I was working on my first book of poetry. I had decided to self-publish. My husband and I agreed it was the right time; we were in the right position. I had enough pieces to choose from, and there were to be four separate sections that would flow into and organically follow one another into the planned slim but substantial volume. Each piece had been carefully selected, edited and categorized. I was putting the pages into a plastic sleeve – everything was that ready. My editor and writing partner, Ruthie, was on the phone, we had just discussed the cover graphic.

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When my husband screamed from another part of the house I said, “Ruthie, we’ve got an emergency, I’ll call you back.”

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Ten days later Ruthie visited me in the waiting area of the hospital ICU where my husband’s life was precariously balanced between the spiritual world and ours. I hadn’t called her, but the “grapevine” had updated her. Ruthie and I didn’t speak of my poetry book again for about two years. During that time my life and those of my family had been sliced off and discarded by the amputation of my husband’s leg and subsequent, continuous, illnesses.

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The transition from poet to full-time caregiver was jolting, heart breaking and revealing. It revealed an amazing strength that I could only have guessed at. And at the same time, I found myself to be a coward who was no longer in touch with her feelings. The social worker in ICU had suggested that I keep a diary, an especially good therapeutic tool for a writer. On second thought, I told myself, no. I was too afraid to remember any of the emotional turmoil. At that point I had no idea how long my husband would live, if at all. I never wrote a word of what happened in real time; I do not want to experience any type of vivid re-call. The memories of that time, when they do come in the small doses that my sub-conscious will allow, are all negative in the extreme.

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About two years or more into my husband’s illnesses, which had developed from an acute crisis into a chronic one, I again dared to pick up the plastic sleeve of poems, with Ruthie on the other end of the telephone. I found the whole process, the poems, the editing and sorting, even the idea of publishing, meaningless and a waste of time. I thought no one would be interested any longer; my words had lost their unique ring.

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To prove my point to Ruthie I read a stanza from my poem “Gray Hair” (published in Israel Senior Life): “The stray gray hair / has been hidden for years / under the brown wig / waiting for the war to end”.

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“So what,” was my attitude. Then I read to her from “Hannah” (published in Fallopian Falafel): “Mother! / Daughters cry out through the generations” – and I shrugged into the phone. Who wrote these? And, what does anyone care? To me they seemed valueless.

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Ruthie parried with full quotes from several of my other poems, award winners among them, and they left me empty. I had been writing throughout the crisis – I never completely stopped. But I no longer recognized myself in my work, didn’t feel I could “waste my time” with it. I was no longer me; the earlier version was exposed for the fraud I felt she was. But Ruthie persuaded me to go to a poetry workshop that I had given up at the start of the crisis.

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The group leader, having heard my self-flagellating introduction said, “I don’t want to hear that any more, you’re an excellent poet.”

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One year after my husband’s passing I can report that my senses have slowly begun to re-convene: I have continued to co-edit, and write for The Deronda Review; I have submitted poems and articles elsewhere, albeit at a much slower rate. With the encouragement of writers here in Gush Etzion, I started a writing workshop which I call Pri HaGush, the sister group to Pri Hadash in Jerusalem. Surrounded by writing companions, I have been able to breathe more easily as I write. I have stopped tiptoeing around the rawness of my feelings. Even before mourning and grieving entered my life, writing was a process. The women writers of Pri HaGush have helped me recognize myself, the old and new versions, at least as much as I have helped them with writing skills and publishing venues as the group leader.

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Most recently I attended the Jewish Women’s Writing Conference in Jerusalem, where I reconnected with friends and colleagues, and put a face on my by-line from cyber-space.

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I still have so much to work out, work through. There are those feelings that I’d rather not deal with. There are the conflicts, the regrets, and guilt too. But yes, there is writing after death. I didn’t die, my words haven’t died, neither has my style. I just need a reminder from time to time.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Mindy Aber Barad, Guest Blogger

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Mindy Aber Barad’s poetry, stories, book reviews and essays have been published in Fallopian Falafel, The Jewish Press, CyclamensandSwords.com and other publications both on and off line. Mindy is the Israeli co-editor of The Deronda Review. – Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

I’m writing about my soon-to-be-completed digital video, Tearjerker, an essay documentary on crying and tears. When I started writing this piece for Poetica, I began to wonder, is there something hidden in my Jewish background that piqued my interest in this subject? While Jews have certainly suffered their share of inequities, we are a particularly resilient bunch, and we are adept at using humor to heal. In any case, I’m not sure that any special relationship to crying or grief exists for Jews, although humor is another story!

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I don’t particularly consider myself a “cryer”, or a depressive type, although I’ve certainly gone through periods of intense grief and tears. A few years ago, I was browsing in a bookstore and stumbled upon a copy of Crying: The Natural & Cultural History of Tears, by writer and critic Tom Lutz. What most intrigued me were the many images of works of art from medieval painting to contemporary film stills. It seemed to me that crying was a visual subject, and therefore, a very cinematic one. I began watching as many films as I could that had well-known crying scenes, and getting recommendations from others on good examples. I also began looking into current psychological research and theories on crying, as well as on the physiology of tears.

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I started working on my project, a digital video consisting of interviews, footage of crying scenes from films and television, and original footage of actors crying, a baby crying, and a doll with a “crying” face, for example. I began to see a few themes emerging: crying from a physical standpoint, and how the body produces tears; as a cathartic act, and the effect on the body and mood after tears, which also includes the strong emotions we feel when experiencing works of art. Also, crying as it relates to gender, and whether or not crying is different for either sex; “faked” crying, or crying that isn’t genuine, but is used to manipulate others; and “magical” properties of tears. This last theme is strictly an artistic device, in which tears are seen to have some sort of supernatural or alchemic power.

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I’ve always been interested in situations and experiences that are ubiquitous, that we take for granted because they seem so common. We all cry as babies and children, even if we cry only rarely as adults. Crying is essentially part of an inevitable cycle – no matter how happy we may be, and no matter how hard we might try to avoid pain, we can always count on tears to happen at some point in our lives. I became most fascinated by the transformative power of tears. What makes us cry, and how is that reflected in art? One of my favorite quotes on crying comes from Madelon Sprengnether’s book, Crying At the Movies, in which she writes, “The lesson of crying is metamorphosis”. The act of crying transforms us from sad to happy and back again, in both life and art.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Roslyn Broder, Guest Blogger

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Roslyn Broder is a Chicago-based graphic designer, jewelry designer, and filmmaker. She received her MFA in filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films and videos have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals and venues around the country. You can find her graphic design work at http://roslynbroder.com/ and her jewelry at http://www.etsy.com/shop/RedAvaDesigns. For information about Tearjerker, contact Roslyn at redorb123@hotmail.com. Follow her on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/redorb1/ - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Yiddish was our language – my Mother and mine. It was the only common language Jews spoke to each other throughout Europe. There were two dialectics – Litvak and Glitzeaner. Mom spoke one, I spoke the other. As was always the case, she wanted me to speak her dialect and I spoke the other one, just because.

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I had two names – Sarinou and Saralle (sweet Sara and little Sara). My mother and I spoke only in Yiddish to each other. For me it was always on automatic pilot. No thought process was involved. When I heard her voice my brain responded in Yiddish. Although German was my first language, Yiddish somehow evolved in the refugee camp when I wanted to know what all the grown-ups were whispering about.

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My mother died in February of 2006. This conversation took place at her bedside several days before her death.

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Mom: "Raialle, (her sister in Israel) dost a bissalle perfume?" (Raia, do you have some perfume?)

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Me: "Vart a minute, eech ob a bisalle perfume in the car?" (Wait a minute, I have a little perfume in the car.) "Mom, dee vilst perfume?" (Mom, do you want some perfume?)

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Mom: "Nu, spritz meech oon. And lipstick, dee ost a bisalle lipstick?" (Of course, spray me on. And lipstick, do have a little lipstick?)

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I put lipstick on her - a beautiful bronze color. Kissed her forehead, kissed her eyes, kissed her face. She held her face up, the way a baby holds its face up when your rub lotion on. She looked a little brighter. She inhaled the attention and breathed a little easier.

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Mom: "The government owes me a lot of money. And when they pay me, Saralle, we're going into business. You know 86 is not too old to go into business, is it? Dee ost g'zain dain tatte?" (Have you seen your Father? He'd been dead since August 2005 and they had been divorced since 1976. We hadn’t told her he had died.)

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Me: "Eech ob im g'zain." (I saw him.)

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Mom: "Git, sz’nisht git ts’zain broyges.” (Good, it’s not good to remain angry.) "Sarinou, eech gay shtarbin?" (Sara, am I going to die?)

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Me: “Mom, you want to die?” (I am completely taken off guard, for how are you ever prepared to lose your parents?)

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Mom: "Lobin zeech klapen dem kop in deir vant!" (Let them knock their heads into a wall!)

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My knees almost gave out, while I’m trying not to laugh hysterically. I sat down next to her bed, my brain racing. Her body is shot. She can lift her right arm and her head a little bit, and she can talk, boy, can she talk. I had a good teacher. Here she is with her body broken, though her spirit, her heart and soul are telling the angel of death to go knock his head into a wall and come and get her if he dares.

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I guess if you can escape the wrath of Hitler, be homeless for seven years beginning at nineteen, bury your parents and your first born and leave your sisters behind in Uzbekistan - all before your 25th birthday - travel thousands of miles to Munich, survive a refugee camp with rations of peanut butter, margarine, and white bread, travel by ship three months to America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, and all before your 30th birthday, what's a little dying?

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*This was written from Yiddish translated notes at her bedside 26 Jan 06 in Scottsdale, AZ when she was in the hospice. Nusha died a week later.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Sara Fryd, Guest Blogger

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Sara Fryd is the author of the book, You Meet No Strangers, a collection of 24 stories about growing up an American daughter in an Eastern European family. It is available in paperback at Amazon, https://www.createspace.com/3564631" target="_blank">Createspace, and in electronic digital format for Kindle and Smashword. She also writes the blog Sara Arizona, with visitors from 180 countries. – Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

In several recent updates I’ve sent out an open call with my weekly blog updates asking for poetry submissions for an Open Forum to be run on JWorld Café in May. This week’s posting holds some of those submissions. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed gathering them. The Poetica Open Forum will continue into next week’s blog posting. Please join me also in welcoming the blog's new visual artist, Marlene Burns, whose work is featured above the blog entries. Please visit one of her websites to see more of her inspiring work.  – Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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Why Can’t The Gardeners Be More Careful

Ina G. Perlmuter

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And the headstones of row B83 and 84

lean one toward another as though in conversation

slag colored crumbling edges interrupt the walkway

and beyond stiletto heel prints puncture the fresh rolled grass

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My sister and I have come to pay respect to our parents

though we complain to each other

“why can’t the gardeners mow the grass more carefully”

we are glad of this carelessness

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And we painstakingly remove grass shavings from the letters

which form the inscription on our parent’s head stone

grateful that we are able to perform this act of love

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Oh Mother I Wish We Could Talk

Ina G. Perlmuter

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Oh mother, I wish we could talk

I miss you

Mother you instilled by example

seldom threats, never in anger

Mother, I have arrived at a time in my life

I remember you being the age I am now

you seemed more mature,

to have accomplished more

Are my memories selective,

are they colored by time

and seasoned with longing to share

that which is so important to me

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Yes mother, I wish we could talk

You had a way of lessening the hurts of childhood

of reinforcing and encouraging a child’s abilities

How I wish you were here to reassure me

that I am being judicious in my role as parent

a positive influence in my children’s lives

I miss you very much mother, if we could talk

perhaps then you could reveal your secrets of parenting to me

I want to make myself as cherished to my children

as you will always be cherished by me

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Jeff Goodman

Steps

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Who knew that there were steps?

Let alone that they actually lead somewhere.

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Up or down

Towards a heaven or towards a hell.

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So Jacob slept on the ground

And dreamt a dream of a ladder

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With angels going up

And angels going down

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We've all heard the story

Some of us have even seen the movie

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Who knew there was a wall?

Something real and tangible you might

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Actually bump your head against

While ascending albeit unwittingly

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Unknowingly. Let alone gates or even

Those secret passageways

Hidden from the uninitiated

Veiled by fate

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Who knew that there were actually

Princes and paupers, kings and queens

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Banquets being held in really fancy halls

And in rubbish heaps.

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People talk, yeah people talk

Professors speak and monkeys leap

The police along the street

Patrol to keep some kind of peace

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Order is mostly what they seek

So tuck in your shirt and straighten your stance

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The musicians at the ball will never go on strike

They re here to provide the background music

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For Kafka on his flight, from the

City inspectors who all they really want to do

Is give him one more parking ticket

Before they go to sleep.

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Who knew that they were not

As serious as they pretended to be

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That they would have let him off

If he would only speak

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It would have been enough if

He would have told them one of those

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Parables or paradoxes he was so fond of

In lieu of the cigarette he offered them

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But how was he to know

That they were interested in literature?

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How was he to know that the sky outside

Was really gray, and that the world really was

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Traipsing toward hell, as the musicians

Played and the wealthy danced

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How was he to know that the sirens in the street -

That the message delivered to the wizard's hall

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From out of the deep, was real?

How was he to know all this?

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This commonplace knowledge

Of what actually occurred

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As clear as clear can be, coming vividly

Across the six o clock news

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The gun shot blast to the head

Of the wincing Vietnamese

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Those images embedded in our collective head

Heard and seen by the sensitive, by those who still

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Dream. Laying awake at night

Wondering about all those

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Steps

They

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Didn't

See.

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Barry Gonen

What Was, Was (translated from Hebrew)

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I was a clerk and studied civil law,

I was a farmer, teacher, musician, and tour guide galore,

I was a soldier and policeman in green uniform,

I always stayed an optimist inside.

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I was a photographer, gardener and planted new life,

I was an archeologist, and dug to discover the past.

I whistled, I drew, sang, and wrote many words,

I always remained an optimist inside.

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I composed my emotions in multiple scores,

I expressed my thoughts in poems and songs,

I would only think of positive things,

I tried to remain an optimist inside.

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I didn’t always agree to new directions,

I was not always satisfied with the changes in life,

I didn’t always want to argue with people,

I struggled to remain an optimist inside.

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I am a husband, father, and grandfather to many offspring,

But their future I see not in smiling colors.

I am a little anxious for the world in the future years,

I find it difficult now, to remain, an

Optimist, deep inside.

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New Day

Barry Gonen

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Every new day beckons adventure into realms of the unknown.

Every breath I breathe has hidden hope for the future of the universe.

Every step I take is strengthened by my latent enthusiasm.

Every word I speak has purpose lacking cynicism.

Every thought I would like to think is embodied with optimism

Every sound I hear has enlightening depths of meaning,

Every sight I see, stamps indelible impressions on my mind,

Every person I meet opens doors to fascinating exploration,

For each approaching night, I give thanks for my existence!

Every dream I envision, reinforces my imagination,

Every morning’s awakening enriches my yearning for life.

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When Is?

Barry Gonen

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When is a poet not a poet,

a musician not a musician,

an artist not an artist?

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When their senses are impaired,

When their vision is blurred,

When their thoughts are disturbed,

When they cease to dream,

When they cease to share,

When they give up on themselves,

When they finally cease to care!

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Frieda Landau

No Mind a Whetstone

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No mind a whetstone to my own

Allusions fly past uncaught

Pleasures of the mind

Pleasures of the body

Inextricably intertwined

Buried in your grave

Nothing to fill the now hollow place

Where Logos and Eros once danced with delight

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Night

Frieda Landau

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I go to bed late, later than I should

Finding reasons to stay awake

Watching old movies in black and white

And playing endless solitaire

Or calling unseen friends overseas

Where the new day is almost half done

But friends, however dear, have their own lives

At last, in the grey light before dawn

When sleep overcomes all excuses

I face the desolation of an

Empty bed the rising sun cannot warm

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Kol Nidre

Frieda Landau

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How do you remember the unknown grandmother whose name and face you carry

Grandfathers fading into less than memory

Uncles, aunts, cousins, ghosts dissolving in the mists of time

The prayer for the dead a plea

Remember me when I am gone

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Thanks for visiting JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog and reading the work of our Open Forum Poets - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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Frieda Landau is a writer and a photographer, specializing in military topics. Landau was born during a postwar pogrom in Poland to Holocaust survivors parents. She writes poetry as a way to deal with her family history. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine and has been anthologized in Poetica’s Holocaust Anthology. Her website: http://www.freewebs.com/listgoddess/ . Her poetry collection, In the Shadow of the Shoah, will be published by Poetica Publishing in the fall of 2011.

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Barry Gonen was born into a musical family in London in 1947. He left England for Israel in 1971 and has been a member of Kibbutz Negba since 1973. He taught English at Tsafit High School for thirty-two years, mostly in the Special Education department, also fulfilling other duties such as musical and security coordinator for the school. He also served in a Border Police Unit for many years and is still active as Security Officer for the Kibbutz on a voluntary basis. His many songs and voiceovers can be found on Facebook, My Space, Skype and YouTube.

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Ina Perlmuter is a wife, mother and grandmother who has published her poetry through ISPS and Poetica, and participated in a reading at the Brewed Awakening Coffee House in Westmont, Illinois. Work is forthcoming in the ISPS Anthology.

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Jeff Goodman lives in Yerucham, Israel with his wife and children. He is the Deputy legal advisor for Beer Sheva Municipality and writes a weekly column, “Elu Devarim” by email. He was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1957 and made aliyah with his family in 1969. From 1976 to 1979 he served in the Golani Brigade, following a volunteer year in Dimona. He attended Law School at Bar Ilan University, and further Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and Har Etzion.

I’m sitting on a lawn chair in our backyard in Skokie, my relatives all ringed around me, the sun beating down on our heads, mottled through the leaves of the trees overhead. There’s a lot of boisterous conversation going on around me, but I sit there staring straight ahead, the idiot American granddaughter. They talk around me, over me, under me, like I’m a vegetable. I don’t understand a word they’re saying. They’re speaking Yiddish.

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I’ve made a concerted effort not to learn Yiddish. For some reason, from the moment I hear it as a small child, I cast it off, decide it’s not for me, that it’s a relic of the Old Country. I resist Yiddish, fight its penetration into my brain tooth and nail. I give my mother a blank look when she tries to speak to me in it. I make her translate.

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I give myself several reasons for my antagonism. First of all, I decide right off the bat that it’s a dead language, so there’s no reason to learn it. After all, only the grown ups around me speak Yiddish, none of the kids. I figure I can wait this thing out. I’ve also absorbed my parents’ desire to be American in all things, to cast off the Old World and embrace the new, and so I cast off the Old World’s Yiddish and embrace the New World’s English. Of course, they don’t mean to do that with language; they want to be able to speak to their children in their mother tongue. And, last of all, since Yiddish is used to hide everything interesting and tantalizing from me, I have a certain amount of hostility towards it.

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My refusal to learn Yiddish causes some problems because one set of grandparents, my father’s parents, never learns English. They resist English as well as I resist Yiddish, eventually dying without letting a syllable touch their lips. And why should they learn it anyway? Yiddish serves all their needs; they commission their sons and daughters to learn English for them, to handle all their transactions with non-Yiddish-speaking merchants, to handle their communications with the outside world. These two grandparents of mine seem to know that it just might not be worth the time and effort to learn such an elaborate, messy and confusing language like English before they die.

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My Dad’s parents are determined to spend their days in America relaxing and enjoying their new status as “senior citizens” in this new country, even if those days stack up together into years and even decades. They never get over the novelty of safety; never take it for granted. They never stop marveling at the amazing American innovations. The convenience of grocery stores - so much better than starving! The traffic signals on every street corner regulating the cars - so much better than cars and horses and wagons all insisting on going at the same time! The mild weather in Chicago compared to Poland and Siberia - a heat wave!

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Just because I can’t speak Yiddish doesn’t mean that I can’t understand some of it. I do understand adjectives and imperatives and direct commands and reprimands. If my mother is mad at someone and decides to hurl an insult under her breath, I can understand that too, the goniffs, the schlimazels, the yachnehs. But the regular conversational ebbs and flows, the make up of ordinary sentences with nouns and verbs, that escapes me.

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My other grandparents, my mother’s parents, learn English, my grandmother better than my grandfather. She understands every word I say; there’s no escaping her, tricking her, or pulling a fast one on her. She’s watching me all the days of my life with eyes magnified by her glasses and ears sharp with the nuances of five languages. All this while my grandfather sits nearby in a suit, his fedora always on his head, even inside the house, practicing the words he has just learned on me.

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“Linda, mameleh, tell me again. Beetles are bugs, nu? Monkeys are animals. But now the Monkees and the Beatles sing songs on the radio? How can this be?”

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Holocaust Memorial Day reminds me of my grandparents, all Survivors, and the Yiddish in our family, now long gone, so today I ran a blog post that is an excerpt from my book,  Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, available on Amazon.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Cafe, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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Linda Pressman is the Blog Editor of Poetica Magazine and a freelance writer. Her book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie is available on Amazon and other venues. Her work has appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, in Brain Child Magazine, and has been anthologized in several works including Mizmor L'David, an anthology of work by children of Holocaust Survivors. She blogs at Bar Mitzvahzilla and on Open Salon.

When I was five my grandmother read Grimm’s Fairy Tales to me. As a child I liked this and I loved when she read both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to me, especially the stories of Esther and Daniel, over and over again.

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But there was a dark side to Grandma. Her religion. She really believed the world was going to end in nineteen eighty, and that the bulk of humankind was going to be cast into hell. At ten she began telling me about the fate of the damned, the Rapture, the False Christ and the False Prophet. And then, just when all the religions of the world were worshipping the false god, the devil, then the rapture would come. She told me, “Just before you’re about to die at the sword of the anti-Christ, God will intervene and those saved will go to heaven and the rest, all of the members of this false Church, will be cast into a lake of fire.” Sometimes she ended even more ominously, with a judgment about the fate of our family,“I don’t think all of us are going to make it to heaven,” she’d say.

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As a Christian, I never really knew what to do with the scary, sadistic God of my imagination after that time. I had nightmares about God. I felt as though my faith was strangled in the crib.

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Finally I left my faith when I was in college. Strangely enough, I was quite grief-stricken at my loss of faith. I felt desolate and found myself wondering things I never let myself think, “Was there a God? What kind of morality existed separate from religion? Did morality exist separate from it?”

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As a child I was interested in Judaism. I don’t mean the Talmud, which I didn’t know existed; I mean Anne Frank’s diary. I pored over her diary; I was even in love with Anne’s boyfriend Peter, or thought I was. But then I saw the pictures of the victims of the Holocaust along with the tragic fate of Anne and her sister Margot. I had never seen or imagined such suffering. It was one of the early hints - before Grandma’s eschatology - of the dissatisfaction I had with the religion of my upbringing. Why had this been done?

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At the same time, a good belief if unacted on, seemed meaningless. And yet I saw—or thought I saw—that you could believe in something fervently and yet do nothing. I struggled with this. I saw myself as evil. Finally I simply left. At the end of that semester I changed my religious affiliation to “Unitarian.” It would be a full year later when I decided to give Judaism a try.

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Then, by luck or design, I found a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics. I started reading it and after classes were out I got my own copy of the work. His key insight to me was in understanding that human ethics benefit us in this life. I had never really thought of the practical nature of ethics. However, Spinoza occasionally came to weird conclusions in spots: he believed that cowardice was actually good because ‘bravery’ was liable to end in death. This was where I thought a Deistic way of understanding God made more sense: those who suffer unjustly in this life will have some sort of afterlife although I wasn’t always sure on this point.

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Years later in Judaism, I found that the simple acting out of mitzvoth was therapeutic. I also made one decision early on for my sanity’s sake: I was not going to try to be Orthodox. It couldn’t be like back when my grandmother used to read me Grimm’s Fairy Tales; that I had to believe everything that was in her bible. I study the Bible but I don’t believe in all of it. When I was Christian, I felt like it had to be all or nothing. I never want to have my religion that way again.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café,

Jennifer Alderson, Guest Blogger

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Jennifer Alderson was born in Topeka, KS in 1978. She moved at age eight to Wichita, finished high school at East High and went on to Friends University. In between starting and finishing school in 2001, Jenny started what would be an unusually long conversion process to Judaism from her original Protestant faith, converting eventually with a rabbi ordained both Orthodox and Conservative. Although she attends both Reform and Orthodox synagogues, she considers herself Conservative. She is a writer and poet whose work has been published in Poetica Magazine and Mim'amakim. She is presently working on her book, The Bible According to Eve. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Today was my larger family's "mock Passover" party.

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After years of forcing them to do Passover my way, with a seder table stretched across my house, with a Haggadah for each person, with - hopefully - songs and discussions, I gave up, realizing that it was only my small family that wanted a real seder. The rest of my family is happy with a get together on a Sunday near Passover, with some traditional foods, and no seder. I can attend as long as it doesn't conflict with the real holiday. My sense of loss about this ended a long time ago, about the time I finally stopped trying to turn them into me. 

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But tonight there was a new sense of loss. We drove my elderly mother and stepfather to the party and my daughter's best friend was in the car, a girl my mother has met time and time again over the years; one who's even been to her house.

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And my mother said, "Who is this girl? I've never seen her before in my life." Like someone - or something - had erased this girl from my mother's brain.

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My mother has Alzheimer's Disease, though sometimes, and this might seem really stupid, I think she doesn't. Sometimes she remembers appointments better than I do, or the most minute ingredients in recipes when I don't, or directions all over a city in which the streets weave around mountains.

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And then sometimes, like tonight, my denial comes to a crashing halt in the face of some irrefutable evidence of the disease. My mother has completely forgotten her first person. Last one in, first one out. An inconsequential person to her life, after all. Just my daughter's best friend. But still. Who's the next one? When will she forget my kids? After all, she just met them eleven and fifteen years ago. When will she forget me?

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Sometimes I can write about this, other times I can't. Sometimes I have to and sometimes, after I've written something and become convinced again that she's been misdiagnosed, I become embarassed by my own words, ashamed that I said she has Alzheimer's when she so clearly doesn't. And then sometimes, like tonight, it's like a door slamming. She does.

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Prior to tonight, my mother had completely forgotten how to cook in the last six months. Yet tonight she buoyantly entered my vehicle, a dish of latkes held in her hands like a trophy. And, since I've turned into a younger version of her, I quizzed her on the ingredients, concurring that she got them all right and telling her that I've spent the last two days cooking. Off of the recipes she gave me. 

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Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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Linda Pressman is the Blog Editor of Poetica Magazine and a freelance writer. Her book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie will be available this week on Amazon.com and other venues. Her work has appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, in Brain Child Magazine, and has been anthologized in several works including Mizmor L'David, an anthology of work by children of Holocaust Survivors.  She blogs at Bar Mitzvahzilla and on Open Salon.

                                            "Clamor" by Raquel Partnoy

My grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in Argentina in 1913, shortly before World War I. They decided to leave their country because of Czarist persecution and discrimination against the Jewish people, and also because of the Army, into which Jewish boys were drafted never to return to their homes.

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My parents were not able to pack many of their belongings when they left Russia, but they did bring a samovar, a mandolin and a sewing machine. In their new country they began to rebuild their lives, always preserving their traditions, language and cultural heritage. The samovar came to my home with all the family memories and I decided to preserve them in my paintings.

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When I painted the series “From Life,” “Life’s Windows,” and “The Brides,” I used all those old photos to portray the negative and positive aspects of life. From then on I could never separate life from art. My series “Life’s Experiences” is related to the dictatorship in Argentina when more than 30,000 people “disappeared.” Many youth who believed in justice were arrested, tortured and eventually killed by the authorities. In that series I tell of my own pain for the disappearance and later imprisonment of my daughter.

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After that I produced the series “Clothes.” By painting clothes without people I portrayed the life my only son, who suffered depression during those horrible years, until he could not bear it anymore and committed suicide.

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Between Two Skies

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In my city of red horizon that trap the winds

and shelter the wings of monsters,

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where a white salt marsh bars the land from bearing fruit,

and the tamarisk bush houses fear,

there are people who envision new skies to keep on living.

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In my city of windows blurred by the dust of indifference

and the gray complicity of silence,

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where streets have kept the indelible prints of the angel of death,

prints of genocidal boots,

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there are people who vanish from earth,

yet were never allowed to meet new skies.

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In my city of gloomy parks, where churches are siblings

to the killer crows, to terror,

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where outrageous spokespersons, poison the air

and break all dreams that sprout anew,

there are people who never chose to live under new skies.

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Portrait of My Mother

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A violet light falls over my mother’s face, or

it is she who radiates this light.

Her dilated pupils look into infinity, maybe at

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the life – the ghosts, she left behind.

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On the ochre wall of the kitchen, a blue shadow

emphasizes her Semitic profile,

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and her expressive features are framed by her white

hair – with a wave on her forehead.

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We all sit around the table, she is under the clock

whose tick - tock accompanies her voice.

She speaks in Spanish , although it is mixed with

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some Yiddish the children understand.

The story starts –and she is a good storyteller– when

she was a child in her Russian hometown.

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Her eyes smile, she remembers her life with her eight

siblings in the house near the river.

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The laughter of the girls when the brothers,

who under the water, caught their legs by surprise.

And, in the winters, their sliding on the frozen river,

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playing together, always sharing their happiness.

The family’s joy as they painted the walls,

and prepared special dishes for their Jewish celebrations.

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All those lively noises while making food

they stored in the basement for the cold seasons.

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But this colorful landscape darkens, she recalls when

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young boys were forcefully taken by the army

and never again they returned home.

Pogroms, houses in flames, death, Cossacks fiercely shouting:

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Jews go away ! Go away !

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My mother remains silent in the corner of my kitchen,

her words still floating in the air.

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* these are fragments of a larger narrative on her blog, City of Red Horizons

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Thank you for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Raquel Partnoy, Guest Blogger

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Raquel Partnoy is an Argentine painter, poet, and essayist who has lived in Washington, D.C. since1994. Her solo exhibits in this city include: Parish Gallery; B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum; Embassy of Argentina; D.C. Jewish Community Center; Studio Gallery. Her work has been featured in: Arte al Día-Documenta 87 - La Plástica Norteamericana; The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology; Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis; CALYX, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women US. Her essays have been published in Women Writing Resistance-Essays on Latin American and the Caribbean; The Jewish Diaspora in Latin American and the Caribbean: Fragments of Memory. Her narrative poem City of Red Horizons will be published in Argentina in 2011. Please see more of her poetry at City of Red Horizons and her artwork at Pintores Argentinos. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

I never told my father when I finally finished my conversion to Judaism. He knew I was converting, mind you, but I knew - everyone knew - that he might be an embarrassment if he attended the ceremony. He would put on an unpleasant face for those there, those who cared. I privately wondered about the sincerity of his own faith, after all, how many devout fundamentalists act the way my father does, miss as much church as my father does?

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His own religion lost some of its luster (although I had already left it) when his second wife left him. That he didn't take his wife's leaving well turned out to be something of an understatement. At one point I said, “But you still have my sister and me.” Dad replied, “It’s not the same.”

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His wife had been adopted and she had finally met her biological father. But her biological father didn’t like dad and convinced her to file for a divorce. At first Dad was only sad and I felt bad for him. However, after a few months he became angry. He contested the divorce, claiming my stepmother was too unstable to make the decision. I think he even believed it himself, but my sister assured me that he’d made this up. He then enlisted the aid of his church to help him get her back, going to each fundamentalist church in Lawrence, Kansas begging for prayers for her return. And he said her father was going to hell for supporting the divorce. He told strangers in the grocery stores. He spoke of nothing else at either my grandmother’s funeral - even claiming her leaving caused Grandma’s death - or my cousin’s funeral a few years later.

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And then there’s the fact that he mysteriously discovered his faith after seventeen years of refusing to go to church with my mom. And when he did go his main interest didn’t seem to be church, it seemed to be in winning Mom back. Later he blamed my conversion on my mother and her Methodist ways.

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So, perhaps I should feel grateful that my conversion matters to him so little, especially in light of how he acts when things matter to him a lot.

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Now when I go to see him, we have nothing to talk about. His politics have moved to the right; he watches Lou Dobbs on CNN and has completely brainwashed himself. He speaks disparagingly of China and Mexico. He comments to strangers about the “funny laws” I have to keep as a religious Jew and often forgets that I am a vegetarian. He sometimes hints that Barak Obama is a Muslim or that Lincoln had African ancestry. Of course, he always laughs at my other Grandma’s jokes about Jews and Catholics.

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What happened to the man I thought I knew as a child? Did he ever exist? I remember when my Mom left him when I was four, I wanted to stay. Where’s that father? Where’s the father who spoiled me, who bought toys, who paid child support? The father I later talked to about politics, religion and music. Where’d that father go?

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Somewhere along the road of me growing up, he turned into another father, the father who came to see me during my first hospitalization for Depression at age thirteen and said, “I’m probably the reason you’re here.”

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Jennifer Alderson, Guest Blogger

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Jennifer Alderson was born in Topeka, KS in 1978. She moved at age eight to Wichita, finished high school at East High and went on to Friends University. In between starting and finishing school in 2001, Jenny started what would be an unusually long conversion process to Judaism from her original Protestant faith, converting eventually with a rabbi ordained both Orthodox and Conservative. Although she attends both Reform and Orthodox synagogues, she considers herself Conservative. She is a writer and poet whose work has been published in Poetica Magazine and Mim'amakim. She is presently working on her book The Bible According to Eve. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Over the years I have had many reasons for writing, the childlike desire to create like drawing with crayons, the need to find a safe place to vent adolescent frustrations, and as a young adult trying to find a direction for my life. Once the words were strung together and the ideas explored, I thought I would find the hidden treasure of personal contentment. While raising a family in my strange new world of suburbia, the writing became a tool to help me improve my outlook on life and soothe myself. My journals were a hiding place and a way to put things in perspective. I had always helped friends write term papers in college and as a fundraiser I was writing all the time, letters, speeches, event brochures, and promotional materials. Most recently I have been helping friends write speeches for their children’s Bar Mitzvahs.

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The one thing missing from my writing repertoire was a way to share my creative writing. I never figured out a way to describe to people what I meant when I said I like to write. So I decided to “come out of the closet.” I started a Blog. The resulting essays, and observations I posted were like pictures hung on an invisible wall (the internet).

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I first began scribbling notes and using writing as a way to escape the pain of losing my father when I was 9 years old. When he was alive, I was the center of his world. I was the singing and dancing sensation starring in my very own variety show every Saturday night in our living room. I had a captive audience. I did not know and it did not matter that I was probably off key, and clumsy. My audience adored me. I made the room light up. When the lights went out on March 9th 1970, my show ended. No one wanted to see me sing or dance and I was not particularly interested in performing anymore anyway. Silence seemed more desirable than music. Pen on paper and pain in hand and heart led me in a new direction. I have no idea where most of those old spiral notebooks went.

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When a child loses a parent the world becomes very confusing. It is no longer a matter of what is for lunch, who am I going to play with, will I get that shiny red bicycle? Suddenly there are questions that simply cannot be answered. I don’t mean “why is the sky blue?” types of questions. I mean questions like “What is the meaning of life? What is a soul? Why can’t you hug a memory? Who is going to protect me from the bad people?” The writing was my way of making a map to lead me out of the foggy mental landscape where I suddenly found myself wandering.

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While I was growing up, my mom was always filling my head with stories about her life, the Great Depression, being homeless, dozens of cousins with complicated lives. This was her way of making me resilient. She was telling me to look at everything our family had survived. I learned I could rely on her and that I was made from strong stock. During one of my cleaning sprees in her apartment I discovered a paper bag filled with black and white photos in her bedroom closet. They were all there. Her cousins, old neighbors, and the dog she had growing up. We spent hours every week at the kitchen table putting the photos in albums and writing down all her stories in the white spaces next to the pictures. I think that was some of the most important writing I have ever done.

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I spent my life afraid of losing my mother. Would she “disappear” from my life just like my father had? Even though I was a grown, married woman with children during the time my mom and I made those books, there was also a 9-year-old child inside my head questioning why “no one lives forever.”

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Lately I’ve had difficulty writing. I’ve abandoned my blog. It’s sitting there waiting for new entries as I struggle to find my way in the world without my mother. Maybe I really did think she was going to live forever? I should write about her so all the good things she gave me will travel through eternity where we will meet up again.

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I should write.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog.

Benita Haberman, Guest Blogger.

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Benita Haberman is a writer who lives and works in Chicago. Besides blogging at House of Mirrors she is a stay at home mother of a 14-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl. She also uses her writing skills to assist people with writing speeches and toasts for a variety of special occasions from Bar Mitzvahs to Wedding Anniversaries. She has taken stand up comedy classes at the Improv Playhouse in Libertyville, Illinois and her first two 5 minute debut performances are posted on youtube. You can reach her directly at benita-houseofmirrors@blogspot.com  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor