Faye Moskowitz

Good collection of essays about growing up Jewish in 1950's and 1960's Detroit, marrying,having a family, and living in Washington D.C.

Moskowitz offers her tender, touching and honest thoughts about how the closeness of her extended family, visits to and from cousins, her family's cultural celebrations shaped her life.

She (and I) loved celebrating Chanukah and being Jewish. In one essay Faye describes helping a friend find health care and housing after he's diagnosed with AIDS. In another she processes her feelings of failure over her daughter marrying a Gentile; but quickly realizes she could never cast her out like her grandfather did to his sister who married out of the Jewish faith.

Writes about the wealthy having too much power and people being hypocritical. And a lovely but heartbreaking memory of her cousin Esther.

There's a hysterical essay on 'pigging out' before and during a family wedding and another about celebrating Passover with a visit from the fire department.

Moskowitz was a reader, a teacher, and loved to motivate her students into reading the best literature knowing it would always serve them well.

A wonderful assortment of feelings on love of family, the anger resulting from anti-Semitic (and racist) comments, about the pain of illness, and so much more.

Excellent read.… (altro)

I'm sorry to say this book did not speak to me. The book is a collection of twenty-four essays, reminiscences with concluding point. What I found most interesting were the things not said: Ms. Moskowitz was born too early to be deeply affected by the rise of feminism---while she eventually goes to college, after getting involved with politics, these are personal choices. From the few hints she drops, Orthodoxy was not as strict then at it seems to be now: she talks about going to movies on Saturday afternoons. And her explanations of taking challah were surprising to me:
"[My mother] tossed a little ball of dough into the oven with the challah to propitiate the evil spirits and ensure a perfect loaf. [pp. 1019-110]
"Fridays before the Sabbath, [my Bobbe [grandmother]] taught me, as she'd taught my mother, to bake bread, to braid the challah, coat it with egg yolk for a mahogany crust, and most exciting of all, to ward off the evil eye with a tiny ball of dough thrown to the back of the oven. (That the bit of dough tested the oven temperature in a time of no thermostats was a practical lesson I received as a bonus.)

Finally, she mentions rubbing a dandelion under your chin to see if you like butter, but---at least in Philadelphia when I was child---everyone knew that buttercups were used!… (altro)