For Sheryl Livergant

Dear friend, so amazing to be in touch with you by blog. You were with Rachel and with me during those intense Calgary days we lived together in one big house on Garden Crescent, mother-in-law and callah. Today you asked, "How do I ask?", and so, here, I'll tell you: Three generations made Aliyah, for Rachel and Yosef it was a homecoming to the land they had dreamed of in childhood, and come to build as young adults. It was fitting that Rachel got to spend a year and a bit, amongst adoring family, and passed away in June of 2008. For you to skim, and for me to savour again, here is the account of this amazing woman's last few months.

May 4, 2008
A brain event they called it, and I honestly don't know more technicalities. In the hospital she walked back to her bed from the washroom, droning in slurred, barely audible groans, "Ani holechet lamut", I am going/walking to die. And then she closed her eyes and was unresponsive, no feeling in both legs, arms just fell to the bed if we lifted them. Weeks later she explained to me, "I knew it would be fine to go, my mother and father would be there, but I decided to stay here. Here I am". Now, she wakes up each morning with beginner's mind, in a big, fresh apartment. "Look how big the salon is! So many bathrooms! And look at the view from the balcony! Fields, orange groves, and who is this man? He is similar to Yosef, but he is not Yosef". Sometimes this is a horror. "Who is this man in my house? Did he steal me? Where am I?" And other times it is sheer delight. We arrive and her jaw drops. "How did you know where to find me? Isn't it beautiful in this new place?" She is always, always, overjoyed to see us, as if it's been years and years. She has no sense of cooking or preparing, and Adam is the keeper of her cooking secrets and the importance of timing and attention to each grain of rice. Yosef does the daily cooking, and they even had a felafel party for the whole mishpacha, about 20 of us came. Beno did all the frying, but Yosef really prepared and orchestrated. Rachel was welcoming and giving blessings, as in earlier days. She is fierce and furious with Yosef when he goes down to the market and doesn't come back for 10 hours, or 10 days. She sings with me, songs that she had forgotten for years. Ir me quiero madre a Yerushalayim, por baisir la tierra - when I get to Israel I'll kiss its soil. She got extremely thin, only bones and wrinkles, during the worst time. Now she is rounded out again, and looks great. Her nieces come around and do her nails and cut her hair chinlength. Her hair is as shiny and black as always, but there are a few strands of gray.

May 23
Adam called happily from the Negev just as we were sitting down for Shabbes dinner at Rachel and Yosef''s. The figs are plump and sweet now, and it feels like sometime I will understand what I'm doing here. Rachel looks at all the Israeli flags flying, from balconies, from cars, from tall buildings and from tricycles. "So much Jewishness here", she says. "As if we were in a Jewish land". We're in Israel, I tell her. And she opens her eyes in wonder. How did that happen? In Turkey, she tells me, you'd never fly a Magen David out loud like that. Look at all of the Jewish flags, she says again. On the balcony we sing Janie's Ba Shana Habaa, next year we'll sit on the balcony looking at the birds and the children playing catch. How good it will be next year, you'll see. And we are on the balcony this year Rachel says. Here we are. She sings all of the words to all of the prayers, in Hebrew and in Ladino. Ya comimos y bevimos y al Dio Santo Baruch Hu u Baruch Shmo. After our chicken and fassoulias and rice pilaf, all cooked up by Beno and me, and it's good we and Yoni and Adam watched well while she still cooked, I began reading the 23rd psalm out loud in Turkish. She took it as a personal love letter. Beni yemyeþil çayýrlarda yatýrýr, I read, and her face lit up, "Ah! He's making nice green grass for me to rest in!" Kâsem taþýyor. I read, and she corrected my pronunciation, then lit up again. "He's filling my cup until it's running over the side. You see how He loves me. Always has. There it is, right there". We had a wonderful visit with Rabbi Kaplan in Tzfat yesterday, and could think of only good things to tell him. Sometimes it all feels right here. Love to you all!

June 15, 2008
Loves, Rachel passed away quietly in her bed, yesterday afternoon. She and Yosef had gone for a nice afternoon nap, and then she awoke and asked Yosef to make her coffee. You know Yosef's rich, fragrant Turkish coffee, the smell that always immediately and delightedly brings me back to Zamenoff 6, where Rachel and Yosef hosted Janie, Randy, and even Mommy and Daddy over the years. Zamenoff 6 where I first met Rachel during Chanuka of 1973, and was intrigued from first glance at finding a person who lives both here and in some mystical space that requires a blessing over the tiniest action, each good news needing "baruch haShem":

("Do you need anything from the store?"

"No, we have all we need, Baruch HaShem, may we never be wanting, may we be blessed with all good things Amen"),

each hope b'ezrat haShem.

The ayin harah, the evil eye, was always to be appeased, and just the day before yesterday, her final Shabbat in this world, she told me about the ayin hatov, the good eye, that she found within the wordplay in, "I will lift up my eyes, m'ayin yavo ezri". She could sing the psalms by heart.

By heart. To the last.

She died when her heart stopped yesterday.

Psalms, and " Ya comimo", the thanks after the meal in Ladino, always her hands and her eyes up to the heavens, the way they did it in Istanbul, eight children at the dinner table, up to yesterday two of them still alive, and when Yoni took Rachel to her father's grave a year ago exactly, she placed two little stones on his grave and explained to her, "That's what's left, me and Emilie". So now we'll place one stone, for Emilie who's left, of all those eight children, hands and eyes lifted in the blessing after a meal. It got told over and over yesterday, to all the relatives who came in to their sweet Israel apartment with a balcony overlooking orange groves and fields and the road to Jerusalem. He brought the coffee, and when he came back to the room, she didn't wake up. Beno SMSed in Hebrew to Adam, "Savta halcha l'olama", she has gone to her world, and Adam was on the next train to Tel Aviv. In our last nights on that VIctoria balcony, Rachel took me outside to teach me, under stars, how she invokes the angels. You announce yourself, Hineni, giving your name and who you are the daughter of. You ask with all your heart, all your heart, los deseos de tu alma, all that you desire. You ask things for your children. "But your sons are grown now", she explained to me. "You don't ask particular things for them. You ask that all their own deseos come to fruitiion." You ask that they have the clarity, the strength, the commitment, the acceptance, the delightinlife, to follow through with all of their hopes. You ask that they'll choose their own paths with sturdiness and faith in their own sense of direction. Her twin brother Pepo's yartzeit is today. Rachel's funeral will be today, 2:30 Jerusalem time.

Ay, Rachelika, Rachelika,
My Sefardi mother-in-law, hands lifted to the heavens, you pushed my hands in that direction too, you tugged me out to the balcony to stand under stars and invoke angels in Ladino, you had me sing nursery rhymes of pishkedikos della mar to my babies. And when they cough, I still hear my voice saying, "Oras buenas, oras claras, malachim". Rachelika, I miss you, our afternoons folding little triangles of filika dough around salty feta cheese, our conversations late into the Shabbes night, candles lighting tears. Your words so infused my cooking and my childrearing, that still, when my son Adam calls from the army, I answer, "ijo della madre, el preciado della casa". My own Yiddish roots were stamped down, paved over, with hopes for a more modern, more Canadian life, as if it were possible to keep a Yiddish tree down for long. (My own childhood read on the obsolescence of Yiddish; my own sister's children speak to her in Yiddish, and I do not understand what they are saying). And so, when I looked for an older voice in my writings, your voice was the one there for me, and I wrote of filikas and berenjenas con tomat. I married a history. But now I live in Israel, and my daily chance encounters with more and more relatives from our family shtetl, Staszow, invite me to connect with the Yiddish rootings I had earlier tried to step on, like some onion in the ground with its head upside down (What's the expression I'm trying to think of? I'm sure it sounds better in Yiddish!!)

From Sinai to the Shtetl, and Back Again

This invitation, from our old friend Lil Blum:
FROM SINAI TO THE SHTETL AND BEYOND: Where Is Home for the Jewish Writer?
Does writing root you in a "home" land?
Do you have a portable shtetl, or did you leave it in Bubbie's kitchen?
How do themes in your writing link you to the Jewish community from Sinai to the shtetl?
Are you linked to the Yiddish writers of our past or the Jewish writers of today?
What is your mameloshen? How does it speak in your writing?
Who are you channelling?

Janie wrote wonderfully on the topic, and here is my attempt: (you need to know that the Hebrew word "HaMakom", literally, "the place", is actually used as one of the many names for God. HaMakom is the name for God used in a house of mourning. You can look for reasons. It could be that at a time of total dissolution of all reality, the only sure thing is this place, right here.)

Une Canadienne errante,
I sit on the shores of Zion
and weep for Lake Ontario.
Zeh lo hamakom
the woman says rudely
when I try to see a doctor.
You're not in the right place.
Zeh lo HaMakom.
In other lands,
Hebrew is the holy tongue.
Here it can be rude.
Here
HaMakom is any kind of a place.
It can mean you came to the wrong desk,
and they don't help you find the right one.
In other lands,
Hebrew is a holy tongue.
and HaMakom is God.
And here Hebrew is for dust and for ashes,
for bitter and for sweet,
for rudely turning you away,
when you don't know this place,
and they don't remember
to be kind to the newcomer,
or to gather the recent wanderers
home.
And then you stop at the corner
of Shaul HaMelech and the Baal Shem Tov,
for a cup of tea with a cousin
whose father was a brother
of your own Zaide,
back in the shtetl,
though you've been Canadian, these years,
and she grew up in Uruguay.
And your pelephone rings,
with dash from the son
of one more of Zaide's
brothers:
this one came in the early years,
brave and ready,
to not feel a welcome,
and still,
to build the kibbutzim.
And the "pele" in pelephone
means miracles and wonders,
like a prayer you learned for Chanuka,
and a war here is named after a dreidl,
and the woman who was rude,
wishes you refuah shleimah
because we are both daughters
of a more ancient Sarah.
And then you walk along the beach,
and waves and sun
connect you to ancient voices,
and as you shake off
the sands of the sea
from between your toes,
you remember a promise to Abraham.
You leave the beach,
under a sign saying
Tzeitchem L'Shalom
as if here they knew
that all of us are angels.

Unreasonable

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man". George Bernard Shaw
My mother, my sisters and I married unreasonable men. Mmmmmmmm. Life is never boring.
As Malca always loved to quote,
Here's to Opening and Upward.
here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your(in my arms flowering so new)
self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here's to silent certainly mountains;and to
a disappearing poet of always,snow
and to morning;and to morning's beautiful friend
twilight(and a first dream called ocean)and

let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid
down with ought with because with every brain
which thinks it thinks,nor dares to feel(but up
with joy;and up with laughing and drunkenness)

here's to one undiscoverable guess
of whose mad skill each world of blood is made
(whose fatal songs are moving in the moon
ee cummings

In the Image

Life is fragile.
Handle with prayer.
Fascinating, doing fluency therapy with a religious young man who stutters. I always show a cross section of the respiratory system and vocal mechanism, with a column of light flowing from lungs through the bronchi to pass smoothly through the vocal folds, then to be molded and shaped by the pulsings of pharynx tongue and lips into the wonder that differentiates us from all other creations: talk. I want to convey the idea that speech flows, unobstructed. But suddenly, to see that we are, with every utterance, being in the image, saying "Let there be light", and then gently molding, shaping that pure light, into all the words in the world. This is a helpful image.

19 sleeps til Canada

Soon I will sing with my sisters.