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wellsprings
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Gender: Female
Interests: reading, writing, learning, experiencing, creating, relating, weight-training, yoga, walking, biking, swimming, wading, beading, journeying (spiritual and physical), resting, and enjoying life
Occupation: rabbi, adjunct prof., MOM
Message: message me
Member Since:
11/9/2003
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| I finished reading The Man in the Sharkskin Suit, a memoir about a Jewish family in Cairo that has to flee during the Nasser regime. About half is about their vibrant yet challenging lives amidst the glamor of "old Cairo," and half about their lives as struggling, impoverished refugees in France and the U.S. It was very riveting, beautiful and sad, ending with the author going back to visit Cairo and a surprise invitation from an elderly Muslim neighbor. Like My Father's Paradise, which brought to life the story of Jews from Kurdistan, Iraq (and featured a cameo role by one of my U.T. professors), it recreated a vanished world of Middle Eastern Jewry. Central to each book is the father figure who never quite adjusts to his new world, although the father in the latter book became a world-famous linguist and the one in the former book died a broken man. Of course, it made me think of Avraham's family's lost world in Marrakesh, Morocco, which was entirely uprooted and moved to Israel, where it was irrevocably changed.
There is a spate of new literature and media out about Middle Eastern Jews (Summers of Shiraz, about Iran, needs to go on my list next). I hope that these are removing some of the stereotypes (and sheer ignorance) about some million Jews who were expelled from or fled Arab lands after the State of Israel was founded. Most went to Israel but many went to France, Italy, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and the U.S.
The book even made me sad for my own "lost world" of our ranch in Utopia, Texas (which my mother sold a few years after my father's death in a jogging accident nearby), and my Texas childhood in general. Even though San Antonio, the Hill Country, and many of the people I grew up with are still there, it's not the same for me since my mother passed away last year. Of course the situations are vastly different, but "you can't go home again" is true even when you can.
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| http://mimi54.wordpress.com/2008/09/28/eat-your-words-simanim/
Savta Mazal (my husband's late mother) used to make these. There are blessings for each food, which I have from the Sephardic Mahzor. The coolest thing is that some opinions hold that black-eyed peas are one of the foods--Talmud meets Texas! (Because that's what we always ate on the secular New Year's Day in Texas).
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| Click on the "audio" button above. I have uploaded a lot more Sephardic High Holy Day/Days of Awe songs recorded by my husband, Avraham Danan, in the Moroccan Sephardic tradition of his native Marrakesh.
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| Remembering Ted Kennedy as a great supporter of Soviet Jewry, friend of Israel, supporter of health care for all, and "lion of the senate." But I also have a personal feeling about his death and feel for his family, since he was diagnosed with his brain tumor the same week as Mom, and I was following his case and comparing his health to hers. As for his failings and flaws, "acharei mot kedoshim emor," after death I call them holy, but my old friend Randy Markey shared this article.
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