Back to the Past

Today's fashion trends has me laughing. 

You know how in Back to the Future, when Marty ends up 30 years in the past, in 1955, and everything is beyond recognition and comprehension? 

So if Marty took the Delorian back 30 years from 2025 to 1995 (God, I'm old) he would see that—

Not THAT much of a difference. 

OK, cell phones aren't around yet, and he would actually have to use a paper map, but the fashions are the same. 

And, well? '90s fashion kinda sucked. 

Floor length denim skirts? 

Platform shoes? 

The long, blocky blazer? 

They're baaaa-aaaaack. 

Skater jeans? Why? 

I can't find anything to wear. 

I'm going to have to wait this out for another few years. Now, the 2010s? THAT was fashion.   

"Rabbis and Wives"

Back in May, the NY Times Book Review rhapsodized over Sons and Daughters, a very posthumous English publication of a Yiddish serial by Chaim Grade. 

Chaim Grade (pronounced Grah-deh) was a Yiddish writer of great renown, to the point when Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel for literature, many in the Yiddish community thought it should have gone to Grade. 

Grade died in 1982, and his widow refused to release any of his papers; after her death in 2010, his documents were pounced upon, and a Yiddish serial that had yet to be translated and published was dusted off and made ready. 

I don't like fighting other library patrons for new releases, so I requested an older Grade book, Rabbis and Wives. It's a series of three novellas, each depicting a very certain type of rabbi: a humble, learned, compassionate man, who eschews a shteler because he cannot bear to tell the poor women of the community that her chicken is not kosher, nor does he want to be embroiled in local disputes. This rabbi is not recognized by many for his holiness, but he doesn't care, obviously. 

Grade vividly depicts a world that was, down to the women's fashions and styling of male facial hair. He describes the children chafing against the ideology of their parents—including the debate if the Land of Israel should be settled by Jews now (Mizrachis) or if Moshiach should come first (Agudahniks). 

The level of detail is mesmerizing, to the point I have no idea how non-observant Jews or non-Jews could possibly chap this universe. One visual made me laugh out loud: the young people are inappropriately taking boat rides down the river on Shabbos, boys and girls cavorting together, however, of course they would not smoke in the streets on Shabbos, for: "they come from good families, after all." 

I had not expected a book such a this, and pulled up his Wiki entry. Apparently, he had learned in Novoardik, and seven years under the Chazon Ish. Rabbis and Wives is dedicated to the wife of the Chazon Ish! Despite the fact that Grade left observance, he apparently maintained a great respect for the rabbinate and his own Rav.  

Grade's mother and first wife were killed in the Holocaust; they remained while he fled, believing that women and children wouldn't be harmed by the Nazis. He tends not to address the war in his books; they are mainly time capsules. 

Here, one can truly envision what life was like before the war; what the shul politics were, what the marriages were like, how children behaved (gotta say, kinda badly). The perspective isn't narrow through one narrator, so one can see the whole picture. 

I think I'm gonna buy Sons and Daughters. 

The Wise Elder

Maggie Anton takes great fictional liberties in her Rashi's Daughters trilogy, but there is a depiction therein that I still think about, a year or so after reading it. 

Rashi came from a family of vintners, but he was away at yeshiva for many years before returning to the family home. His widowed mother ran the show.

He dutifully toils in the fields with the others, but in terms of agricultural strategy, his mother is the one with the experience. So if the rains came too early or too late, she knows what to do in order to salvage the crop. 

As Book 1: Yocheved, continues, Rashi's mother begins to suffer from cognitive decline. Yet even in dementia, the family still turn for her knowledge when it comes what to do with the grapes. Even when mentally disadvantaged, her experience is still sought after and respected. 

In a time when the science of agriculture—all of science, rather—stayed the same for hundreds of years, the wisdom of elders was valued and respected. They saw many years of bad weather, which would result in a bad harvest. Yet in their old ages, they would know what to do to at least make out the year with something rather than nothing. 

Yet as technology advanced to the point that the new becomes old in a matter of months, not centuries, that once valuable experience became obsolete. The reverence of the aged became scorn. 

I'm not elderly yet, but as I am almost 40, I'm noticing a shift. Younger people use unfamiliar slang that doesn't feel natural to me (I still say "awesome" and "dude"; I have no idea how to use "salty" organically except in terms of food). When I pass by 20-somethings on the street, I realize now I'm not their contemporary anymore. Han is just a few years older than me but other guys his age are marrying off children, while our oldest is six. 

I've become that crotchety complainer by weddings. "The music is too loud. Do you have ear plugs?" "This is how the kids are dancing nowadays? Shrieking and jumping? This isn't dancing!" "Can we leave yet?" 

I've also become aware how important life experience is. It's not the new features on the phone that matters. It's about learning from one's mistakes, doing better, being willing to recalibrate. It's about understanding what is important, what should be priorities. It's about the values we carry and try to pass on. It's about so much more than technology. 

I've already resigned myself to a future witnessing eye-rolls in response to whatever I say, but that'll just be the youth not getting it. 

Some More Trauma Talk

You'll have to bear with while I squeeze this topic to death; I was obsessed with this article when I first read it, and reread it more than once. 

To continue: 

Around the time the piece came out, Han was listening to Edith Eger's The Choice (he likes Audible). Edith Eger is a Hungarian survivor, but she didn't practice a particularly religious life; when she came to America, she tried to deny her experiences, attempting to make herself as American as possible (but I must say, her attempts to beat the Hungarian inflection from her speech was not successful). 

She didn't want to be identified as a survivor. Han noted that her experience must have been different from that of our grandparents, who dwelt in a religious community who were primarily survivors. My grandmother's idea of small talk was "So, where were you in the war?" 

I guess that's the logic of support groups. Being amongst other people who have also dealt with your experience can help us bear the burden. 

After first reading the article, I had felt this burning need to track down Brodesser-Akner and pour out to her my own story. She'll understand! And yet I know that sometimes sharing pain is not what some want to do. 

Rachel Goldberg-Polin wrote an article following Hersh's murder that, in essence, begs people to not approach her with their pain:

When my girls and I are having a moment walking, breathing and smiling, and someone stops us and starts crying, they are robbing us of a moment of respite from the horror we are digesting. When I am walking alone, with a hat, sunglasses and my head down, it is me saying, “Please, oh please, let me breathe for a moment without having to also carry your pain. Your pain is as real as mine, but I have no strength at the moment to carry yours too. I love you and am endlessly grateful for you loving Hersh. I love you for loving the hostage families. I love you for trying to help. But please, if you want to help me, let me go on walking. When you see me and our eyes cross paths, please, oh please, just smile and wave. My knees are buckling from all the wounds people are sharing. I am just not formidable and powerful enough. Not yet.” 

Sometimes we do have to sit with our discomfort, and gauge first whether others are willing to share that pain. People are often at different stages of their grief journey, and maybe they can't always go there.

Another comment to Brodesser-Akner was how sometimes in our need to fight the trauma, it can negatively overtake our lives. The commenter said that her mother also had a traumatic birthing experience, and became a focused advocate of home birth. Yet, her daughter said, her book writing and agenda so overtook all that her children were neglected. This reaction to her trauma may have seemed healthy—after all, she's fighting for change—but it in turn traumatized her children. 

We also have to be mindful of collateral damage, which can happen in numerous ways. 

The article ends off that Brodesser-Akner concludes with this awareness:

It happened. It will never not have happened . . . after all your attempts at healing—when you finally realize that you are forever changed—you can allow yourself to embrace your trauma. You survive what happened to you, then you survive your survival, and then the gift you're given is that you fall in love with your whole life, inextricable from the bad thing that happened to you. 

It's sort of like with people. We sometimes wish that a person in our life was a little less this and a little more that, but people are an entire being; you can't pick and choose what parts we want to keep and what parts not. 

It's not that the stories of our lives are stuck in only one point in time. Our grandparents accepted their experiences, but they didn't allow them to define their lives. It was but one year amongst many. 

I sometimes meet young, bright things, who haven't yet hit that inevitable bump in the road, and I know how small their perception of life is. Because knowing grief, I feel, gives me a more complete perception of the human experience. Before, it was narrow and shallow; now, while it may be more painful, it is more accurate and true.