Though I finished reading the book a few days ago, I haven’t had the time to fully sit down and put my thoughts to a virtual page. It is is forthcoming and should be here for perusal in the next few days. Stay tuned!
I am thinking of re-reading “The Red Tent” in honor of Lifetime Network’s upcoming release of the miniseries on film. Thoughts?
Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve now been in the Pale of Settlement and saw the Hasidim dance, I’ve lived through the October Revolution and its pogroms. I survived the Holocaust alongside Shargorod’s Jews that included my immediate paternal family and am now almost to the point where historical reality intersects with my own: the past joining my own life in Shargorod. I’m more than half way done through Red Shtetl and I have more questions than I anticipated and it’s hard to put them all down in words.
Are any of people described my ancestors that have faded out of the family lore? Or Is the village scholar/itinerant rebbe my paternal great grandfather who taught (term used loosely here) his own unofficial yeshiva students while his wife operated a goods store on her own and raised their children? Are the kids hidden during the Holocaust when the Germans were there before Shargorod was taken over by Romania my father and his sisters? Is my paternal great aunt a victim of Civil War pogroms in 1918-1921? The answer is yes, probably, and absolutely. The story of Shargorod is unique in a greater sense of things. It is just another Jewish shtetl but it did more than survive. It thrived when the Soviets were taking away Jewish communal rights like the synagogue and the heder. It thrived when Jews in the region were massacred and t kept its own people safe and welcomed deported families.
Reading this book has once again underlined how little I know where I come from. And yet, it is also full of possibility: of avenues to explore and stories to learn. Above is one of the many videos of Shargorod from Youtube. It combines both the historical visuals and the concrete structures of my memory.
Filed under Uncategorized
Red Shtetl
I began rereading Red Shtetl by Charles E Hoffman recently because I’ve been feeling nostalgic I guess. I am particularly biased when it comes to this book because it happens to be about my hometown, about the history of both the town and the Jews in it through the last half a millennium. I’ve now lived outside my hometown for longer than I did live there but Shargorod is my childhood, it’s my family, and it’s the past of my people. What makes it special besides being my home? Perhaps, it’s the fact that a stone synagogue was built there before any other religious structure. And it still stands, almost 450 years later. Or perhaps it’s the fact that there are tzaddikim buried there. Or perhaps that Baal Shem Tov supposedly spent time there in 1700s. Or perhaps it is the fact that unlike most of the other shtetls in the region, Shargorod’s Jewry with my father and his family remained almost completely intact during Shoah while everyone else was slaughtered by the SS.
Perhaps I am just a sucker for anomalies.
Filed under Uncategorized
The name of the blog came about as a bit of a joke. Once upon a time (it was pretty recent) I was an unofficial literary Judaica expert for a Facebook group I am a member of, Romani Yehudim Cultural Center. Other members of the group knew very little about their Jewish heritage so because I am a voracious reader with a minor in Jewish Studies, I started to give recommendations to the members. And then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I had a blog that specifically reviewed Jewish themed books? So that’s how Jewish Books Are Awesome was born. 😀
Filed under Uncategorized
attempts to recover my lost multisyllabic gumption
Reading Into Our Past...
New Jewish Books
Exploring what it means to be Jewish
Jewish Books Are Awesome 