Completely obsessed with this week’ article in the Forward about Louisa May Alcott’s Portuguese Jewish history. (I read Little Women at least ten times as a child, and I always knew Jo and I had to be from the same DNA somehow!)

Eve LaPlante traveled to Portugal recently to research a biography about the Little Women author and her mother, Abigail, to whom she is distantly related.

Though “Alcott never wrote about her Jewish heritage, nor did she visit her ancestral homeland of Portugal,” LaPlante found the threads of their Jewish heritage amongst the bloody history of mass conversion in the 15th and16th century, when Jews were either forced to become Christians or be expelled.

Unbelievably, many Jewish features remain in Lisbon and beyond, even though the vibrant Jewish community that once lived here has been dispersed for centuries. Read more here.

There is good reason for my fascination with “Renaissance” Portugal’s and Spain’s expelled Jews: Many of them ended up in England, and a boatload of those refugees were sent over to America in 1733. Those 42 men and women docked in Savannah, GA just three months after General Oglethorpe had declared it a colony for England, and they founded Congregation Mickve Israel — the third oldest synagogue in the America and the one the Yenta family attends (not as often as we should. But that is a different blog post.)

The feeling of persecution is a familiar one for us who grew up with Polish and Austrian and German and Hungarian relatives who told us in their yiddishe accents about the heartbreaking and hair-curling anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe. The stories of Spain and Portugal are further removed — I don’t think I was even aware that Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish, a whole other Hebraic-derived dialect with songs and folktales, even existed until I found it on the interwebs.

While we are, well, not exactly comfortable but aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities of the Inquisition are even creepier for their exotic evils. It’s amazing what the ancestors did to keep the traditions alive, practicing crypto-Judaism behind closed doors and pretending to eat pork to fool the neighbors. If someone suspected a converso as not being faithful enough to the church, all they had to do is sound the call and that person would be burned at the stake. In public. Like it was a party. Sick.

I just finished reading The Inquisitor’s Wife by Jeanne Kalogrides, a novel set in 1481 Seville, Spain just as Queen Isobel has issued her doctrine of death to the Jews. Marisol Garcia, a young women from a wealthy family, is married off to a lawyer with connections to the Church — ostensibly to protect her, though escaping one’s roots is awfully tricky.

While the story itself is a little slow and chastely romantic for my tastes, I was interested enough to keep reading all the way through — the scene where Queen Isobel sheds her fake-pious mask to host a party full of nude boys was definitely a highlight. Based on the true events of Seville, the book contains fascinating details of life at this point in history — what a crappy time to be a woman AND a Jew.

Of course, my FAVORITE book about the Sepharic conversos is The Blind Eye, written by my mother, Marcia Fine. Set in 15th century Portugal as well as modern times, it makes the connection all the way to Cuba and Miami — tracing the threads of this hidden history all the way home.

The Blind Eye was a finalist in the International Book Awards, and Mom travels to NYC this week to present it to the Jewish Book Council — it all goes well, she’ll be speaking at a JCC near you soon!

In the meantime, I think I’ll go brush up on my Spanish. Perhaps El Yenta Man and I might do some Sephardic sleuthing of our own while the kids are at camp…?

So this evening begins the holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai and also the First Fruits of the Harvest.

That totally make sense because guess who’s got strawberries? I love this holiday and its gifts, as long as we can keep those gifts away from the damn squirrels. God bless bird netting.

Shavuot is traditionally observed with an all-night study session meant to make up for the fact that the morning God delivered the Torah on Mount Sinai, our lazy ancestors overslept. So now we go the insomniac route to show we’re actually ready to receive the wisdom. It also includes a reading of the Book of Ruth, a story that defies the nasty stereotypes of sparky relationships between mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws. (Here’s another one, a recent Civil Society Column.)

For reasons not completely understood but heartily embraced, Shavuot is also celebrated by eating a lot of cheese. Farmer’s cheese, gouda, goat, blue, ricotta, cottage, Limburger, parmesan, asiago, the drippy white deliciousness served with chips at Mexican restaurants, you name it. Unfortunately, El Yenta Man is viciously lactose intolerant, so me and the kids may be partying on our own with a wheel of brie and a stack of cheddar cubes.

And we can’t forget cheesecake, a ubiquitous Shavuot staple, as well as blintzes, which are the same EXACT thing as crêpes except your bubbie didn’t know Nutella from a noodge and filled the thin pancakes with — what else? — cheese.

Here is the fabulous Joan Nathan making her Ultimate Blintzes for Tablet:

How good are THOSE gonna taste at 4am? Not that I’m so pious that I’ll be joining in the learning tonight, but I’ll may be up anyway guarding the strawberries.

A blessed day to all who know the joy of watching tiny wrinkled people grow up before your eyes as well the enormous fun of following those people around cleaning up their messes and reminding them to mind their manners.

I’m reposting my favorite poem, my “Mother” work, if you will. When I wrote it, I could not imagine how fast the next decade would speed by nor the challenges and wonders in store. Though the little calamari fingers described below have grown into full-sized man hands, I am ever perplexed and bouyed by motherhood’s lessons. I maintain that one of the most important ones is to mother oneself, to nurture our own bodies and souls as lovingly as we do our children’s.

For those of you close by, I’ll be performing this along with some very talented Savannah people next Saturday, May 18 as part of the Blank Page Poetry Event at Indigo Sky Gallery. Hope to see you there!

One True Poem From A Housewife

This morning all I ask
Is for a wee bit of wisdom before these tasks:
The laundry, the dishes, my children’s needs and wishes
The packing, the stacking, the order the house is lacking
The cooking, the cleaning and I guess I should think about weaning…
But today I can’t find meaning in any of it.

Even though I know
This is the work the world cannot do without
I want to shout “There has been some mistake! I was not supposed to have this ordinary life!”
See, when I became a wife
I had this notion I could still go far, learn how to play guitar, be a rock star
But now that I am a mother, with only seconds sprinkled throughout the day for other, grander dreams
It seems those aspirations vaguely float around my head
Whisper who I meant to be as I make the beds, poach the eggs
Search for the self I still hope to become but find mismatched socks instead.

I stand in an old, old house that slopes in the kitchen
And I reckon the heart of any home is in that dip in front of the sink
It’s enough to drive me to drink to think of some other woman who stood here before
Growing old on this here slanted floor
And I fear there’ll be nothing left of me in fifteen years

But I banish that thought right from my brain
Because I’m not going to go insane
Not just because I have too much to do
But because it just doesn’t have to be true
Not if I revel in this choice
Use my voice
I’m going to do these fucking dishes for all womankind!
And find the courage to rescue my dreams from the trees
As well as shoulder God’s greatest responsibility:
Beating the heart of a family.

So what I have today is this:
A Cheerio-scented morning kiss
Constant companionship while I piss
Tiny fingers like calamari wrapped around my wrist
The list is longer than what I could possibly miss from some fantasy of my future
I can still suture together a poem or two
Cobble the truth with words and glue
Poetry saves me every day
What saves you?

So as I stand at the sink on this slanted floor
Thinking of the woman who stood here before
And finally comes the wisdom that I’ve been asking for:

What is Now
Is what is True
No matter how mundane, how boring, how depressing, how plain
So you see, I will not go insane
No, that will not be me
I will find a way to stay free

But right now I’ve got to take my place
With grace
In the face
Of ordinary.

Every year I post a little something about how your mama doesn’t want another tsotchke for her dashboard mantel or a bouquet of wilty tulips for Mother’s Day — all she cares about is that you turned out not to be a shmo.

So, listen, make her proud already: Donate $25 to JWI’s Mother’s Day Flower Project and she’ll totally forget about that time she found you smoking weed with your uncle when you were supposed to be cleaning out your bubbie’s garage.

The funds go towards flowers and gift baskets full of feminine necessities for 200 domestic violence shelters around the country, helping out over 45,000 women and children not lucky enough to have someone like you to care about them every day.

Yes, it says May 3 to guarantee delivery by Saturday, but click it up today and you’re golden. Better yet, save a tree and send an e-card.

Either way, you’re still a mensch.

Ooooh, I love puzzles and mysteries! Especially Jewish ones, and I’m not talking about going into therapy.

Making the rounds this week on Reddit is this fabulous little teapot with all kinds of yiddishkeit tucked inside.

Look what happens when you take off the top:

A dreidel!

Then, a tiny but complete megillah, totally impossible read when you’re drunk on Purim but who cares?!

And what’s this, a precious pair of Shabbat candlesticks?

And, no, it cannot be, a MENORAH? It’s like M.C. Escher dropped acid with a rabbi!

There’s also an etrog holder, a place to light the ner tamid (eternal flame) and little kiddush cup – a portable synagogue for the displaced Jew.

It’s like having the entire holiday wheel in your pocket, so convenient when you’re being chased by Crusaders and anti-Semitic villagers wielding torches! One commenter called it “a Jewish version of a Swiss army knife,” but I like to think of it as the Pogrom Runner’s Leatherman Tool.

The owner of this amazing tea service says that it was a gift from his or her grandmother, and some have speculated that it was once owned by Sephardic conversos trying to escape the evil eye of the Spanish Inquisition.

However, Rabbi Fink of the Pacific Jewish Center writes that “there is no way this teapot dates back to the Inquisition.” He makes the point that in spite of what we learned in Sunday School, dreidels have only been around for a few hundred years, and “there is no tradition of dreidle among Sephardic Jews.”

That doesn’t diminish its value to art and history and plain old coolness. Perhaps ModernTribe.com will commission some fabulous contemporary design to display on our mantles and drop in our purses if — Heaven forbid — circumstances bring the necessity of fleeing in the future? Because, as every Jewish mother thinks in the back of her neurotic brain, you never know…

I got a little preoccupied with the awful tragedies of last week and just didn’t feel up to riffing on Justin Bieber’s unbelievably narcissistic entry in the guest book at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

Besides, the immediate responses were just too good, especially Allison Kaplan Sommer’s “In Spite of Everything, I Still Believe Justin Bieber is Truly Good At Heart.”

Let’s face it, Justin has lived in fame bubble most of his life and likely only has the emotional capacity to relate to the horrors of the Holocaust through his own overblown persona. He didn’t mean to do bad. C’mon, he says the “Sh’Ma” before every show.

Still, the boy needs a good schooling, and perhaps Jen Dodd is the one to give it to him. A theoretical physicist and science outreach director by day, Ms. Dodd does a pretty good Dutch accent:

What do you think? Too much?

(Yarmulke tip: Heebmagazine.com)

Though no one will ever accuse me of correct religious observance, since becoming a Jewish mother I’ve always maintained that Saturdays are meant for rest (and the occasional mani-pedi.)

Shabbat at the Yenta house starts with candles on Friday night and usually ends with Havdalah, but sometimes we forget or we’re out and we just sing “Eliahu Hanavi” loudly (especially fun for El Yenta Man on date nights.)

There are a lot of rules about what you are and are not supposed to do during the time in between, but we just do our best to enjoy our environment and each other. I personally avoid laundry, dishes and the computer. If EYM feels that driving to Home Depot and planting some flowers sounds like a good time, he’s welcome to have at it. But our loose-and-fast rule is if it feels like work, it can happen on Sunday.

During the year or so before Yenta Boy’s bar mitzvah (come to think of it, he’s a man now, so perhaps we’ll change his name here to Smaller Yenta Man, SYM for short) we spent some time on Saturdays at synagogue as well. We’d get up late, make my famous challah French toast, don some nice duds and go sit together in a beautiful old building, reciting the prayers of our people (of course, at our synagogue the prayers sometimes sound very different that everywhere else, but that’s a topic for a different blog post.)

Even though the kids grumbled about it on the way, they chanted the V’ahavta loudly and Little Yenta Girl always trotted up to the bima to help with the Torah undressing. My philosophy around Judaism is to do things out of joy rather than obligation, but I daresay that the Yenta family came to look forward to synagogue on Saturdays. And not just because they serve lunch afterwards.

So why stop, you ask? The Saturday following SYM’s big BM began LYG’s first soccer game, and the times have conflicted ever since.

But if you were really committed, you’d find another activity for your kid, you say. Maybe. But LYG is a talented player, which means she’s moved up to the superspecial youth development league that treats her and the rest of the nine-year-olds like they’re training to take on Real Madrid. Two practices a week, multiple games a weekend, travel to glamorous places like Augusta and Macon.

Our reluctant involvement in Fascist Soccer (I was calling it “Nazi soccer” but I decided that was disrespectful to Holocaust survivors) is driven only by the clear evidence that LYG is thriving from the physicality and teamwork, not to mention developing a lethal left foot (a Jewish mother never pooh-poohed a scholarship to anything.)

But Fascist Soccer is cramping my Shabbos Style. Now instead of sitting in an air-conditioned sanctuary wearing my good earrings and a nice dress, I’m slathered with sunscreen in an unshaded green field, swatting the most ferocious and evil swarms of biting gnats known to humankind. It feels like work.

Though I do so love to watch my girl and her Princess Warrior teammates run and play and whoop it up, I end up screaming things like “Offsides!” and “When is this stupid ref gonna get some Lasik?!”

So I’m trying to reconcile my Sabbath Soccer Dilemma. Do I bring a thermos of Bloody Marys to the field to make the games more enjoyable? Do we split the family, with one parent doing soccer duty while the other takes SYM to synagogue, like we did last Saturday? (Shhh, don’t tell EYM they served lemon chicken, his favorite lunch.) Do I construct my own chuppah on the sidelines, giving a spiritual flair to sun protection?

The season only has a few more weeks, so I suppose like most things, it will resolve itself, and we’ll get back to synagogue more often.

But by then I might be used to bringing a lawn chair and cocktails everywhere on Saturdays.

Well lookee here!

I did this interview AGES ago with motherhood site MommyPage and just found it on the interwebs while Googling myself for porn links (actually, I was just checking my site stats.)

Here I am talking about the joys of being a suburban Jewish chicken farmer and how matzoh ball soup is an aphrodiasic:

“Yo Yenta!” on Hannukah and Spending Time With Family

I forgot about that Manischewitz shirt. Think I’ll have to break it out next Shabbat.