Last night I played a lullaby for the several dozen tornado victims in Alabama. That number has continued to grow today as officials across the southeast tally the losses. When last I checked the news this afternoon, it had risen to 150, and as of right now the New York Times is reporting that the death toll nears 300.
A Kaddish for my mother, Ruth Leavitt Kadish
It’s been 7 months since my mother’s passing on September 19, 2010.
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.
daily kaddish: tornado victims’ lullaby
Dozens of people have already been reported killed in tornados sweeping through Alabama today. I didn’t feel like playing Kogan’s “Kaddish” tonight. Instead, I improvised a sort of lullaby for those people and their loved ones.
daily kaddish: for lost histories
I’ve spent the evening digging through ancestry.com and a box of old family photos—most unlabeled—mixed up with big envelopes of negatives (also unlabeled except that they were ordered from Bismarck, North Dakota by my great-grampa (Mom’s dad’s dad) Herman L Selvig from Plaza, North Dakota. I haven’t been able to make a whole lot of sense of most of it.
some perspectives from the shikse’s dad
Dad and I were talking about the “kaddish in two-part harmony” project the other night, and he muttered something about spending a career dealing with death. I’d never quite put it together that his thirty years in the Social Security Administration had had him dealing with death all the time—well, duh! So I asked him to write a guest essay about what that was like.
daily kaddish: for don, sr
A kaddish for our neighbor don, sr; we just learned of his passing two weeks ago.
daily kaddish: chez rebecca
Today Mira and I visited her mom, Rebecca, for a mini Seder, and I recorded a kaddish afterward in her great room. Wow.
daily kaddish: mohammed bouazizi
Mira dedicated this kaddish to Mohammed Bouazizi, whose humble reaction to bureaucratic humiliation set off the revolution in Tunisia, which set of revolutions in Egypt and Libya.