Judy Bolton-Fasman
By Judy Bolton-Fasman
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Life A Haunting Visit to My Old School, My Mother’s New Home
The last time I drove up the hill of Hamilton Heights I was a high school senior at Mount Saint Joseph Academy — steering the gigantic wheel of my father’s asthmatic ’65 Malibu. But today I was behind the wheel of my Volvo on a reconnaissance mission to see if it would be the right…
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Culture Dramatizing the History of Indian Jews
Dropped From Heaven By Sophie Judah Schocken Books, 243 pages, $23. Members of the Bene Israel, the ancient Indian Jewish community, claim they are the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, that they escaped persecution in the Galilee in the second-century BCE, and that their ancestors were shipwrecked on the southern coast of…
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News I Believe
As it is said, in Genesis 28:16: “And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’” I am a Jew. A matrilineal, patrilineal, Temple-going, nonpraying, kosher-keeping, nonfasting, Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Ladino-Yiddish-Spanish-English-speaking skeptical, superstitious, terrified, brazen, monotheistic, mezuza-kissing, idol-worshipping Jew. I alternate between humbly…
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News Through the Portal
When I recited the Sh’ma as a child, the words evoked another world. It was my rabbit hole, my looking glass, my wardrobe. When I said the Sh’ma, I pictured the large block Hebrew letters as the ultimate portal to God. Sh’ma Yisrael. Hear O Israel. That was Moses’ rallying cry to the Israelites. But…
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Culture A Different Kind Of Jewish Mother
A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous And Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted To Be a Respectable Jewish Mom), by Her Bastard Son By Clancy Sigal Carroll & Graf, 288 pages, $26. * * *| I n the past few years, there has been an impressive list of memoirs that triumphantly…
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Culture Amid the Smokestacks, An American Dream
Now You See It… Stories from Cokesville, PA By Bathsheba Monk Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $22. * * *| Cokesville, Pa., is a gritty fictional American shtetl. It is populated by Polish-Catholic émigrés and anchored by the steel mills in which they are employed. It is a place both defined and defeated by…
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Culture Aleppo on Ocean Parkway
From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Growing Up In a Jewish-Arabic Family in Midcentury America By Jack Marshall Coffee House Press, 256 pages, $16. * * *| To have an identity strung together with hyphens is to live in several worlds at once. “From Baghdad to Brooklyn,” Jack Marshall’s beautifully crafted memoir, evokes an entire galaxy. Author…
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Culture My Tower of Babel
I spent every holiday — American, Jewish and otherwise — with my mother’s Cuban family. At Rosh Hashanah and Passover we crammed into my Aunt Rachel’s five-room flat, which was decorated with ashtrays from various restaurants and hotels to which she had never been. Seated at the holiday table we were in a collapsed Tower…
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