Beis Shefe בית שפע

March 19th 2024 – Adar II 9 5784

Lately I have been reading and finishing books at rate that I have not replicated since in elementary school and spent every moment of free time I had reading chapter books, like Judy Moody, Percy Jackson, and these kooky-funny-weird series about girls at a posh English boarding school called St. Clare’s that my aunt heard about from a British girl she made friends with when my father’s family went to London in maybe the nineteen-seventies, and she gave me the series for Chanukah. I’ve finished six books since I arrived in London, mostly reading on Shabbos and also on my bus trip to class in the morning and home in the evening that sometimes take less than half an hour and sometimes more than an hour, it’s very unpredictable. I like having the second floor of the bus mostly to myself, and I can get lost in the book as the city goes past the window, it’s very cosy.

The Secret That Is Not A Secret by Jay Michelson

Almost immediately after starting this book I knew it was special. That’s not to say that I liked each story. One or two I really didn’t like at all, and there were a few stories that I couldn’t really pick a part from each other, each of them about two men meeting in an unexpected place and sharing a mystical-sexual experience, and they felt like they were repeating each other, or hitting the nail too hard over the head. Nevertheless I also enjoyed those stories, but my favorite was called “The Verse.” This story imagines that the verse in the Torah prohibiting homosexuality miraculously disappears from every Sefer Torah in the entire world. I thought this was a very good concept to use in explore and reckon with such verses in the Torah that feel incompatible with our notions of Justice and a loving G!d.

Enemies, A Love Story by Yitzhak Bashevis Singer (I can’t resize the images)

This one had a very profound effect on me, as I see now when I go back to look at the book and some of the pages are brittle from where I cried all over them.

Here are some of the lines I underlined:

“One must please everyone, even the former husband of one’s mistress.”

“In some of the ghettos, they even had cabarets. You can imagine what cabarets! You had to step over dead bodies to get in.”

“You’re lying, Herman. If a woman loves a man, she wants to have his child.”

“I’ve wanted your child since the day we met.” (Underlined, with stars)

“Now I’m entirely without hope, and one dies of that more quickly than of cancer.”

“Tamara, she saved my life.” “Is that why you want to destroy her?”

(About Yadwiga, a Polish peasant, one of his three wives) “Then she burst into tears like a good Jewish woman.”

One of the scenes that stuck with me the most was Herman and Masha’s trip to a borscht belt resort. He sees a girl in a tight swimsuit and a Star of David Necklace, flirting with a boy with hairy chest, a rabbi playing tennis with his wife wearing a sheitel, mothers dressed revealingly forcing their kids to eat, people making speeches and having political arguments. The waiters are flirting and making jokes, and when a woman sends back her food, one says “by Hitler you ate better?” They are American Jews who have seemingly moved past the war, and Herman can’t bear to be around them because he sees is excess and vulgarity. He thinks, how could they be living, after all that’s happened, and so much?

How to be a Renaissance Woman by Jill Burke

This was a much lighter read that I relished every single second of. I loved reading about the Sephardic Jewish women who created beauty treatments in Renaissance Italy and administered them to other women, which is something I definitely want to research and write more about later. This book made me want to take pride in the act of adorning oneself, to take it the act of decorating one’s body seriously. The best part were the recipes at the back! Testing out the recipes was incredibly enjoyable, and I would like to make a post in the future detailing which were the ones that were most successful.

Wanderers in the New Forest by Juliette Baïracli Levy

This book got me through a very difficult week-or-so. Each chapter dealt with a different aspect of life in the New Forest region in England, (which is actually very old, but like all things, was new once) including the gardens that people grew, the wild horses, and the Romani people who lived in the forest. Juliette De Baïracli Levy is known as a pioneer of modern herbalism, and reading her book made me want to learn a lot more about the uses of plants, and hopefully one day have my own garden! In the meantime I would love to learn how to grow herbs in pots indoors. The book inspired me to take a trip, a pilgrimage really, to the New Forest region where she made her home with her children and their dog and cat, with the intention of practicing Hisbedosus and also free bleeding, which I may write more about later…

Other books I’ve read included a very good fictional biography of Artemisia Gentilesci by Alexandra Lapierre, and On Photography by Susan Sontag, which I would like to dedicate its own post to. Currently, I am about to finish The Apple in the Dark by Clarice Lispector, so look out for my thoughts on what she herself called “The Best One” out all her books.