I cannot believe that I made - even late but in time for Shushan Purim - these homen-tashn to celebrate my mom's birthday on Shushan Purim two years ago. Kudos to Jenny Romaine and all the musicians and actors and participants to this year's Purim shpil Jews With Thorns in a year and in a world where we better be Rosendorn than Rosenblum if we don't want to be Rosenblut. Purim is a symbol of national resistance as well as a rebellion against any form of authoritarianism, and certainly a festival where the women's intellectual and spiritual power is skillfully revealed. As is revealed the magic of disguise, reversal, détournement and blurring lines of identities out-staged by artistry.
Strength in numbers! Purim 2017 — with Zachary Wager Scholl, Emma Alabaster and Jenny Romaine
This text was written in 2015 Mars 5th, on Shushan Purim,
to celebrate my mother Rosa Portnoi's birthday:
My mother Rosa Portnoi happens to be born on Shushan Purim. Choosing the language – English or French – in which I will write this little piece had a sort of metaphysical implication in the same way than being in my kitchen here, in Brooklyn where she was never healthy enough to visit me in her old age, and doing her recipes.
On what is called Shushan Purim – the 15th day of Adar – the Jews of Shushan, the Persian capital, defeated their enemies one day later than elsewhere in the Empire and also celebrated their victory one day later.
Rosa was all her life apparently very … imperial. She had this sort of backbone that was given to her by her education, at home and at school. The eldest of eight, she has also brought up her six sisters and one brother. In the kitchen, she was a queen, and in term of Jewish education and knowledge, she was in the same time like an oak-tree and like a reed, very sure of her sources, but very flexible about practices and rituals, having gone through the Soviet system and the necessary maranism that survival in its arcanes implies. The nature of her faith was not unquestionable, but it was build-in in the structure of her being. I remember some strange interrogations about god that she roused precisely at Yom kipper when we sat together in the women section of our shul. She was a real Litvak, prompt to learn and respectful of knowledge. She may have had a very inflexible notion of purity and moral probity.
During the war, she didn't take any bit of meat in her mouth, to make sure not to eat any non kosher food. She was the one who urged my father to sneak out from Lithuania after the so called “doctor’s plot” Staline invented, sensing before him the perils of being Jewish in the new "anti-Sionist" context, de facto the growing state antisemitism. And she was the one that my father has “farpoylished”, “Polonised” to be able to get out from the country when Soviet Union accepted that the Poles return to Poland in 1956 – although my father was the one whose father was born in Warsaw.
When she arrived in France, she rushed at the Alliance française and learned the language in about three months. She had acquired strong methods for this exercise in her Gymnasium Yavne in Telz, when she studied of course Lithuanian, Hebrew (the teaching language), Latin and German. All her life she corrected my father’s gender mistakes or hesitations and was most often correct. And her pleasure and pride at speaking languages was never belittled with vernacular speakers who were amazed at her skills and perfect dikduk and grammar.
Finally the most spectacular was the kind of answer she gave to my own shortcomings. All my life, the impression of being late in whatever I accomplished – even if, as a professional free-lance translator, I honor my contracts in time – has accompanied the deep feeling of being not enough … educated, literate, learned, skillful. I know that this sense of uncompletness is very common and verges sometimes a paralyzing lack of self-confidence. To my complaints about myself, she used to say: “Du vest vern a rebbetsin eyn tog shpeter”. Not that she thought that I was doomed to become a rabbi’s wife, but she suggested that I will rich the perfection I was yearning for one day later, which means maybe … never. And that is the lesson of modesty that she taught me, the highest is your spiritual, educational, professional standard, and I would also say metaphysical, the more you have to accept your unaccomplishment.
It was all these little things that came back to my memory when I was fighting with the poppy seeds of my homen tashn to celebrate her birthday in my kitchen today. I thought of her like a proud and uncompromising queen Esther.
And there is something strange and troubling linking her date of birth with the one of her death in the official document. The first name of the hospital employee who went to the local city hall to declare her death was SHEHERAZADE (not common at all in France). Like Esther, Sheherazade is Persian and she crafts her 1001 nights narrative to save her life as a woman. The name of the city hall clerk who recorded and signed the death certificate, a woman also, was … HACHEM.
And there is something strange and troubling linking her date of birth with the one of her death in the official document. The first name of the hospital employee who went to the local city hall to declare her death was SHEHERAZADE (not common at all in France). Like Esther, Sheherazade is Persian and she crafts her 1001 nights narrative to save her life as a woman. The name of the city hall clerk who recorded and signed the death certificate, a woman also, was … HACHEM.
