Dolly Baruch's Open Salon Blog

My D'var

Sun, 20 May 2012 09:05:26 -0400

For those of my friends who asked to see a copy of my d'var (from my Anshei Mitzvah class).

I am grateful to Rabbi Weiss and Cantor Green for their dedication, their humor, and the generous hours they spent to help me achieve my goal of becoming bat mitzvah in this spiritually meaningful way. And to those of you sharing this time with me, my sister Helana and my brother-in-law Walt, my youngest daughter Ericka, and to all my friends, my beloved study partners, and my havurah. I could go on.

I also mark this occasion as the 60^th anniversary of my confirmation at Temple Anshei Emeth in Peoria. I think I am genetically predisposed to immaturity and today’s Bat Mitzvah marks a deeply significant and radical change in my thinking about myself and my Jewish life.

D’var Torah

God’s Love and God’s Loathing – One and the Same?

Roberta “Dolly” Baruch May 19, 2012

When I chant my Torah portion (Lev 26:11-13), I am going to sing tig’al, which will be translated as “spurn.” It could be variously interpreted as “loathe,” abhor,” even “vilely cast away.” What a strong declaration. It’s God’s word – His promise, which He makes to all of us, the Israelites at Mt. Sinai – He says “I will not spurn you.” In these verses of Leviticus, it is a contingent statement, an “ If…then…” “If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, I will not spurn you.”

But here’s a paradox. In other places in Leviticus, God says He will not spurn us whether or not we follow His Laws. God says: "Yet, even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or spurn them so as to destroy them, breaking My covenant with them, for I the Lord am their God."

The Zohar comments: "Come and see the pure love of the Blessed Holy One for Israel. A parable: There was a king who had a single son who kept misbehaving. One day he offended the king. The king said, 'I have punished you so many times and you have not [changed]. Now look, what should I do with you? If I banish you from the land and expel you from the kingdom, perhaps wild beasts or wolves or robbers will attack you and you will be no more. What can I do? The only solution is that I and you together leave the land.'

So . . . the Blessed Holy One said as follows: 'Israel, what should I do with you? I have already punished you and you have not heeded Me. I have brought fearsome warriors and flaming forces to strike at you and you have not obeyed. If I expel you from the land alone, I fear that packs of wolves and bears will attack you and you will be no more. But what can I do with you? The only solution is that I and you together leave the land and both of us go into exile. As it is written, 'I will discipline you,' forcing you into exile; but if you think that I will abandon you, I Myself too [shall go] along with you."' This is the never ending love we are promised whether or not we are able to keep the laws and commandments.

As I contemplate this affirmation, I think of what it means– to have a God who will not forget us, will not spurn us, will not abhor us, will not loathe us, will not vilely cast us away. When I was in Cairo last year at the awe-inspiring pyramids, I thought about the Egyptian pharaohs, self-proclaimed gods who had elaborate earthly reminders built so they would not be forgotten, would not be spurned by the generations to come. But God promises us something entirely different from what the pharaohs sought. Rather than demand our remembrance, God promises that we will not be forgotten by Him. His love abides and comforts us in our personal prayer – when we are anxious, troubled, afraid of dying, afraid of being alone forever, afraid of our body’s aging, afraid of being too hard or too easy on ourselves.

This promise knits the ragged edges of our souls together and brings us peace. He says to us “My own children. I am here with you forever. I will always be on your side, at your side. You cannot make me loathe you no matter what you do. I’ll be close by and won’t let you withdraw too deeply. I’ll always be there to help you come back. I will listen to you whatever you have to say. I’ll question you to help you discover what you think about things and I’ll say ‘tell me again’ if you’ve already told me. I’ll never forget what you’ve said to me and I’ll help you remember what you need to remember and I’ll never berate you for forgetting. I’ll never get tired of you even if you get tired of Me. I shall love you forever and nothing in the world or out of it can change that. I and you together, both of us.“

Quite a comfort. Quite a promise. Our souls will be raveled, knit up. Ours is a living God who will not spurn, will not abhor, will not loathe, will not vilely cast away. Ours is a God who will be with us.

Songs My Mother Sang to Me – My Mother’s Lasting Legacy

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:05:49 -0400

“Your tune is a ter’ble ‘boice’.”

Notwithstanding that pronouncement I made at four years old beside the piano where my mother sang in her whiskey (or more likely scotch) tenor, I loved my mother’s singing. She sang the songs of her own childhood – not the Yiddish lullabies she learned at her mother’s breast but the popular tunes from the 78s of the twenties and thirties her older sisters brought home and played on their Victrola. The phonograph was a precious treasure – considering that it probably cost $15 and their yearly income was probably somewhere around $1000 - with the three oldest sisters working to support their family of six, including their mother and their younger sister (my mother) and baby brother (the “prince”).

No matter what else, whatever emotional or financial trauma was happening in my family in the 40s and 50s, we sang and we danced and we laughed. This was primarily a female domain and my father did not participate. But when my brother came along in 1953, a surprise bonus – a new prince for our family, we continued the tradition. My baby brother was indoctrinated into the songs of long ago and the dancing and the laughter. The radio was on all day long – and popular music was the mainstay. We never even got a TV until I went away to college and even then it was the music and dancing and comedy that caught our attention.

In the 50s, I had my own little portable radio that I used to take to bed with me and listen to under the covers so my parents wouldn’t hear – and late at night, I could get FM jazz stations from Chicago and St. Louis.

But the best were my mother’s songs she sang from her youth – Bye Bye Blackbird - Baby Face - (I’ll Be Lovin’ You) Always - I'll See You In My Dreams - Tip Toe Through The Tulips - I'm Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover - I Wanna Be Loved By You - Ida, Sweet As Apple Cider - Side By Side - Somebody Stole My Gal - Carolina In The Morning - Blue Skies - If You Knew Susie - Ain't We Got Fun - Me And My Shadow - When The Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along - Margie - Parade Of The Wooden Soldiers - Sleepy Time Gal - All Alone (By the Telephone) - Five Foot Two, Eyes Of Blue - Yes Sir, That's My Baby.

These were just a few of the tunes my mother sang to us and that we knew all the words to – and so did everyone else. I taught my children Ballin’ the Jack when they were small – all three in matching outfits (that the youngest hated as she wore the hand-me-downs for years before they were outgrown) doing the dance and hand gestures that went along with it and amusing the barbers (and none of us the least cognizant of the meaning of these lyrics except perhaps the owner of the hair salon).

And all those old favorites were played on the radio too, along with the more contemporary songs of the 40s:

The love songs - Green Eyes - Till The End Of Time - (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons - You'll Never Know - To Each His Own - I Don't Want to Set The World on Fire - Paper Doll - Sentimental Journey - I'll Be Seeing You - As Time Goes By - Don't Get Around Much Anymore - Some Enchanted Evening - I'll Walk Alone

The novelty songs - (I've Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo - Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree - Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive – Mairzy Doats - Pennsylvania 6-5000 - Swinging On A Star - Open The Door, Richard - Is You Is or Is You Ain't (Ma' Baby)

The bouncy good time songs- Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy - Chattanooga Choo Choo - I'm Looking over a Four-Leaf Clover - On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe

The cowboy songs - Don't Fence Me In (I’ve Got Spurs That) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle - Pistol Packin' Mama - Cool Water - Mule Train (these I sang to my daughters to put them to sleep – why cowboy songs? Don’t know for sure, maybe they were composed to a horse's slow rocking walk, but they did lull my babies to sleep).

The Latin flavored songs (all the rage in the 40s)- Brazil - Frenesi - Manana (Is Soon Enough For Me) Amapola - Rum and Coca-Cola – so we learned to rhumba and to samba and later on, the cha cha.

Favorites to dance to -Tuxedo Junction - Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy - Rag Mop – swing dancin’ in the kitchen!

Sentimental tunes - Peg O' My Heart - The Old Lamp-Lighter - When You Wish Upon a Star - You Are My Sunshine

Some that can’t be categorized - Nature Boy (which was the theme song of the 1948 movie “The Boy with Green Hair” that starred my much loved movie star, Dean Stockwell) - How Are Things in Glocca Morra? (on the jukebox in our preferred upstairs Chinese restaurant in Peoria and that I begged nickels to play as many times as I could get away with it.)

One of our favorites we sang for years and years as a family on every road trip and that I taught my children and they’re teaching theirs - Cuanto La Gusta,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rY4d5MlinA%20

sung with much gusto and over and over again until someone shouted "No more" and started another favorite that we couldn't help singing along with - You Are My Sunshine - or one of our extensive repertory of cowboy songs.

And then there were the show tunes – into the 50s, when Broadway show albums became available, the old windup phonograph was relegated to the attic and mother bought a tabletop player with a record changer (allowing several records to be played in succession). Though albums were fairly expensive in those days, she had half a dozen that we played over and over, South Pacific, Show Boat, Oklahoma among them.

In the last year of her life, when Alzheimer’s had all but taken her whole personality away – our mother was still able to sing along with the piano player who came to entertain with the old songs at the nursing home, the older the song, the more words she was able to sing - including some that we had never heard before, obscure tunes from the 20s she must have forgotten when she was singing to us. My sister and I were called to her room (my brother living too far away in San Diego to come in time) by the hospice nurses because they predicted it was going to be my mother’s last day. It took some hours – and we whiled away some of the time by singing as we had done all our lives even though she was unconscious and seemingly unaware that we were there. So we sang to her – and as the time passed, we noticed that she grew somewhat agitated if the songs were too bouncy or too new.

If we’d thought of it, we might have sung the Yiddish lullaby our mama sang to us – “Yah yah bubeleh, shlafee, shlafee bubeleh” (yah yah little grandmother, sleep, sleep, little grandmother). But older and softer songs quieted her, so that’s what we sang. She was still the essence of herself and teaching us how to please her to the last hours of her life.

Mother left this life with songs in the room. I hope I go the same way.

What I Learned from My Father

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:04:51 -0400

What I Learned from My Father

Dolly Baruch

April 18, 2012

There were some awful things I learned from my father - how angry one can get, what gambling and drinking does to a family, how to walk on eggshells.

There were wonderful things I learned from my father too and one I learned that today makes me so happy was to ride a bike. It was 63 years ago on my birthday, April 23, 1948. As I remember, it was a dazzling day much like today – warm, breezy, mild, dry. My present was a beautiful bicycle. I had been wanting one forever and never expected to get one. But here it was, waiting out front of our two-story grey shingled rented house on Johnson Street, outside our chain link fence, standing there in all its glory, a shiny bicycle proudly standing upright on the sidewalk.

My father had somehow heard my longing (and probably oft repeated begging) for a bicycle and he had gone to a police auction and rescued an abandoned or stolen bicycle. He had shined it up, repainted the chips and scrapes, oiled up the sprockets and the chain, and even finished it off with a straw basket and a red gift bow.

A bicycle represented freedom to any kid. To ride in the wind, to go where you wanted to without having to wait for someone to take you, to save the nickel carfare. However, there was another matter, that of learning to ride the bike. Though my heart rose at the sight of the birthday bike, it sank at the same time. I didn’t know how to ride – or who would teach me. I couldn’t imagine my mother on a bicycle – and indeed, I don’t think she ever did ride one. And I also couldn’t imagine my father teaching me – he was not that sort of father or so I thought.

But that gorgeous spring day, he WAS that kind of father! “Up you go,” he said and he helped me up to the seat, grabbed it from behind to steady me and showed me how to put my feet on the pedals. “Now pedal, push. Hang onto the handle bars and keep your balance.” Running along the sidewalk beside me – he encouraged me and never said one disparaging word. Leaving my little sister hanging over the fence green with jealousy and who knows what my mother was thinking. What a shock. All those commands, and yet I was able to follow all of them without trouble. Within a couple of turns around the block, I could ride my bicycle alone! I could pedal, push, use the coaster brakes to stop the bike, get off at the street corner and back on again and start pedaling, hang onto the handle bars, and keep my balance all at once! I suppose I was stunned into compliance – and astonishingly, I found myself loving my handsome, difficult father. Mostly, I hated him.

That day of learning from my father was a revelation – never to be repeated. He tried to teach me to ice skate – I was abysmal and could never learn to stand up in my shoe skates. He and my sister took off skating smoothly around the frozen pond and I was so jealous, but I didn’t learn to skate in one lesson or five before we both gave up. He tried to teach me to play tennis. Again, I was totally inept, unable to catch my breath and progress beyond the simplest beginner’s level, even with lessons and more lessons from instructors at the park district courts.

Now bicycling – that was something I could do. And still can. Today, riding in the breeze on a glorious spring day I am transported back to my nine-year old self –for once accomplished, competent, and free. That’s how my father related to me – as a teacher of sports. I still love him for that.

Whence Cometh the Propensities

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:03:11 -0400

Shiny black faceted bicone beads (my favorites), gloriously multicolored rainbow sequins changing color as I looked, feathers, fringe, tassels, braid, soutache, lace, crystals of every hue and shade, and thousands, maybe millions of colorful beads of every description, bugle beads, seed beads, glass beads. The inner sanctum – I was allowed to look but not touch. I could open the small drawers one inch and no more. The danger was that I would drop their precious contents and that my bubie could not allow.

The sewing room was off limits to my younger cousins, they could not be trusted, but as the oldest granddaughter, as long as my bubie or one of my older aunts was there along with me, I could look until I got my fill. That could never happen, I would never get my fill of looking and longing to touch. Sometimes, the interminable game of Monopoly in the living room would draw me out anyway for an hour or two, but then I would be back to begging for someone to accompany me into the sewing room.

My father Max was the oldest of eight, four boys and four girls. Then came Mary (who was my mother’s best friend during their high school years), then Bertha, Larry, Louie, then Beatrice, Leon, and Beverly, who is only two years older than I. My zayde used to come home empty handed, the joke was, to celebrate each family simcha, and then leave a present with the family, another baby on the way. He had come from a long line of scholars and then, through a shidduch, married my bubie Rose.

She was characterized as “robust” by the schadchan. That probably meant short and chubby and strong in mind and body and spirit. Certainly that was how I saw her. Strong minded. She would have to be, the matriarch of a family of eight begun when she was only a teenager with a mostly absent husband – a scholar and a peddler. A combination to make one crazy. Crazily handsome, crazily smart, crazily alcoholic, crazily casual about gambling he was. My father inherited all those traits. And I seem to have inherited some of my bubie’s traits – perseverance, stubbornness, ability to clown (although that’s probably from both sides – and may be part of what attracted my father to my mother), and being short and robust.

So bubie Rose, a mere 17 years older than my father, had to make a living for the whole family because her husband Barnett could not be counted on for any steady contributions to the family coffers. What a determined and resolute woman she was. (I have her chin.) By the time I knew her and got to poke around in her sewing room, she had developed quite a prestigious career. She was costumer to the stars of the Boston Opera House among other prominent clientele.

I can still remember the glorious aroma of the hallway we entered to go up the stairs to their flat – a combination of cooking, clean laundry, old wooden floors and plaster walls, and some ineffable and indefinable brick flat essence that I have since smelled again whenever I enter an old but well kept brick apartment building . Their six room flat was located in Brookline – not only did it have a living room and a dining room and three bedrooms and its own bathroom, it also housed a Bendix washer. In total fascination I watched the wet clothing circle slowly in the suds through the glass porthole, another enchanting bonus I was not allowed to touch.

The sewing room was a miracle in itself. A room used solely for sewing. What a luxury. Hung about the room were long zippered garment bags of a dark glossy material I was never allowed even to peek into the interiors of so I could only imagine what was inside. But I had a pretty good idea – my job at my parents’ cleaning store was to deliver similar (but much more cheaply made) garment bags I had packed myself to the Faust Club on the next block over in Peoria – so I knew those bags held glistening costumes decked with feathers that had to be hand sewn back on after they were cleaned.

But my bubie’s dresses were lavish, custom made, one of a kind, expensive creations, nothing like the cheap, gaudy, skimpy things the chorus girls wore at the burlesque club. Such a disappointment, I wasn’t allowed to finger those lush materials, velvets, satins, brocades, lame. The sewing machine took up the space in front of the only window in the room, which looked out on a window in the brick building opposite it, but it let in the light. Another luxury. Natural light during the day. You could save on electricity.

On the wall opposite the wall of tiny drawers were open shelves – filled to the brim with fabrics of various kinds, floor to ceiling. Again, I wasn’t allowed to touch – my grandmother sewed with white gloves on. But oh, they were gorgeous fabrics. To dazzle the eye, both close up and acres away in the magnificent Boston Opera House, a high class vaudeville house in those days.

Bubie’s sewing machine was the finest commercial one manufactured. A Singer. The best money could buy for home use. We had a Singer at the store – an old commercial treadle machine my father attached with long screws onto a thick wooden board so it wouldn’t wobble when Mrs. Johnson the seamstress used it to fix zippers on convertible tops. Come to think of it, that cleaning store with its dyeing, tailoring, tuxedo rentals, pressing machines, and zipper repairs was a direct descendent of my bubie’s business acumen – only my mother had the commercial ability, my father must have brought up the idea of owning a set of cleaning stores as a flight of fancy, but my mother operationalized it.

My bubie Rose was a clown of the highest degree. She used to hang her washing out on the roof of the apartment building – and I can remember her dancing around with the washtub on her head and we cousins and younger aunts falling over each other laughing and giggling. Oh, we couldn’t get too rambunctious – bubie was also strict. No grubby fingers touching her clean washing hanging on the line. No chasing each other through the wet clothes. Not after she had so meticulously pegged up each piece of underwear to dry. No, the fairly decorous continuous Monopoly game was about the most we could use to let off steam when we visited our bubie Rose.

And she made us clean out the tub and sink every time we used it. And would come to inspect our work to make sure it was done properly. No pushover, my bubie. And no helping in the kitchen. My other bubie Anna let me put my hands in the challah dough and pick the grapes on the grapevine growing on the trellis in the backyard, and inspect each of the tchotches and other chazzerai in her glass fronted cabinets in the parlor. And no supervision.

But not my bubie Rose. No with her, it was her rules or else. No one knew what the “or else” meant, we cousins were all too afraid to fall out of her favor to find out.

I only saw her once every few years for a day or two each time from the time I was about 7 until my early teens. Every few years, mother and father would pack us into the black pickup truck with the bench seat my father had fashioned from some old salvaged automobile at the junk yard and fastened to the floor in such a way that it could be removed for cleaning deliveries. We would drive the 1150 miles from Peoria to Boston in two days, sleeping in the truck. My father did not sleep. He drove, and drove fast.

My mother would remind him every time she would see a miles per hour sign, which in those days, had not only the speed limit posted as Max. 55, but also the minimum speed you could go, Min. 35. So of course, my mother pointed out each sign as specifically meaning my father, who most often would drive at least 10 if not 15 miles over the limit. At first it was a sort of joke, and my father might slow down for a while, but he had a lead foot and if he could push it when my mother was asleep, he would go 20 miles over the limit. But we always made it, even if we were sufferin’ in Suffern (north of New York City) in the middle of the night.

Those trips were a highlight of our lives. We sang in the panel truck and my father tolerated it - never even minded. My sister and I hardly fought at all. My parents left the cares of the business life and debts and arguments behind and were children again in their mothers’ homes. And since we were usually there for a family celebration, most often the wedding of one of my father’s brothers or sisters, tensions between my mother and father abated – they both had to deal with the tensions of their own families and generally presented a united front to my sister’s and my delight. We did not get punished for our transgressions, and therefore, very few transgressions were committed.

Besides, where else in my life would I be exposed to such grandeur and sumptuousness as in my bubie Rose’s sewing room? And why else would I have such fun making costumes for myself and my children, and luxuriating in fine fabrics and wanting the best – certainly not the cheapest – of everything?

Two Years Today

Fri, 6 Jan 2012 14:01:48 -0500

Today is the two year anniversary of my heart attack. The top picture is at the Parthenon last December. The bottom picture is at the Hermitage a little more than two years ago, before I had the HA.

You'll notice my son-in-law hasn't changed a bit - but I've lost 85 pounds. If you want to know how I did it, check out KaySheppard.com