I Wish My Father (Headmistress Press), which will be released on January 2, 2021.

Both our fathers were named Edward. My father was Edward Robin. How my Polish immigrant grandmother came up with those names, I will never know, but my father was always more of an "Edward" than an "Ed." He grew up in the South, and loved the English language. He was an amateur actor, an amateur bird watcher, and a fan of movie stars and royalty. We both enjoyed The New Yorker - he for the short stories and me for the cartoons.

Newman's poem do not vary in style -- they are all narrative prose describing her father's decline, and those moments where his strong personality still shined through. 

At the end of "Without Warning My Father," Newman expressed what I felt as my father was in hospice: "but I don't know if the same God will forgive me for not knowing what's best: to pray or not to pray for the Book of Life to be inscribed at the start of the new year with my father's holy name underneath my own." 

In "For as Long as Can," Newman details her father's early morning routine. My father, a"h, was an early riser, also getting up at 6 am every morning, putting on a suit and tie, and then walking to work, with a stop at the candy store on the corner to pick up a daily newspaper. The stories deviate here, as my father predeceased my mother and needed full time care. 

As I continue reading, one phrase in "My Father Is Moving Out", in which Newman describes cleaning out her mother's closet and remembering which shoes and outfits she wore to which events, stands out:

"Such a long and short time ago"

As I light the yahrzeit candle, I can't believe it's been 23 years. I remember his morning routine so vividly. It's a strange mix of good memories and some sadness that I did not get to share so many life events with my father. My father's yahrzeit usually falls out close to Veterans' Day. He served in the army during World War II, and he was so proud to be a Jewish War Veteran, but, to him, November 11 was "Armistice Day."

Newman writes  "My Father Was Never on time once in his entire life." My father was the same. He usually arrived early, saying "Punctuality is the politeness of kings." He took pride in being the first person to vote at the designated precinct on Election Day. For those of us who don't appreciate standing around waiting for everyone else to show up, it was a challenge, but his acts of showing up on time were another facet of his reliability and dependability. 

So thank you,  Lesléa, for sharing your thoughts and memories so eloquently, and sparking some great memories for me. May both Edwards' souls be elevated, and may they continue to be strong advocates for us in the Heavenly Courts.

19 Tammuz

The nineteen of Tammuz is my mother's yahrzeit. My mother died on July 6, 2015, and observing the customary mourning period was challenging. I missed several weddings and bar mitzvahs of close friends and neighbors, and I sorely missed listening to music and going to live events.The Jewish custom is to honor a loved one's memory by doing good deeds and giving to charity, and I undertook a project "for the elevation of the soul of Chana Rachel bat Moshe." I also started knitting, something my mother enjoyed, but was never able to teach me.

Now that the second yahrzeit is approaching, I am finding that I can look farther back than the recent past, recount stories and silly songs and corny jokes to her grandchildren, and reflect on what was a complicated relationship. How does a librarian do that? With books.

I have been a fan of Roz Chast since she started at the New Yorker in 1978, which is about the time I started reading the New Yorker, which means looking through the magazine to get to her cartoons. Her 2014 memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloombury) chronicles her parents' decline and demise. She "could see that they were slowly leaving the sphere of TV commercial old age -- and moving into the part of old age that was scarier, harder to talk about, and not a part of this culture." Although my mother's trajectory was different, I dealt with many of the same issues including the lifetime accumulation of such clutter as old eyeglass frames and free gifts from opening bank accounts; sorting through endless financial and medical papers; and that pull between spending time visiting her at a senior facility versus spending time with my children.

Hilarious, touching and spot-on, I mostly laughed and sometimes cried (and sometimes laughed until I cried). It seems I am not the only one who felt like their father's daughter and heard, "I'm not your friend; I'm your mother" many times. My mother also had a fearsome temper and a strong aversion to doctors, whom she "knew" were in cahoots with the pharmaceutical and insurance companies to overcharge and prescribe drugs so they could go to conferences in Hawaii.

But perhaps this tenacity was what enabled both women to live past 90. My mother, a"h, cheated the Angel of Death many times. She outlived the "normal" diagnosis for Alzheimer's patients. She collected every penny of her long-term care insurance, and lived way past the expectancy for those who break hips. She was in and out of ICU several times. She was hospitalized on 19 Tammuz of the previous year, and a rather inept doctor encouraged us to "let her go and stop being selfish." Well, the gauntlet was thrown down. My mother lived another year, just to show the doctor that she was horribly wrong.

©Roz Chast, 2017, ‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, used with permission.

Another memoir, The Bridge Ladies by Betsy Lerner (Harper Wave, 2016) is about Betsy's mother and her mother's bridge partners. Growing up, Lerner saw them as a group of suburban housewives who got together once a week around a card table, but as a grown up, she discovered a new respect for these women who show up every Monday, always dressed tastefully and with accessories, and have a friendship defined by a love of the game and a presence in each other's lives.

My mother did not play bridge with the ladies, but she and my father enjoyed playing with other couples. They would set up the card table in the living room, put out some bridge mix (best part of the game for me. Interesting fact: the chocolate covered nuts and confections seemed to be the perfect snack for card players), and spend the evening playing cards and talking. This is another one of her hobbies that she tried to teach me and that I couldn't master, which might be a good thing, since none of my friends play bridge, either. But Lerner practiced the game and improved, learn the intricacies of play, and bonded with her mother over the game.

Lesléa Newman's I Carry My Mother (Headmistress Press, 2015), is also a chronicle of her mother's dying and death in a series of poems that vary in style, format and tone that follow both her and her mother's journey during this time. She touches on all phases of the mother-daughter relationship as well as the physical and emotional challenges for both parent and child. Newman found inspiration in classic Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Dr. Seuss works, as well as more modern voices. Her own voice shines through with rhymes that are full of love, sadness, and often irony. She vividly captures the experience: "My mother tells me where she hides her jewels/a nurse comes in to ask about her stools." And in the aftermath "but I know, too, that my mother is involved in everything I know." 


Thanks to AJL super-colleague Rachel Kamin for suggesting these books on several platforms, and for the Hashgacha pratis that I got to read them when I did -- another example of bibliotherapy.

My mother, a"h loved poetry, and one of her prize possessions was a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass that she received as a birthday present. So many lines are so appropriate:

"This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, 
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. 
Night, sleep, and the stars."

"I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or 
wake at night alone, 
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, 
I am to see to it that I do not lose you."

Finally, not one of the Real Cats of Israel, but the best cat ever, Connie, whom my mother trained to not go upstairs and not jump on tables or counters.  Everyone thought they were Connie's favorite human, but Connie was very smart -- she knew who was in charge of the food (and who didn't chase her around the house to try and play with her), so my mother was Connie's best friend.

Stay cool and happy reading!

Of Making Many Books There Is No End

Note: This blog is based on/inspired by a presentation I gave at the 2008 Jewish Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Seminar in New York City. I chose to update it for several reasons: during the holiday of Sukkot, we read the Book of Ecclesiastes -- from which this quote is taken, so it is timely. Also, the 17th Annual Jewish Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Seminar, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council, will take place on Sunday, November 15th, 2015 (in New York City), again timely. Also, this month's deadline sneaked up very quickly, so I wanted to post in a timely fashion. Enough with timeliness and onto the books!

Of Making Many Books There Is No End - Ecclesiastes Chapter 12, Verse 12 

The Book of Ecclesiastes is a journal of King Solomon’s attempt to answer a difficult question: what is the purpose of life? Near its conclusion, he warns, “Beware, of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” As a reviewer, editor and book lover, I see hundreds of books every year. While we all know the pleasure of  reading a great book, it is very hard to have to read bad books, books with errors that could have been corrected with a Google search, books about Israel with a political agenda, or books that include graphic details inappropriate for children.  As the weather starts to turn colder and it starts to rain in Israel, I've put these books on my reading list:

In 2013, I had the pleasure of representing AJL at the World Congress of Jewish Studies (see E-Reading and Jerusalem). My topic was "Off the Derech and Onto the Page," and I talked about books by and about people who left their Orthodox Jewish Communities. Since then, the market as been flooded with even more books. Here are a few of the memoirs:

All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen (Graywolf Press, 2015)

Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews by Lynn Davidman (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood by Leah Vincent (Penguin Books, 2014)

Uncovered by Leah Lax (She Writes Press, 2015)

There is a certain sadness to all of these stories, so I try to alternate between sad books and happy or funny books, which leads to a book I'm enthusiastically anticipating:

Yes! Mirka is back in this 3rd book of the series by Sydney Taylor Book Award Winner Barry Deutsch. This time Mirka is a travelling baby-sitter. A magic fish, sibling rivalry, and some Jewish wisdom - I can hardly wait!

Of Making Many Book There Is No End – Rashi notes that it is not possible to  commit everything to writing, and Rabbi Yisroel Salanter cautions that not everything that man thinks must he say; not everything he says must he write, but, most important, not everything that he has written must he publish. Here's a title that came to mind: The Book of Jewish Secrets: and Why Most of Jews are Not Real Jews. I guess it would be worth $2.99 for a Kindle edition to learn the secret. I also think about this when I see Clifford, Grover, and mice celebrating Hanukkah. I didn't even know they were Jewish. But, if Hello Kitty starts celebrating, I just might have to read about her. 

In the meantime, Leslea Newman's Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed will fit the bill for feline reading -- cats, music, friendship - MEOW!

Of Making Many Books There Is No End - The Midrash comments on this verse that there are 24 books in the Jewish canon, and that it should be ample reading material.  Indeed, Jewish culture is full of potential topics. I just started a book by Heather Streltzer Gelb about her path from Rwanda to Israel - From Hilltop to Hilltop. So far I am reading about her experiences working for the Peace Corps in Rwanda in the early 1990s (before the genocide), and while there is a tiny bit of Jewish content, her daily life in Africa makes for interesting reading.

Next month: more on Heather's path and some Lovingkindness.