What topics do you like to discuss?
Books
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
God
God I need sleep.
Bookworm: Britain’s Most Prominent Defender of the Jews Is Also a Pretty Good Male Mystery Writer – Tablet Magazine
Bookworm: Britain’s Most Prominent Defender of the Jews Is Also a Pretty Good Male Mystery Writer – Tablet Magazine
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/274693/j-k-rowling-lethal-white
New Indian Jewish Art – Jewish Review of Books
The artwork of Siona Benjamin, who says she belongs everywhere and nowhere, recombines traditional and contemporary elements in surprising ways.
— Read on jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3153/new-indian-jewish-art/
Filed under Personal Reflections, Uncategorized
You know what will make me happy?
I will be happy at the end of August. Why you query? Because not only will audit at my workplace be done and over (along with all the prep work I still have for it) but it will also be my birthday and this year unlike last year I feel I will be happy to actually celebrate.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Jewish cemetery grows.
Today is the Jewish yahrzeit, first anniversary of my mother’s passing. Only dad and I were there today, my husband being sick at home, the rest of the family elsewhere today. To be fair, it was fine to just be there together because the collective family had already gathered on the calendar anniversary of her passing last month, in Father’s Day, with much more souls than I anticipated at any rate. What’s interesting today vs last month is the fact that today the headstone was covered, something we were told would happen last month when we all gathered for the official unveiling but apparently the cemetery follows the Jewish anniversary rather than calendar.
I felt fine, anxious to get it over with even today. We had chores to do, and I wanted to be home with Ken. And then a few hours later, when I was wandering through my dad’s (it’s still half my parents’, half my dad’s when I refer to it) house, it hit me how desperately I still need my mother. Yahrzeits are supposed to be days to light the candle in remembrance of the departed ones and all I remember today is the heartache of not hearing her voice, not playing with her hair, not telling her about the silly thing my dad told me earlier. The light does not burn just one day and night, the light is ever burning.
Filed under Personal Reflections, Uncategorized
Reading about the Romanovs
So this is slightly off topic or you know, maybe not. I’ve been slowly making my way through the last few weeks and getting my bearings again after the 1st yahrzeit of my mother’s passing and my dad’s two days spent in the hospital. So I’ve been reading and though nothing review worthy has come up, shades of things I want to express have been bubbling up in other topics. Last week or so I’ve been plowing through a history of the Romanovs written incidentally by a Jewish author, Simon Sebag Montefiore. I didn’t find this authorship significant until he began outlining how virulently anti-Semitic the tsars were. From Nicholas I and his enforced 25 army sentences for Jewish boys to Alexander III forcing Jews out of Moscow and encouraging pogroms that forced so many to come to America in the 1880s. And his blessed successor, the executed Nicholas II? Same exact shit with encouraging and overlooking pogroms in 1905 and beyond. I am at the point of he story where I am impatiently waiting for him to be killed. And I am not that Kind of angry person! It boggles my modern mind that educated, intelligent, Westerners a mere hundred years ago were OK with murder and rape of the minority they hated. History just tends to repeat itself, doesn’t it?
The significance of a Jew writing this history isn’t lost on me. I’ve read several histories of the tsars and yet this feels like the first one where anti-Semitism isn’t given more than a two sentence address in hundreds of published pages.
I feel weird reading it at this point. I do. But the end is nigh so to it I go and take mental notes as I carry through.
Filed under Midread thoughts, Personal Reflections, Uncategorized
Little less stress please
I had a little dream that after the longest year of my life things would get less stressful. It comes and goes but the tide of stress is rather on a high right now. I want low tide, please. Just to get a little breather please.
Filed under Uncategorized
Jewish Books Are Awesome 