Author: hershel
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The Trees Are Also Immigrants
I am sickened by the daily images of brown people being shoved, beaten and disappeared by men wearing masks into unmarked cars. I fear that tomorrow they will take my friends and after that come for me. Where I live, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 265 miles from the Mexican border, people have migrated to and…
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No Enemies
My ancestors lived with Arabs and Muslims for 1260 years. They migrated to the US in the early twentieth century.As Sephardic Jews, they lived in Al-Andalus, the Iberian Peninsula, where Muslims ruled from 711 until the Christian Reconquista and the expulsion of both Muslims and Jews. In what is now called Spain, the Jews learned…
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Notes From Mexico City: “La Conquista Continúa”
I’m trying to think of a word or a phrase or a way to describe the arc of a certain kind of relationship, a relationship a person has with a place. I want to describe what it is like to be in a place where I didn’t grow up. It’s a verb that I’m looking…
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Notes from Mexico City, Part One
From my tiny rooftop apartment in the colonia Coyoacuán I see the sun rise blood-orange red fading into hot orange and then silvery white and blue. On the horizon the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl come into focus. I see the stunning main library on the UNAM campus. I am fascinated with this building designed by painter…
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Mezuzahs are for Everyone
Can anyone have a mezuzah? Or does it belong only to the Jews? A Cornerstone of the Religion The mezuzah is a sacred object that plays a central role in Jewish tradition. It is used in a ritualistic way. It contains our most important prayer, the Shema. Affixed to the doorpost, it defines the home…
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Eucalyptus
Eucalyptus Eucalyptus globulus When I was attending woodworking school in Northern California in the mid 1980’s I’d pass a grove of eucalyptus trees on my way to class each day. I still remember the trees’ wonderful aroma in the fog and rain and the way they shed their blueish bark in long strips. Recently my…
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Breaking the Glass Dial: My Childhood and Heritage
My father wore suits his father had made on a treadle sewing machine. His first language was Yiddish. My mother was born on the run, her parents fleeing the overthrowing of the Ottoman Empire and the ensuing anti-Jewish oppression. Her father was a coppersmith. She typed seventy words a minute on her black Royal manual typewriter. Her…
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A Cabinet from a Pear Tree
Here is the beginning of the cabinet, a single plank of European pear wood, almost twenty inches wide, two inches thick and ten feet long. Sawed near the center of the log it contains the full diameter of the tree. The truck driver and I unload the plank onto saw horses under the portal. It…
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My Mulberry Tree
As a very young child, I adopted a sapling and named it George. It is not uncommon for children and adults to form close relationships with trees. We think of them as people, not to take away their “treeness” but to have them as our relatives and equals. The mulberry tree in this story never…