Published April 15th, 2012  ·  www.rumpus.net. filed under rumpus original

Neck Up.

If a man touches your tetas you will lose control and then lose everything.

Touch your cookie only to clean it. And do not clean it for too long.

Never talk to a man who has a tattoo.

Marry a Jewish boy.

Marry a professional Jewish boy.

If you use tampons you will lose your virginity.

If you wash your hair on the first day of your period you will be infertile.

If you want a baby girl, have an orgasm before your husband. If you want a boy, do not have an orgasm.

Give birth without drugs, that way you can have a big meal right after you give birth and you won’t feel sick to your stomach.

Do not scream in labor. Be a lady.

Do not leave your children with anyone except family.

Do not bring up your children to be gringos.

Do not paint your toenails red. Only chusma girls have red toenails.

Chusma girls also wear ankle bracelets and snap their gum.

Wear high heels—they make your legs look prettier.

Never wear sneakers.

Wear slippers with a heel at home. Your husband will like that.

Grow your hair long. Brush your hair a lot so that you don’t have bolones.

Wax your eyebrows every two weeks.

Swing your culo slightly when you walk down the street so that you are appealing yet still a lady.

Do not wear sleeveless shirts. Chusmas wear sleeveless shirts.

Do not knot your shirt so your bariga shows. Only chusmas show their barigas.

Pray that your husband has a long life.

Do not marry again when you’re old. You do not want to get stuck taking care of some old man you hardly know.

Pray that your children will take care of you.

Fast on Mondays and Thursdays if you want your wishes to come true. The gates of heaven are open on those days because the Torah is read in the Call.

Do not mix meat with milk.

Do not eat puerco and do not eat like a puerca.

Watch your weight. Men do not like gordas.

Get an education. You may need it if your husband turns out to be like your father who doesn’t make enough money and then you have to go to work.

Open your own checking account.

Make sure the department store credit cards are in your name only.

Make sure the house is also in your name.

Give your children everything.

Save something for yourself and don’t tell anyone.

*A Juban is a person who is both Jewish and Cuban

···
Judy Bolton-Fasman is writing a family memoir called 1735 ASYLUM AVENUE. (It’s the address of the house in which she grew up. Really). Judy is an award-winning columnist on family

It’s spring. It’s Passover. The days are longer. The trees are blooming. And in these past few months new trees – giving trees inspired by Shel Silverstein’s iconic book “The Giving Tree” – have grown out of Isy Mekler’s bar mitzvah project.

Isy, a seventh grader at Solomon Schechter Day School of Boston, was determined to emphasize the mitzvah in his bar mitzvah. Along the way he assembled a museum quality exhibit, excelled as a fundraiser for a national literacy program called Reach Out and Read and received a Make a Difference Award from the John F. Kennedy Library, where he was the only student who spoke at the ceremony.

Isy’s Giving Tree Project started as an English class assignment to write a fan letter to an author whose book was life-changing for the student. Although Shel Silverstein died in 1999, Isy memorialized him, praising the late author and illustrator for helping him understand life a little better through the tree’s unselfish giving.

“When I read your book ‘The Giving Tree,’ I thought it was absurd that a tree could be happy after stripping itself of everything it had. The tree gave away all its apples. The tree gave away all of the branches it had, and its trunk. But the tree was still glad that it could keep giving. …Now I understand how divine it feels to give.”

Isy wanted to “give” his love of reading to other kids. But he realized that such joy is not easy to come by for children who can’t afford to buy books or don’t have access to well-stocked libraries in their schools. He was also well aware that a meaningful commitment to literacy meant giving everything he had in the form of time and heart and love.

And then, there were the trees. Isy designed trees for artists to paint or illustrate that were composed of two quarter-inch thick hardboard panels that slid into each other to create a three-dimensional tree. Each tree measured 19.5 inches in height and 15 inches in width.

By the time the prototype for the trees arrived from Colombia – Isy’s family is originally from Colombia and his grandmother there oversaw the manufacturing and delivery – Isy had written to more than 300 artists, 28 of whom committed to painting or illustrating a tree to support kids and literacy. In addition, fine art glass artist Dale Chihuly donated seven signed copies of his books to Isy’s project, and illustrator Karla Gudeon donated a giclée print called “Big Tree.”

When Isy became a bar mitzvah last November, the participating artists had completed the trees in time to be used as table centerpieces for his celebration. Some of the trees incorporate explicitly Jewish themes. Tikva Adler, a North Carolina-based artist, painted her interpretation of an Eytz Chayim, the Tree of Life. Adler elaborated that creating art was akin to experiencing “prayer or meditation because it brings my awareness fully into the present moment.”

Joy Chertow, Isy’s art teacher at Solomon Schechter, created a weeping willow tree using wire. Isy noted that Chertow was the only artist who changed the shape of the tree. He pointed out, “When seen from above, Joy’s tree is more oblong and the wire seems to be swinging with a non-present wind.”

Raquel Rub, a Peruvian-Jewish artist who makes her home in Miami, painted her artistic interpretation of “Creation.” In a recent e-mail, Rub explained that when she visited Israel, she was moved by: “Four sites in Israel where I was inspired by Creation. In Hebron, I visited the burial sites of the patriarchs. In Tiberias, I took a boat ride on Lake Tiberias. In Jerusalem, we remember where the Temple stood. Tzfat is the mystical city. Together, these four places reminded me of the elements earth, water, fire and air to make the piece you now have called ‘Creation.’”

Illustrator and children’s book author, Aaron Becker, was so impressed with Isy’s commitment to service that he designed a tree based on his upcoming children’s book called “Journey,” which is set, in part, in a forest. The material was a natural fit for Becker, whose tree Isy admired for its air of mystery and “the beautiful shadowing and the soft glow of the lanterns.”

In his acceptance speech at the JFK Library, Isy said that his father “was the driving force that inspired me to enjoy reading.” He also noted, “I want to provide other kids with this wonderful gift, and I want to make a difference.”

And Isy continues to make a difference in the waiting room of a Roslindale clinic where he volunteers to read to the young patients twice a month.

Isy Mekler’s Giving Tree Project will be on display at the Danforth Museum in Framingham from April 15 to August 15 as part of the museum’s literacy initiative. After the exhibit, the trees will be auctioned, with all proceeds going to Reach Out and Read.

Kelle Groom—my friend and mentor—sees her best-selling memoir come out in paperback today. It’s a luminous book in which Kelle performs the delicate dance of being both lyrical and gritty without a misstep. The central event in the book is her unflinching account of giving birth to her son when she was 20, unmarried, unmoored and heavily drinking. Her aunt and uncle, childless and still young enough to raise a child, adopted her son when he was four days old. My friend held him twice and never saw him again. She still hears his cries as he was bundled up and taken away.

Kelle is a prize-winning poet and the title of her book—I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl—is both hopeful and elegiac in its reference to the blue dress  she wore as a flower girl. She was six when she walked down the aisle strewing rose petals. I was six too when I was the flower girl at my uncle’s wedding. I was all tulle and scratchy netting in a dress that turned me into a preternaturally aqua-colored cupcake. Anna was a flower girl when she was five. She wore a long rose dress with patent leather Mary Janes and fancy white socks that peeked out from the hem as she methodically scattered petals before my sister the bride. Kelle knows the tender soul of a flower girl.

After reading Kelle’s book and tiptoeing my way through the rush of my own memories, I believe that Kelle wrote her way to something that Abraham Joshua Heschel called “radical amazement”—a holy appreciation for a moment in time. In my case, it was a holy appreciation for motherhood. When Anna got some good news recently, she was so happy she jumped on my back without thinking. We were both surprised when I gave her a piggyback ride. It had been a half dozen or so years since I last tromped around the house with her on my back.

I’m not nostalgic for diapers or mashed bananas. But I miss lifting my children and feeling their beating hearts against mine. I miss their shoes that once fit in the palm of my hand. I’ve stashed away one of Anna’s onesies—the one a friend made exuberantly announcing Anna’s name, date of birth and weight in red and purple waterproof marker.

I met Kelle six years ago in a writing workshop in Provincetown. She presented a chapter from her memoir in which she was casting about for a definitive way to link the Superfund site in the Massachusetts mill town where her only child Tommy lived with the leukemia he developed at 9 months of age. He died in 1982 when Kelle and I were 21. I had just graduated from college and was paralyzed with anxiety about what would happen to me without the familiar scaffolding of a school routine. I couldn’t imagine being anyone’s mother let alone experiencing the aching, exquisite love I’d come to have for my children still to be born more than a decade later.

A few years ago I found my college journals in the shaggy, pink bedroom of my girlhood. I cringe when I remember that I hoped someone would discover remarkable poignancy in my self-conscious and self-important teenage angst. I wonder if Anna keeps a journal. I wonder when I stopped knowing everything about her.

When she wasn’t serving drinks at a bar or dusting the shelves at a health food store, Kelle often drank herself into a black oblivion in the early ’80s. Yet she never stopped writing poetry. I moved to New York and wrote bad fiction. When Kelle and I went out to dinner last year to celebrate the initial sale of her memoir, she had not had a drink in 26 years. At the time, I wish I had known that we had met within days of the 28^th anniversary of her son’s death. I’d like to think that when we talked about Tommy that night it felt as deep as a yahrtzheit—the anniversary of loved one’s death—for Kelle.

At the end of the book, Kelle sees her son in 8mm films that she has made into DVDs. She writes that she was afraid that these reels of film from her aunt and uncle  would crumble before they were digitized. She was afraid she would crumble if she got to view them. But they survived to and went digital. And Kelle  watched her son celebrate his first and last birthday from beginning to end in a hospital room. He will be dead in two months.

Kelle has shown me that the peace of motherhood is a restless one. She wears the ocean in the shape of motherhood. Every woman does. I’ve come to a teary acceptance of tears and joy in my own mothering.  Anna is a young woman but I’m still thrilled—radically amazed, really—when she puts her head on my shoulder and calls me Mommy.

It’s been ten years and four deaths since I first said the Kaddish for my father. Too many people to glorify and honor and extoll while pretending that God is on the receiving end of such lavish praise.

My Kaddish has been stretched thin.

My Kaddish is tattered like the yellowed lace doilies my grandmother crocheted. Doilies made of scarred, arthritic time. Adrienne Rich, who died on March 28, 2012 at the age of 82, composed her tattered Kaddish to the doilie makers of this world, to the ones who wished away earth-bound time to die sooner, to the ones who waited for death in dark agony and rain.

Blessed and sanctified are the ones we loved, the ones we thought we loved, the ones we thought loved us and the ones we were supposed to love. Praise to life. Praise to death. Praise to the poet who will forever inspire.

Adrienne Rich

Tattered Kaddish

Taurean reaper of the wild apple field
messenger from earthmire gleaning
transcripts of fog
in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month
speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:

Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel
on ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though its windows blew shut
on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though ones we knew and loved
loved it badly, too well, and not enough

Praise to life though it tightened like a knot
on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us

Praise to life giving room and reason
to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable

Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

1989

–Adrienne Rich. An Atlas of The Difficult World. 1991.

Until he was 7-years-old, Ibrahim Miari was called Avraham. The son of an Israeli Jewish mother and Palestinian Muslim father, Ibrahim has shaped and crafted his improbable life story into a one-man show called “In Between.” He performed it last Saturday night at Boston University.

Ibrahim’s appearance was part of a faculty initiative by the university’s Religious Studies Department called “The Other Within.” The goal of the initiative, underwritten by a grant from the Posen Foundation, is to explore cultural dimensions of Judaism and Jewish identity.

Ibrahim raises awareness about his complicated identity the moment he whirls onto the stage like a Sufi dervish. His circle dancing is dizzying, mesmerizing – a way for Ibrahim to center himself and dwell in calm, still moments. The stage is bare except for a red suitcase, a chair and dumbek drum. He begins by telling the story of his parents’ improbable courtship.

His mother was a schoolgirl in Acco. His father drove a 1969 red Volkswagen around town and fell in love with this Jewish girl at first sight. That’s the story Ibrahim invents for parents who are mum on the subject.

Ibrahim’s story ricochets from his childhood to an interrogation at the airport. He’s the only actor on stage and plays all the parts, from the El Al employee who notices Ibrahim trying to check in with a suitcase belonging to Sarah Goldberg from Boston–Sarah is Ibrahim’s Jewish fiancée, and the two met working at a summer peace camp for Israeli and Palestinian children to his future mother-in-law.

“You’re an Arab and a Jew?” Ibrahim’s investigator asks going through his luggage with a rubber glove. “That’s a good one! Who would marry you?”

Ibrahim tells his audience that in Israel his identity is composed of labels piled one atop another. That Ibrahim Mairi is a Jew is acknowledged by the most stringent of rabbinical authorities because his mother is a Jew. But Muslims claim him as one of their own through his father. His American Jewish mother-in-law worries about her future grandchildren, whom she says will “need a clear sense of identity so you don’t pass on the confusion.” Children need community and culture, she adds.

The more pressing problem is that Sarah and Ibrahim need a clergy person to marry them. Sarah is a Jewish Buddhist – a JuBu. Three clergy – Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist – refused to officiate for various reasons. Three clergy portrayed by one puppet. With just a flick of the side curls the rabbi becomes a sheikh. And with a quick change into a turban, the sheik is a Buddhist priest. There is no possibility of hyphenated identity for Ibrahim and Sarah’s children. They’ve been turned away from their parents’ religious communities.

“I’m not Buddhist, Muslim, or Jewish enough” for anybody, Ibrahim explains.

Ibrahim tells his audience that Purim was the last Jewish holiday he celebrated as Avraham. Purim was his mother’s favorite holiday, and the last year he was in a Jewish school she made him a lavish costume. Purim is Ibrahim’s favorite Jewish holiday as well. It’s poetic that a holiday during which identities are masked and stereotypes inverted speaks so deeply to a man whose Jewish heart co-exists with his Muslim soul.

In 1991, Ibrahim was 15-years old during Operation Desert Storm when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles into Israel. The Mairis, who lived in Acco, didn’t have gas masks or a safe room in their house. In a nod to Arabic tradition, they put dough on their windows for good luck. When a couple is about to be married, family and friends stick coins in the dough of the couple’s new home to symbolize prosperity.

Fifteen years later, missiles rained down on Israel from Lebanon. It was Sarah’s first visit to Israel, and Ibrahim was an eager translator. But the clear blue sky that summer wasn’t an accurate reflection of the region’s turmoil. The war came to Acco and so Ibrahim took his fiancée to Haifa. The rockets landed in Haifa and the couple took cover in Nazareth. The missiles found them there, too, and Sarah’s next stop in Israel was the airport.

Ibrahim’s show began as his thesis project at Boston University’s drama school. Over the years it has evolved in response to audience comments. He says the show’s length depends on his mood and the audience’s reactions.

For all of the show’s spontaneity, Ibrahim’s message is consistent. He’s not Israeli enough because he’s a Muslim. He’s not Arab enough because he’s a Jew. He’s not Palestinian enough because he doesn’t live in the West Bank.

“I am a 1948 Arab.” This means that the members of his Arab family are Israeli citizens because they left their old village to settle in Haifa during Israel’s War of Independence. “I’m a demographic problem. I’m an inside Arab – an Israeli citizen. I am the country’s cancer – a few bad cells they put up walls around and have security checkpoints for. I am a ticking bomb – the ultimate security risk.”

A friend finally marries Ibrahim and Sarah in Massachusetts. They come up with a to-do list for the wedding ceremony using the ABC’s. C is for canopy. F is for the friend who would marry them, H is for henna. L is for lanterns. S is for simcha. U is for ululations. Y is for yamulka.

Ibrahim and his wife recently became parents, and during the Q&A all he would say is that that they plan to raise their child with pure love. He also said that he was not ready to show his play to his father. But his mother, a convert to Islam, has seen a taped version of his show. For the most part, she liked what she saw and heard. But she also told her son that as long as he makes his life story art, she’ll never tell him the story of how she met his father.

It’s spring. It’s Passover (practically). It’s prom season, and I reprise my role as Anna’s personal shopper. My job as my darling girl’s lady-in-waiting has evolved over the years. At first I bought her clothes as part of my maternal obligation to her. Along the way I had a lot of fun dressing up my first child. I can’t remember what I wore yesterday, but I remember all of those adorable outfits I assembled for Baby Anna.

We happily moved through toddlerhood and childhood with me still shopping for my little girl. And then we hit tween-hood. My girl had strong opinions, one of which is that she didn’t want to dress like me. In what is a role reversal that I think of as particular to those of us who straddle the baby-boomer generation, Anna thinks I’m too funky. Yes, she’s more conservative in her tastes, but I’m hardly radical in my dress. I like to say she’s elegantly simple, and I’m appropriately daring. We’ve always been on the same page with regard to propriety and, yes, modesty. Anna had a vision of her prom dress, and I had a vision of my daughter in her prom dress. But a couple of weeks ago our sensibilities crashed and burned in a fitting room in Bloomingdale’s. She tried on dress after dress. My selections looked beautiful on her. She thought otherwise. By the time we got home we were hysterical, and poor Ken had to play referee.

The next week, I explored the emotional fallout of our shopping excursion in New York City at the conference “What to Wear” held at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The organizers paid significant attention to teenage girls and the concept of tsnius – modesty – as both empowering and repressive. To be clear, this was a conference with a pluralistic mission, and one that provided space and time for teenagers to have a private seminar.

My favorite session of the day was the seminar “Concealing and Revealing: The Torah We Learn From Clothing,” led by the British fabric artist Jacqueline Nicholls. Nicholls elevates clothing to an art form through which she also connects to aspects of Torah. She’s created a group of diverse pieces for her first clothing series, the Kittel Collection. A kittel is ultimately a shroud, but in this life men wear one on Yom Kippur, the day of their wedding and, in some traditions, at the first seder.

Nicholls reclaims the kittel for women by feminizing a traditional male garment – the white shirt. She marries form to content by giving these garments obvious feminine shapes. I was taken with a kittel that Nicholls designed as a little girl’s party dress, replete with a Peter Pan collar, and an egg-shaped bottom symbolizing fecundity.

But the piece that took my breath away was a stand-alone corset refitted as a Torah cover in Nicholls’ Torat Imecha – The Maternal Torah Series. Nicholls brilliantly captures the symbolic tension between the Mishnaic saying, “Listen to the instructions of your father, but don’t forget the Torah of your mother” and the restricting relationship women traditionally have with the Torah.

The day Anna and I tumbled into the house as emotional refugees from the mall, we calmed down by listening to the instructions of the father of the house. Ken reminded us that our goal was one and the same: to have Anna feel happy in her new dress. The Torah of our mother included an addendum to the Ten Commandments: Honor Your Daughter and Son.

Ken’s intuition was right. Wearing new clothes is a mark of renewal and deserves a blessing – in this case the shehecheyanu to thank G-d for bringing one to a season of joy. For Anna and me, it’s also the season of shopping madness merged with the season of prom chicness.

After the conference, I went to Saks Fifth Avenue – the ultimate emporium of beauty and fashion. I had to run a gauntlet of women offering me free makeovers before I found the escalator to the fourth floor – the prom floor. All prom, all the time, and 20 percent off to boot. I took pictures of several dresses and e-mailed them to Anna. We narrowed down the choices to two lovely dresses. I’m happy to report that we have a winner, and that mother and daughter are doing very well.

Before leaving the fraught subject of fashion in the eye of mother and daughter, I want to note a couple of beautiful textual references that Jacqueline Nicholls wove into her presentation. According to the Zohar, the soul is a self-constructed garment. And in the traditional prayer lauding “a woman of valor,” a mother dressing her children is a form of protection.

Yes, I want to be that parent whose child’s security extends to feeling good in her clothing and, frankly, in her own skin. If that means going through racks of tulle and ruffles for the perfect dress, then feel free to call me over-protective.

Upon hearing bad news, it’s customary for Jews to say Baruch Dayan Emet — Blessed is the true judge. No questions asked. No motives suspected. This is God’s will.

The night before my father’s funeral I found a tattered prayer book in my old bedroom, a small square book with pastry thin pages that I had from my Yeshiva school days. The book was thick with line after line of tiny Hebrew letters. I practically choked on the chewy Aramaic. But this was the only way I knew how to prepare to be my father’s Kaddish.

I also knew that I would not find a single word about death in the Kaddish. But I was struck by the phrase that translated as “magnified and sanctified.” The words were connected to the act of enlarging God’s stature and acknowledging His holiness. The words of the Kaddish read like a stiff valentine to a lover who, in my resentful state of mind, did not deserve any adoration.

But sometimes there is nothing to do but to say the Kaddish. To accept God’s judgment. And yet to still be angry with Him. And so it is for the three children and their father, murdered in Toulouse because they were Jews. May their memories be a blessing. And may I be able to cope with being alternately grief-stricken and enraged over their deaths.

THE MOURNER’S KADDISH

Yitgadal viyitkadash sh’may raba, b’alma deevra chiruteh v’yamlich malchuteh b’chayechon uvyomechon, uv’chayey d’chol bait yisroel baagalo uvizman koreev, v’imur amen.

Y’hay sh’ may rabba m’vorach l’olam ulmay ulmaya.

Yitbarach v’yishtabach v’yitpoar vitromam viyitnasay, viyi’t hadar, v’yitaleh v’yatalal sh’may di’kudisha, breech hu, l’ayla min kol beerchata v’sheerata, toosh b’chata v’nechemata, d’ameeran, b’alma, vi’imru amen.

Yi’hay shl’omo rabba min sh’maya v’chaim alenu v’al kol yisrael, vi’imur amen.

Oseh shalom b’m’ramav, hu yaaseh shalom, alenu v’al kol yisrael, v’imru amen.

Magnified and sanctified be the glory of God

In the world created according to His will.

May his sovereignty soon be acknowledged,

During our lives and the life of all Israel.

Let us say: Amen.

May the glory of God be eternally praised,

Hallowed and extolled, lauded and exalted,

Honored and revered, adored and worshipped.

Beyond all songs and hymns of exaltation,

Beyond all praise which man can utter

Is the glory of the Holy One, praised is He.

Let us say: Amen.

Let there be abundant peace from heaven,

And life’s goodness for us and for all Israel.

Let us say: Amen.

He who ordains the order of the universe

Will bring peace to us and to all Israel.

Let us say: Amen.