Tag Archives: memoir

Watching Movies on Chaiflicks

Posted on August 3, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

This year for my birthday I got a subscription to Chaiflicks, a Jewish streaming service that has movies from around the world (France, Hungary, Germany, South America, the United States, and, of course, Israel). And since there’s almost nothing new on regular TV in the summer, except for news and sports, I’ve been making my way through their movie collection.

There was one movie called Nowhere in Africa about a Jewish family who left Germany for Africa just before Kristallnacht (1939), leaving behind family members who still weren’t convinced that Hitler and the Nazis really meant all of the awful things they said they wanted to do to the Jews. The transition to life in Africa was hard for them: the heat, the villagers, the farming and hard labor, and of course the language and culture and food. The movie is based on an autobiographical novel by the daughter of the family, and we get to see a lot of the events through her eyes, both her incredible adaptability and the grief she feels when, after the war ends, the family returns to Germany to help rebuild the country.

Another movie, called Gloomy Sunday, was about a thruple (two men and a beautiful woman) in Hungary during World War II. One of the men is a Jewish restaurant owner and the other is a penniless musician who is hired to play piano in the restaurant. Drama ensues, of course. The musician writes a song that becomes intertwined with a series of suicides, and the Jewish restaurant owner is eventually sent to the camps and killed, despite thinking he had a friend among the Nazis who would protect him. But the ending is satisfying, in a revenge is best served cold sort of way.

You may be sensing a theme at this point, because many of the non-Israeli movies on Chaiflicks focus on the Holocaust, from many different perspectives. One of the more hopeful stories was about a grandmother in Bordeaux, France who thought her whole family had been murdered in the Holocaust and then she accidentally finds her granddaughter, alive.

There are so many stories that deserve to be told, and have so much to teach us about survival and grief and evil and fighting back, but it’s hard to take it all in.

One of the non-Holocaust movies we watched was about an event I knew almost nothing about: the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1994, which killed 85 people, including children. The movie is called Anita, and focuses on a woman with Downs’s syndrome who is injured in the blast and survives, but gets lost for days, while her brother believes she must have died along with their mother in the explosion. Anita seems to bring out the best in a lot of the people she meets, but not right away. In a strange coincidence, the week after we watched the movie the 1994 bombing was in the news again, because it was the 30^th anniversary of the bombing and after a court in Argentina had finally placed blame for the bombing on Iran and Hezbollah, the government vowed to pursue justice.

We’ll see what else I can learn from Chaiflicks this summer, though I’d really like it if the filmmakers could be more gentle with my prudish American sensibilities and stop randomly showing women’s breasts in every other scene.

I don’t think I would have had the emotional bandwidth to deal with these movies during the school year, and I feel really lucky to have summers off, not just to rest but also to challenge myself in ways I couldn’t tolerate the rest of the year.

Of course, I still take tons of breaks to watch Hallmark movies, or to binge one of the great South Korean series on Netflix, so I’m not overdoing it. Don’t worry. I just wish I had more time for all of the things I wanted to do this summer. I’m not ready for it to be August already, with only one month left before school starts again. If anyone knows where I can find one of Hermione’s Time Turners (from Harry Potter) I’d be eternally grateful.

“Is there a doggie streaming channel for me?”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Posted in Uncategorized and tagged chaiflicks, Holocaust, Israel, Jewish, memoir, movies, summer. Bookmark the permalink.

We Need a New Air Conditioner

Posted on July 27, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

We need a new air conditioner in the living room. For the past few summers we’ve just taken it for granted that every few days we would mistakenly use the microwave in the kitchen while two air conditioners were on at the same time, and blow the circuits, and have to go over to the basement in the next building to reset the main circuit breaker. We had an electrician in at some point to see if there was anything we could do to get more electricity into the apartment, but he told us that it would be a very extensive and expensive job, because he’d have to first get more electricity into our building overall and only then focus on our apartment in particular. So we accepted our fate and tried harder to remember to turn off one of the air conditioners before using the microwave.

This summer, though, the power kept going out even without the microwave, or any other possible source of trouble. It didn’t happen as soon as two air conditioners were on at the same time, and it only happened when one of the air conditioners was the big one in the living room, so at first we weren’t sure what the problem was. The worst problems came during the hottest week, when the local electric company was using brownouts to manage the higher than usual usage, so, we realized, each time a brownout happened, and two air conditioners were on, and one of them was the air conditioner in the living room, we lost power.

But knowing that we had no way of fixing the problem, except to sit in the heat with no relief, was not comforting. After blowing the circuits three days in a row, Mom decided that the problem was probably coming from the big air conditioner in the living room which was getting old. She reached out to a friend of my cousin’s, who happens to be an electrician, and was told that, one, older model air conditioners are less energy efficient, and two, as air conditioners get older they use more power. She suggested that we get a newer, more energy efficient one, and, hopefully, that would solve the problem.

So we ordered the new air conditioner, and we hope that once it’s in place we won’t have to traipse outside and into the next building and down to the basement to reset the circuit breaker in the heat of the summer. And who knows, we may even discover that the new air conditioner will even allow us to use the microwave every once in a while.

The problem is, it costs money. And we didn’t have this on our list of expected repairs for this year. Nor did we have the faucet in the bathroom sink on the list, or the new car battery, or the higher cost of groceries, or the latest federal court decision that might mean I have to go back to making regular payments on my student loan, on top of the medical loan.

One of my projects this summer has been to educate myself about all of the bills and home details Mom has been taking care of for so many years, so that if, God forbid, Mom can’t take care of things, I will know what to do. This idea came up as a result of Mom’s second hip replacement, and the heart scare, and a very, very gradual realization that I am not a teenager anymore. I took the project seriously, and in my turtle slow way, I filled a binder with files for each category of responsibility: the car, the apartment (including the mortgage and maintenance and insurance), the appliances, the monthly bills, etc., and I was quickly overwhelmed by how much money it takes to just to keep things copacetic. I have a whole folder on what to do if different appliances and fixtures and furniture break down (with phone numbers for repair people and warranties and preferred brands), but this past month has made it clear that no matter how organized I try to be there will always be unknown costs that pop up. And you know what I can do about that? Nothing. Except raise the dose of my antidepressant, when necessary, and trust that I will be able to figure it out when the time comes.

I just want to say: Phooey. This adulting stuff really sucks. I give it one star, at most.

**The new air conditioner is so much quieter!**

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

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Posted in Uncategorized and tagged adulthood, bills, heat, memoir, money, summer. Bookmark the permalink.

Tikkun Olam and Tikkun HaLev

Posted on July 20, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

Over the past few decades, most liberal Jewish congregations in North America have emphasized Tikkun Olam (usually translated as “Repairing the World”), especially the social action/giving-to-charity interpretation of Tikkun Olam, instead of the particular rituals of Judaism. And more recently, many liberal Jews have seen Tikkun Olam as almost interchangeable with progressive American politics, supporting movements like Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, efforts against Climate Change, etc.

(**Two Tikkun Olam images I found online**)

In a way, this narrowing of American Jewish values down to Tikkun Olam made it easier for parents to explain to their children what it means to be Jewish, though it left a lot out, and also left out a large portion of the Jewish people who, like me, find meaning and solace in the religious aspects of being Jewish, like prayer and study and rituals and history. But, for the most part, my own liberal Jewish congregation was able to bridge the gaps, accommodating the Jews who wanted to have both a particular Jewish identity and to play a role in the repair of the world overall, and I thought that’s what was happening everywhere else too.

Until October 7^th. Many American Jews were caught off guard when their fellow progressives saw Israel, and the Jews who supported Israel, as the enemy. These were Jews who had been raised to see progressive politics and being Jewish as basically the same thing, and couldn’t imagine their lives outside of these movements for social change. Over the next weeks and months, many of these Jews felt alienated and abandoned by their fellow progressives, while others took on the anti-Israel values of their friends; maybe because they’d done their own research and found that they agreed with the progressive stance against Israel, or maybe because they knew very little about the long history of anti-Semitism, and the history of why and how the modern state of Israel came to be and didn’t feel like it was worth losing friends over, or maybe because they identified so much more strongly with their fellow liberal Americans than with the eight million Jews living in Israel (mostly refugees from pogroms and then the Holocaust and then from the surrounding Middle Eastern countries, or the descendants of those refugees), who they knew very little about. I don’t know.

But when I heard from Jews who called themselves anti-Zionists, or distanced themselves from their Jewish communities over conflicting views around Israel, in the aftermath of October 7^th, what I heard over and over again was that they were living up to the Jewish values they’d been raised with, especially Tikkun Olam, and that made me think that I needed to better understand the concept of Tikkun Olam and where it came from and how it came to be understood the way so many Jews understand it today.

The first use of the term Tikkun Olam that I could find was in the Mishnah (a commentary on the Hebrew Bible written between 200 and 500 CE), where the rabbis invoked the idea of Tikkun Olam, or repairing the world, when they considered how their legal rulings would impact society overall (by which they meant Jewish society, because that was all they had any control over). Often these legal rulings were focused on small details about how to make the laws clearer and easier to follow. I love the idea that just by making road signs clearer you are improving the world and I love this lower case interpretation of tikkun olam, which basically says that by doing your individual job well, whatever it is, or being patient with others, or taking other people into consideration, you are fulfilling the Mitzvah (good deed or commandment from God, depending on your point of view) of Tikkun Olam.

Maimonides, a medieval Jewish sage, later defined Tikkun Olam as made up of three specific parts: studying Torah, doing acts of kindness, and following the ritual commandments. Many of the small diaspora Jewish communities over the millennia have practiced Tikkun Olam, but most referred to it by its component parts, defining their efforts to help their fellow Jews, by caring for the poor and disabled and elderly in their communities as act of loving kindness (or G’milut Chasadim in Hebrew), rather than referring to them as acts of Tikkun Olam.

The concept of Tikkun Olam overall got a boost from Rabbi Isaac Luria and the kabbalists of the 16^th century, when they spoke of how God had contracted part of God’s light in order to create the world, and then created vessels into which to pour God’s light, but the vessels weren’t strong enough to hold all of that power and they shattered. The kabbalists determined that, therefore, our role as Jews, or just as human beings overall, is to collect the shards of those vessels and the sparks of God’s light, like a big jigsaw puzzle, in order to repair the world. But the way we collect those divine sparks, they said, was pretty much the same as Maimonides had prescribed: studying Torah, doing acts of kindness, and following the ritual commandments.

And then, as Jews began to thrive in places like the United States, where they were free to live and work where they wanted to, many of their G’milut Chasadim efforts to help one another (creating hospitals, social work agencies and charities) grew into more universal organizations meant to help all Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike. At the same time, many Jews were also stripping away the particularly Jewish aspects of their identities in order to fit in with the larger American culture, which they were now free to do, and encouraged to do. And many Jewish congregations and organizations therefore made an effort to keep those more marginally connected Jews in the fold by emphasizing the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam, and redefining Tikkun Olam in a way that allowed these less connected Jews to see their charitable giving and political activism as distinctly Jewish and therefore able to be done in place of the old traditions.

One of the things that started to bother me about the modern take on Tikkun Olam was that it became very prescriptive and rigid. In part because , from what I’ve seen, when people focus their ethical behavior singularly on social activism, at both the left and the right extremes, they begin to harden their hearts as their goals becomes more important than any individual people involved, and their ideals eventually calcify into weapons. Because, really, it takes a lot of self-knowledge to create real empathy with someone else’s struggle, and to know how to be genuinely helpful, and that wasn’t a value that was being emphasized in these social action movements.

In the midst of my wrestling with this concept of Tikkun Olam, and feeling torn and bruised by the battle, my rabbi happened to mention another phrase that I hadn’t heard before: Tikkun HaLev, which roughly translates to “repairing the heart.” He said it offhand during a bible study session and I wrote it down, without context. When I looked back at my notes, and realized I didn’t know what it referred to, I went to my friend Google to find out. But I only found a few references, most of which emphasized that repairing the heart is a way to improve your ability to practice repair of the world. I struggled to find any references to what the rabbis themselves meant by the term, or if they had even used it. So I went back to my rabbi and asked him what he’d been referring to when he talked about Tikkun HaLev, and he didn’t even remember saying it, let alone what he’d meant by it.

What all of that said to me was that I was free to translate Tikkun HaLev however I wanted. I could envision a little stick figure character with a broom sweeping the dirt away from a big red heart, or I could imagine a heart-shaped character lifting weights at the gym, or getting surgery, or at least stitches. Or, I could think of the kind of work I’ve been doing in therapy forever, which is about healing my own pain and, only as a side effect, growing my ability to have compassion for others. But the most enduring image that came to mind when I thought of repairing the heart was of the hundreds of times my mom picked up a dog toy from the floor, where its fluffy white guts were spilling out after yet another vigorous play session, and gently re-stuffed and resewed that beloved toy, so that whichever dog it belonged to could continue to play with it and love it.

**Miss Ellie, surrounded by her repaired toys.**

If I were going to create my own practice of Tikkun HaLev, or repairing the heart, I would focus on the small details that I actually have some control over, and the ways that fixing those small things improves not just my own life but the lives of the people around me. I can smile at a neighbor, pet a dog, plant a tree, or a flower, practice being patient when a friend tells a rambling story, and take the time to listen and make eye contact when someone needs to complain about the cost of medication. And adding repair of the heart into my vision of how to repair the world could also allow me to be more humble in my assumptions about what needs to be done and what is actually possible.

In my own version of all of this, I would also want to include outward signs of my Jewish identity, to remind myself and others that being proud of my Jewishness doesn’t mean that I reject the modern and secular world at large, that I can value both at the same time. But that’s just me.

We are at a point in history where the need to repair our world has become obvious to almost everyone, and we have many different ideas for how that repair should be done. My hope is that we can take some of this energy to repair our hearts as well, and to grieve our losses, and try to be more generous, to ourselves and others, as we go through this process together.

**“Shh. Don’t tell anyone I’m up here on the computer. I don’t like the idea of surgery.”**

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

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Posted in Uncategorized and tagged dogs, Israel, Jewish, love, memoir, social action. Bookmark the permalink.

Stuffing My Critics in a Jar

Posted on July 13, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

This past winter and spring, I was busy writing something new. I had wanted to work on revisions for the second Yeshiva Girl novel, which has been in the works for way too long, or add to the draft of the synagogue mystery that I’ve also been mulling over for years, but instead a new story burbled up. By May, I had a 220 page first draft of a novel, tentatively titled Hebrew Lessons, about a young woman who takes online Hebrew classes (like me) and falls in love with her Israeli teacher (that part is fiction. Sorry). It was fun to write and also gave me a chance to think about the relationship between Jews in America and Jews in Israel, which has always been complicated, and has become even more so since October 7^th.

The problem is, now that I have to start re-reading the draft and planning revisions, I can’t make myself do it.

While I was writing the first draft I was able to shut out the big, noisy critics in my head, for the most part, with a gentle “Shut the fuck up!” But now that I’m ready for revisions I need to keep the door open to critiques, and the big, noisy, nasty voices in my head keep pushing their way in through the open door.

Even looking in the direction of the manuscript, which is sitting on a pile of books next to my bed, brings up all of the nasties: How dare you write a story with an Israeli character when you’ve never been to Israel? What the hell do you know about love? No agent will touch a book with a Jewish character now, let alone an Israeli! Everything you write gets rejected so why waste your time? Your writing is too serious, silly, sentimental, simple, stupid, etc. You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking your voice even matters. You should be doing something more responsible, selfless, constructive, etc. with your time. If you actually finish the book you’ll have to write query letters and face rejection, and you’ll be embarrassed when people see your imagination written out on the page, like an x-ray of your inner self.

At first I thought I just needed a few weeks away from the book to get some perspective, but then weeks passed and, if anything, the voices got louder, and nastier, and I couldn’t do anything to stop the flood.

Eventually, an image came to mind from the first Superman movie (with Christopher Reeve), where the bad guys (General Zod and his two henchmen) are sentenced to jail and trapped in these flat/see-through boxes where they can be seen, but not heard, for eternity. And I thought, that would be awesome!

Mom found me a jar (she collects them for art projects) and I labeled it “Unhelpful Critics” and started to fill it with slips of paper slathered with critical messages. But the voices kept coming, threatening to overflow the jar, and my resistance to reading the draft stayed just as strong.

I’m sure that part of the problem is my inability to convince myself that it’s okay to ask to be treated with kindness, so when a critique is hurtful and I want to shove it in the jar, I worry that I’m being too easy on myself and ignoring a painful reality that I really should force myself to face. There’s also the issue that it’s been hard to separate out a specific, technical criticism (the pacing is too fast or slow, the details of the setting are too sparse or vague) from the big bad feelings that stick to every criticism and feel like a punch in the gut. It’s as if the nasty, destructive voices in my head attach themselves to even the mildest suggestions for improvement, and make it all into a toxic mess.

But I really wanted the jar, or anything, to work, so I kept filling out these strips of paper, until I had to graduate to an oatmeal container, and then until I couldn’t capture them in words anymore, but they were still coming, constantly.

It took me too long to start to wonder why all of this pain was coming up around the novel, and yet I’ve been able to write weekly blog posts forever without being swamped this way. And I had to ask myself, why is writing fiction, in particular, bringing all of this up?

I have always loved fiction, writing it and reading it, for the way it can organize reality, and improve on it, and create safer containers for all of the experiences that overwhelm me in real life. But maybe, at least in this case, imagining a better version of my life, and myself, means facing all of the grief I feel that that isn’t my life, and the jealousy I feel that this imaginary young woman gets to live that life. There’s also, interestingly, a deep fear of the unknown, because in living vicariously through her, and facing difficulties and opportunities I’ve never faced, I’m overwhelmed with anxiety about how to solve these unfamiliar problems, in love and life and work. And I feel guilty that I don’t have the tools to protect her from that pain.

I think there’s another aspect to this as well. When I write my short essays I imagine my blog readers, who are so kind and curious and generous, and so much nicer to me than I am to myself, and that allows me to feel safe enough to write difficult things. But when I write longer things, like the novel, or something else that I expect to send out to literary magazines or agents or editors, I hear the cold, dismissive, and destructive voices I’ve faced so many times over the years, in graduate school and beyond, and those voices set off my inner critics and it becomes a wildfire.

Maybe, if I could find a way to think of the novel as a very long blog post, or just imagine my blogging friends as my primary readers, the nasty voices would step aside, or at least quiet down, but I don’t know how to make that switch. If I tell myself that I’m not going to send the novel out to be judged by the industry, then either I won’t believe it, or I’ll believe it and that will set off a whole other kind of grief, because I’m not ready to give up on the possibility of being a successful author, not yet.

But the thing is, I really loved writing the first draft of this book, and I want to get back to that feeling, and I also want to finish the book so I can see if other people like it as much as I do. I feel like just writing this essay has gotten me most of the way there, but I’m not quite there yet, and I’m not sure what else to try.

**“Curling up in a ball works for me. Just a suggestion.”**

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

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Posted in Uncategorized and tagged critics, fiction, Israel, Jewish, memoir, writing. Bookmark the permalink.

Renewal

Posted on July 6, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

It was time to renew my social work license, five years after earning it, five years during which I haven’t been working in the field at all, and I felt torn. I mostly thought I should renew it, even if it cost money and took time, in case I wanted to work as a social worker again one day, but part of me wanted to burn that bridge, so I would have no choice but to focus on teaching and writing, without the option of an escape hatch.

I received the renewal notice by email a few weeks ago, and kept looking at it, wishing it would go away. Partly, I was afraid that the process of renewing my license would be complicated or stressful, asking embarrassing questions about why I wasn’t actually working as a social worker. And I was afraid that renewing my license would cost a lot of money, or require me to reach out to former bosses, or current bosses, for documentation, or that I’d find out that I need to do a lot more expensive and time consuming trainings in order to qualify for license renewal in the first place. But I was also afraid of finally giving up on the idea of being a therapist.

The thing is, my decision not to seek a job as a social worker was not simple. It came after six months of applying for jobs and getting nowhere, even with personal contacts or recommendations. The biggest problem seemed to be that, despite being a beginning social worker, I could only work part time, or less, because of my health issues, and, at least at that time, the jobs that allowed for flexibility and limited hours were not available to beginners. But I was also not sure I was actually ready to be a social worker/therapist.

Towards the end of my time in graduate school I had been telling my teachers and bosses and advisors that I didn’t feel prepared and that what I really wanted was a third internship to help me figure out where in the field I belonged, but they all said that I shouldn’t need such a thing and it wasn’t possible anyway, so just get off your ass and get a job. And I couldn’t.

I liked the idea of myself as someone who could help people heal. And I liked the image of myself as a respectable and responsible adult who goes to an office and actually makes enough money to buy nice clothes and go on vacations. And I wanted to fight for better insurance coverage for mental health, and to argue against the ubiquitous manualized, supposedly evidence-based short term therapy that only actually helps if you have a short term problem. But the reality of social work, eh, I didn’t love it. I hated the phone calls, and the office politics, and the paperwork, and the long hours, and the clothes I had to wear, and the constant criticism from bosses and clients and client’s families, and I hated the staff meetings and the family drama and on and on.

Oy.

When I was first offered the job teaching after school synagogue school, five years ago, I accepted with relief, thinking that it would be a good first step, and allow me to accumulate experience working with children while I continued to pursue every available avenue to improve my health and eventually get to work as a therapist, and I kept taking one or two trainings each year to keep up my skills, just in case. But five years later, my health is worse, not better, and more importantly, when I think about adding more hours to my work week I tend to think about more teaching and more writing, not social work.

And then the renewal notice came, and it took me five read-throughs to realize that it wasn’t even due for another five months (when I’m anxious I tend to skim things and miss important information), but I still felt like I had to hurry up and get it done. So after a lot of handwringing, I went to the website and opened the renewal form, and one of the first things they asked if I’d like to go on “inactive” status, which would be free, and could be reversed at any time. And I thought, “Oh! I didn’t know that was an option!” It sounded perfect and I felt much better, for a second, especially about the money I would not have to spend, but then the relief went away and the nagging worries returned, because it’s hard to let go of something that once seemed like the answer to everything, even when it didn’t seem like the answer to anything anymore.

And yet, I couldn’t convince myself to close the door on social work, given all of the time and money and hope I’d invested in that goal for so many years. So, I filled out the renewal form, which mostly consisted of checking a few boxes and paying the fee, and then I set to work planning more training classes, because, I don’t know, I guess I’m kind of stubborn.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

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Posted in Uncategorized and tagged career, memoir, renewal, social work, teaching, writing. Bookmark the permalink.

I Wrote a Poem in Hebrew

Posted on June 29, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

It started as a song. I was in my car (on the way to yet another doctor’s appointment) and singing harmony along to some of the Israeli songs on my playlist, and I started to think about how I could write a song specifically for an alto (like me) where the harmony line becomes the melody of the song. But I was too busy driving to record what I was singing, and by the time I got to the doctor’s office and tried to record the tune on my phone, I’d forgotten most of it. But while I was in the waiting room, and then waiting again in the exam room, I wrote down some of the lyrics that had come to mind while I was singing, and the words kept coming, all in Hebrew.

By the time I got home from the appointment, I had four or five pages of potential lyrics, but no music to sing them to, and no idea how to get the music back. I decided to keep working on the lyrics anyway, shaping them into verses and a chorus and a bridge, in the hope that the melody would come back to me; but I found myself writing a poem instead, without any strict rhymes or rhythms. And after ten or fifteen drafts, and some help from Google Translate, I ended up with a poem I was happy with, about returning to my online Hebrew classes after a year away.

It took me a while to get up the nerve to send the poem to my current Hebrew teacher and ask for her corrections, though. I felt self-conscious about presuming to write a poem in Hebrew, and embarrassed to share what had turned out to be an ode, and kind of emotional and squishy (AKA not cool).

My teacher made a few corrections to the Hebrew, but mostly she just showered me with praise. She told me how meaningful it was to her, after teaching through the past year in Israel, to see that her work was paying off and reaching people at such a deep level. She also asked if she could send it to some of her friends, who also teach at the school, and I jumped up and down for a while before I could calmly type back, Sure. It took me a few more days to get up the nerve to ask her if I could send the poem to our WhatsApp group, to share it with my classmates, but when I finally sent it I got some very nice responses, and I felt great for a whole minute, maybe even two!

Then, of course, the letdown kicked in and I thought, ugh, I’ll have to keep writing poems in Hebrew to keep getting this much attention, and each poem will have to be better than the one before it or else they’d get bored and, really, over it. Or, maybe I could send the poem to new people, so they could be impressed, and then I wouldn’t have to write a whole new thing. And I thought, Aha! The blog! But, most of my readers are not fluent in Hebrew, so I would have to translate it, but I could also include the Hebrew, so they could be impressed in theory, if not in fact.

And as I started to translate the poem I realized that, except for a few details, this poem could just as easily be about the blogging world, and the kindness and curiosity and love we share here, in this place that doesn’t quite exist in the real world, but is very real, for us.

So, thank you for being such amazing, passionate, and compassionate people, and I hope you like the poem.

Hinei! (Here it is!)

An Ode to Citizen Café Tel Aviv

A year ago, I thought I was done with this,

I thought I’d finished learning Hebrew

After two years in the Zoom rooms.

Maybe, I thought, this is my Hebrew

And it can’t improve anymore.

And so, I closed the door on this world.

But,

I still dreamt about the zoom rooms

That existed outside of space, or

I worried,

That didn’t exist in reality at all.

Those zoom rooms were closed to me for almost a year,

And what a year,

In which the world shattered into many little pieces.

I watched the news and said to myself,

Maybe the whole world is different from what I imagined

And there’s nowhere to go for comfort.

Finally I understood

That I missed the zoom rooms

That exists outside of space or that I’d imagined completely,

But,

I’d lost the key

Or I’d lost the path to the rooms

Just when I needed them the most.

I missed all of the weird sentences,

About the beach and the traffic in Tel Aviv,

And about Ross and Rachel from Friends

And about Beyoncé the queen.

I missed all of the speed dating questions that we answered in the rooms,

And I missed this place where love is in the air,

Love of languages, love of food, love of music and laughter,

Love of the land of Israel and the Jewish people.

And so I decided to return

Even if these rooms only exist in my imagination,

Because I remembered that here everyone believes in this world that we create together.

This world isn’t perfect, I know.

Here everyone speaks Hebrew with a different accent,

And they don’t agree on a lot of things.

One man believes in every word of the Torah, and one doesn’t believe in anything.

One woman believes in world peace, and one thinks it’s impossible.

But,

In these rooms, all that matters to us

Is to learn from each other and to support each other

And to create a different world,

A world filled with kindness and curiosity.

That’s why we’re here

From Barcelona, and New York, and Berlin,

And Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem, and London,

And Argentina, and Toronto, and Arizona

To create a beautiful world together,

With all of our words and all of our love.

And because of this, our world, which exists outside of space, is real

For us and for always.

עוד (או אודה ל)סיטיזן קפה תל אביב

לפני שנה, חשבתי שמיציתי את זה,

חשבתי שסיימתי ללמוד עברית,

אחרי שנתיים בחדרי הזום.

אולי, חשבתי, זאת העברית שלי

והיא לא יכולה להשתפר עוד.

ואז, סגרתי את הדלת לעולם הזה.

אבל,

עדיין חלמתי על חדרי הזום

שהיו קיימים מחוץ לחלל, או

דאגתי,

שלא היו קיימים במציאות בכלל.

חדרי הזום האלה היו סגורים לי כמעט שנה,

ואיזו שנה,

שבה העולם התנפץ להרבה חלקים קטנים.

צפיתי בחדשות ואמרתי לעצמי,

אולי כל העולם שונה ממה שדמיינתי

ואין לאן ללכת לנחמה.

סוף סוף הבנתי

שהתגעגעתי לחדרי הזום

שקיימים מחוץ לחלל, או שדמיינתי לגמרי.

אבל,

פספסתי את המפתח

או פספסתי את הדרך לחדרים,

פשוט כשהכי הייתי צריכה אותם.

התגעגעתי לכל המשפטים המוזרים,

על הים והפקקים בתל אביב,

ועל רוס ורייצ׳ל מחברים,

ועל ביונסה המלכה.

התגעגעתי לכל השאלות הספיד דייטינג שעשינו בחדרים,

והתגעגעתי למקום הזה שבו אהבה נמצאת באוויר,

אהבת שפות, אהבת אוכל, אהבת מוזיקה וצחוקים,

אהבת מדינת ישראל והעם היהודי.

ואז החלטתי לחזור,

אפילו אם החדרים האלה רק קיימים בדמיון שלי,

כי זכרתי שפה כולם מאמינים בעולם הזה שאנחנו יוצרים ביחד.

העולם הזה לא מושלם, אני יודעת.

פה כולם מדברים עברית עם מבטא אחר,

ולא מסכימים על הרבה דברים.

איש אחד מאמין בכל מילה בתורה, ואחד לא מאמין בכלום.

אישה אחת מאמינה בשלום עולמי, ואחת חושבת שזה בלתי אפשרי.

אבל,

בחדרים האלה כל מה שחשוב לנו

זה ללמוד אחד מהשני ולתמוך אחד בשני

ולהמציא עולם אחר,

עולם מלא חסד וסקרנות.

בגלל זה אנחנו פה

מברצלונה, וניו יורק, וברלין,

ותל אביב, ויורשלים, ולונדון,

וארגנטינה, וטורונטו, ואריזונה

ליצור עולם יפה ביחד,

עם כל המילים שלנו, וכל האהבה שלנו.

ובגלל זה העולם שלנו, שקיים מחוץ לחלל, הוא אמיתי

לנו ולתמיד.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

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Posted in Uncategorized and tagged blogging, Hebrew, Israel, Jewish, memoir, music, poetry. Bookmark the permalink.

Can I Make Things Happen?

Posted on June 22, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

In a previous post I mentioned that I was putting the idea of what I want out into the universe, and ever since then I’ve been debating with myself over whether I really believe in this concept or not. I want to believe in it. I want to believe that by putting my dreams into words and speaking them outloud I can create some sort of alchemy that will bring these dreams to life. But then I worry that this is all “magical thinking,” which has always been a soft spot of mine, and something I’ve been told is somewhere in mental illness territory.

Logically, I can argue that you have to articulate your dreams in order to reach them, at least as a first step on the journey, because if you don’t know what you want you can’t work towards your goals. And I can also argue that telling other people what you hope for can be practical, both because they may have connections or advice to help you reach your goals, and because having friends remind you of your goals can keep you on track. And, if you strip away the wishful thinking part of the whole thing, it’s reasonable to assume that if you focus more on the things you really want in your life, you will start to notice the small opportunities you might have missed before, and therefore have more chances to reach your goals.

But, I don’t think that’s what I really mean when I think about the power of putting an idea out into the universe, or “manifesting” as it seems to be called today. What I’m really hoping for is that God, or the universe, will give me what I want without me having to do anything.

Early in life I learned about a version of God that actively does these kinds of things for us: pushing water out of the way so that my ancestors could cross the Sea of Reeds, or sending locusts to convince Pharaoh to let our people go. I loved this vision of God, but it was hard to hold onto it in the face of a much more disappointing version of reality. Then I was taught that even though God hears our prayers, and they are therefore never wasted, sometimes, for whatever reason, God’s answer is no; and we should trust that when God says no to our requests that means the best answer was no, even if we will never understand why. This has never been a satisfying idea for me, if only because I don’t really trust authority figures to judge what’s best for me. Even God.

And then, in college, I learned that it is reasonable to doubt that God has a plan as such and is choosing winners and losers, or even has a role in our everyday lives. Instead, I should see God in the Aristotelian way – as the unmoved mover, the one who got the ball rolling but then stepped back and left us to our own devices. And therefore we have to make our own fate, and fight and scrap for everything we want and never wait for luck to kick in.

So, I’m split. I believe, deep in my heart, that there are powers and connections at work in the universe that exist despite my inability to see them. But I also believe, almost as deeply, that believing in such things is ridiculous.

Recently, my mother underwent a heart procedure where they were supposed to insert clips on her mitral valve in order to mitigate the damage to the valve, which was causing fluid to regurgitate into the left ventricle. She has had mild to moderate damage to her mitral valve forever, but a recent test showed that the damage had reached the severe stage and therefore needed to be addressed surgically.

Except, the procedure was unsuccessful. It’s not that the clips were unable to adequately close the holes in the mitral valve but that the doctor was unable to even deploy the clips in the first place, because of changes in Mom’s anatomy caused by her scoliosis. The doctor also discovered two other important things during this failed procedure: one, because of these changes in her anatomy the open heart surgery that would have to be performed to fully replace her mitral valve would be contraindicated (aka too dangerous), and two, the damage to the mitral valve isn’t actually so severe and therefore can be managed with medication.

After reading up on “manifesting,” I started to worry that my fears about the open heart surgery had caused this procedure to fail. I was asking God to make sure we didn’t have to do the open heart surgery, or anything that could put my mother’s life at risk, and what if, in response, God said, Okay, we’ll just stop it all right here. The logical part of my brain says that God didn’t do any such thing, and that this was going to be the outcome no matter what I thought or prayed for. But if that’s true, doesn’t that mean that my prayers are a waste of time in every case?

In the research I did on “manifesting,” I came across different interpretations of the idea. One said that having any negative thoughts causes negative things to happen, so, it really is all my fault. Another said that if you do affirmations a thousand or so times a day, you will draw your goals closer to you, with your vibrations. The most practical interpretation I read, though, said that the point of all of the thinking and hoping and focusing on your goals is to get you to start thinking of actions you can take towards your goals, and to encourage you to notice more opportunities than you otherwise would. There is still some magic implied in this interpretation, along the lines of “God helps those who help themselves,” but it’s a kind of magic I can almost believe in.

The reality is, you can argue for almost any world view you want to, and find plenty of evidence for your choice, but there will always be loose threads left unexplained, because we don’t, and can’t, know the whole picture. We are all guessing, or at the very least, interpreting the data we ourselves have access to as if that’s all the data that exists.

So, do I believe that I can manifest my dreams by saying them out loud? Maybe. I don’t know.

For now, I’m going to hope that the doctors can find the right combination of medications to help Mom manage her mitral valve, and allow her to have the energy to do more of the things she loves, for many years to come. And I’m going to keep looking at the stuffed puppy dog sitting on top of my computer screen, and hope that the real life version of him will arrive someday soon. I don’t know if God listens to my hopes and prayers, but I know that it feels good to put it all into words, and saying my dreams outloud makes me feel like I’m taking steps to make the world into the kind of place I can live in, just by imagining that it already is that place. We’ll see where it takes me.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

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Posted in Uncategorized and tagged dogs, health, Jewish, manifesting, memoir. Bookmark the permalink.

Grandpa’s Memoir

Posted on June 15, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

Recently, I realized that while I had typed up all of my grandfather’s letters back and forth with his father (despite many of my great grandfather’s responses being in Yiddish and broken English) and my grandmother’s travel diaries (listing all of the things she hated about each country she visited) and all of the children’s stories my grandfather had written for his grandchildren, or at least the ones that I could find, I hadn’t typed up his forty some odd page memoir, even though I was sure I had. We’ve had copies of his handwritten memoir forever, and maybe that’s why I assumed it had been typed up or at least scanned into the computer at some point, but no.

So, since I’m on summer break from work, I decided to type the memoir and give myself the opportunity to hear my grandfather’s voice once again.

I had four grandparents, of course, but my father’s parents were both difficult people with not-so-great English who were unlikely to write down their thoughts in any language. And my mother’s mother, who wrote quite a lot, was not the most generous soul, so reading through her poems and essays, can be, at the very least, claustrophobic.

But my mother’s father was a writer (as well as a teacher) and towards the end of his life he decided to sit down and write an account of his childhood, specifically for his grandchildren. He wrote, early in the pages, that he wished he’d had such an account from his own grandparents, and so he wanted to make sure to do that for us.

For the past few weeks, whenever I’ve had time, and energy, I’ve been sitting in front of the computer transcribing a few pages of my grandfather’s handwriting – hearing his unique voice and how he played with punctuation (a dash here, a comma there, often both at the same time) and how he often repeated words for emphasis, like hard hard, for very hard, or much much, for very much. Interestingly, I’ve noticed this same pattern in Modern Hebrew, where le’at le’at (or slow slow) means very slowly, and maher maher (or fast fast) means very quickly.

I was sure I remembered everything important from having read the memoir years ago, but of course there were so many things I’d forgotten: like his descriptions of the outhouse behind the tenement across the street, and how lucky his family was to live in a tenement that had two indoor toilets per floor; or his description of all of the wonderful food his mother made for holidays, or the deep anxiety she lived with year round and that was finally echoed by everyone else during the High Holidays; and there were all of the stores he accompanied his mother to, when he was only four years old, because his English was better than hers; and the way he described his childhood synagogue on Yom Kippur, where the Cantor would close the windows, to avoid catching a cold from the breeze, leaving many people struggling with the heat, and fainting from the combination of the heat and the hunger from fasting.

My grandfather was a wonderful storyteller; I’ve always known that. And he had strong feelings about the ways his childhood orthodoxy no longer fit him as he grew up and began thinking through his Judaism for himself. And I knew that he loved language and food and his family. None of the information or the wisdom in these pages is new to me, but I am so grateful for the opportunity to dawdle over these pages again and to take my time as I type (because I am a very slow typist) and visit with him again.

In the midst of the typing, my great aunt Ellen, my grandfather’s baby sister, died at the age of one hundred and eight. She had outlived the rest of her siblings by decades, taking on the mantle of family elder and family glue. And with her death it feels like a whole generation is disappearing at once, except for all of the memories they’ve left behind, including this memoir my grandfather wrote just a few years before he died. These forty short pages are giving me a chance to have conversations with him that we never got to have when he was alive, and I am so grateful to have these words to help keep his memory alive, and the memory of his baby sister whom we loved very much, and, who, as a result, we will never really lose.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

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Posted in Uncategorized and tagged death, grandparents, loss, love, memoir, memories, writing. Bookmark the permalink.

Back in Hebrew Class

Posted on June 8, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

I’m back in my online Hebrew classes and it is such a relief. I didn’t realize how much I missed this imaginary place, this zoom class that exists somewhere outside of space and which I can get to without leaving my apartment. After almost a year away – and such a year – I feel so much gratitude to be back.

Up until the moment class started, though, I wasn’t sure how I would feel. I was already feeling guilty for spending the money on this instead of on ten other things that seemed more important, and I felt needy and silly for wanting to be taught instead of teaching, and I felt ridiculous for not having been to Israel yet after so many years of wanting to go.

And then, because I was out of practice with the time difference between New York and Israel, I thought the class started at 2:30 PM and was surprised when I checked my email and found out that the class had already started, at 1:30, and I was late. I still had to set up my computer and brush my hair and change my shirt (I wear my pajamas all day every day when I’m not at work) and log into the new learning system the school had created while I was away, and by the time I finally popped up on screen I was fifteen minutes late.

But I was fine. No, better than fine.

The class (or the screen) was full and there were some familiar faces, but mostly the faces were new to me, including the teacher. And yet I was able to keep up, and my Hebrew was much closer to the tip of my tongue than I’d feared. We didn’t talk about the news, much, instead we focused on the things we could control, like how to be kind and generous with each other and leave room for making mistakes. I’m a big fan of being treated like a big puppy dog when I make mistakes, instead of hit over the head with a hammer.

During my first week back in class I went to every practice group I could get to, which ended up being more than I’d gone to in the two years I’d spent in the program before. I wanted to challenge myself, socially and with my Hebrew, to get back into the stream as quickly as possible. And I didn’t realize until afterwards how easy it was, compared to even a year ago, to manage the social anxiety and fear of the unknown that comes with the practice groups – especially in week one when I had no idea who my teachers or fellow classmates would be. In our regular classes things are more predictable: you get a class list ahead of time, and an introduction from your teacher, and that’s your group for the semester. But in practice groups we’re dropped into breakout rooms with random strangers to discuss random topics and then we’re being tested on things we’ve learned in previous semesters, generally using vocabulary I forgot long ago.

I don’t think I’ll be able to do this many groups every week, both because I have doctors’ appointments coming up and other things I need to get done this summer, but I’d really like to work harder this summer than in the past and push myself and my Hebrew as far as possible.

Except, despite all of the progress I’ve made on my mental health, somewhere around the third or fourth practice group the negative voices in my head returned: Why am I such a loser that I have to pay people to spend time with me and laugh at my jokes, why is everyone else so much more impressive and successful than me, why does everyone else get to be married and have children and travel around the world and have so much more energy and good health than me?

I’m not sure why the negative voices were on pause for the first few days, but at least that gave me a few moments to revel in the joy of being back in class. But then the avalanche of pain made me realize that this was probably why I’d decided to stop taking classes last year. I thought, at the time, that I had run out of ambition to learn more Hebrew, but I think it was more that the classes were bringing up too much internal noise that I couldn’t handle and couldn’t drown out.

The anxiety I used to be so focused on, around making mistakes and saying the wrong thing, seems to have been hiding a much deeper pool of anxiety around all of the things I want to have in my life and believe I can’t have. Being in class seems to bring up so much longing – to go to Israel, to have more friends, to be more successful in my career, and to be in love – and when all of that longing comes up to the surface, my deeply felt belief is that none of that is possible for me.

In the past, when these feelings overwhelmed me, my answer was to turn off the faucet altogether, usually without realizing what I was doing. But now, it seems like my brain is telling me that I am ready for more, or should be, and therefore it’s time to let me know that I want more; but I still feel like the things I long for are impossible, and I don’t know why my brain believes I’m closer to ready.

So, in the midst of seeing real progress, and feeling real joy, I’m also feeling awful at the same time, and it sucks. I’m so frustrated by how long it takes to make progress in my life, and how often I have to stomp the brakes to avoid falling off cliffs that seem to come out of nowhere. I wish I knew how long each step forward would take, and which goals would actually be reachable, because then I could plot it all out on a calendar and be comforted that it’s all going to happen when it needs to happen; but instead I have no idea what will be possible next week, let alone next year.

My brain remains mysterious to me, and I don’t understand what it is about Hebrew in particular that has opened this door for me, but I am committed to continuing to go forward in whichever ways feel possible. So I will make as much of this summer of Hebrew as possible, enjoying the laughter and the challenges and the friendships, and I will also try to make sense of the pain and confusion that come along with them. And I will keep trying to remind myself that this is what progress looks like and feels like, for me, even if I wish it could be different.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

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Posted in Uncategorized and tagged anxiety, Hebrew, Israel, Jewish, love, memoir, mental health, zoom. Bookmark the permalink.

The Flowers on the Pawpaw Tree

Posted on June 1, 2024 by rachelmankowitz

The Pawpaw tree has flowered again. Actually, some of the flowers have already bloomed and fallen away, exposing the tiny fruit getting ready to grow. There’s endless inspiration in watching this pawpaw tree go through its cycle of life and death and renewal each year. In the winter, when all I can see is the bare tree with no leaves or buds or fruit or flowers, it would be easy to imagine that there is no life left, but I know better. I know that spring always comes again.

**Can you see the three little fruits in a clump?**

When Cricket died in October, I put her collar around the trunk of the pawpaw tree, not because I thought she might come back to life herself in the spring, but because I hoped her life would be an inspiration to the tree, to keep growing. Ellie’s collar was added in December and in a way it made the tree seem more whole, because now it had both the quiet joy of Ellie and the loud vibrancy of Cricket to help it along.

**This picture was taken in December, when the Pawpaw tree was still sleeping.**

I don’t know why this small gesture has been so meaningful to me, but every time I see their collars there on the pawpaw tree I feel a sense of comfort and reassurance. I still hear the dogs in the apartment all the time, and I see shadows and imagine that one of them is running past my door. It still surprises me how solid these memories feel, of all of the dogs and people I’ve loved and lost. It’s not that “I see dead people,” but I feel their presence in my mind and in my heart in a way that is so much more substantial than the words “ghost” or “spirit” would suggest.

My grandfather, who died when I was eight years old, is still a daily presence in my life: his smile and his laugh and the strength of his attention bolster me through so many difficult days. The same is true of some of the less positive characters from my past too, unfortunately, but there’s at least reassurance in knowing that my memories remain a part of me, and none of that time was wasted.

However temporary nature may be, with flowers blooming and wilting, and dogs coming into my life and passing away, I know that I will never really lose them. It all remains. And I think that’s a gift, even if at times a bittersweet one.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

62 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged dogs, memoir, nature, pawpaw, temporary. Bookmark the permalink.

rachelmankowitz

Tag Archives: memoir

Watching Movies on Chaiflicks

We Need a New Air Conditioner

Stuffing My Critics in a Jar

I Wrote a Poem in Hebrew

Can I Make Things Happen?

Grandpa’s Memoir

Back in Hebrew Class

The Flowers on the Pawpaw Tree

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