I think this is a great campaign, both from an advertising perspective and in terms of the principle involved. (West Seattle’s Kol HaNeshamah is similarly inclusive, which I’ve always appreciated.) Well done, T’chiyah!

Bewoket: By the will of God, a documentary by Seattle filmmaker Andrea Mydlarz Zeller about a dedicated Jewish doctor working to provide health care for children in Ethiopia, has recently gotten distribution with the National Center for Jewish Film.

You can read more about Bewoket here.

And purchase copies of the movie here.

Congrats to Zeller and thanks to Elisa for the tip.

It’d be quite a mitzvah.

Last month, my mother sent me the manuscript of her soon-to-be-published book, (Re)vision of a Life: My Mother’s Holocaust Story. Of course, the “My Mother” of the title was my grandmother, who died in 2004 following a life lived in the aftermath of the Third Reich. As my mother points out in the book, my grandmother was able to move on in many ways, making a good life for herself in New York, getting married, having a child, and eventually moving to Michigan to watch me, her only grandchild, grow up.

Reading my mother’s carefully chosen words, which tend toward the solemn, makes me wish I’d gotten to know my grandmother better. Indeed, I wish this book had existed while she was still alive; I might have known which questions to ask to bring us closer together. As it was, I sensed a gulf between us. Part of it was cultural; she was born in Germany and sometimes spoke a mixture of German and English, though her accented English was quite good when she stuck to it. Part, too, was generational. She was born in 1911 and was 34 when my mother was born; my mother, in turn, was 33 when I was born. Neither age is old by today’s standards, but I imagine that in the 1940s and ‘70s, both women might have been considered older than average to be having a first child.

In any case, neither cultural differences nor the span of years could mask my grandmother’s love for me, which she expressed verbally and also in the form of gifts, though sometimes my parents had to step in to make sure she didn’t spoil me (further). I have faint memories of her babysitting me when I was young, and much stronger memories of visiting her apartment in Southfield, Mich., which she moved to in 1986, when I was 7. She lived there until the end of her life, benefitting from 24-hour caregiving that my mother took great pains to coordinate. My grandmother didn’t want her life to end in a nursing home, and my mother made sure it didn’t have to. What my grandmother had gone through in the Holocaust I had some inkling of, but not until I read my mother’s book did I realize the depth of her ordeal. Expelled from her German hometown, made to march across the Polish border, struck in the teeth by a Nazi, herded onto one of the infamous train cars, and shipped off to a Polish concentration camp, my “Oma” experienced things I hope never to get even a taste of.

True, most Jews of my generation with grandparents who survived the Holocaust have stories like these to tell, but not until I reached my current age, and was able to hear these tales through my mother’s voice, did they really sink in. While I regret that I wasn’t able to feel closer to my grandmother, and that I wasn’t around when she died, I feel certain that my very existence, as well as the successes I managed to achieve before she passed away, were a source of pride for her. My grandmother wasn’t the type to impose her views on others; she occasionally tried to convince me that wearing a gold chai around my neck would be a nice idea, but she never implored me to date only Jewish women, and she was extremely kind to my (consistently non-Jewish) girlfriends.

As I read Re(vision) of a Life, I miss my grandmother, not in an aching, highly emotional way, but in the way you miss people who were a whole lot more interesting than you gave them credit for, and whom you can no longer ask all the pressing questions their lives, remembered by another, suddenly bring to mind.

Enjoy the best version of this song, EVER. No Shlomo, it does not sound better in the 2000s. Don’t recover your old songs, with a few exceptions. And don’t let other people cover your songs either, they sound awful!