ellenkushner: (DREYDL)
[personal profile] ellenkushner
Skip the jokes, OK? I'm really sick of them. My mother never tells me to "Eat a little something" - indeed, she looks askance when I announce that I'm hungry - which I am every couple of hours, and as a result can't believe everyone else isn't, too, which is why I'm always offering people food. My mother does not "guilt" me when I don't call her often enough; indeed, when I do call her, she gets antsy after about 10 minutes and says, "Well, that's enough for now." My mother keeps a kosher kitchen and reads fluent Hebrew. When she was 17, her parents caught her packing her bags to run away to fight for Israeli independence, and grounded her. All 3 of her children have Biblical middle names. She's a Jewish mother.

The Jewish Women's Archive, a terrific organization I worked with some in Boston, invites us to post your own photos of our Jewish Mothers on their Flickr page.

In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month and in celebration of Mother's Day, the Jewish Women's Archive is creating a special photo collection about "Jewish Mothers."

Photos can show a Jewish mother, now or in the past, in any context -- mothers at home or at work; mothers in the family and in the community; mothers of different generations and family constellations; formal portraits or candid snapshots.

How would you like to represent Jewish mothers?

Date: 2009-05-08 02:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ambyr.livejournal.com
Thanks! My dad's been scanning a bunch of his old family pictures for a series of blog posts about his family's history--I'll see if I can persuade him to stick a few up there. (I think my mom would be kinda mortified if I added pictures of her, unfortunately.)

Here (http://fortyquestions.blogspot.com/2008/07/tales-from-old-country-and-beyond-part_11.html) is one story he's told, about her search for her father in post-war Poland, and here (http://fortyquestions.blogspot.com/2009/03/tales-from-old-country-and-beyond-part_27.html) is another, about her confrontation with the IRS.
Edited Date: 2009-05-08 04:05 pm (UTC)

Date: 2009-05-08 02:55 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ktempest.livejournal.com
I am utterly charmed by the story of your mother being grounded because she wanted to fight for Israeli independence.

Date: 2009-05-08 06:05 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] baka-kit.livejournal.com
As am I.

SO MAYBE YOU'RE INDIAN INSTEAD OF JEWISH?

Date: 2009-05-08 02:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ellen-kushner.livejournal.com
You can't post on the JWA site - but you can watch this video, "Indian Parents"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cpp71tpehg

It's hilarious - and reminds me so much of the American Jewish comedy routines of the '50s and '60s by Nichols & May et al. All part of the Ambitious Immigrant Experience, I guess!

Re: SO MAYBE YOU'RE INDIAN INSTEAD OF JEWISH?

Date: 2009-05-09 02:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ellen-kushner.livejournal.com
My Mom's comment:

"My parents saw my report card, all A's, and questioned the C in physical education."

Date: 2009-05-08 03:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sinboy.livejournal.com
My Jewish mother sued the state of NY for the right to work at her teaching job at SUNY Farmingdale while pregnant with me. And she won. The case set precedent for the state. My Jewish mother taught me by example that women could do anything.

Date: 2009-05-08 04:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tithenai.livejournal.com
It's actually quite offensive to me that anyone could turn the act of feeding people -- which is hospitality and love and grace -- into something to be made fun of. Grr.

Date: 2009-05-08 04:29 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sdn.livejournal.com
this is awesome.

Date: 2009-05-08 05:39 pm (UTC)
rosefox: Green books on library shelves. (Default)
From: [personal profile] rosefox
My Jewish mother is a professional chef and still doesn't do the constant "Eat, eat, you're too skinny!" narration. I've inherited her love of feeding people, but neither of us nags about it.

Date: 2009-05-08 05:43 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tylik.livejournal.com
One of my dear friends is a Jewish mother. She was a lawyer. Actually, she always had mixed feelings about being a lawyer, and sometimes she says that she mostly submitted her applications to law school to get her parents off her case. But then she got full ride scholarships, and passed her bar exams, and has done some amount of practicing and even more volunteering... however, she decided that there wasn't a branch of the law she felt ethically comfortable practicing, so she settled in to be a full time mom.

Though I think she got the arguing in her blood. She was on the older end of a whole group of us who used to do music together. When the younger set of us were finishing up college, she was always happy to volunteer if, say, someone (who had filled out everything and sent it in early) had their financial aid application get lost and were in the process of being told they couldn't go to school that quarter. She's call up the office and yell at them, and usually in under and hour everything was taken care of.

It was amazing. I mean, that is some superpower. But the joke was that if she didn't get it out of her system there, her family would hear it...

I was not a direct beneficiary of the above, but she has my heartfelt and eternal gratitude for taking me in one night when it abruptly became unsafe for me to be at home. (My mom wouldn't change the locks on the doors after my father - who didn't live there anymore - became increasingly threatening, and then one night he tracked me down to where I worked evenings alone, and... well. This was more than twenty years ago, but darn, sometimes it's really, really important to have somewhere to run. I was a fifteen year old university student.)

I do have to mention the food, because darn, she is one heck of a cook. Actually, the cooking was something we collaborated on for years (no longer the case now that I live some thousands of miles away). Reconstructions of medieval recipes. Hunting down obscure spices. Our illegal cheese conspiracy. (We did some cheese making together. We planned to make young cheeses with unpasteurized milk, hence the illegal, but somewhere in there - ironically, as I was doing more serious work in molecular biology - my academic schedule became too much.) Canning. The smoked fish. (I was their in house identifier of wild mushrooms. This meant I was in for a cut of the smoked fish - OMG, smoked black cod.) Passover at her place (foodgasm). Longest night at mine, but she usually ran the alcohol tasting of the year. (Everything from port to mead to homemade eggnog. The subject would be announced some weeks ahead. I ran this party for almost twenty years, and it had its own traditions and long term staff.)

Oh, and the kids. It did not entirely surprise me, considering how well she'd done by the younger set of the minstrel's guild, but she was an amazing advocate for her sons. Which ended up being particularly important, because they're unusual kids. They're both very bright. The eldest is extremely bookish and unworldly and you wouldn't believe the trouble this got him in to, completely innocently. I ended up being called in as a consultant when it became clear that he was bright enough and weird enough that the standard academic programs were just not working. He's a kick - when I was at Microsoft he'd call me at work any time he found a bug in any Microsoft program. And when he was eight he announced he was big now. He was big enough to learn to code. The youngest is very socially focused, just as much trouble, perhaps less innocence. When he, at six, was teaching the owner of the stable's daughter, who was also six, who to kiss up in the hayloft, well I kind of knew he'd be a hand full. Great kids both. Oh, dear. And the eldest starts college this fall... *sniff*

What else? Herb gardens and antique auctions and scuba lessons. Playing the stock market (what we did with the boys' college funds in the late nineties...) Setting things on fire. Figuring out how to install bookcases over secret doors in the master bedroom. Dying their entire downstairs carpet blue (okay, that one was an aquarium accident).

Date: 2009-05-08 05:43 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tylik.livejournal.com
Excuse the tome. But, well, she's really cool.

Date: 2009-05-09 04:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ellen-kushner.livejournal.com
Sounds like having you in her life was a wonderful as having her in yours!

Never underestimate the importance of having somewhere to run. And somewhere delightful to be safe to play & to experiment, as well! Thank you for your memories. Makes me feel like I was there.

Date: 2009-05-08 06:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com
I agree with the comment above, about how wrong it is to insult the act of feeding! Once I fed a homesick Czech woman some noodle kugel and she almost died of joy that someone else understood her kind of food. How can that be wrong?

(My favorite part of Laurie Marks's elemental trilogy is the cook, and how he figures he can make peace with good bread and good soup. That's the person I'd like to be.)

Date: 2009-05-08 06:52 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com
Also, my Jewish grandmother can't cook to save her life, but she was an accountant starting in the 1930s or 1940s. She had a group of women friends who were also accountants, and they met monthly for most of their lives, fifty years at least.

October 2014

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
121314151617 18
19202122232425
262728293031 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Aug. 1st, 2025 02:48 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios