Then and Now

Two Turkish Jews—A Perfect Couple, 1984

My uncle grew up in America in a poor Jewish neighborhood with gangs. He served in the U.S. Army and became a foot doctor. He was a beloved pasha—the head of the family—to his wife and two sons and had a manly laugh. My aunt, his wife, grew up in Turkey, coming here at fifteen after difficult years with a lack of food during the Great War. She was a skilled homemaker—happy in their beautiful house in New Jersey, joyously cooking Sephardic meals for her family and relatives who came on holidays to celebrate together their survival. When her sons were grown, she wanted to work outside the house at “something interesting,” but that never happened. When my aunt and uncle turned eighty, they moved to Florida—a paradise without cold winters. One day my cousin, their firstborn, a heart doctor, and his wife, visited. The four were seated on the balcony drinking freshly squeezed orange juice. My cousin, chatting, said something about the Democrats being good. His father said quickly and clearly, “Mama and I have always voted Republican.” After a minute, suddenly my aunt said to her husband, “Actually, all my life I’ve voted Democrat.” As my cousin tells it, my uncle’s jaw fell—so far that it fell all the way back to New Jersey.

The Good Book, 2003

One day my mother called to tell me she was reading a book—and it was DISGUSTING!

At that time, she was around ninety-two, and living on 23rd Street in Manhattan. Every day she very much enjoyed going to the Senior Center nearby. They had lectures, each day on a different subject, like opera or Shakespeare. They had a bridge club, a book group, and what’s more, they served lunch. Also, she had friends there. The Center was perfect for her, a widow living alone.

On the phone that day, I asked if the book was for her Senior Center book group.

“Yes,” she said.

Thinking for a minute, I said, “Is the book Lady Chatterley’s Lover?”

“YES!” she yelled, astonished. “How did you know?” She couldn’t believe it.

“Well,” I said, “the leader of your book group likes classics. But look, Mom,” I added, responding to her word disgusting, “the book is about the human body. It’s okay. It’s not about terrorism.” (I said this because the World Trade Center attack in New York on 9/11 was still fresh in our minds.)

A few days later, on Yom Kippur, I was in synagogue, upstairs in the women’s section. Usually my mother arrived early, before me, but she wasn’t there. And all morning, each time the door opened, I looked to see if it was her. It was uncomfortable twisting my head each time. But it was always someone else. She didn’t come! I was very worried. Was she okay? Where was she?

After services, I went outside and phoned her. “Mom, are you okay? Why didn’t you come to synagogue today?”

 “Yes, everything is fine,” she said. “No need to worry. I decided to stay home to finish the book. All morning I was reading it, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

The next week, my mother told me she decided to place a personal ad in The Forward. That’s the great Jewish newspaper founded in New York in 1897 and still going strong. Now it had two editions, one in Yiddish, as before, and a very popular one in English. She showed me what she wrote about herself, that she wanted to find a man of about eighty, for a friendship. She said she was Sephardic, with interest in opera, Shakespeare, bridge, and travel.

“You didn’t say what a magnificent cook you are?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. “Enough with cooking. I did that enough.”

When my copy of The Forward arrived, there was my mother’s ad, describing an attractive woman, a widow of eighty. And a few days later, she received a response. Yes, someone wanted to meet her! She showed me his answer, with his telephone number. How great! But she didn’t do anything. And she didn’t want me to call this man for her. It was enough to have this beautiful idea. She didn’t want anything more. Having the idea in her mind was enough, having read the story of the woman in England. But an actual man, no thank you.

Another day, it was Shabbat, and my mother surprised me again. When I arrived at synagogue, she was already there, sitting in the women’s section, reading. She was very engrossed in what she was reading. It was the Bible, Bereshit, the book’s opening pages. In the Chumash, she was reading about the Creation—and the man and woman without clothing in the garden. Finally she saw me and greeted me. And then she told me something with great interest. Touching the Bible, she said, “It’s a good book.”

She didn’t mean that the Lady Chatterley book was bad and this was good. The novel was a gift that allowed her to feel in the know. Just knowing what she had missed during her life, during sixty-five years of marriage, gave her pleasure. Her eyes open, she could meet her future with clarity, hope, and desire. She didn’t want more, just to continue living and feeling alive, and learning. With Lady Chatterley, she burst free of the restrictions of her Turkish family, her father, her mother, her husband. Now her world was wide open, to the Bible, to everything.

Stars in the Midnight Sky, 2022

Everyone loves to see the stars in a dark midnight sky. The vast world disappears beneath the sky, as if only the sky has any value. The stars feel like protection and mysterious love, very far and near at the same time. Seeing them, we feel a great sense of security and an immense happiness.

Dreaming of a black starlit sky, this summer we went to the new planetarium in New York. The height of the pandemic was behind us; it was post-pandemic time. “We” were my husband and I and our family visiting from out of state—our son, daughter-in-law, grandsons aged six and nine—and our son who lives in Brooklyn. You know, architects build great buildings to give people a sense of majesty: synagogues, cathedrals, palaces, and museums. Well, the planetarium at New York’s Museum of Natural History was not new at the time, but it was to us, because we hadn’t been there since its dramatic redesign. The planetarium sphere is in a palace of glass now, a vast cube, its glass sides immense windows for giants in space to peer through. It was perfect for our grandsons and for all of us as well.

Our son spent one hour on his computer and cell phone to buy tickets. A little difficult, but with patience it can be done. What type of ticket, at what time do we want to go, which entrance will we use, and what else do we want to see in the museum? One must think about all that with consideration and clarity. And if you don’t spend that hour, it will mean two hours standing in front of the museum waiting to enter and buy tickets. While our son was on the computer, our grandsons played on the floor with a toy, an earthquake simulator. They were constructing a Lego-type building on top of the simulator, trying to figure out the best way to build it, to protect it in the event of an earthquake. The blue plastic simulator has a toggle switch, and when you flip it, your building gets hit with an earthquake, first a small one, then a big one—and let’s see if your building falls with a crash, or whether it stays up just fine.

Done! Tickets! Waiting to enter the planetarium, two hundred people stood watching on thirty overhead screens a five-minute history of all the people—all over the world in all eras—who made planetariums, the first one in 500 BCE. Then we heard, “Enter, please.”

You know, the planetarium show was okay, but it wasn’t magnificent like those from my childhood. In my memory, while we, as children, leaned back in our seats, the stars were perfect in the great black dome overhead, and a man with a magical clear voice told us stories of the constellations while a sharp red arrow pointed to Orion’s Belt, the Big Dipper, or the North Star.

This time, after we’d seated ourselves in the round theater, the show, Worlds Beyond Earth, began. But I have to say I cannot remember one minute of it. A lot of time passed, twenty-five minutes, and my neck was hurting from leaning back, plus my beautiful daughter-in-law suffered in the same way. It was a shame.

Well, what then? Exploring aimlessly, perhaps to leave the building or to see some exhibits, we walked slowly, the seven of us, ages six to eighty, here and there, as if we ourselves were wandering weightless in space.

But suddenly, like Alice in Wonderland, we found ourselves in front of a door. There was no bottle labeled Drink Me. But there was a good man who said, “Enter! You will see The Big Bang!” It was just our family, no one else. The large crowd of people from the planetarium had disappeared. A short hallway led to another round theater, like a very small version of the planetarium but without any seats, just a circular handrail around the center of the space. All of us leaned forward with our forearms on the railing, staring down into the hollow in the center.

Suddenly the door closed with a tiny bang. Our family and a few people on the other side were waiting to see what would happen. What was it going to be? The Big Bang—It happened! Oh, God! Very fast with not much noise, but with brilliant colors changing quickly. We watched, our eyes fixated on it. Without thinking or understanding, we heard sounds of explosions in the midst of a profound silence, if that’s possible, and then suddenly it was over. “I want to see it again!” I immediately shouted.

The gentleman opened the door. He was happy and friendly. “The whole thing is only four minutes and forty seconds,” he said. “And yes, you can see it again.” I can see it again! Four minutes and forty seconds, a miracle, I thought—the universe is born. My grandsons wanted to see it again also, so the three of us stayed and the door closed with a tiny bang once again.

The world was born! And we were there together, in my mind like all the Jews gathered on Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments.

When we exited, we saw something we hadn’t seen before: a big sign that said, Thirteen Billion Years. We were now on a walkway, long and comfortably wide, spiraling as it gently sloped down, and on the wall, panel by panel, was the story of everything that had happened, the sequence of creation, in those thirteen billion years. Each step we took was millions of years down the path, but there was little time to read, as the Milky Way was forming, and a meteorite dating from the birth of the solar system was right there, and the sun and the moon formed, and then something about oxygen in the ocean. Finally, after walking and meandering, we met up with the rest of the family and arrived together in the present—2022. After more than twelve billion years, we found, instead of a great triumphant panel, a single hair, a short vertical line drawn on the wall, like the letter l, the thinnest line possible, representing 350,000 years of human existence, the time we’ve been here on our planet. A mere hair, nothing more.

It was lunch time. Our sons studied their phones for the best restaurant nearby. They found a Turkish one, and at the table outside on the sidewalk for the seven of us, the waitress with a sweet smile and big dark eyebrows said, when I asked where she was from, “Izmir.” Of course, I thought. She brought a great lentils platter, grilled fish, salad, wine, Turkish bread, tarama, labneh, olives, and water with fresh lemon slices. It was a meal to remember. And while we were eating dessert, including the best figs from Smyrna (that’s Izmir) and rice pudding with pistachios and apricots, I said to the whole family, “Two narratives are now the most famous stories in the world: Bereshit and The Big Bang.” I asked, “What do you think? How are they the same?” Our two sons, the older one a doctor and the younger one a math teacher, had different ideas.

“Ah,” said the older one, “The Big Bang is the result of observations and vision and studying the history of the entire universe.”

The younger son said, “Bereshit is also the result of observations and vision and studying the whole universe. But,” he went on, “Bereshit’s Creation took seven days, while The Big Bang’s Creation took thirteen billion years. Of course, before the sun was created, a day could be eons in the vastness of time. Bereshit,” he added, “really says what the gift of life is and how to live in this world knowing nothing or knowing something. That hair’s breadth of humanity—what is it, and how do we find joy in it?”

 “Well,” said the doctor, “two stories, two narratives, Bereshit and The Big Bang, they each want to make sense of life.”

We all liked this thought, and also the savor de boka—the mouth-sweetening—of the sherbet that the waitress brought us with the bill. But our older son said, “I have another question.” The two grandsons stayed quiet—a miracle. “My question is: Why in Bereshit does God tell Adam and Eve that they can eat from the tree of life, but not from the tree of knowledge? How is it possible that God, King of the Universe, does not want humans to have knowledge of good and evil, and threatened Adam and Eve with death to stop them? And Eve ate the fruit! In this story of the beginning of all humankind, how can it be that knowledge is a bad thing and wanting it is punishable by death?”

“Ah,” I said. “Our friend—our distinguished rabbi, you know who I mean—spoke of exactly that on a Zoom last year. You will laugh. Bereshit seems like the story of Eve’s sin and punishment, but it’s not. The rabbi said that when his son was two, he told him, ‘Do not climb out of your crib. You’ll die, you’ll fall and break your neck.’ But the child climbed out and walked into his parents’ room with a smile. And the rabbi was proud!

“‘Why,’ the rabbi asked, ‘did God even create a forbidden tree and a snake? Why did He give this commandment to Adam, and why did Eve want the fruit? Because she had to know what she was and why she was here. She needed to see herself and know her human consciousness, distinct from an animal’s.’ And God, like the rabbi with his son, was proud! ‘Also, like us, God is tricky,’ said the rabbi. It seems Eve failed the test, but actually she passed it beautifully. People think Eve is guilty and for this reason men should control women. ‘No!’ said the rabbi. ‘Eve eating this fruit, in her intense and necessary desire for self-knowledge, is the mother of all humanity.’”

I’m glad my son asked this question. Questions are like stars in the deep dark sky, in a black sky at midnight. Love is having questions and voicing them instead of hiding them. In many places now, we cannot see the stars at night. But questions are great points of light, even when the answers only raise more questions. Questions are protection and mysterious love, very far and near at the same time. And being together when we talk about them, we feel a great security and an immense joy.

The Shofar, 2022

I am writing about a time of terrible fear. The mid-term election is coming and there is only a small chance that the Democrats can hold onto our slim majority in the government. In other words, it’s likely that in January extremists in the opposing party will have gained most of the reins of power in our country. Do you know that 360 candidates for political office this Election Day are repeating the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen? It doesn’t matter if they believe it or not. They use the lie to gain power. And it seems like many of these candidates will be elected.

A perfect couple, that’s what we are. My husband is Ashkenazi and I’m Sephardic. Forty years ago, I created the word for our sons: Ashkefardi. Sometimes now I hear someone use this word, but I was the first to come up with it. Yet this word may have no real importance. The family of my husband came from Russia, and my family came from Turkey—his from north of the Black Sea, and mine from south of it.

A truly perfect couple, we are both Democrats. Both of us have voted Democrat all our lives. Sometimes we have different political intuitions, but together we suffered great despair over the man who won the presidency in 2016. And what immense relief when we wrested it back in 2020. Why such panic now? All signs point to a Republican wave, and that party denies the needs of planet Earth as much as it denies the facts of the 2020 election. The Democrats work to prevent perilously high temperatures, the loss of rivers gone dry, and violent floods and fires that destroy people’s homes and lives. The Democrats want our air and water to be clean. The opposing party is not grappling with these concerns. Instead, without shame, they circulate crazy, cruel lies to gain power—as if lying were an entitlement central to freedom of speech. And now the election is coming at us like a monster. In truth, we are face to face with fascism.

What can we do? My husband and I, like many of our friends, have written hundreds of letters to voters in different parts of the country. We didn’t go to protests; we wrote letters to many men and women, asking them to vote. If all Democrats vote, there is hope; if not, we are dead in the water.

My husband and I have lived for fifty years in a good four-room apartment. Small, but perfect. At the beginning we had no children, then three sons, and now we are just the two of us again. About a hundred years ago, our brick building was constructed on a street on a hill with trees. Two parks nearby are full of magnificent trees, some old and grand, some young.

This year for Rosh Hashana, we went to a synagogue in Brooklyn with our middle son, our daughter-in-law, our grandsons ages two and six, and our youngest son. The two children heard the shofar, the blasts of the ram’s horn. It was the first time for the little one. His father stood holding him, the child’s big eyes astonished. We all stood together and heard the shofar with respect and love, as if it were a call from a hilltop thousands of years ago. And on the eve of the holiday: chalah, wine, dates, pomegranates, apples and honey, zucchini with tomato and onions, leek patties, salad, roasted fish, and for dessert, plum cake and wheels of fresh oranges. Our little apartment lacked nothing. We were singing. Smitten by the birthday of the world.

Yom Kippur and Simchat Torah followed, but now I am in bed at night thinking, and I cannot sleep. The problem is immense. The opposing party is calling us the devil and demonizing us. Worry fills the darkness of my bedroom and the silence of the sleeping neighborhood. My small battery alarm clock is ticking. I hear my father’s oak dresser, now ours, settle with a sigh, or is it the wooden floor shifting a bit under the dresser’s weight?

But listen, there’s something more. At three in the morning, for the first time last week, something sounded in our building’s old pipes. What is it? I’m listening now. It’s a high, thin calling sound. What is it? Oh, God! You know what? It’s a shofar. Tekiah! Delicate, not done well, mixed up, but there it was. I heard a shofar in the plumbing.

Last week, each night, every few hours, it was the same, and this week every night again. The sound is very quiet, as if somebody didn’t know how to blow the shofar well, but I heard it. Tekiah! Everyone was sleeping; only I heard it. I’m thinking, wake up, Democrats. The fascists are here.

And soon: Shevarim, Shevarim, Shevarim. And Teruah! It keeps letting out its uneven call, every day, haphazard with long pauses in between, but intentional. I also hear this right now this afternoon, as I’m writing these words.

And finally last night—how is it possible?—someone upstairs in his apartment uses the bathroom, and at four in the morning, I hear it, that intent cry in the pipes. Not just Tekiah, Shevarim, and Teruah, the nearly hundred blasts of the ram’s horn on the holiday. Now it’s the Tekiah Gedolah, quiet, quiet, but it’s the Tekiah Gedolah drawing its long, long, long breath, tremulously heralding something, telling us to wake up.

And then my neighbor three flights up heard it, and she calls today to complain bitterly about it. It makes her angry. I explain that it is the shofar telling us to wake up. It’s a warning, because more and more, fascism is filling the hearts of Americans.

A house in New Jersey, an apartment in New York, no matter. Turkish or Ashkenazi. Doctor or math teacher. Figs or rice pudding. The question is whether our democracy is going to fall in the election-day earthquake. There are so many good people. But we are crazy for not working much, much harder.

And then suddenly, after eight days, we exhale. It has taken over a week for the votes to be counted. We are like children playing a game in apartment doorways, pressing our arms into the doorframe, then stepping away to feel our arms sail up in easy joy. The polls were wrong. People are fed up with extremism. True, the Democrats lost their slim majority, but they won some major victories and the catastrophic Red Wave did not materialize, allowing us a thrill of relief. If we had imagined even this in our dreams, we would have scolded ourselves for having false hope.

But my neighbor calls me. “I still hear it,” she says. “It’s horrible! It keeps coming at us, a squeaking high-pitched sound. It’s the same as before. And I know what it is,” she says firmly, and she’s smart and may be right. “It’s air in the pipes.”

After a minute, I suddenly hear myself say a surprising truth, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but the sound won’t go away. You understand? It’s not going away! The mid-term election was not the total catastrophe we had dreaded, but we are still in grave danger. The fascists are full of hate, and the attack on the earth is an attack on the human body. The high-pitched cry in the pipes will continue. I know it, I know what it is. The shofar in the old pipes is going to continue. The shofar is calling to wake us.”