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I'd put stars at your feet
This afternoon, I received the e-mail transcription of a letter written to my parents by my grandmother's oldest friend: and it honored me greatly.
As it says on the first page, The Dybbuk in Love is dedicated to my grandmother, Bernice Madinek Glixman. She was an actress and a sculptor; she spoke at least five languages, and taught me the Greek alphabet when I was still in elementary school; she died in 1997. When she was still alive and my grandparents lived in Portland, Maine, I would come up to stay with them every summer; and although my grandfather has been an atheist ever since the age of eight, when he chalked some rude sayings on the sidewalk in front of a synagogue and was not promptly hit by lightning, my grandmother attended services at Congregation Bet Ha'am and I would go with her. Although they now have a permanent home (and their own website: I hadn't seen that), my earliest memories of Bet Ha'am seem to belong to the basement of a church—or somewhere that was definitely synagogue space, but on someone else's ground. There were posters on the wall. One of them was for some play called The Dybbuk. When I asked my grandmother about this, she very intelligently did not reply that a dybbuk was the possessing spirit of a dead person that had to be exorcised, because I would have freaked out completely. (The dead and I had an ambivalent relationship for most of my childhood. Likewise, masks. Halloween was interesting in our house.) Instead she said, it's someone who's died who loves someone else very much, and so stays around to be with them; which actually isn't a bad plot synopsis of Ansky's drama, albeit without much of the kabbalistic strangeness that so fascinates me now. I'm sure I would eventually have discovered dybbuks on my own. I am a voracious reader of folklore. Hershel of Ostropol was one of my earliest culture heroes. Or, literature failing, I'm sure it's an entry in Leo Rosten's Dictionary of Yiddish. But my grandmother told me; and so the story is in her memory.
She died when I was a sophomore in high school. She never saw me in a musical at Lexington High School; never heard me in my recital at Brandeis or an opera at Yale; she never saw any of my work in print, and what she had read could be kindly termed "juvenilia." I only started Greek in college. She never heard me as a formal storyeller. All of the elements of my life that I feel most define me were after her time. But Gladys wrote I know, though, how proud, how very proud she would be if she had been party to all that has gone on in Sonya's career, and it matters to me incredibly that Gladys liked The Dybbuk in Love—it resolved her to read Ansky's The Dybbuk for comparison, and she writes of it with an enthusiasm that literally rendered me speechless—but it matters also that she thinks my grandmother would have. I know; you have grandchildren, you're honor-bound to show off their photographs to everyone. But I'm not sure you're honor-bound to like everything they write. It matters. Eight years, it matters. And I am still annoyed that I cannot hand her copies.
Singing Innocence and Experience has been chosen as a Project Pulp Weekly Pick. I'm not sure I deserve half the things Jon Hodges says about me, but I'm still extraordinarily pleased. Tell your friends.
For perhaps an hour more, it's Tisha b'Av: the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, and not a good day for Judaism. On this date, it is said, the First and Second Temples at Jerusalem were destroyed; by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, by the Romans in 70 CE. (Other disastrous events are attributed to the ninth of Av, with varying degrees of plausibility. I found this an intelligent and well-supported look at what did happen, did not happen, and why we should care about the distinction.) It's a day of fasting, of mourning.
We need a word for mixed days.
As it says on the first page, The Dybbuk in Love is dedicated to my grandmother, Bernice Madinek Glixman. She was an actress and a sculptor; she spoke at least five languages, and taught me the Greek alphabet when I was still in elementary school; she died in 1997. When she was still alive and my grandparents lived in Portland, Maine, I would come up to stay with them every summer; and although my grandfather has been an atheist ever since the age of eight, when he chalked some rude sayings on the sidewalk in front of a synagogue and was not promptly hit by lightning, my grandmother attended services at Congregation Bet Ha'am and I would go with her. Although they now have a permanent home (and their own website: I hadn't seen that), my earliest memories of Bet Ha'am seem to belong to the basement of a church—or somewhere that was definitely synagogue space, but on someone else's ground. There were posters on the wall. One of them was for some play called The Dybbuk. When I asked my grandmother about this, she very intelligently did not reply that a dybbuk was the possessing spirit of a dead person that had to be exorcised, because I would have freaked out completely. (The dead and I had an ambivalent relationship for most of my childhood. Likewise, masks. Halloween was interesting in our house.) Instead she said, it's someone who's died who loves someone else very much, and so stays around to be with them; which actually isn't a bad plot synopsis of Ansky's drama, albeit without much of the kabbalistic strangeness that so fascinates me now. I'm sure I would eventually have discovered dybbuks on my own. I am a voracious reader of folklore. Hershel of Ostropol was one of my earliest culture heroes. Or, literature failing, I'm sure it's an entry in Leo Rosten's Dictionary of Yiddish. But my grandmother told me; and so the story is in her memory.
She died when I was a sophomore in high school. She never saw me in a musical at Lexington High School; never heard me in my recital at Brandeis or an opera at Yale; she never saw any of my work in print, and what she had read could be kindly termed "juvenilia." I only started Greek in college. She never heard me as a formal storyeller. All of the elements of my life that I feel most define me were after her time. But Gladys wrote I know, though, how proud, how very proud she would be if she had been party to all that has gone on in Sonya's career, and it matters to me incredibly that Gladys liked The Dybbuk in Love—it resolved her to read Ansky's The Dybbuk for comparison, and she writes of it with an enthusiasm that literally rendered me speechless—but it matters also that she thinks my grandmother would have. I know; you have grandchildren, you're honor-bound to show off their photographs to everyone. But I'm not sure you're honor-bound to like everything they write. It matters. Eight years, it matters. And I am still annoyed that I cannot hand her copies.
Singing Innocence and Experience has been chosen as a Project Pulp Weekly Pick. I'm not sure I deserve half the things Jon Hodges says about me, but I'm still extraordinarily pleased. Tell your friends.
For perhaps an hour more, it's Tisha b'Av: the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, and not a good day for Judaism. On this date, it is said, the First and Second Temples at Jerusalem were destroyed; by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, by the Romans in 70 CE. (Other disastrous events are attributed to the ninth of Av, with varying degrees of plausibility. I found this an intelligent and well-supported look at what did happen, did not happen, and why we should care about the distinction.) It's a day of fasting, of mourning.
We need a word for mixed days.
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You're not. (trust me)
I very much enjoyed reading this about your grandmother. I'm glad to hear that it matters. It should. :)
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Heh. May I ask how old yours are, if they're presenting you with writing?
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I was thinking of my own grandmother, who never hesitated to point out errors and help me correct them, who never ever felt obligated to say something was wonderful if it wasn't. And of my own mother, who has been inflicted with far more of my daughters' writing than I ever will be and who has graciously aided them with their poetry and stories without ever telling them something was fine if it needed work, even when they wanted her to. I suppose, though, that since one was a schoolteacher and the other a librarian that correcting and editing things comes naturally. Still, they felt no obligation because of their ancestral status to coo and smile over anything that didn't merit such treatment. :)