In Lillian Nattel’s novel, The River Midnight, four Vilda Hayas (wild beasts) I mean four teenage girls grow up into women, each leading different kinds of lives, all revolving around the little fictional shtetl of Blaszka in Poland. Hannah-Leah gets married but cannot have children, Faygela gets married and has more children than she can handle, Zisa-Sara dies young and tragically after marrying, having two children and moving to New York, and Misha marries only briefly. Parts of the story’s plot are told over and over again from varying points of view – one must get used to this while reading the novel. At first one thinks, didn’t I read that already? But then something new is learned in the next telling.

Is the story realistic? I don’t know, I didn’t live in 19th century Poland, and neither did Lillian Nattel. But I like her characters, and I enjoyed learning more about each one. We never really get to know Zisa-Sara, but we learn more about her family through her revolution-seeking daughter Emma, her aunt Alta-Fruma and her Torah learning son Izzie. Pogroms, Shabbos food, Yom Kippur prayers, a woman who must give up her dream of higher education when her father dies, fertility and infertility, a pig owned by a Jew and an herb healer who gets pregnant out of wedlock are all part of the tale.

I found one of the questions in the reading group guide at the end of the book a bit strange: “What do the people of Blaszka get out of following their strict religion with its rules, songs, dances at prayers?” I say strange because their version of Judaism did not seem particular strict to me. It seemed like a woman-centered society – the rabbis don’t really seem to be dictatorial leaders, even if they are the knowledgeable ones. Without the women, everything would fall apart.

I will leave you with a taste of the writing style, a paragraph and a line from the prologue:

Time is a trickster in Poland. In Warsaw they have electric lights. On the farms, peasants make their own candles. And in Blaszka? There, time juggles fire, throwing off sparks that reach far into the past and spin toward the future.

But shh, we can’t talk now. The story is about to start.

Child survivors of the Holocaust filmed few days after the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army, January, 1945

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. I will be updating this post throughout this week, linking to related posts.

• A Mom in Israel: Poignant Holocaust Memories in “Sepharad”
• Miriyummy: Never Eat Chocolate Like Bread ( a preview for Kosher Cooking Carnival, to be posted later this week on this blog)
• Rayna Elianna: Review: Bearing the Body “Grandparents and parents must find a way to tell their grandchildren and children about the Holocaust. Their experiences must be carried down through the generations. Their stories shouldn’t be left in the caves within the mind and soul to fester, causing unhealthy and extreme emotional outlets.”
• Rayna Elianna: Yom Hashoah, Days of Remembrance
• Shimshonit: Odds and Ends for Yom HaShoah, such as “discomfort over the Shoah haunted the Israeli psyche for decades after the end of World War II.”
• Elinka: Chaim Ginott – “My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans.”
• Ilana-Davita: Holocaust Memorial in Stockholm – the Wall and Paving Stones
• Baila: Today I Remember – about Carol’s father, who was liberated from Matthausen
• Robin: Never Forget – Never Again

On My Blog:

• Calf, Swallow and Wind: Joan Baez sings
• U.S. Holocaust Museum
• Holocaust Remembrance Day 2010
• Klara Levine: A Child of Survivors Writes
• Holocaust Remembrance Day 2009
• Kristallnacht
• Greetings from Mariampole
• Ilana-Shafir, Artist, Survivor
• Holocaust Remembrance Day 2008
• Aharon Appelfeld, writer, survivor
• Elie Wiesel on Rashi

Some of the books I have read this past year about the Shoa, the Holocaust:

• The Pages In Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home, Erin Einhorn
• Stronger than Iron. The Destruction of Vilna Jewry 1941 1945: An Eyewitness Account, Mendel Balberyszski
• Gertruda’s Oath: A Child, a Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II, Ram Oren
• The Violin of Auschwitz, Maria Angels Anglada
• The Boy, A Holocaust Story, Dan Porat

A few more books, with a loose Holocaust relationship:

• Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel
• Let Our Fame Be Great, Oliver Bullough -the first part of the book tells the story of the Circassians, for those who are interested in reading about the topic of genocide in general. Some Circassians live in the Galil in Israel.

Detail from watercolor of Raritan Avenue

On My Blog

Hereville: A Review of a Graphic Novel about A Young Orthodox Jewish Dragon Fighting Girl

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

• Margo Young has a blog about her book, A Voyage Through Time. She left Germany in 1938.
• In memory of Hannah Katsman’s father, here is a post she wrote in 2008 about her father: Holocaust Remembrance Day: One Family’s Story.
• Rayna Eliana is often reviewing books that I would like to read, and here is one: Review – The Island Within (three generations of a Jewish family as their lives lead them from Vilna, Lithuania to America).
• Ilana-Davita reviews The Pity of It All (informative account of German Jewish history from the arrival of Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin to Hitler’s being appointed chancellor).
• I bet my husband would love this Lemon Pie. Oh, my daughter might enjoy it, too. By the way, I’m hosting the next Kosher Cooking Carnival (submit your posts here).

Do you like … trolls? Witches? Knitting contests? Arguments? A blended family that sort of works? A hint of a dybbuk? A smattering of Yiddish? An unknown monster who turns out to be a well-known (to those who have lived in places other than Hereville) farm animal?

In Hereville, a graphic novel by Barry Deutsch, Mirka, the 11 year old Orthodox Jewish girl heroine does get her sword. Math enthusiasts who like baked goods may enjoy the cake sharing problem. And the author has two pages at the end where shows preliminary sketches of his troll – valuable to those who enjoy the graphic aspect of this novel.

Thanks to Larry Lennhoff for lending me this charming book. And for pointing out there is one glaring halachic (Jewish law) error in the book. I won’t give that one away.

This was my first kraut, which had chopped garlic and carrots in addition to the cabbage. Note the large cabbage leaf on top.

Ingredients and Supplies

• Cabbage – any kind will do
• Sea salt – a few sprinkles for every time you chop up some cabbage
• 1 large glass jar
• 1 small glass jar that will fit inside the large jar – I used a baby food jar.
• Knife, cutting board, large bowl

How to Prepare the Sauerkraut

Put aside one or two large, outer leaves from the cabbage for later. Chop the cabbage. When the cutting board is full of cabbage, put it in the large bowl and sprinkle on some sea salt. Each time you fill the cutting board with cabbage, sprinkle on some sea salt. If you prefer amounts, in his book Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz suggests 3 tablespoons per 5 pounds of cabbage.

According to Sandor Katz, you can’t use table salt, as it may not work in the fermentation process. More about sea salt vs. table salt on this article. You can buy sea salt in Highland Park at Anna’s Health Food Center for about $3.

Once the chopped cabbage is in the bowl, you press it with your hands until the water from the cabbage starts to leak out. In one video I watched, the sauerkraut preparer used a potato masher to hasten the process. In another, the person wore plastic gloves while pressing the cabbage. Next, press the cabbage into the large glass jar. Take the outer leave(s) and press them on top of your chopped cabbage. If the brine doesn’t cover the chopped cabbage, add a little water + salt to the top so it does cover. Press your small baby food jar bottle on top of the cabbage. If you can’t cover your large jar with the cap (and you probably won’t be able to until the cabbage has settled more or has been eaten a bit), cover it with a cloth and a rubber band.

Place your jar on a high shelf in your kitchen or in your basement or some other cool, dry place. Do not refrigerate yet – that will stop the fermentation process. Feel free to try the mixture every few days. We ate some after one week, and then we ate the rest after two weeks. If you have the patience to wait a month, maybe it will be even better then!

Benefits of Fermentation

Sandor Katz writes: “Fermentation not only preserves nutrients, it breaks them down into more easily digestible forms.” Some of you may have heard of priobiotics and its many benefits — think of fermentation as creating your own probiotics. A Finnish study found fermented cabbage could be even healthier than raw or cooked cabbage for fighting cancer.

For more information:

• See the videos in this post on Fermentation Experimentation
• Read Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation;
  check out his recipe: Making Sauerkraut is Easy!
• Healing Properties of Cabbage
• Plant-Derived Biomolecules in Fermented Cabbage

On My Blog

Elsewhere on the Web

Books I’ve Read, Books I’m Reading

Gertruda’s Oath, Ram Oren
Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz
Fear No Evil, Natan Sharansky

I highly recommend all three of these books. What are you reading?

The Violin of Auschwitz is not a long book. Indeed, I read it in only two hours. Perhaps one might call it a novella. Like many books on the theme of the Holocaust, it gives one pause. Why did Maria Angels Anglada choose to write a story about a Jewish man who is saved because he is allowed to design a special violin? We can’t ask her, because she died in 1999. The book was recently translated from the Catalan.

What struck me about the book was not the descriptions of the terrible conditions in which the prisoners of Auschwitz lived, if they were lucky enough to live. It was not how Daniel, the main character, missed his girlfriend, whom we never really meet. It was the memories: the protection of his father’s tallith (prayer shawl), his mother’s delicious cholent with rice, eggs, dried beans and goose(anyone ever hear of such a cholent?), a hard-boiled egg on a seder table, and how he once used to pray Shaharit, the morning prayers. He shared with the evil Nazi commander a love for music, but the Nazi commander would never be able to understand his Jewish neshama, his Jewish soul.

Daniel survives Auschwitz, but only long enough to marry his girlfriend Eva and to adopt his niece Regina through whom we learn this tale. The story is historical fiction, but the conditions and torturous experiments of the camp were frightfully true.

Have you ever been in a culture different than the one of your birth? Did the people of that culture try to get you to be more like them? What if they took care of you, fed you, clothed you, sheltered you, gave you work, but you still missed home?

In the book Scapegoat by Eli Amir, Nuri, a teenage boy from Iraq who has lived with his family in a ma’abara (a transit camp for Jewish refugees to Israel in the 1950′s, 80% originally from Middle-Eastern countries) chooses to join a program on a kibbutz, along with other immigrant teens. His job on the kibbutz is shoveling manure under the supervision of a kibbutznik who has a PhD in manure (yes, there is humor in this book that is partly autobiographical). Not only does he get on the job training in farming, he also gets lessons in Zionism and socialism. The teens are renamed when they enter the kibbutz — Jamil becomes Yoram; Fawzi is changed to Ilana. Nuri unwillingly becomes a leader within his group of teens, and too often he has to bounce between the strong opinions of the kibbutz leaders and the counter opinions of the obstinate teens.

One of the most compelling scenes in the novel is regarding music: classical music favored by the kibbutzniks and Jewish music loved by teens from Baghdad. One of the kibbutzniks declares: “Do something about your bloody little Arabs. Their caterwauling is unbearable.” One of the kibbutzniks tries to teach Nuri some classical music:

Yishai stuck the mouth-organ in his mouth, sucked and blew into it, and his two hands silently touching each other emitted a rhythmic humming sound. He played something unfamiliar to me and when he finished he said: ‘That’s a bit of Mozart’s “Little Night Music”.’
“Who’s he?”
‘”A composer. A genius.”
“What’s a composer?” I asked shyly.

There are a few mentions of the Holocaust. Olga, one of the adults in the Ahuza transit camp, has a tattoo of numbers on her arm. Nuri has never seen such a thing. He can’t imagine why someone would tattoo numbers. Later in the book, Dolek, the doctor of manure, relates tales of European anti-semitism. He tells Nuri a heartbreaking story of witnessing a rabbi attacked on a train, and how Dolek felt powerless to help him.

The last chapter in the book explains why it has the Hebrew name, Tarnegol Kaparot, as there is a chicken involved that is supposed to be waved overhead before Yom Kippur. The main character brings his mother a chicken from the kibbutz; oddly, he doesn’t realize that she will reject it because it is not kosher. I suspect the English name of the book, Scapegoat, is to provide a title that is more understandable to readers and still relates somewhat to Yom Kippur. Although one could perhaps argue the main character was a scapegoat.

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).