A lot of the conflict with B comes at the dinner table because that's the only place where all four of us are present. I don't want to give up on family dinner, even if he makes it miserable, because family dinner has always been the basic touchstone of our family ( Read more... )

I feel like my world has broken open like a pomegranate in the last many weeks - glowing, messy, staining, sharply delicious but difficult to eat ( Read more... )

This is so much of what makes music meaningful for me ( Read more... )

I feel like my life is going off the rails. The last time I saw E was September, and she's not going to be back for another week. I got handed this bizarre second job at work that involves me breaking in to a team of app developers who have been working together for months already on this project. So I've been getting up an hour early to get work ( Read more... )

When R and I were in our sleeping bags in the sukkah on Friday night, she said, "I know what story I want to read for my Bat Mitzvah."

It was the story of Esau and Jacob, the trick and the birthright. This is the same story that B found so relevant when he was about her age. She didn't make the direct link between their story and the story of our ( Read more... )

I made the Russian dinner for J in the sukkah tonight. It came out even better than I had hoped. The sauerkraut soup tasted like the best thing ever, and one of the other guests had three bowls, and then a fourth after dessert. As soon as J smelled it - before she took a taste - she said, "This is really a Russian soup. It's full of dill." I made ( Read more... )

I have eaten so much challah in the last three days. Two days of holiday followed by Shabbat means triple challah overload.

Seven species salad ( Read more... )

Many years ago - more than five years but less than ten - E and I had this conversation ( Read more... )

When I was growing up and learning about the Holocaust in a Jewish context, this is one of the things that was stressed: the Jews of Germany were assimilated into German society, as much as Jews are assimilated in the U.S. today. My European history is not good enough to verify that the assimilations were equivalent, but it's true that the Jews of ( Read more... )