Life is a Narrow Bridge

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to see Broadway's Roundabout Theater production of "The People in the Picture."   This multigenerational musical takes place in pre-war Warsaw with a Yiddish theater troupe, mid-war Warsaw in the ghetto, and then in the 1970s with a surviving mother and daughter and the next generation granddaughter wanting to record her Bubbie's story.   The musical met with mixed reviews because of its wild treatment of an immensely serious topic, but it hit me in the gut so strongly that I had to see it more than once. Initially, the musical struck a chord with me because of the grandmother-granddaughter relationship. Knowing family stories was always so important to me and I cherished Sunday afternoons looking through the photo albums trying to remember names and make sense of a world long gone. I'm sure that nothing was ever really as I imagined it or  even as it was narrated to me,  but these stories formed a part of my cultural ide...

   I was in high school when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Actually, we were on a family vacation and Dad pulled me aside someplace out west. He had me look at the price of gas before we went into our hotel for the night. Sixty seven cents. "You'll never see gas that price again, Emily," he told me. I was convinced he was clairvoyant when the same station had raised its price to a whopping eighty six cents the next day. That same year, I began to look into colleges. Although I was reluctant to make any change that involved growing up, the only two colleges that seemed to merit the sacrifice of leaving home were Bryn Mawr and Haverford. At the time, they were interconnected to me. I liked Haverford because it was coed. I liked Bryn Mawr because my host played handbells and enjoyed Charlotte Bronte. I was comfortable in both colleges because they were intellectual, small, and havens for individuals. My mother, though, was a war worrywart at the time. She was scared that the ...

I've been thinking a lot about Eleanor Roosevelt lately, and thanks to a wise seventh grade student, I have learned so much about her in the past week. Before Maya set forth on her independent research for National History Day, I didn't know too much about this First Lady, and my feelings about her were mixed, to say the best. I credited her for being a strong feminist and a stout intellectual. I empathized with her for not matching society's view of beauty and for having an odd speaking voice. And, somehow I had it in the back of my mind that some of her actions were antisemitic and that she could have done more to help with the plight of the Jewish people in Europe.  Maya is researching Eleanor Roosevelt as a representative example for Leaders and Legacy, this year's theme. She chose the leader and has come to work on her research at lunch and study hall just about every day this school year. Her efforts have given me a greater appreciation of the many predicaments ER...

Dear Mr. Kurtz, I have just spent the past four hours swept away by your three minutes (and much more!) in Poland. Like you, I grew up in Long Island, in a cluttered house of a loving family, and like your grandparents, mine made it to America from Jewish Poland before the war, without seeing that WW2 was on its way.  Like you, I am a musician (by passion)...though by trade I am a teacher of middle school gifted students in central Jersey. Recently, I found out that I would be one of 25 teachers worldwide invited to Poland to meet with Holocaust survivors and commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.  I'm honored...and emotionally all over the place. Sorrow, fear, horror, gratitude, connection--- so many feelings in such a short time since I found out the news. As a scholar, I've learned to handle emotional overwhelm with learning...which led me to find out about your book. I watched the three minutes several times and imagined, wondered, po...

Yesterday, on the way home from teaching at RVCC, I had one of those amazing NPR driveway moments where I just sat and listened and was transported into another world.  The topic of this radio show was a children's opera, "Brundibar", which was written in the Terezin concentration camp and performed by a desperately rotating group of children there.  One of the survivors, Ela Stein Weissberger, has taken it upon herself to revive the work and the story of the children who lived through its performance. I marvel at how a caged bird can sing, and yet I know the transcendental power of music.  After studying Spanish theater of the civil war, I also know how the arts are ways to critique government indirectly.  In this operetta, Brundibar represented much more than simply a villainous cat.  It represented Hitler and all the wrongs enacted on helpless people. We musicians, we theater people, we live the art of the ephemeral.  As I named this blog ages ag...

These were the questions Robin Migdol of USC Shoah Foundation asked me...and my responses: When and how did you become interested in teaching the Holocaust?  My interest in teaching about the Holocaust stems from my desire to model kindness and acceptance.  This desire has grown within me for my whole life.  In primary school  at the tail end of the Cold War, my teacher read our class Peter Spier's book "People". At the end of this colorful book, there is a page where diversity is eliminated and all the buildings are grayish rectangles. I vividly remember my well-meaning kindergarten teacher admonishing the class that we should be grateful that we don't live in Russia, because everyone is the same there. As much as I loved variety, even back then, I was horrified that the first time my great-grandmother's native land would come up in school would be in that context. I wanted to know more, to go beyond the picture books and beyond one teacher's interpretatio...

Last time I wrote in this blog, my life was so different.  I'm grateful for the rise in confidence and the growth of adventures I have had in the past five or so years, and it is time to start blogging again. It's odd; back when I started blogging, Facebook wasn't so prevalent in my life.  I began blogging before my sister Mel passed away, and it was actually her coma and eventual death that brought me into the social networking community.  Blogging was a way to mix diary writing with social interaction.  It was a way to keep my diary writing thoughts "safe" in an era when my childhood family was changing so drastically.  This blog helped me say goodbye to my sister and my grandparents. Now that years have passed, I am always and ever connected to Mel, Nana, and Papa...but I have a different reason for writing. I'm about to embark on an immense emotional journey, one that I am honored to share with the world.  I will be heading to Poland in a few mont...