Mira, your writing and thinking and worldview blow me away on a regular, delightful basis. This is me saying in front of God and everybody what an honor it is to be your collaborator.
Category: essays
Mira and Erin writing on themes of death, dying, grief, ritual, music, listening, Kaddish, Lev Kogan’s “Kaddish,” and so on.
national poetry month
Thought I’d better get this in before it isn’t April any more. I think next year, the whole month of April’s posts should be in poetry. I’d be pretty proud if I could manage it. This poem I stumbled on searching through my replacement computer after the crash of my favorite but unreliable old one,…
the shikse makes more charoset—& mrs tzaddik doesn’t care
After years of making the weak, watery Ashkenaz muck that Mira so disdains, I ran across this recipe in the The New York Times Passover Cookbook, credited to Larry Bain and Catherine Pantsios as an adaptation of his gramma’s.
the bookstore
So. The bookstore the other day — One of Malkah’s favorite things to do on planet Earth was to go with the tzaddik on his frequent forays into the dark and gloomy bowels of used bookstores. Holmes Books, in San Francisco, was one of their favorites together. The tzaddik would give Malkah a whole…
a kaddish for farzad bazoft, and also saddam hussein
I never met Saddam Hussein. But I wanted to. We were guests, actually, of Tariq Aziz — who was Foreign Minister at the time. Little known fact: they both share a birthday (one year apart): April 28th. It was my birthday. And we had just been detained. Pulled from the Baghdad airport just as we…
the inheritance
First they told me I was inheriting the biofather’s art supplies and his own paintings. Biofather was a Chinese painter. Then they found a new copy of the will, and next to my name was one word, in his handwriting — with an arrow to be clear: OMIT is what it said. And I thought,…
the shikse makes charoset—and Elijah likes it
I had the chutzpah to challenge Mira to a charoset-off. Uff da.
anyone who is hungry, let them come and eat
The tzaddik grew up in the Bronx, across from Yankee Stadium. That must say a lot about him, but I’m not sure what exactly. His family lived in a shvitzy little apartment, overcrowded with uncles and cousins and such. That was in addition to mamma, poppa, the tzaddik and his two younger brothers. Of course,…
the mystery of the missing beat: on meter in Kogan’s “Kaddish”
How I came to notice that Lev Kogan’s “Kaddish” for solo horn is missing a beat. After TWENTY-FIVE YEARS of caring passionately about the piece. Hm.