Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, is in less than one month. So I started looking at past posts I wrote about the holiday. I have an idea for a new way to present the simanim (symbols) – I plan to post it next week.

On My Blog

  
  
- Agnon, Joyce, Woolf and Kafka
- What Happens When You Raise Taxes

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

• Jew Wishes reviewed Izzy’s Fire, a book about a Catholic family who saves Jewish families in Lithuania during the Holocaust.
• Ilana-Davita wrote part one of Jewish History in Hamburg. She also has a fascinating photo of a kosher dining room, where Jewish passengers ate before traveling to America in the early 20th century.
• Cooking Manager has some delightful recipes for black-eyed peas, one of the simanim for Rosh Hashana.
• James took some fascinating shots of Philadelphia through a fountain. My daughter wants to go to the Philadelphia Art Museum, because we got a pamphlet about a Renoir exhibit.

I read Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali – she has led a difficult life, and what she has to say is not easy to hear, but she is a good writer and her story is gripping. I read the book in only two days. I can’t say I agree with her conclusions, but her story of growing up in Somalia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia, then running away to Holland because she doesn’t want to marry the man her father has chosen for her is quite a tale. I amazed that she has made it as far as she has in life (at one point, she was a member of Dutch Parliament; now she is a fellow at American Enterprise Institute).

I am reading a biography of S. Y. Agnon by Harold Fisch. He writes:

In Joyce or Virginia Woolf we are accustomed to what is sometimes called the interior monologue. Characters reflect inwardly, drawing on past experience; it is a relatively unstrenuous form of reflection. In Agnon we have something more dramatic, viz. the interior dialogue. His meditating characters argue back and forth, debating inwardly, using the method of question and answer which the Jewish reader recognizes as the technique of talmudic discussion. Should the Guest have a new coat made?

He is also compared to Proust, to Thomas Mann, to Edgar Allan Poe, to Joseph Conrad and to Kafka. On Kafka and Agnon:

The symbolic and everyday worlds are yoked together by violence in a way only found elsewhere in Kafka, though Agnon differs from Kafka in his greater degree of faithfulness both to the dream and to everyday observation…[Agnon writes] an allegorical tale like so many of Kafka’s tales…Such a tale is thus and image of contemporary existence in the historical present. And here is where Agnon differs from Kafka. “A Whole Loaf” is a naturalistic account of a Saturday night in Jerusalem in the twenties. We see the Arabs in their fezzes, the orthodox Jews in their fur hats (streimels); there is traffic, there are cafes and hotels; you see the different types coming out to take the air after a burning day of hot desert wind (hamsin).

Felisol has been writing about James Joyce and Ulysses. Mrs. S. has a guest poster tell us that Agnon is buried among distinguished company.

Do you have any literary stream of consciousness ideas to share?

For more on Agnon, read about a short story from A Book That Was Lost.

I started reading The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus From Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado because someone from my husband’s work lent it to him. After a few chapters, I was hooked. One of my joys in reading the book is my husband is reading it as well, so we get to compare notes on our reactions to the characters and developments.

The main character is the author’s father, Leon Lagnado. He is the man in the white sharkskin suit, always dressed up and ready to do business, gamble or party. However, in the later part of his life, he must change his ways, and this sad second half of his life is portrayed with love and empathy by his daughter. One can easily find the younger Leon an unlikable man – he is arrogant, cheats on his wife, gambles and stays out late. When Lucette or Lou Lou, as she is affectionately called, is born, one notices how he pours all his affection into this little girl. Later, a fall changes his life forever.

The family lives in a beautiful home in Cairo that they must leave after the fall of King Farouk and the rise of Nasser. Some of their relatives travel to Israel, where life is harsh, and it is difficult to make a living. The Lagnado family moves temporarily to Paris and then on to New York City, where the children adjust to life in America, but the parents never really do.

Some of the themes in the book are Judaism, culture shock, women’s issues, illness, and family relationships. Indeed, Judaism and women’s issues are intertwined, as Leon goes every day to the synagogue and the women maintain the home. One of the difficulties we (my husband and I) had with the book was how can a man consider himself a religious Jew if he cheats on his wife and gambles? The ethics are different than those of our own. At one point, the mother tells the daughter, don’t marry a Syrian (Leon’s family is originally from Syria); the implication being a Syrian man would not be good to his wife. However, other relationships described in the book are not as harsh, so I suspect Leon and his wife Edith had a particularly poor relationship. It seems like Lou Lou, the author of the book, is the main tie that holds them together.

The issue of the role of a woman arises again as the mother, Edith, applies for a job in New York City with a top publisher. Due to her classical education and brains, she surprisingly gets the job. However, she doesn’t take it, as she can’t see herself in the main role of breadwinner for the family. Later she takes a less taxing job in a library, one that feels more comfortable to her. For many years the family is supported by the older son (who is only in his early twenties at the time).

America teaches Lucette about the different kinds of Jews there are in this world. Before Passover, she spends many hours with her mother cleaning the rice so no grains should be mixed in. In America, she learns that many of her Jewish friends (those originally from European countries) would never eat rice on Passover. Still others do not follow the Passover laws at all. She is also the only woman in her family to receive some Jewish education. In the U.S. the leaders of her community realize that even though they did not educate women in the old country, in America where assimilation is so strong, it is important for girls to learn so they can pass on the traditions to their children. This reminds me a bit of my grandmother’s description of life in Russia – they would send the boys to yeshiva and the girls to what was called gymnasia where they learned French and science, so the girls then didn’t want to marry the boys because they had little in common.

Lucette comments on what the Jews from Cairo who resettle in New York manage to save of their community: the synagogues and the food. She finds there is so much that is missing, that cannot be saved. Some of it she views again when she revisits Cairo, but the new Cairo has no Jewish community. A pastry shop called Groppi’s still exists, but only in name. Gone are the famous pastries and elegantly dressed people she remembers from her childhood. When she first came to New York, she was in awe of the white bread. Her father tells her that isn’t bread, and he finds some pita to purchase, as to him, that is bread.

One notices similarities between this book and Ariel Sabar’s My Father’s Paradise. In both stories, the families are forced to leave Arab countries after living there for many generations. In both, description of the resettling in Israel in the 1950′s is stark: people do not treat each other well, and Lucette’s maternal grandmother, instead of receiving pity, is the object of derision. But the dysfunctional family theme is much, much stronger in Lagnado’s book.

If you like this review, you may also want to read Jew Wishes’ review of this book.

I would write these posts:

• Review of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, by Lucette Lagnado, a fine, moving, fascinating book
• Review of Isaac’s Torah, by Angel Wagenstein
• Millet Pilaf recipe or my nickname for it, millaf
• About braces? And kids?

I have had time to putter in the garden, and so our family has enjoyed salad with nasturtium and nasturtium flowers.

Those of us recovering? re-emerging? from having celebrated Pesach (no noodles, no bread, no pretzels, no oatmeal, no breakfast cereal except for ones that should be outlawed, no rice if Ashkenazi, no beans if Ashkenazi, no corn chips if Ashkenazi, no peanut butter if Ashkenazi, no popcorn if Ashkenazi and lots of cooking and food and meals) may be experiencing difficulty in reconnecting with the planet. I think a good night sleep tonight for me will help do the trick. More importantly, my kids finally return to school tomorrow, though my eldest sighs it was too short a break.

Any Pesach recuperators having a hard time looking at a potato?

Some great links:

• SuperRaizy hosted Haveil Havalim. I so connected with her post on childhood Pesach preparations – sometimes holidays bring out difficult times for families.
• My heart goes out to Baila, who has flown to New York to visit her dad who is not well. So difficult to see a parent suffer.
  Update: according to A Mother in Israel, Baila’s father has died.
• Ilana-Davita recommends The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society and other books.
• Jew Wishes reviews Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes by Tamar Yellin. Having read Tamar Yellin’s book The Genizah at the House of Shepher, I’m sure this one is a worthwhile read, too.

I’m reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I finished Harriet Reisen’s Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. It left me with great admiration for Louisa May Alcott – she worked hard to support her family (never married – she supported parents and sisters), volunteered as a nurse in the Civil War, and in an era when women had few choices of livelihood, became rich and famous. She unfortunately became ill in her middle years and died at age 55 probably of complications from lupus.

Feel free to talk about whatever you like, as long as it’s not rude. (the people who comment on this blog make the world seem like remarkably polite folks – what a group of mensches, that is, good, polite folks).

This is a photo of my maternal grandfather, whom I never met, on a boat. No idea who the man on the left is – the captain? I am guessing the photo was taken before my grandfather went to Russia as a salesman for Ford(?) and met my maternal grandmother, whom he married in Russia and then returned to the U.S – my grandmother and mother came a few years after, needing special permission to enter the country (they came in 1929, one month before the stock market crashed).

•  More on my maternal grandfather

•   •   •

How many of you had relatives that came through Ellis Island? My paternal grandparents did and possibly my maternal grandparents and mother as well. I highly recommend American Passage: The History of Ellis Island by Vincent Cannato. He writes about the different commissioners of Ellis Island and their styles, Castle Garden (the immigration inspection predecessor to Ellis Island), nativist vs. immigrant lobbies, and recent politics of rebuilding Ellis Island as a museum.

There is a funny passage in the book where Theodore Roosevelt declares at a dinner that “he had chosen [Oscar] Straus without regard to race, color, creed or party. To that, an elderly and increasingly deaf Jacob Schiff nodded and said in his thick German accent: ‘Dot’s right, Mr. President. You came to me and said, ‘Chake, who is der best jew I can appoint Segretary of Commerce?”” Sad are the descriptions that investigators bring back of the situation in Eastern Europe – poverty, starvation and disease were too abundant in the late 19th – early twentieth century.

For more photos with sepia, visit Sepia Scenes: