Category Archives: Jewish Interests

Where Was Freud When She Needed Him??

Some people don’t remember their dreams. Mine are so vivid that they have become at times their own reality, creating some very embarrassing moments.

When Larry and I first moved to Clifton Park in 1976, we didn’t know anyone. At the urging of Larry’s mom, a lifetime member of Hadassah, I joined the fairly new but very active Clifton Park chapter. The very first meeting I attended, I sat with a group of women who were also newcomers to the community. We became friends, and several of us became pregnant the same year. We attended Lamaze classes together, went to each other’s son’s bris, and attended La Leche League meetings together. Yes, 1978 was a bumper year for Clifton Park Hadassah babies.

When my son Adam was around eighteen months old, that core of Hadassah mothers, along with a few other friends, formed a playgroup for our children. Each week, we would take turns dropping off our child with the designated mother at ten o’clock in the morning. Seven of us would go off on our merry way, free from toddler responsibilities for two blissful hours. The assigned mother would organize activities for the day’s playgroup. During the winter months, the children played with toys, participated in an arts and crafts project, or enjoyed a story time. In the summer, the children went outside and played on the swing sets or in sandboxes. The mom-in-charge fed the children lunch—usually peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit juice and cookies. By twelve noon, the playgroup mom was more than ready to hand the visiting children back to their own mothers.

The group went well, and the children, for the most part, played well together. Yes, there were the expected outbursts and tantrums and fights.But this arrangement worked well for both the children and the mothers.

The eight of us became good friends, so I was saddened to hear that Fern, her husband Steve, and their son Marshall were moving to Chicago. I shared the news with my friend Diane during a phone call on a non-playgroup day.

Diane immediately questioned my information. “Are you sure?” she said. “I spoke to Fern yesterday, and she didn’t mention a thing about a move.”

“No,” I insisted. “Steve got a promotion with his company. Fern feels bad about leaving all her friends here, but she said this is an excellent opportunity for Steve. They are moving in two months.”

Diane was still doubtful. “Look, I have three-way calling on my phone. Let me get hold of Fern right now and the three of us can talk.”

I agreed and heard a few clicks and buzzes as Diane set up the conference call. We soon heard Fern’s hello.

“Hi Fern!” said Diane. “Marilyn was telling me that you are moving to Chicago!”

“I’m not moving to Chicago,” Fern immediately responded. “Where did you hear that, Marilyn?”

“We talked yesterday, I responded. “You told me all about Steve’s promotion and his transfer.”

“What promotion?” Fern said. “As far as I know, we are staying put in Clifton Park.”

It was just at that moment that the circumstances of my “conversation” with Fern fell into place. Horrified, I realized that this entire episode had taken place in a dream I had experienced the night before. Every moment of that dream came rushing back to me.

“Oh my G-d!”I exclaimed. “I am so very sorry! This whole conversation took place in my sleep!”

I was totally embarrassed. I stuttered my way through apologies to both Fern and Diane. They understood—as much as they could understand that this crazy lady couldn’t distinguish dreams from reality. And what if Fern thought it was ‘wishful thinking’?

All of the mothers in that playgroup remained friends through our children’s nursery school years that followed. Three years later, some of us mothers, who all delivered younger siblings in 1981, formed another playgroup with the same positive results.

Many of us joined the same synagogue. Even after some moved out of the area, we continued to stay in touch. We attended each other’s children’s bar and bat mitzvahs, rejoiced in their successes in high school and college, comforted each other during the sad times, and shared each other’s joy in our former toddlers’ marriages and the births of each other’s grandchildren. Obviously, Fern and her family didn’t move to Chicago. She and Steve still live in the same house that housed our sons’ playgroup over thirty-five years ago. She is currently president of Sisterhood and is stepping up to the plate to become the next president of Congregation Beth Shalom.

I still clearly remember the “conversation” I had with Fern. After that incident, I was a little more careful after waking up from a vivid dream. I have checked myself several times over the years, realizing that I was about to pull another “Fern Moment.” But I also remember our playgroup and the friendships that grew from those once-a-week get-togethers.

Never Forget

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How does one comprehend the unfathomable? How does one grasp how six million Jewish lives were snuffed out by a world gone mad? For me, it was through the lives of Anne and Elie and Sophie and Pavel and many others. Thanks to brilliant writers, I have experienced the Holocaust through literature.

Neither of my parents spoke of lost relatives as their families had emigrated from Russia by the early 1900s. My first in-depth exposure to the Shoah came from reading The Diary of a Young Girl. I was thirteen years old, the same age as Anne Frank when she started her journal. While I was worrying about acne and first crushes while living in a small, upstate town, Anne was worried about having enough food and not being caught by the Nazis while hiding in an Amsterdam attic. Her words were prominently displayed on a poster on my bedroom wall throughout high school and college: “I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Her journal, found after she perished in Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, remains one of my most beloved books

As a first year high school English teacher, I was assigned to teach Police State in Literature. It was a challenging course, made even more difficult for me as I was replacing a well-loved teacher who purportedly made Brave New World fun.

Instead, the students faced a young, idealist Jewish teacher who had been told to include in the curriculum. Night, Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his life in the Nazi concentration camps The following June, two of my students handed me their yearbook to sign. They had drawn swastikas on my picture. Refusing to sign them, I sadly realized Wiesel’s shattering tale had not impacted them as it had me.

Anne and Elie showed me the Holocaust through teenage eyes. Sophie’s Choice forced me to see it through the eyes as a grieving parent. William Styron’s novel depicted the story of a young mother who was forced by a camp doctor to make a heart-wrenching decision as she entered Auschwitz: She must choose which of her two children would die immediately in the gas chamber and which one would be allowed to live, albeit as a prisoner. Hoping her blue-eyed, blond-haired son had a better chance at survival, she sacrificed her daughter. I read the book when I myself was a mother of two young children. Reading about the grief and guilt that haunted Sophie for the rest of her short, tragic life broke my heart. Shortly after finishing the book, I woke up in the middle of the night screaming, “Don’t take Julie! Don’t take my daughter!”

Reviews of the subsequent movie were outstanding, and Meryl Streep won an academy award for her performance as Sophie. I myself have never seen the film. It was hard enough to read the book.

In 1994, a collection of art and poetry provided a way for me to revisit the Holocaust through the art and poetry by Jewish children who lived—and perished— in Theresienstadt concentration camp. A line in a poem by Pavel Friedman (1921-1944) provided the book’s name. “For seven weeks I’ve lived here/Penned up inside this ghetto/But I have found my people here./The dandelions call to me/And the white chestnut candles in the court,/Only I never saw another butterfly.”

The butterfly became my symbol of the Holocaust.Even today, each time I see a butterfly, I am reminded me of that young man standing behind a barbed wire fence wishing for freedom. In honor of Paval and the six million, I wear a chain on my neck with two gold charms: a Jewish star and a butterfly.

In recent years, literature helped me explore the Holocaust from the perspective of those on the other side of those camp fences: people who eked out their lives in war-torn Europe during Hitler’s reign Kristin Hannah’s novel The Nightingale followed the story of two sisters in Nazi-occupied France. The older sister Vianne desperately struggled to do whatever she could to keep herself, her daughter, and her friends—including a Jewish woman and her child—alive. The younger sister Isabelle risked her life to work for the Resistance. The description of physical and emotional deprivation experienced by those living through the four years of Nazi oppression gave me appreciation for the brutal,often deadly, conditions that were a fact of life for everyone—Jews and non-Jews— under Nazi rule.

Through a novel written by the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I came to understand how experiences encountered in death camps often haunted not only the survivors but also their children. The Speed of Light, a novel by Schenectady native Elizabeth Rosner, tells the story of two adult children whose lives were shaped by their father’s time in Auschwitz. While Paula tried to bring her father joy through her globe-trotting career as an opera singer. Julian a scientist, lived as secluded, highly structured recluse. ‘My father …carried his sadness with him, under his skin, Julien states.”It was mine now.” How the siblings moved past their father’s demons and redeem themselves was a fascinating read.

I am grateful that despite all that has already been written about the Holocaust, the topic still generates literature that gives us new ways of examining one the darkest periods in civilization. “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana. I will never fully understand the horrors endured by so many. But at least through the extensive amount of quality of literature available, I can at least hope we can learn ways to assure “Never again.”

Dayanu

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Browsing recently at a Denver airport store on my way home to Orlando, I was greeted by the clerk. Exchanging pleasantries, I asked him how his day was going. “Counting the hours, ma’am. Just counting the hours.” “It can’t be that bad,” I replied. “I am working a fifteen hour shift in a newspaper stand in an airport, “ he said. “And this with a college degree. As I said, ‘Just counting the hours.”

Okay, so this young man was not living his dream. But all I could think of is that the clerk appeared to be the same age as a friend of mine who became a quadriplegic twenty years earlier as a result of a freak accident. “Be grateful for what you have,” I wanted to say to this total stranger. “Don’t count the hours; count your blessings.”

On Passover, we Jews celebrate the physical and spiritual redemption from slavery. Each year, we sing Dayanu, a song which lists the steps leading to our freedom. In it, we are reminded of our need—our responsibility—to be grateful for all G-d has given to us.

Yes, it is sometimes difficult to be grateful. College degrees and sometimes lead to menial job. Cars break down; toilet overflow; a bite into a hard candy results in a $3000 dollar dental bill. But as a dear friend said to me after I complained about a costly home repair, these are all First World problems.

In addition, in our highly commercial, secular world, it is sometimes difficult to be happy with just enough. We are bombarded with advertisements promising us happiness if only we purchase a new car, a new home, even a new brand of soap. We are exposed to all this noise on television, on billboards, on ever-targeted ads on the internet between our Facebook posts.

I am sure the Jews who escaped Egyptian slavery complained. Some of the kvetching is recorded in the Torah, but I can only imagine the grumblings that were not written down. “Manna that tastes like coconut cream pie again? For one night, can’t it taste like my mother’s matzoh ball soup?” Or: “Who put Moses in charge? We’ve been wandering this desert for forty years. The man can’t find his way out of a paper bag!”

The child of parents who were on different ends of the “cup half full”/cup half empty” continuum, I struggled as to whether my father’s rose colored view of the world was a better way to go than my mother’s practical but less than optimistic outlook. Whereas my father was content with his life, my mother often compared herself and our lives to others, and she saw the grass as greener in the other’s yard. “Comparison is the thief of joy,” said Theodore Roosevelt. And also, in my eyes, the thief of gratitude.

When looking for property in Florida, Larry and I made the conscious decision to downsize. We chose a smaller home that, in line with most houses in the Sunshine State, had no basement and a fairly inaccessible, extremely hot attic. We purchased the home with all its furnishings in a community whose home owner’s association that took care of our lawn and shrubbery. As a result, we were able to divest ourselves of much of our belongings and start over. Once we unpacked—and gave another load of unneeded items to a local charity–we assured ourselves that we were never going back to having so much.

Despite my best intentions, however, I began to fall into my old habit of acquiring more than we needed. The search for that one last item to complete our new home—a new outdoor seating set, a water softener, updated lighting fixtures— was taking me away from where I wanted to be: grateful for what I had.

One day, while at a salon getting my hair cut, I saw a poster with the following affirmation: “Gratitude turns what we have into enough.” And somehow that quote from Melody Beattie was the kick in the pants I needed.

Researching studies in positive psychology, I learned that those who are habitually grateful are significantly happier—and even healthier— than those who are not. One recommended method to enhance these feelings is by maintaining a gratitude diary in which one records on a regular basis three to five things for which one is grateful.

Using a beautiful floral-covered journal a dear friend had given me as a going away gift, I started ‘counting my blessings’ each night before I went to bed. Some entries were major milestones: “I saw my granddaughter crawl for the first time!” Other day’s reflections were more mundane: “Larry and I laughed our way through a great ‘Big Bang Theory’ episode.” No matter what the magnitude, I was ending my day focusing on the positive.

In the process, I have turned the focus from how many material possessions I have to how much goodness I have in my life. “Collect moments, not things” says a Hindu expression. The journal gives me the opportunity to capture those moments: savoring an Upstate New York apple, reading a book to my granddaughter, sitting on our lanai and viewing the wildlife in our pond, appreciating one more day of good health.

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was thank you,” wrote Meister Eckhart, “that would suffice.” Or, in the word of the Passover seder, ‘Dayanu.’ Chag Sameah!

Mother’s Day

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Julie and me with family.

When our daughter Julie was expecting our first grandchild, she called me to tell me about the children of her friends, both around eighteen months old. She commented that the little boy is a little fussy and needy, with frequent meltdowns. Her other friend’s child is easy, calm and sweet; her name “Grace” says it all. Julie said that she hopes her child like Grace. My comment? “So you want a Grace, not a Julie, huh?” Not surprisingly, she wasn’t appreciative of my observation.

Larry and I were ecstatic the prospect of becoming grandparents. Julie and Sam had been married eight years prior to her pregnancy, and I wasn’t sure if they wanted to have children. Over Thanksgiving, 2014, however, we learned they were expecting a baby on a walk along the Mohawk bike path. Sam pointedly asked me how we were enjoying our hot tub. I told him how much we loved going in on cold November days, “A day like today!” I offered them towels, robes, a bottle of wine, and privacy.

“I can’t go into the hot tub, Mom,” piped up Julie. “And I can’t have a glass of wine.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because [—pregnant pause—] I am carrying your grandchild.”

Once I stopped jumping up and down, and once we promised we would not share the news with ANYONE until at least mid-January, I began reflecting on words of advice I could give to the new parents. On Mother’s Day 2015, in honor of her impending motherhood, I gave Julie the following advice:

Nothing will prepare you for the moment you hold your baby for the first time. Throughout my first pregnancy, Larry and I were thrilled about becoming parents. However, Larry and I had several discussions as to how our life would not change that drastically once s/he was born. We would bring our child everywhere, and we would continue to travel and work and socialize as we had done before. Once we each had held Adam in our arms for less than a minute, however, we knew that our lives were never going to be the same. The reality of taking care of a tiny, dependent being who needed every ounce of our physical and emotional attention to survive put any ideas of “business as usual” out the window. In fact, we didn’t mind turning our lives upside down. We would move mountains to make sure our son was well fed, dry, content, and especially safe. Three years later, I harbored similar thoughts regarding status quo while awaiting the birth of our second child. During my pregnancy, I thought to myself, “Okay baby, I will love you, but just know that we already have a child, and he will come first.” Again, I was proven wrong. The bonding was immediate and powerful, and our arms and hearts were more than big enough to accommodate another child.

Children don’t grow like lettuce. Whenever I encountered a bump in the road while raising our children, whether it was braces or a bad track meet or a broken heart, my mother would offer her favorite expression. Unlike lettuce, she would remind me, which you just put in the ground as a bunch of seeds and harvests thirty days later, children are work intensive. Things don’t always go smoothly, and you don’t sail through the eighteen years until they head off for college. It took me a while to realize raising children was more like growing prized orchids. And I have no green thumb.

Give your child roots to grow and wings to fly While raising these “delicate orchids,” Larry and I tried provide Adam and Julie with a supportive nurturing environment throughout their formative years. We tried to give them moral values, a strong sense of community and personal responsibility. It was not until Julie packed up her life in my used Toyota and moved to Colorado and Adam headed to the West Coast for law school and life in San Francisco that the Dalai Lama’s words wholeheartedly hit me. Oh, how I envy my friends who have children ten minutes away! I would even settle for three hundred miles. But this was not to be. They have forged a life a long plane ride—or two!—away. They both have put down their own roots far from where we live but are happy, settled, content, and doing what they need to do. We hope the root system we gave them will guide them in their journeys.

You ultimately know what is best for your child.

When Adam was six weeks old, I drove him to a local mall, put him in a red umbrella stroller, and pushed him through the stores, my first time shopping since he was born. A woman stopped me and said, “Oh my goodness! Your baby is all crunched up in that stroller, pale as a ghost! He looks dead!” I immediately pulled Adam out from carriage. He began howling with rage because I had jarred him awake. As she walked away, the “baby expert” commented, “Oh! I guess he was okay!” I learned quickly that I knew what I was doing, not some stranger. Remember those roots your parents gave you? Trust that they will help you grow as a parent.

Ironically, during Julie’s pregnancy, friends gave us advice about grand-parenting. We were told repeatedly that the moment we held our granddaughter in our arms for the first time, our life would never be the same. “It’s different with a grandchild,” a friend said. “It is as if you are holding your future.” We even got advice about when, where, and how to give advice to Julie and Sam. Until then, I hoped that the “mommilies” I gave Julie that Mother’s Day would be taken in the spirit in which they are given —with much joy and love

There Goes My Heart

The stories on "There Goes My Heart " capture special moments in a lifetime spent in Upstate New York, Florida, Colorado, and beyond.