Book Review: Brazen by Julia Haart

´I may be tiny, but I can be deadly´.

I am a consumer of almost everything about the condition of the off-the derech. What is now at the margins, the dissent wave against the various establishments, may one day represent the mainstream. It used to happen with the Hasidim once upon a time as well.

However, after reading quite a couple of such testimonies - and watching some movies as well - there is a given setting which defines this emerging genre, a pattern which at the limit is a easy/cheap recipe stereotypically reproducing itself. Some of its features are: escape from the ´cult´; cutting the ties/becoming estranged with/from the ´old world´ - among which children, siblings, parents and/or spouse; few paragraphs repeated in different forms about the oppressive dress code and the nida laws; excessive search for sexual adventures; getting saved by someone, something, an organisation, literature, the non-Jewish boyfriend. It looks as a cartoonish - cynical - description which unfortunately is what often the ´outside´ world wants to listen. No matter if it is the same old story re-told again and again, important is to have a bit of fun with an escape-game-from the Middle Ages cultish mindset.

There are some noticeable exceptions but unfortunately the more I read the less I am interested in continuing this intellectual adventure. Although, my curiosity is bigger than my literary standards, therefore count on my to review the next OTD memoir.

My latest journey was Julia Haart of Netflix´s My Unorthodox Life, Brazen. I had watched the movie - rather said, punished myself to do it - and was appalled by the vulgarity and exhibitionism. Plus, doing a bit of research, I realized how fake this ´reality´ show actually was. Both Haart and her daughter Batsheva divorced shortly after the end of the series, despite the excessive displays of love and harmony towards their respective spouses. 

I started the book though with an open mind and I appreciated the first part of it, despite the high need of editing and the overall bad and incoherent writing. Plus an inadvertence or two, like mentioning that ´yeshivish´ is a sect. 

Haart was born in Soviet Russia and left with her non-religious parents when she was three years old. Her parents, scientists by background, turned religious - not Chabad though - and with the enthusiasm of the new comers hurried to adopt extreme versions of different religious practices. Although lacking a formal education, Haart used to be a teacher - religious, including - in various girls school. As a Monsey resident, the mother of four felt oppressed by the men-predominant society, parting ways to a world where ´women acquire greatness by proxy´. Her taking off from the religious world took her around 12 years. At 42, she left her husband and started a career as shoe designer, living the fashion glamour while living in hotels by the week and heimische for her children during the weekend. 

The ways in which she fought to keep his children close, despite her more and more extravagant style is meritory and no matter the circumstances, her success had a positive impact on the life of her children - her daughter Miriam and Batsheva are social media stars with fat advertising contracts and following. 

Most probably there is much hidden from her story, that may not suit her ´feminist´ assertions. Less sordid still obsessive, her sexual adventures do not necessarily bring anything spectacular to her story. In 2022, many women do have sex when and where and with whom they want, especially her aimed audience. If they would have been told in a more literary way, maybe there would have been a higher interest, otherwise, a big bored sigh from me. 

Her deep anger for being for over 40 years kept captive in a society not at all friendly towards women - bodies, clothes, their careers other than baby-making - is understandable. But there were people among the religious who invested first a humongous amount of money, without recipes, in her company. 

Haart adds the character of the ´business women´ to the series of OTD life stories. It was partially interesting to get into her story, although I doubt greatly the veridicity of many facts. And a memoir whose authenticity is in doubt ceased for being a memoir at all. 

Stories from a Yeshiva

 ´I don´t remember when I stopped thinking every day would be my last day´.

Gerry Albarelli answered an announcement for an English teacher opening at a school in Brooklyn and will end up teaching for around five years in a boys religious school. He does not reveal in the book explicitly the name of the yeshiva, but it is a Satmar boys´ school, which according to his descriptions - non-judgemental, and this is a greatest merit of the book - looks like a very dangerous and chaotic place. Teachers are surrounded by 3-4 graders and almost lynched; the teachers are beating the children with no regrets and administrative consequences. Only the English teachers are running as fast as they can after a short amount of time.

The boys are rarely speaking English and the teacher doesn´t speak Yiddish but they will find a way to communicate and learn together, in the good spirit of the religious learning. The teacher will create attractive classes, creating stories with the boys themselves distributed as characters. An idea which boosted the interest for the classes. ´They wanted to learn English if only to find out what they were doing in the stories´.

One of the big merit of the book is to elegantly share the stories, without any trace of patronizing. This is what is going to a Hasidic yeshiva in Brooklyn, a secret for many, especially girls.  The non-critical stance is very important, as it avoids the horrible stereotypes easily sliding into the stories about Hasidic life and education in general. But what is the point of writing stories which are biased, stealing from the reader the pleasure of making his or her own opinions about a book. 

Last but not least, Teacha! suggests to educators creative ways to build bridges during the educational process especially in a diverse cultural context. After all, the role of a teacher is to share knowledge and this may happen no matter how different his or her culture his or her culture is compared to that of the students.

Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano

 

Born in 1926 in Paris, from Jewish parents - father originary from Austria, mother from Hungary - Dora Bruder was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. Modiano is trying to recreate her life from fragments of archives and encounters with the places she and her family lived. There is a race against forgetting, for marking the memory of the deported. 

I feel there are so many untold stories of French Jews, stories of resilience, of resistance, but also hopeless stories, of people killed and disappeared without trace. People who were forced to wear the German-imposed yellow star and betrayed by their non-German neighbours. 2014 Literature Nobel Prize Winner Modiano himself has a complex WWII Jewish history, on his father side. While researching and writing about Dora Bruder, there are episodes from his own life slipping away, as memories or sensations or allusions. 

The I-centered story of Dora Bruder is a story of Paris too. A story of Jewish Paris, of immigration and despair, of a geography of hate and exclusion, but also of everyday life flowing slowly its pace, out of history. It is a history common to many Jews, those hidden in Catholic institutions and maybe never brought back to their families or to their faith. Dora run away from her Catholic school, she was for sure a rebelious girl. 

But fate and what humans made of it, wanted her to die in Auschwitz. She ´disappeared´. There are so many hidden chances and opportunities and failures in a name. Dora Bruder. She never got old. Or had her own children to stroll with alongside the streets of Paris. 

Since 2015, her name was given to a street in the 18th arrondissement. 

I had access to the book in the audiobook format, read by Didier Sandre, an actor that played in J´Accuse too, a film inspired by the tragic fate of Albert Dreyfus. 

Jewish Learning with Jewish Interactive

I am a constant supporter and beneficiary of the extraordinary power of online Jewish learning. Particularly if it happens to live in a non-English, remote community without direct access to diverse source of education, online classes for every age, but especially for children, are a great mitzvah. As an adult, I had the chance to attend various online classes on a big variety of Jewish topics, from the comfort of my home, long before Covid made Zoom calls and online classes fashionable - by default.

The more, the better and therefore I was very excited to get in touch via social media - another blessing on the online connections - by the representatives of Jewish Interactive, a fresh new website offering resources to teachers, school leaders and parents. 

The site is very friendly, both in terms of design - fonts, colours, accessibility - and information. There are games, and books and tutorials about holidays, Israel and the Hebrew alphabet. If you are a parent who haven´t had the chance to attend the Jewish school, you can learn at the pace of your child or refresh your long forgotten memories of Jewish education. Among the topics featured: Hebrew, Parasha, Jewish holidays, Jewish books. 

According to the site´s representatives, the target of the website wants to help any teacher of Hebrew or Jewish studies to create their own content based on the sourecs provided. The content can be accesses in English, but the search can be done in any of the 13 support languages. All descriptions of images, for example, are automatically translated into the 13 languages allowing for searches in those languages.

Jewish Interactive plans to train teachers to become master teachers based on professional courses currently under development. They can create their own lessons and become part of the community. Under the community section of the website, teachers will be able to join and list their bios and expertise, and share their coures. Thus, teachers of Hebrew and Jewish Studies throughout the world will be encouraged not only to contribute but to support and share their experiences. As for now, teaching can be done via Google Classroom. 

Although most of the access to the materials - over 17,000 Jewish and Hebrew games made by teachers - is free, there are also paid options, in case you need a wider access. For instance, for families - up to 5 children - the subscription is of 4.99 USD/month, while for educators - 11.99/month. Especially in the case of educators, the paid option makes possible to use various tools to trace and organise your classes. In both cases, a 7-day full access trial is possible, which is enough time to figure out the advantages and shortcomings, if any. In order to access the resources, either for free or as a paid membership, one needs to set up an account. 

For children and families thinking about making aliyah soon, the section Ivrit Misaviv La´Olam can be used as a good start. Besides language tools, there are also interactive games explaining everyday life in Israel, which can be useful for both children and parents.

Jewish Interactive is browser-based. You can use it from your PC or/and iPad but not phones. All lessons allow the creator to both write and/or voice instructions. Some of the JIGs (Jewish Interactive Games) were created by the specialists from Beit Issie Shapira in order to help the learning process of children with disabilities.

I will definitely continue following the next steps of JI and will clearly encourage my son to improve his Hebrew and Jewish knowledge by using it during the upcoming summer holidays.

Fear by Chana Blankshteyn translated by Anita Norich

 

Yiddish women writers are becoming discovered lately through excellent translations. After the Blume Lempel and Yenta Mash who were relatively known among the Yiddish knowledgeable, the short stories of a well travelled Vilna based author, Chana Blankshteyn seen the light of the English-speaking literary realm, in the translation of Anita Norich. 

For those curious about an Yiddish-English translation of the short stories who gives the name of the volume, Fear, they can practice this exercise offered by In Geveb Yiddish publication. 

Blankshteyn is relatively less known outside her time and Vilna. Contemporary with Isaac Babel, she dies on a natural death in 1943. Her collection of stories was originally published under the title Noveles with a foreword by Max Weinreich and was one of the last Yiddish books to appear in Vilna before WWII. There are only a few copies available right now from this collection, out of which only two in the US. The author who felt at ease with the world and travelled extensively, especially throughout Europe, was eulogized as a writer and a pioneer for women´s rights and the poor. 

The first English volume of Fear recently published includes nine short stories. The story that gives the name to the volume deserves fully to be given the title of the volume because it is an admirable collection of emotions and contrasts, a vibrant episode from the life of a character, full of dramatism and suspense. It is so well written that one may need a break before continuing with the rest of the stories. Almost all the stories though look like sequences from the life of some characters brought together temporarily, as it usually happens in life. After the story ends, we may guess they life continued but it is out of the sight of our literary imagination.

There are mostly women with voices represented in the stories, and they are coming for various layers of Jewish life, especially non-religious ones - although in one of the stories there is a ´comrade rabbi´ requested to officiate a chupa - Jewish wedding - to two secular Jews, one of them the granddaughter of a Hasidic rebbe. There is a world on the move, changing both in social, political and economic ways. Not surprisingly, there is the character of the ´foreigner´, more or less Jewish, who is entangled in relationship with local Jewish girls. The foreigner is the messenger of a globalized world, and so are becoming the relationships too.

The women in the stories are orphans, single mothers by choice and not because widowed, working women, women not interested to have a relationship at all. In most cases, the location of the story is not mentioned - except Paris - and so is their Jewish identity. Although, the references to High holidays in autumn or the month of Tammuz - actually, the only month mentioned; Tammuz usually takes place between the Gregorian June-July and is the month where the 17th of Tammuz fast takes place, which marks the beginning of the three weeks leading to Tisha B´Av; overall, not a happy month in the Jewish calendar - are a reference that we are moving within the Jewish realm. References about anti-Semitism and pogroms do exist too, but one must remember that in this part of the world, such events were rather the rule than the exception therefore they were part of the everyday Jewish reality.

With calm and cold blood, analytically and observing, sometimes from very afar, Chana Blankshteyn is a witness of her times, a literary journalist of a world that soon is about to disappear. We - me including - may be tempted to judge it according to the current literary standards and expectations. But this is a wrong take. Rather, we should open our curiosity towards exploring the Yiddish world of past times. I wish there are more such books brought to the editorial light, they mean more than any historical reference because they are slices of life as it once was.

Rating: 4 stars 

David Grossman: More than I Love My Life (transl. into German by Anne Birkenhauer)

 

Included on the 2022 International Booker Prize Longlist, More Than I Love My Life (transl. into English by veteran Hebrew to English translator Jessica Cohen)/Was Nina wusste (transl. into German from Hebrew by Anne Birkenhauer) is a multi-generational women story. Vera, originally from Yugoslavia, now in her 90s and at the beginning of Alzheimer´s, is back to the feared Goli Otok Island, the Adriatic Alcatraz where she was imprisoned and tortured for refusing to betray her non-Jewish husband, involved in the anti-Tito resistance. The return is part of a movie, her granddaughter Gili is making about her, and her daughter, Nina, who abandoned Gili when she was 3, is also taking the trip.

The novel is inspired by the story of one of Grossman´s confidante and I felt actually that this story has the emergency of writing down before it is too late, before the story is lost. Therefore, although it is far from being a short read, there are some parts which look like they were either wrote too fast, and therefore, not all the details come along together and the characters may have less depth. In other places, the emotional aspects take over the prose and it is not necessarily in the advantage of the writing.

Nevertheless, there is a certain attraction of the writing, as usual in the case of Grossman´s books, although personally I feel like his last books are somewhere floating on a sea of incertitudes and the characters look like unfinished paintings. 

Rating: 3 stars

Get Ready for a Summer of Gazoz

In full honesty, I don´t like - I deeply despise actually - most of gazoz - a word of Turkish origin desining ´gas´ - based drinks. I am not even a big friend of champagne...lame, I know, I know, I know...

But I cannot resist to think about new creative way to drink my summer, especially when my summer - compared with the long friendly Tel Aviv summer - is usually very short. Finding for inspiration that may help improve my hobby bartender skills is always a good idea, especially when one of the author of the collection of various gazoz recipes is Adeena Sussman, the popular chef of Sababa fame. The other author of Gazoz is Benny Briga who brought back in fashion in Tel Aviv the old soda. 

The drinks offered in the book do use a big variety of spices, ingredients, confits and fermented fruits. They are inspired by various seasonal harvest and by the local flora diversity. Fruits are combined with herbs and spices and flowers and as someone almost addicted to everything roses I am sure will dream by night about different drinks including rose petals as their featured ingredient. 

More than the recipes - which are relatively easy, only the ingredients may be a bit problematic to acquire if living outside Israel and the Middle East - in themselves, those sparkling soda glasses do share stories. Think about the rosewater syrup your grandma made for you, all the jams made of the fruits picked up fresh from your garden or the herbs your neighbour decided to share with you. In every glass, besides spices and a drop of syrup, there is so much humanity too.

After all, there may be a ´fizzy power of bubbles´ that I am willingly staying away of it...for now.