What are books?
They contain a blending of ideas; they may be filled with poetry; they can possess wonderful atlases to help us see the world even before we travel there; they can, in enormous size, be the study texts for the Jewish people; they can be filled with original memories of loved ones; they can themselves be beautiful works of art in general and Jewish art in particular; they can be filled with inspirational stories; they can be novels just to read; and they can tell the history of a people.
As July 4th approached this year, I recalled how I had searched through the 50 or so books still on my shelves during the coronavirus challenge. Some I had not looked through for years; several I had read constantly for over 20 years.
They were filled with fingerprints because I never stopped using them whether my hands were clean or dirty. The ideas they contained inspired me in the stories I have written. During COVID-19, newspapers were with us daily.
Since 1978, I had been fortunate to write the original works of my heart and mind. At times, my tales grew out of the old newspapers I could now read online. We Jews are daily introduced into the Christian world because we are an ancient people whose rituals remain in practice until today. Our rituals, our holidays, our love for Israel intrigues the world so they observe us and write about us.
My quest during corona was to find American-published books that I could walk through the pages and think about many aspects of the Jewish people to whom I belong.
Shoshana Dolgin Beer, 94, has been a resident of Jerusalem for over 50 years. She and I have been friends for just over 30 years. She was born a twin in Kansas City, Missouri, where her father, Yehuda Braver, was the chief rabbi for over 20 years. We first met in her apartment on Keren Hayesod Street at the corner of Agron. Her home is filled with Jewish objects and paintings, large books studied for years and smaller books in Hebrew, Yiddish and English that have sentimental value for her.
Back in the 1980s, we met, initially, to write a biography of her father. A modest man, he received rabbinic ordination (smicha) from a famous yeshiva in Lithuania. He and his wife escaped from his birthplace in 1912, and he became a rabbi in Akron, Ohio.
A Zionist, he joined the American branch of Mizrahi after it was founded by Bar-Ilan. What has survived from that membership is an enormous wrap-around photo of Braver and all the American leaders of American Mizrahi in 1919. Shoshana’s home is filled with primary source material of her father’s, which hopefully will be in an archive.
In the year before corona, she and I spent many hours together so she should could write a book – with her hands in her 90s but her mind in the 1920s – titled My Reflections on the Aliyah of Our Family to Israel 1967-2019. A fascinating tome of mind and heart, it contains, for example, a copy of a letter from Rabbi Aryeh Levin, one of the most spiritual rabbis. It is addressed to her daughter. Shoshana provides the readers the meaning that the document holds for her and her family.
Here is an American Jewish memory under the title “The Lost Aroma of ‘Schmaltz and Gribenes’”:
“Certain smells stay with you forever. One of the most tantalizing aromas of my childhood (in the 1920s and 1930s) was that of simmering schmaltz and gribenes on our kitchen stove.”
How did her mother make rendered chicken fat?
“Mama would open the freshly slaughtered chickens she brought home which she kashered by soaking for half an hour in cold water, then sprinkling with coarse salt letting them drain for an hour on a slanted board near the sink so the blood could drain off.’’
Now, what Shoshana and her sister and brother were waiting for. “Mama cut off the gobs of fat which she would trim from inside the washed off chickens... into a pot on the top burner of the stove together with pieces of chicken skin and onion to simmer slowly.” Now, the golden schmaltz was poured into jars.
The gribenes, those crunchy pieces of cooked curled skin, were delicious beyond description. For her, that aroma as they cooked was “sweet and tangy.”
She watched as her father – the chief rabbi – mended shoes. How sad Shoshana was when her beloved brother was killed in World War Two. A rabbi’s children served too. Pearl Harbor struck her as she listened to President FDR announce that America was going to war. D-Day for her, June 4, 1944, was one of the greatest moments of her life. Her descriptions about those events she has never forgotten fill the book.
Several books were a pre-corona gift. They had belonged to Rebecca Affachiner – Israel’s “Betsy Ross” who in 1948 created the country’s first flag – and are finally opened.
Most of you know the name of Emma Lazarus, the author of the poem on the Statue of Liberty. I memorized it in my teens and have recited that poem many times in my life. My late wife, Rita, and I took one of our grandchildren to the Statue of Liberty and I read the poem aloud for him.
I always knew that Emma Lazarus had written other poems. I had never seen them.
Rebecca Affachiner owned two well-used volumes: The Poems of Emma Lazarus that were collected by two of her sisters. Here is a lesser-known poem.
Storm
Serene was morning with clear winnowed air
But threatening soon the low, blue mass of cloud
Rose in the west, with mutterings faint and rare
At first, but waxing frequent and more loud
Thick sultry mists the distant hilltops shroud
The sunshine dies; athwart black skies of lead
Flash noiselessly thin threads of lightning red.
And all the while the dreadful thunder breaks,
Within the hollow circle of the hills
With gathering might, that angry echoes wakes.
Emma Lazarus wrote about 50 poems, but she also captured the meaning of certain American events, one called 1492. Here are the last few lines; some familiar to you:
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying , ‘Ho, all who weary enter here’!
There falls each barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!
The renowned American Jewish historian, Prof. Jonathan Sarna, wrote his American Judaism: A History in 2004, the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Jews in America. His work is inspired by a “reawakening,” what Jewish life in the US is all about.
“To study the history of American Judaism is, among many other things, to be reminded anew of the theme of human potential, in our case, the ability of American Jews – young and old, men and women alike to change the course of history and transform a piece of their world. This volume is not just a record of events, it is the story of how people ‘shaped’ events: establishing and maintaining communities, responding to challenges, working for change.
“That, perhaps, is the greatest lesson that I can offer readers; the knowledge that they too can make a difference, that the future is theirs to create.”