Here in Highland Park, New Jersey

Some of you enjoyed seeing my portrait posted, so here’s another one. If you’ll click on the photo, you’ll see the boy that I’m missing. I dropped him off yesterday so he could head off to camp for a month. He’s sure he’ll love it (Camp Stone), but I’m sure I’ll miss him. He’s my creative youngster, the one who was in the local teen film festival (shh, he’s only 11). On an aside, Michelle Reasso is back part-time at the Highland Park Public Library, so hopefully, there will be a new teen film festival this winter.

The photo was taken in the mirrored elevators of the King’s Hotel in Jerusalem. At some point, I will do a post on their “swimming pool” (they don’t really have one, it’s not the ritziest place in town), but it will be a fun post about an interesting city element with a Paris connection.

While I was driving my son from Highland Park, New Jersey to Teaneck, New Jersey, I asked my boy to take a few photos. Not because there is great scenery on the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s more like a nightmarish view, what gives New Jersey a bad name. I haven’t even looked at the photos yet; they are still in my camera, but maybe I’ll get up the guts to post a few, and submit something to Sky Watch Friday? As a contrast to all the beautiful sky photos from around the world one can find there.

Lion of Zion said he posted for a year about his trip to Israel, so I feel better about doing so here. Stay tuned for more postings about food in Israel, as Lion of Zion raised the topic of restaurants.

And just to add yet one more topic to this eclectic post, if anyone has any good thoughts on alternative energy research, would love to hear.

People have different boundaries; what might be comfortable to you, for example, might not be comfortable to me. My husband is a rather private person, so I try not to write much about him. It’s hard, though, because our families are part of our lives, and I enjoy connecting by writing.

I do try to be careful about what I say about other family members, and I don’t think I’m being too revealing by saying:

Here’s what my boys are excited about.

This is a website that has lectures my father enjoys (I’ve downloaded them unto his mp3 player).

And here are some of my daughter’s buddies:

Baruch Dayan Emet (blessed is the true judge): this is the phrase we observant Jews are supposed to say when we hear someone has passed away. The truth is, I often think of it afterwards. I am usually rather shocked when I hear the news, even if it is someone who has been sick for a long time.

This afternoon I learned that Rabbi Levi Meier died after a long battle with cancer. The family is sitting shiva in California.

When studying the Book of Ruth, I wrote about Rabbi Levi Meier’s book, Second Chances: Transforming Bitterness Into Hope. He was the author of other books, including one that I own, Ancient Secrets: Using the Stories of the Bible to Improve Our Everyday Lives. In that book he talks about his work as a hospital chaplain and his experiences counseling people with terminal illness.

I only met Rabbi Levi Meier a few times, briefly, but I knew his mother, z”l, may her memory be a blessing, well. She made the best homemade gefilte fish I have ever tasted.

My daughter wanted a picture of her standing in front of our favorite toy store in Highland Park: Over the Moon Toys. She told me not to put up the one with her squinting (which may have been a better shot of the store).

Do you have an old-fashioned, mom-and-pop style toy store in your area? Or just chain stores? We like Over the Moon Toys because it’s friendly(the store is owned by two sisters, and varying family members are behind the register), they have a nice selection of toys, and they wrap presents beautifully–yellow and pink tissue paper, blue and green tissue paper, multi-colored ribbons, colorful dotted paper, your choice. If your child walks into the store when you need to buy a gift for a friend and says:”I want this and that and this and that”, they have a gift registry. So you then tell your child to put the items she wants on the registry, so when it’s time for her party, she can tell her friends to check the registry.

My daughter is standing in front of the store with her brand-new Webkinz that she bought with the money her saba (grandfather) gave her before Pesach. Webkinz are a big craze among kids in America; you buy the little stuffed animal, then you go online to take care of it. What’s really funny is when my daughter plays on the computer at our house with the little boy across the street who’s on his computer at his house, and they go into the same room in the Webkinz game and make their Webkinzes jump and down together on a trampoline.

Mother’s Day is a hard day for me. I really miss my mom. My husband is nice; he usually buys me a new cookbook or another book I might like on Mother’s Day. One year he bought me a nice metal watering can that I cherish. And my father brought me some flowers on Friday and wished me Happy Mother’s Day.

But it’s not the same as being able to call your mother and talk to her. Just for a bit.

On the right is my maternal grandmother z”l, whom we called Baba. That’s Russian for grandmother. The slim woman next to her is my mother, Elaine, z”l, may her memory be a blessing. When my mother became a grandmother, almost twenty years ago (eeks! is my niece going to be that old?), my sister-in-law thought she would want to be known as Baba. No, she said, there was only one Baba. So my mother became Savta.

My mother was born in Leningrad, Russia in 1924. When she came to this country (USA) in 1929, she had never tasted a banana. It tasted like a funny potato, she said. Her father, whom I never met because he died when my mother was 14, was already here in the U.S. He was born in Lithuania, came to America as a teenager, and went to Russia as a salesman for some American company–was it Ford? I’m not sure. There he met my grandmother, my Baba, whom he married. At some point they were separated; he came back to America and supposedly pulled strings in the State Department to get his wife and daughter to join him in New York.

When my mother was in kindergarten (same age as my daughter!) in New York City, she knew no English. So her father pinned a note to her shirt. When she needed to go to the bathroom, she was supposed to point to the note. It’s hard to imagine my mother not knowing English, as she later became a technical writer, corrected English grammar errors, and wrote an essay about mothers and daughters in Jane Austen.

There are a lot of stories about my Baba that I would like to share in future posts. My father once said she had experiences by the age of 25 that most do not have in a lifetime. She lived through the Russian Revolution and what was known as the “starvation period”, when people would have to walk many miles in the bitter cold just to get a frozen potato to eat. My Baba told me that the rabbis said it was OK to eat non-kosher food; you ate what you needed to stay alive. If you looked in the back of her mouth, you could see the shiny gold that replaced the teeth she lost during this period. Gold was easier to come by than food.

Enjoy your Mother’s Day, and as always, thanks for reading.

Last week my Middle Son was learning about resistance during the Shoa (the Holocaust). One of the ways Jews kept up their spiritual resistance to the Nazis was by reciting the “Ani Ma’amin”. Gail posted a translation of the phrase and mentioned use of this phrase in the Shoa, which gave me the idea for this post.

This is the phrase in the original Hebrew:

This is the 12th of the Rambam’s 13 Principles of Faith. (thanks, LOZ)

So, getting back to Middle Son: he had a vocabulary test last week. I often help him study for Hebrew tests, because I really enjoy learning along with him. My husband studies with him on his Mishneh, social studies, science, and other tests. His Hebrew teacher is definitely his most challenging teacher.

One of the words on his test was: יתמהמה
Transliteration: yitmameihah
Say that ten times fast. “yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah yitmameihah ”
Hard, no?
Now what happens if the teacher gives you the following as a translation for the strange word “yitmameihah”, and you are a 5th grader with a 5th grade vocabulary:
procrastinate
(other translations say “linger” or “tarry”)

So my son did not know what “procrastinate” meant. So I came up with some explanation, something about delaying something happening and continued to test him, alternatively asking him the Hebrew or the English word. He had a very difficult time with this word.

So I told him:
mem-heh-mem-heh
In Hebrew, the roots of a word are often only three letters. This is an exception word, one that has a seemingly two letter root (mem being the first and heh being the second), and the root is doubled, thus “mem-heh-mem-heh”. A similar word might be wheel: galgal. The “yit” part of “yitmameihah” means that it is hitpael, or a reflexive verb, one that is done to oneself. I was hoping that by breaking down the word into its parts, he might be able to remember it.

No such luck. On Friday afternoon, after the test was over and he was home, I asked him how he did on the test. “Good,” he replied. I believe him. He usually knows.

“How do you say ‘procrastinate’ ?” I quizzed him.
I got some garbled answer that sounded sort of like a distance relative of “yitmameihah”.
Oh, well.