Family Memories: A Review of The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok

Posted on January 22, 2012 by judy bolton-fasman

The memory palace of Mira Bartók’s eponymous memoir is a place that she visualizes: “[T]wisted hallways . . . improbable stairs, like an Escher print, leading to doors that do not open, rooms too dark to see. This is how the memory of trauma works, how we glimpse forgotten years trapped inside the amygdala, that almond-shaped center of fear in our brain. Years are erased or condensed into hazy snapshots.’’

Bartók’s mother, Norma Herr, was a schizophrenic who felt both haunted and hunted. But Norma was also a musical prodigy whose concert career was abruptly halted after her first breakdown at the age of 19. By the time she divorced Paul Herr in 1963 she had two young daughters whom she shuttled between her parents’ home shadowed with memories of abuse to a dump of an apartment on the other side of Cleveland.

The ineffable functioning of memory and the brain itself is integral to Bartók’s complex story. She brilliantly teases out the emotional and physical fallout of her mother’s brain, damaged by illness. Within the memoir is also an autobiography of her own brain, traumatized in childhood and then injured in a car accident a decade ago. Cognitive function or lack thereof in her life is represented by “a palimpsest — a piece of parchment from which someone had rubbed off the words, leaving only a ghost image behind.’’

Bartók’s childhood is a continuous maelstrom powered by Norma’s violent rages and hallucinations. The will to survive the storm leads to the desperate moment when Bartók and her sister legally change their names as young adults so that their mother cannot track them down. Thus begins 17 years of homelessness for Norma and 17 years of wandering for Mira Bartók, who was born Myra Herr.

The Herr sisters’ name change is the foundation of the memoir — an action and reaction that calls to mind the Jewish superstition of changing a dying person’s name to hide her from the angel of death. For that was what Norma Herr was for her daughters — messenger of death who in one of their last encounters in 1990 chased Bartók with the jagged end of a bottle as her nearly hysterical sister Natalia, formerly Rachel, called the police for help.

Over the years Bartók lived in Italy, Israel, and Norway. Along the way she penned a series of children’s books on ancient and living cultures. She became an accomplished artist who taught herself the art of illumination. She remembers being transfixed by Queen Isabella’s Book of Hours — a devotional on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She also remembers wandering among ancient art, searching for the mother who forgot to come back for her.

From 1990 to 2007, Bartók set up post office boxes to both evade Norma and stay in touch with her. Their correspondence is a paradoxical record of a tragic yet fierce, loving relationship. Norma wrote to her daughter on the backs of greasy fast food bags about subjects as eclectic as art, religion, and geology. Her formidable intellect mingled with her insanity. She kept detailed notebooks on her peripatetic studies that at the brink of Norma’s death Bartók and her sister excavated from a storage locker.

Bartók eventually learns from a friend who maintains her post office box that her mother is dying. She and Natalia rush to Cleveland from their respective homes in Western Massachusetts and upstate New York to keep vigil by their mother’s bedside. During those intense three weeks Bartók utters the most wrenching yet bravest words in this memoir: “You know, I always loved you, Mommy.’’ The fact that Bartók can convey how and why she still loves her mother is perhaps the book’s greatest triumph.

A version of this review first appeared in a January 2011 of the Boston Globe

The Modesty Wars by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Posted on January 19, 2012 by judy bolton-fasman

Dear Chaya Mushka:

I read that your name is the most popular one among young Lubavitch women. It’s the name of the late Chaya Mushka Schneerson, wife of the fabled Lubavitcher Rebbe. Anywhere you turn in a Bais Yaakov seminary there’s a Chaya Mushka.

I admire the Lubavitch movement for many reasons, not least of which is that my children will soon set off into this great big world. Who knows if they’ll go hiking in Peru, ashram hopping in India or honeymooning in New Zealand? What I do know is that there is likely to be a Chabad outpost nearby to help them be Jews when they most need it. Even a post-modern, skeptical Jew like me can’t help but admire your movement’s dedication and organization. You’re like MasterCard, for heaven’s sake; you’re everywhere I need you to be.

In that spirit, your sisters in Israel – and anywhere else there is oppression of Jewish women – need you, Chaya Mushka. It isn’t just that they’re relegated to the back of a public bus in Israel or even New York. They are the victims of a so-called modesty movement.

Scene from “The Black Bus,” Anat Zuria’s documentary about the plight of haredi women.
We all know that modesty is crucial to an observant woman. Skirt hems and sleeve lengths must cover most of her body. I try not to be judgmental. I know that sometimes we get into situations that are not of our making. Sometimes these dilemmas are as suffocating as a locked trunk. Not many of us are Houdinis, so we do the best we can to survive. But this time, we must speak out.

I’m not asking the Chaya Mushkas of the world to desegregate the public bus lines in Israel singlehandedly. I want you to do something much more long term. I want you to tell your sons that obsessing about a woman’s modesty is, in fact, wantonly sexualizing her.

And if you can manage to see one film this year, watch “The Black Bus,” Anat Zuria’s documentary about the plight of haredi women. Better yet, view it with your sons and daughters. The film, which centers on two young women who have left their haredi communities, will probably make you uncomfortable. But I sense you’ll recognize a bit of yourselves in Sara Einfeld and Shulamit Weintraub. They fled their Gur Hasidic families. I realize your world is more expansive than that of the Gurs. Yes, you follow strict guidelines in dress, behavior and food. But you are educated women, the dream progeny of Sara Schnerir, a seamstress who lived in the late 19th century and founded the Bais Yaakov seminaries.

Equality is a slippery word between us. You think you’re exempt from certain commandments because motherhood is a higher calling. I think that’s a convenient excuse to exclude you from Jewish ritual. But let’s leave equality out of our discussion for the moment and talk about human dignity. You may not completely empathize with Sara and Shulamit as you watch “Black Bus.” But Sara writes a popular blog in Israel called “The Hole in the Sheet” that’s a window into your sisters’ lives in haredi communities. At one point, Sara interviews a former Hasid who tells her that he was taught to be disgusted by women. Not only would he avert his eyes when he saw a woman on the street, he would order women old enough to be his grandmother to wear a scarf over their wigs when they entered the synagogue.

Shulamit takes pictures on the busiest street in Meah Shearim in Jerusalem. The women react to her camera as if she’s pointed a gun at them. No one wants to talk. No one wants to be seen. One woman hides behind the stroller she’s pushing. Off camera she tells Shulamit that she rarely leaves her home, and when she’s in public she tries to use side streets.

Chaya Mushka, you have more authority than I do to tell these men that this is not the Torah of their fathers or their mothers.

I want to leave you with two thoughts. The first is about a siddur from 1471, which replaces the traditional prayer recited by women – “Blessed are You, Lord our G-d, Master of the Universe for creating me according to Your will” – with this: “Blessed Are You Lord our G-d, Master of the Universe for You have made me a woman and not a man.” Clearly, this is a response to the prayer said by observant Jewish men: “Blessed are You for not creating me a woman.” Maybe a woman commissioned this medieval Italian prayer book, I don’t know. But I think the degree to which women have been recently degraded is strictly the depraved interpretation of a few cruel and insecure contemporary haredim.

The second is a picture I recently saw in The Jerusalem Report. Someone caught haredi girls frolicking in a public fountain in Jerusalem. Despite their teachers’ warnings to stop, the girls continued playing. The picture captures the pure joy of simply being a young woman.

Remember that image of your younger sisters when you refuse to step to the back of the bus.

A Life with Aspergers Recorded: A Book Review of The Journal of Best Practices by David Finch

Posted on January 17, 2012 by judy bolton-fasman

David and Kristen Finch had been best friends since high school when they married in 2003. By 2008 their marriage was all but over until Kristen connected the dots and recognized her husband’s lack of social graces, his meltdowns, and his obsessive compulsions as symptoms of Asperger syndrome.

Rather than cause for alarm, the diagnosis was a relief for the couple. Over the years David had perfected a coping mechanism that involved viewing his daily interactions as acting roles in which he would “assume characters – versions of myself that are optimized for the social environment at hand.’’ That worked when Kristen and he were casually dating. It worked by day when he was playing “the businessman’’ with an impressive client base. Then at night he’d come home and fall apart.

The Asperger diagnosis also provided the Finches with a common vocabulary to communicate better. It gave them information and insight into David’s mindblindness – a condition in which people can’t read social cues or understand another person’s feelings.

Armed with new self-awareness, David Finch set out to reset his brain with the goal of becoming the empathic husband Kristen deserved and the loving father his young daughter and son needed. He meticulously recorded his efforts with grace and humor in a self-styled manual, which eventually evolved into a memoir.

“The Journal of Best Practices’’ began as a growing pile of notes to self – reminders that became something bigger as Finch attempted to challenge his behavior one obsession, tantrum, and social faux pas at a time. His self-education began with basics like showing respect for others or refraining from changing the radio station if Kristen was singing along. His approach serves as an organizing principle for the book, its chapters bearing titles such as “Use your words,’’ “Just listen,’’ and “Give Kristen time to shower without crowding her.’’

Finch’s book represents a milestone, arriving just as the first generation of diagnosed Aspergians has come of age. Just last month The New York Times published an extensive front page piece about the obstacles an Asperger couple faced as they struggled with love and sex and setting up house together. Among the trials these young adults faced was translating the hard-won skills they had successfully acquired to enroll in college or get a job, and use them in romantic relationships.

Finch’s brutally honest and very funny book takes the volatile mix of Asperger syndrome and relationships a step further by highlighting the emotional land mines waiting to be set off in “neurologically mixed marriages.’’

Kristen is no saint in the book, but she comes close. She’s a working mother with two small children and a husband whom she often has to coax to express himself in words. But Finch is a more insightful writer than to leave us with the impression that he’s the third toddler in the house. He conveys the complexities of his marriage as clearly as he does the obvious frustrations. He writes:

“Not only were we dealing with issues common to every marriage, we were also forced to deal with extremely bizarre challenges that plague relationships for people on the autism spectrum: my daily routines, my obsessive tendencies, my unwillingness to participate in social events.’’

That meant he had to figure out how to give his kids a bath even though he couldn’t stand the sensation of wet clothing against his skin. He eventually accommodates by donning swim trunks. He also had to find a way to control his temper when events – holidays, vacations, traffic patterns – didn’t unfold according to his preconceived plans.

After several months of jotting down behavioral dos and don’ts on scraps of paper and Post-It notes, Finch felt that he was dangerously close to adding another obsessive compulsion to his repertoire. In his final note to self, he warned: “Don’t Make Everything a Best Practice.’’ He heeded his own advice and transformed his ad-hoc journal into a poignant, self-effacing memoir about the power of love.

This review first appeared in the January 16, 2012 edition of the Boston Globe

A Slim Peace in the Middle East by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Posted on January 13, 2012 by judy bolton-fasman

Yael Luttwak is a young American filmmaker whose heart and soul live 5000 miles away in the east. After graduating from the University of Rochester, Luttwak moved to Israel, serving in the Israeli Defense Forces until 2000. In 2007 she premiered “A Slim Peace,” a documentary she made featuring 14 women from Israel and the Palestinian territories who come together to participate in a weight loss support group. Luttwak was in Boston last week to screen her remarkable film and talk about the eponymous non-profit that arose from her initial production.

Luttwak initially connected weight loss to peace efforts when she went to Weight Watchers meetings in 2000. She was living in Israel when talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat broke down at Camp David that same year. As she lost weight she thought that if people were healthier and happier in their own bodies, positive self-images might be a unique inroad to peace.

The women in the documentary—Palestinians, Bedouins, Jewish-American settlers and secular Israelis—are a seemingly disparate group. Two dieticians—one Israeli and one Palestinian—facilitate the meetings. Throughout the film, weight becomes a metaphor used in fresh, surprising ways—the weight of the stalled peace process, the weight of the future.

This is also a film that is fundamentally about the salutary effects of one-to-one encounters with stereotypes and perceived enemies. One woman compares attending the weigh-ins to going on a blind date—no one knows if and when a bond will establish. Early on in the program the women are supplied with a pedometer to keep count of their steps. The goal is to take 10,000 steps a day—a daunting yet achievable number.

Luttwak captures the pervasive tension during the women’s weekly meetings at the Jerusalem Cinemateque in East Jerusalem. Ichsan, a fiery Palestinian woman and Dassie, a secular Israeli and dedicated Zionist, forge a close relationship during group meetings. When Ichsan learns that Dassie’s father-in-law was one of the leaders of the Stern Gang during Israel’s War of Independence she jokingly exclaims he’s a terrorist, “He’s one of us!”

The three religious Jews from the Bat Ayin and Gush Etzion settlements are transplanted Americans who are awkwardly polite in meetings until Hamas wins an election in 2008. One of these women says that although the Arab women in the group haven’t personally harmed her, she nevertheless feels threatened by them. The women sideline weight loss altogether as they argue over whether Hamas’ victory was an act of hostility or desperation on the part of voters. Coincidentally, the pedometers stop working accurately in the middle of the fracas.

Relationships are both painfully fragile and surprisingly sturdy in the group. Ichsan visits Dassie’s home in a posh part of Jerusalem and the two end up in a heated argument. Luttwak honors their request and turns off her camera. But it’s obvious that things didn’t end well and Ichsan is filmed sitting alone in Dassie’s living room.

One of the deeper friendships occurs between Amal, a Bedouin woman who runs a Jewish-Arab cooperative that builds playgrounds in Bedouin villages, and Sara, a settler who believes that she has the G-d-given right to settle anywhere in Palestine. Amal wears a jihab and Sara covers her head with a scarf. That superficial commonality transforms into an abiding camaraderie. One of the more remarkable moments in the film occurs when Sara says that she can imagine visiting Amal in Beersheba.

After the film was released, a charity in Britain provided seed money for satellite Slim Peace groups. Despite her experience working in television, Luttwak resisted turning the project into a reality series. The groups were determinedly sacred spaces to cultivate hopes for peace.

Luttwak relates that throughout the Gaza crisis, Arab and Jewish women continued Slim Peace meetings in Jerusalem. By then their permanent venue was the YWCA near the King David Hotel. Another time, a Palestinian woman in the Jerusalem group went to her Slim Peace meeting as her house was being demolished on the West Bank. She said her commitment to her sister weight-watchers was the only way she knew to move forward.

A couple of years ago Slim Peace further invested in Israel’s future prospects for peace by establishing groups for adolescent girls. These groups were intended to provide safe refuges for girls to talk about body image and self-esteem. As Israeli and Arab girls became better acquainted it was blessedly obvious that Slim Peace was not about trying to be a size 4; rather its main goal was to help these girls from both sides of the Green Line to feel comfortable with one another.

Today there are 18 Slim Peace groups throughout Israel. Plans are in the works to bring the curriculum to Bosnia, Kosovo and the United States to facilitate similar relationships among Muslims, Jews and Christian women—women like Amal and Sara who would otherwise never have met one another.

My Judaism by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Posted on January 12, 2012 by judy bolton-fasman

Six years ago, when I was asked to give a talk on Yom Kippur, I decided to state some of my core beliefs with the simple declarative: I believe. Among my pronouncements about family, prayer and Israel I said that:

I believe that putting women on a pedestal distracts them from the fact that they do not have full and equal access to Jewish life and ritual. And relegating them behind a divider in the synagogue is the historical equivalent of having forced African-Americans to move to the back of the bus.

A few people pointed out that I was wrong when I compared the civil rights movement to gender separation in the synagogue. I thought long and hard about what my critics were saying. One in particular gave me pause. “I don’t agree that a mechitzah – a divider – is the equivalent of having African Americans in the back of the bus,” he wrote. “I don’t personally like a mechitzah and would not choose to pray with one, but it is not sexist in the way that the bus rules were racist.”

Over the years, I’ve reflected on that comment in the context of understanding my Judaism. I’ve come to learn that the Judaism I want to cultivate is powerful because it is unassuming and respectful. My Judaism doesn’t move someone to picket in front of Planned Parenthood to harass young women. My Judaism does not proselytize, because no one has the last word or the best take on G-d. I was born a Jew. But I continue to be a Jew because that’s the best way, the most meaningful way for me to navigate the world. I want my children to be Jews because if they stick with it, they’ll come to feel that their religion is vital and enriching.

My Judaism is the Judaism of Sara Schnerir, Joseph Solevetchik and Solomon Schechter – pioneers in Jewish education who believed that girls had the same rights as boys in a classroom.

I believe that a Jewish girl should have the same opportunities as a Jewish boy. I believe a Jewish girl should be in control of her spiritual life. I believe that Naama Margoles should never have been afraid to go to school.

Naama Margoles, a cherub-faced 8- year-old who lives due west of Jerusalem in Beit Shemesh, was cursed and spat upon by ultra-Orthodox men, a group of haredi fanatics, for going to school. Haredi translates as those who fear G-d, who tremble before G-d. Members of this extremist faction, which has been condemned by other haredim, believe their anger toward women is justified on behalf of G-d. This is not my G-d, nor is this the G-d of my Judaism.

Naama’s parents – Modern Orthodox Jews originally from Chicago – settled in Beit Shemesh, but their presence was too close for the comfort of some of their haredi neighbors. The haredi thought the length of Naama’s sleeves was immodest. Her destination – a single sex religious school – inappropriate. The women these haredi men placed on pedestals must have wept as Naama did when she walked through a daily gauntlet of hate. Those images of Naama reminded me of Ruby Bridges, who was also surrounded by faces twisted by prejudice and ignorance when she went to elementary school in 1960 New Orleans. Yes, she was cursed and spat upon too. Were the reasons really so different? Am I sidling up to a misguided historical equivalency?

Some haredi want pictures of women on bus stop advertisements and in newspapers to disappear across Israel. They must be so weak if they’re driven to distraction by the sight of a woman, shamelessly corrupted when she sings. There is a sign outside a synagogue in Beit Shemesh telling women to cross the street as if they somehow could taint the place. I have brilliant, forward thinking women friends who like the gender separation in their synagogues. For some, it takes them back to childhood. For others, they like the solidarity of praying close to other women. I have never heard one of them express concern that they feel relegated to the women’s section to spare men the temptation of thinking about them instead of G-d.

I worry about what will happen to Jews everywhere. Will my granddaughters cross a street in Jerusalem because there’s an unavoidable sign forcing them to do so. Will those same children look back on my generation, shaking their heads in disgust that we didn’t do more to protect our girls. Where is my Judaism? I need it to articulate my outrage.

I believe that world Jewry must acknowledge that we are engaged in a battle for the dignity of Jewish women. What does life mean without self-respect?

An editorial in Haaretz warned that when the dust settles in Beit Shemesh, “we’ll find out if we have a secular or religious society here; democratic, theocratic or fascist; Western or other.”

When the dust settles, we’ll see if a little girl in Beit Shemesh can go to school without making headlines, feeling sick to her stomach or stirring up more violence on behalf of the false G-d of extremists.

Life In Translation by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Posted on January 11, 2012 by judy bolton-fasman

My mother masks her creeping frailty behind a fraying quirkiness. She lives a couple of hours away from me in a shambled two-story colonial to which she’s laid siege at 1735 Asylum Avenue. It’s the home to which she brought her babies from the hospital. It’s the home that I left to after I graduated from college. It’s the home where my wedding dress hung on the living room mantle while I got ready. It’s the home where my father died.

It was once a house bulging with the cacophony of industry—the ratatatat of my father the accountant’s adding machine, the thick-as-molasses voices of kids reciting stem-changing Spanish verbs at my mother’s summer school. I’d sit at the top of the basement stairs listening to her drill her hapless students like the master sergeant she was meant to be.

When she retired as a Spanish teacher, she forged a new and exciting career as a court interpreter. Her specialties were drug busts and juvenile cases. A judge once scolded her for interfering with a 15 year-old’s sentencing. “Pobresito,” my mother interrupted. “Poor kid, he didn’t mean it.” It wasn’t the first time my mother was in contempt of something.

When her legs worked, my non-driving mother crisscrossed Connecticut on Amtrak and Greyhound to get to far-flung courts in Waterbury and New Haven. Though she’d never admit it, she was a callejera—someone who liked to be out and about. And for years I was her callejera-in-training on the streets of Downtown Hartford. Saturday afternoons we set out looking for bargains and chicken salad sandwiches in Sage-Allen’s basement. Sage-Allen may have been G. Fox’s poor cousin, but it was the only place in town to get a raspberry soda to go with our sandwiches. And their coffee was my mother’s reliable laxative.

Sage-Allen is long gone. A few years into retirement, my mother replaced the store’s coffee with something she needed more—adrenalin—the adrenalin of processing sixteen arraignments after a night of drug busts. My mother the translator was as quick as ticker tape. Including the Portuguese my mother learned years ago from our house cleaner, she knows a suspect’s rights in three languages.

And she knows her rights too. She’s not budging from Asylum Avenue. She’s not transferring power of attorney to her adult children. If it comes down to it, she’ll get to a bill on second or third notice. She’s not in a hurry anymore. If someone wants to learn Spanish from her, he sits at the dining room table where she props up a book of Post-it-Notes as big as a blackboard. Behind her, she’s tacked up a gag sign that says, “Parking for Cubans Only.”

Yes, my mother the callejera, is now parked. She’s mostly parked in a recliner that plugs into the wall. A push of the button will practically eject her from her seat like a cartoon character—spiral jack and all. When she’s not sitting in the den watching her novellas, she’s parked in the chair lift that first scarred the wall when it was installed for my father. After he died, Mom couldn’t bear to see it anymore. Eight years later, she had a newer model reinstalled. I think she takes joy rides in that chair.

My mother lives amidst the shambles of her own making and fantasies of her own necessity. She wants to paint the house, fix the crumbling concrete front steps, install central air. None of that will happen. Nor will she swap out her antique boiler for natural gas. Life is just so on Asylum Avenue. And life two hours away from Asylum Avenue is waiting for my mother to run out of heating oil, for her cable cum lifeline to go out or for my mother to fall as if she were the star of a bad commercial.

Life a car ride away from my mother is waiting for shambles to become ruins.

Mucking Around in the Past — A Review of “What they Saved” by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Posted on January 7, 2012 by judy bolton-fasman

IN ITS ESSENCE, THE FEMINIST literary scholar Nancy K. Miller’s memoir encompasses a genealogical quest, excavations into attics and makeshift archives, and attempts at sorting drawers. Miller, the author of more than a dozen books, is the distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. her industry culminates in two topsy-turvy trips to Kishinev, now the capital of Moldova, then her ancestral home in Russia. at its most brilliant, Miller’s book is a writer’s memoir – a book brimming with passion and intelligence – a book that makes the weary and often opaque process of writing about one’s family story appear more translucent. And yes, even buoyant. Miller achieves what every memoirist strives for. her story engages the reader because she uncovers an unvarnished truth by sifting, assembling and ordering, and then willingly reordering the facts of a life, of many lives. “despite my intense desire to know the truth, however partial or incomplete,” writes Miller, “I am forced to recognize that the process of finding the story continues to change the story.” And therein lies the fun of reading this book, which casts both writer and reader as avid detectives at credibly formulating Miller’s story.

The motivation for writing “What They Saved” took hold of Miller after the death of her father, Louis Kipnis, a first-generation American born in 1906 “close to the memory of the immigrant experience,” who excelled in school and became an attorney. Within the alternate vastness and claustrophobia of a long marriage, he was a constant presence in Miller’s life. But he effectively had no extended family – having lost touch with a brother who moved to Arizona in 1934 – and she spent her childhood under the “leafy” part of the maternal family tree. The old world, “gloomy” Kipnisses were represented by a solitary maternal grandmother who barely spoke English. Louis’s only sibling Sam found relief for his son Julian’s severe asthma out west. The move severed contact between the brothers, leaving a gaping hole in the Kipnis family story, as well as in Miller’s imagination. in light of her deep connection to her mother’s family, after her father died she saw no point in keeping the Kipnis name – a name for which Miller had no seemingly natural affinity.

But K for Kipnis is her stalwart middle initial and the K stands ramrod straight, distinctive between her first and last names. Miller may be the bloom on the family tree, but Kipnis are the deep, buried roots. To find the Kipnisses, Miller sifts through familial and “urban archeology.” Her father’s high school report card, long-forgotten photographs stashed in drawers. “Little by little,” writes Miller, “I’m moving the contents of the drawer into a shareable story.” In Miller’s case, “little by little” translates into years of yearning and questing. It was easy to get mired in research and more research, to become distracted with travel from New York City to meet long-lost cousin Julian in Memphis. Miller’s father died when she was 48 years old. Twenty-two years later she writes that she “has something like a recognizable story line – a familiar immigrant’s tale of displacement and renewal [of which] I have already assembled the bits and pieces of a scattered archive and gathered them into a design of my own.” Miller’s idiosyncratic narrative – nonlinear yet distinctly chronological – pivots on the discoveries she makes as a memoirist.

She strews aphorisms throughout her story. Early in the book she informs her readers: “The hardest thing to find is what you think you are looking for.” Miller was initially confronted by the silence of ignorance cum mystery when it came to her father’s story. Yet she sensed that there were signposts from her father’s past that she had yet to recognize – pictures of austere relatives, her paternal grandfather’s correspondence to a friend in Yiddish about buying show tickets, that same grandfather’s correspondence to and from a Lower East Side synagogue. There were pictures of her mysterious uncle Sam Kipnis snapped in the Arizona desert. Miller learns that he was the elected mayor of a small district of Phoenix. But how will she connect the dots in this story? Her stepson, a scientist, offers a strangely apt word to bridge the disconnect – splines. “Splines,” explains Miller, “fill in the blanks between isolated points, construct a complete object from limited information.” The notion of splines leads Miller to another insight about writing memoir: “You don’t necessarily know what it is you’ll want to know.” That’s why Miller finally unearthed information about Kishinev. Just the sound of the word propelled Miller from the “glamorous vagueness of ancestral myth – Russia – and into the banal realities of historical factness, the concreteness of geographical DNA.” Emerging information about Kishinev and its pogroms makes a trip there imperative – a trip underscored by her observation: “In the matter of quest, location means everything.”

In Kishinev, Miller is an Amerikanka looking for her babushka. Her translator asks anyone she can collar if he recognizes the pictures that Miller brandishes of her grandparents. While not exactly paralleling Jonathan Safran Foer’s satiric novel, “Everything is Illuminated,” the overall bumbling feel of the trip calls up some of the mishaps in the novel. In Miller’s case there are missed ferries, strange museum guides and a reckless driver who speaks no English. In fact, Miller goes back to Kishinev a second time to attempt to excavate what lies “‘under the story,’ as my yoga teacher likes to say about meditation. Maybe that should be a term: understory – not ‘backstory,’ with its overtones of Hollywood gossip and glamor. The understory. That would suit these characters in my family, who are something like understudies – practicing for parts that they never quite get to play on stage, or not for long.”

The understory is very much the bailiwick of a memoirist. One could say that there is an understory in every photograph, every letter, every business contract that Miller comes across. She has also, in essence, created her own geniza – a repository of her family’s historical and holy artifacts. What is a geniza but the accumulation of life’s holy and ordinary detritus? A sacred heap of stuff, which brings the reader to Miller’s next assertion: “The truth of the past comes in pieces, but not all of the pieces fit together.” Miller finds far-flung cousins in Canada who expand the Kipnis story, but don’t provide a through line. Uncle Sam worked for gangsters in New York. When he moved to Arizona he owned a bar, probably jointly with some of those old mobsters. Why hadn’t Lou Kipnis bothered to visit his brother when he made business trips out west? Did Sam and his son Julian really serve in the same Air Force unit during World War II ? Sam told himself this story until he believed it so thoroughly that he convinced a local reporter to write about him.

Self-conflation – the struggle to establish a personal multiculturalism (which is not the same as its notorious cousin self-aggrandizement) may get in the way of constructing a coherent family story. But the helter-skelter way that a life plays out is key to understanding the functioning of memory. “In retrieving the past, there is no straight line.” Miller comes up with a neater, more selfcontained mathematical descriptor of mucking in the past – asymptotic. An asymptote is a line that a curve perpetually approaches. But in the end the asymptote and the curve never meet, they never touch. There are objects and more objects retrieved from dusty archives and lined drawers that never quite touch. How do ticket stubs, wedding invitations, birthday cards and old prescriptions convey a life, define an identity? I think Nancy K. Miller continuously poses those questions when she notes: “ …the past continues to reshape our ideas of who we are in the present.” This marvelous memoir pinpoints the elusive phenomenon whereby memories get through to our consciousness and how they ultimately influence our lives. Capturing moments of transformation is what happens over and over in an adept memoir like “What They Saved.” Miller’s intent is not to establish a definitive family history – but to scatter the incidents and events that she unearths the way memory itself functions.

A version of this review was published in the Jerusalem Report

Snow Globes by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Posted on January 6, 2012 by judy bolton-fasman

Adam was four years old and two days, blissfully playing in pre-school, when the plane hit the first tower on that perfect September Tuesday of the cloudless, blue sky. Anna was in second grade. When I heard the news about the first plane, I thought a small aircraft had veered off course. Then another plane hit the second tower. I needed to be with my children and I had to find Ken.

I called Stockholm and told the hotel operator that I was calling from the United States. “I’m so sorry,” said a woman’s voice. “Today we are all Americans.” Ken was in a meeting and no one there knew that New York City was under attack. “Turn on CNN right now,” I sobbed when he came on the line. Ken hadn’t heard yet. His European colleagues cried with him as they watched the Twin Towers collapse on live television.

I collected my kids early. Anna’s school correctly understood that parents should be the first to tell their children about the terror attacks. I waited until we got home to tell Anna that the Twin Towers were gone. The towers had been her landmark of choice when she was asked to draw a famous building that she liked in first grade.

I will never forget the wide-eyed look that accompanied my daughter’s first question: “Where’s Daddy?”

And then Anna wanted to know if all the people on the planes and in the towers had died. In those days Ken was always on planes. He sent us postcards with exotic stamps. He brought back snow globes from his travels for Anna’s growing collection.

As it happened we had a spectacular snow globe of the New York City skyline, which thankfully helped me explain the enormity of what had happened that morning. When I shook the globe tiny pieces of red, blue and green foil fluttered in the water—pieces of foil that were shaped like the sun, moon and stars that I always want to give to my children.

Like a lot of our culture–kitsch or otherwise–the snow globe originally hails from Europe. The first “snow dome” was exhibited in 1878 in the Paris Exposition. Eleven years later, at another exposition, the Eiffel Tower was the main attraction. Its doppelganger was a ceramic miniature replica swimming in a water-filled dome.

The snow globe took off in Vienna in the 1890s after a man named Erwin Perzy was looking to create a cheap lens. Attempting to enhance the light he added white semolina, which put him in mind of a snowfall. Perzy’s first snow globe was a reproduction of a Viennese basilica. Today the Perzy family is still in Vienna producing 200,000 snow globes a year.

For weeks Anna traced the Twin Towers against her snow globe’s glass. One time I saw her take Adam’s small index finger and trace it for him. The first few days she asked me if the Towers were really gone, each time she looked hopeful that I might change my answer. I was grateful for the way the snowball preserved memory and helped me to explain to my children, and even to myself, how and when the Towers came down. But as a friend of mine says, “Sometimes there is no why.”

The week of 9/11, Ken hopscotched across Europe for six days. When he finally got a return flight to Boston, we went to the airport with flowers and signs to welcome him. Anna was clutching her New York City snow globe. Three years later she would try to bring home a snow globe from Alaska only to have airport security confiscate it. No more than three ounces of liquid permitted through the gate. We mailed the snow globe home and it arrived in pieces.

A lot has changed in a decade. Osama Bin Laden is dead. My children, on the verge of adulthood, know that Bin Laden’s death is momentous, but they wonder how much safer they really are. These past ten years they’ve been to Israel twice and on that first trip they noticed an army at work at checkpoints and street corners. They saw armed security guards posted at restaurants in Jerusalem.

The other day my close friend, a Muslim, linked her arm in mine and said, “Let’s go to Israel together.” She’d love to see the Dome of the Rock and the Wailing Wall. I’d love to go with her. Until then we have to settle for shaking a snow globe and watching confetti-like snow blanket small-scale versions of our holy sites.

The Back of the Bus by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Posted on January 5, 2012 by judy bolton-fasman

Tanya Rosenblit is still stunned that she garnered international attention last month when she refused to move to the back of a public Egged Bus in Israel. She never intended to make a statement about sexism or racism in Israeli society, she said; she simply wanted to save a little time. The bus, which she boarded in her hometown of Ashdod, travels mostly through fervently Orthodox – haredi – neighborhoods. But the bus was convenient, stopping five minutes from where Rosenblit had a business meeting in Jerusalem. Unfamiliar with the route, she took a seat behind the driver so he could point out her stop.

Rosenblit said it was only after other passengers looked askance at her that she realized she was breaking an unspoken rule on the bus: Women were expected to sit in the back. While it is illegal in Israel to force gender segregation on public buses, there is often a tacit agreement to comply when the majority of riders are haredi.

Rosenblit, who is 28, describes herself as “secular by choice.” Born in Moldova, she and her family immigrated to Israel in 1988. She graduated from Tel Aviv University in 2008 with a degree in biomedical engineering and is currently studying screenwriting and film. Since September she has been a producer for Jewish News One, a new independent satellite network that covers international news from a Jewish perspective.

The fateful bus trip on Dec. 16 earned her the moniker “Israel’s Rosa Parks.” In a recent email exchange, Rosenblit said, “the description makes me laugh a bit.”

She recounted that two stops after she boarded Egged Bus 451, a haredi passenger noticed her in the front seat as he paid his fare. The man prevented the driver from closing the door and started shouting obscenities at her. He called his friends to come to the bus stop to start an impromptu protest.

“During the entire incident no one asked me to move,” Rosenblit said. “Even when they started that demonstration outside the bus, I knew I was the cause. But no one bothered to address me.” The driver eventually called the police to intervene. An officer asked Rosenblit if “I would be willing to respect them [the haredi on the bus] and move to the back section. I refused, saying that I don’t think I’d be respecting anyone by humiliating myself, and I remained seated behind the driver.”

Merav Michaeli, a columnist for Haaretz, asserts that this latest “festival of (and against) women” is taking place in a political climate that “brings the right-wing, super-Jewish, anti-democratic feelings – as well as various forms of oppression – to the surface and is causing more and more people to lose any shame they might have had about excluding women. And perhaps this sloughing off of shame is what is annoying the public.”

Although Rosenblit pierced that silence for a moment, she maintained: “This [incident] and the big buzz it’s been getting is a response to a very radical act. The fight is not against religion or the Orthodox community. This phenomenon of segregated buses was initiated by radicals and has many opponents among the Orthodox community.”

Ester Scheiner, an Orthodox woman who describes herself as “a freedom rider,” has been riding public buses to highlight the crisis. In an opinion piece published last month in the Jerusalem Post, Scheiner wrote: “Relegating women to the back of the bus, burka-wearing, and the disappearance of images of women and even young girls from newspapers are things that can quickly become customary in a community that treasures traditions. This is why we must speak up and make it clear that these things were not part of the Judaism of our grandparents.”

Yet for all of the public and political support Rosenblit has attracted, she’s ultimately uncomfortable with the comparison to Rosa Parks. “Rosa Parks lived in another time and in a country where racism was the law. I live in a free country. The proof that [Israel] is free is that I became famous over such a triviality.”

But Rosenblit is adamant about using her newfound fame to expose a larger fight against extremists of any kind. “The fact that my case made the headlines is amazing to me. But nonetheless I’m grateful for the voice I was given.”

* * *

In a late development in, Rosenblit told Tel Aviv police that she had received threats on her life by phone and email and through Facebook, Ynet reported Wednesday.

Food to Die For by Judy Bolton-Fasman

Posted on December 31, 2011 by judy bolton-fasman

The first time I fed Anna a baby spoon’s amount of yogurt she was five months old and I panicked that she would throw up forever. Dairy allergy, said my wise, bow-tied pediatrician. He assured me that Anna would grow out of her exorcising ways when she ingested any dairy. Almost all babies do. But not my girl. She had the real deal—a milk protein allergy. No milk, no cheese, no cure.

A dairy allergy is not in the running for the worst health problem that can happen to a kid and for that I have always been grateful. But monitoring your kid’s diet is fatiguing. Vigilance is exhausting. Anna’s reaction to even the smallest trace of dairy in a piece of bread, for example, brings on hot red hives all over her body, a lot of vomiting and a bit of asthma that compromises her breathing just enough to freak me out. But these days my girl—a young woman really—wants to be a doctor and can advocate for herself when she orders from a menu.

Anna has a kindred spirit in Sandra Beasley—a poet and a highly allergic person who recently published a charming book called Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Kill-Birthday-Girl-Allergic/dp/0307588114/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325306632&sr=1-1) that was part memoir, part handbook detailing her life-threatening food allergies and the ways in which she coped. As she writes, she “experiences the world in a slightly different way.” But Beasley is anything but gloomy about her situation. She is a warm and lively guide to the quirky world of allergies. And she’s determined not to tell “the story of how we [the allergic] die…[but] the stories of how we live.”

More than 12 million Americans live with actual food allergies. I’m willing to bet that those allergies extend to the lives of more than 50 million Americans, including those who invite a person with food allergies to dinner.

Beasley is spot on when she morphs from food outcast to hapless birthday girl who can’t eat her own cake. Children’s birthday parties are minefields for the highly allergic child. One person’s butter frosting can be another person’s poison. Eggs, whey, walnuts, dairy-laced margarine — all of those ingredients and more can be lurking in a bakery cake.

Over the past decade there’s been a lot of research in and public awareness of food allergies. Yet for all of the consciousness raising, allergies are still too often dismissed as psychosomatic or as one study brushed off, a catalyst for “contagious anxiety.” Despite the skeptics, allergy awareness won a crucial victory in 2009 when Massachusetts passed the Food Allergy Awareness Act.

Ming Tsai, celebrity chef and owner of the Blue Ginger restaurant (http://www.ming.com/blueginger.htm) in Wellesley was one of the bill’s most vocal and effortless supporters. His own young son’s food allergies and the restaurants that refused to serve the boy initially inspired Tsai’s activism. The Massachusetts bill requires all restaurants to display a poster listing the “big eight” allergens in their kitchens along with reaction symptoms and emergency protocols.

Tsai’s ultimate goal is to accommodate restaurant patrons’ allergies across America. Anyone who walks through the door of a restaurant is entitled to safe kitchens, chefs and servers who understand the importance of meticulous food preparation. Eating safely at a restaurant is about access and access, says Tsai, is a basic civil right.

My family recently took me to Blue Ginger for me birthday. We asked Tsai to come over to our table so the four of us could thank him for his tireless lobbying on behalf of food allergy awareness, for lobbying, really, on behalf of Anna, his son and the people who love them.