Thank you, Dr. Potok

Some books I reread almost yearly. Others I read every so often.

I read The Chosen for the third time in the past few days. I remember really liking it the first time (at 15) and detesting it the second time (at around 32).

Now I am 60.

I have distanced myself enough from the world portrayed by and in The Chosen to be able to view it as something/some people who do not -or at least, who no longer- affect me personally. I have seen Chasidim in different venues than those of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, and as they walk, I feel no animosity - just a quiet semi-acceptance. They don't yell or get angry at me. I don't get angry at them.

Thus when I reread The Chosen, it was with a kind of rediscovery. Yes, I re-remembered their passion, their clannishness, their insistence on their own interpretations of the Torah and Tanakh, their view of women as not entitled to participate in study or prayer with them (and generally, not at all).

What I loved was the evocation of Brooklyn in the 1940's, the war years, the years of Israel's Independence struggle, the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the streets of Flatbush. Chaim Potok did this masterfully. I was born only nine years after the war, so such scenes, while mostly occurring in The Bronx where I lived and visited, were still familiar to me. Then, dear. Now almost uncapturable.  When I reread The Chosen, I was there again, and the atmosphere of the glass doored-studies, the tea, the books, even the meals in the synagogue and  shul lived again for me, as did the streets and the sycamores. Far from these years and the places shown, I now missed them but blessed Potok for bringing them back.

I also ended up appreciating the part of it that was after all a coming of age story. At 32 I scoffed because it seemed so male-oriented, with baseball as the catalyst. Now I have witnessed other coming of age stories, some featuring girls, some featuring boys, and I didn't mind- well, not as much- the fact that women seemed to play minor roles, at best, here. I still wish that at least a woman or two would have had more of a voice.

I am glad I reread The Chosen at 60. I would still not consider it one of my all time favorites, but it spoke to me of times gone by, and I appreciated that, although Potok probably would not appreciated what made me warm to it.

Thank you, anyway, Dr. Potok.

Book about Mom and our Socialist family

I have been told that the book that must be written is about my mom and my own "red blood" Socialist pedigree (grandparents on both sides and one great grandparent, as well).

I can tell some of the stories, even the political ones, but I am not a political writer per se. I know the movements and their derivation(s), but political theory is not my thing. Fiction, poetry, yes. But not political writing.

I want her to have a book, though. I just don't quite know how to format, delineate and direct it.

Eye opener

Aha. Book to be written:  Books I read very differently once I recognized their anti-fat bias. Needs a title!

To Name and Name Not, To Name or Not to Name

Book to be written:  To Name and Name Not:   How and Why Two Cousins Did and Did Not Name Names during the HUAC Hearings

I think it is probably true to say that very few people in the USA have the questionable distinction of having had two relatives come before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, one who "named names" and one who didn't.

The one who didn't name names is mentioned in the book entitled "Naming Names," by Victor Navasky. Only one problem:  Navasky got his Communist name wrong. It was "Jim Casey," not "Jack Casey." As a baby and a toddler, my mom was called "Baby Casey." The real last name was "Glaser."

The one who did name names was rather famous, in his way. He was a third cousin, same side of the family as "Jim Casey." His name was David Raksin. He did the music for many movies in the forties and fifties. His most famous movie music was that of "Laura." He was president of ASCAP for years. From wiki:  "With over 100 film scores and 300 television scores to his credit, he became known as the "Grandfather of Film Music."  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Raksin

Raksin named names because he feared for his career in Hollywood. My grandfather didn't name names because the owner of the New York Post, where he worked as a copy editor at the time, was extremely liberal and sent her own lawyer to the hearings. Thus he was not roughed up and threatened the way most of the media and arts people were when they came before HUAC.

I don't hate Raksin for naming names. I am, however, proud that my grandfather didn't.

Yiddishland

Was reading an essay about the book The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon. A heated argument ensued after the book was published as to whether he had been respectful or disrespectful toward the book Say It In Yiddish, published 1958. He had stated previously that he did not know of any place where this book would be relevant, so he imagined Yiddishland, perhaps in Alaska, perhaps called Alyeska, where Jews escaping from various places in Europe wore fur coats and were active in the salmon industry.

After Chabon's book came out, various Jewish Yiddish-celebratory groups and organizations held "Yiddishland" retreats and conferences at which one could indeed use the phrases from Say It In Yiddish, and many other phrases in Yiddish.

I find myself wishing fervently now that such a place existed. We would talk in Yiddish and sometimes English, wear warm clothing (depending on where we lived), we would be extremely liberal/progressive and peaceloving...


Oh, wait a minute. Such a place did exist once. It was called The Amalgmated Clothing Workers' Union Houses, The Amalgamated for short..And it was part of a number of coops built by American Jews in the Bronx, NY, any of which could also claim to be part of Yiddishland.

With my propensity for imagining utopias, I envision such a place in the future. But this time we must be sure that other groups don't live on it, even under absentee landlords who don't care about the others living on it.

Or would the fact that it would be Jewish cause others to object to it for any number of drummed-up, unsupportable but financeable reasons?

Life In Between

Life In Between        F.Z.

This book discusses how it is to live as an "average" person and as a "fat" person, with the caveat that "fat" here is used as a descriptor, not a negative. It is simply an adjective, like "tall," "short," "thin" or "blue eyed." There is no value judgment about size implied in its usage.

The writer talks about different stages in her life when she was heavier and when she was slimmer. The only time she veered into "sort of slim," territory, she tells us, is when she was 12 years old, 5'6, and went down to 123 pounds when she had a bad case of bronchitis (during which time she was nursed and loved back to health by her grandma, mom's mom).

She also discusses her mom's eating disorder and the fact that her mom was one of the five percent for whom dieting mostly worked. Her mom was constantly on a diet and made her feel like a pig when she was eating, it turns out, like most teenagers. Of course the writer dieted, and  kept yo yo dieting herself up to 250 pounds, then down again, then up. Until she figured out that it was in her best interests to stop dieting.

But she talks about the times she was "slimmer." To her surprise, there did not seem to be as much difference as she had imagined in the way people treated her when she was "average" sized. She started to realize, slowly, that perhaps it was most important for her to feel better about herself no matter what she weighed.

The lesson took years, but started to sink in. Slowly.

Bronx Utopias

"Amalgamated Housing to First 
Houses: Re-defining Home in America" 

Memories and details exist in blogs, films,exhibits and projects, and of course in this thesis by Emma Jacobs (Columbia University, 2009). But the subject badly needs an actual book, narrated by someone who has been there, lived there, felt it.

Oh..hmm. A work of fiction might work even better, one that captured the flavor of the Amalgamated Houses (short for Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union Houses). 

They came into existence in 1927, enabled by the New York State Housing Act of 1926, but born previously in the mind of Abraham Kazan, not only the "father" of cooperative housing in the USA, but also the initiator and creator of other Coop housing projects in NY. 

There are no book length bios of Abraham Kazan, either.

In a way, this is shameful. In a way, it's kind of nice to see that there are still important biographies to be written.

There is a wonderful project that is entitled "Bronx Utopia" which describes and houses photos of the four progressive Coop projects built in the Bronx in the 1920's, but each merits a volume of its own:  The Amalgamated Houses, the Allerton Ave/Workers' Coops, the Sholom Aleichem/Sholem Aleykhem Houses and the Farband Coop.

This would be the tour I would give...