This post is bracketed by snow: The first serious snowfall of the season occurred almost immediately after we returned from the south. While ADC was enjoying Florida, the boys had a snow day after one day back at school. The day before yesterday (January 27), as I set off for Princeton, they had another one. My talk at Rutgers has been postponed to March, due to the storm - which in the event didn't affect places south of New York as much as was forecast. Still, it would have been difficult to get to Rutgers (even leaving in the afternoon, it took longer than usual to get to Princeton, as the commuter rail was far less frequent. I ended up taking a bus from Trenton, where I was the only passenger most of the time, and the only non-person of color all of the time.
Going back, on January 9 I spent the morning with my cousins SG and her sister JG, who was visiting from London. We visited Kreeger House, formerly the home of David and Carmen Kreeger, that was specifically designed to set off their collection of art, which ranges from the Impressionists onwards. There were some very lovely pieces there, and I was sorry that it was too cold too see the sculpture garden properly: the grounds were covered with snow, making many of the sculptures inaccessible. It was nice spending time with JG, who I hadn't seen since we lived in Cambridge, and she brought Smarties for the children, which they are taste-testing in comparison with M&Ms.
Last weekend was Martin Luther King Day, and the boys had a day off school for teacher training. With a four-day weekend, we decided to set off for New York. We stayed in a mid-town hotel, the Grand Union, that suited our needs perfectly. Unfortunately for us, it is about to be renovated and will probably be priced above our means when it reopens (We were told this by a lady we met in the lift, who has been staying their for decades whenever she visits New York. She also identified the neck warmers that were all wearing as having been home knitted, and complimented me on my work!). But in the meantime, it was very pleasant, and had really excellent croissants at breakfast.
We arrived in New York on Saturday afternoon, and almost immediately went off to the High Line park, before it got dark. We were expecting a place where you could see views of New York from above, and were severely underwhelmed by what we found. Ignoring the fact that it was freezing there, the view was completely blocked by a variety of high rise buildings going up. I think that even if we had gone at a warmer time of year, this is a place that New Yorkers appreciate, rather than visitors. After recovering with large bowls of hot chocolate, we took the subway to the Guggenheim, which has semi-free entry on Saturday evenings. We stood in a fast-moving line for a while, and had a restorative experience once we got inside. Only part of the museum was open, because they were between exhibitions, but there was just the right amount of art for us to look at. We saw an exhibition of early Kandinsky, another of the Justin Tannhauser collection (some really lovely Impressionists), and of a modern Indian painter, Gaitonde. Interestingly, even before looking at the labels, it was clear that this was Indian-influenced art. We then returned to the hotel and ate at a neighbourhood Korean restaurant, which specialized in dumplings. We had fried and boiled vegetarian dumplings as starters, and I liked them better than most Chinese dim sum I've had. In fact, after this trip, I have come to the conclusion that Chinese is my least-favourite Asian cuisine. It's simply the worst option for vegetarians, it seems to me.
On Sunday we experienced possibly the worst weather so far: freezing, driving rain. We went to Queens, to see the street in Rego Park where my parents-in-law grew up, and were thoroughly soaked. Even the best coat has a limit - and we also walked through slippery slush, which was quite scary since I felt that my boots were not really up to the job ... Had the weather been better, we might have considered knocking on the door and seeing if we could see the inside of the houses, but we felt that we could not drip over the furniture of complete strangers. We then continued to the Museum of the Moving Image, where we tried to meet up with another cousin, OC, and her family. Unfortunately, museums are not really a good place to meet up unless your children are exactly the same age. We did manage to talk a bit, when the children were all involved in activities, but most of the time we were going though the exhibitions at different speeds. S was in heaven, and we all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. We spent over 5 hours in the museum, first at a special exhibition on Chuck Jones, who directed most of the Looney Tunes cartoons, and then at the permanent exhibition, which described the development of all aspects of movies and television, from actors, scripts and costumes, through special effects, make-up and merchandise, to different kinds of cameras and screens. The children experimented with stop-motion animation and played Pacman on an arcade machine. ADC and I particularly enjoyed two collages of famous scenes and famous words from the movies, trying to identify as many as possible. Just watching all the movies in those collages would be an education in classic film. We tentatively agreed to meet OC after supper (they left the museum much earlier than we did), and we even ate at an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side - not the one they recommended, though - but by the time we finished, we were too exhausted to be sociable, and went home without seeing them again. I hope we will be able to find another occasion, but if not, we are all going back to Israel in the summer, and apparently they are considering moving to somewhere in the Jerusalem hills.
On Monday the weather was much better, and we spent the day on the Lower East Side. We began by taking the Staten Island Ferry back and forth to see the Statue of Liberty. ADC and I had been to the Ellis Island Museum when ww visited New York in 1996, and we decided that the Tenement Museum would be more enjoyable for the children. We booked two tours - a walking tour, at 2 p.m., and a house tour, at 4:45. Before the tours, we met ADC's cousin (we have so much family here it's unbelievable) LS, who took us to a Chinese place for lunch (which was where I came to the conclusion above. It was't that the food was bad, it was just boring. There were about 3 vegetarian options in a list of lunch specials that ran to close to 30, one of which was plain steamed vegetables.) Anyway, it was very nice to see LS again, she seemed to be enjoying her life. The Tenement Museum tours were for me the highlight of our trip (thank you, Daddy, for suggesting it). The walking tour was led by a woman originally from the Netherlands, who had come to New York to study American history, and the group was multi-ethnic. We saw many different styles of buildings, three synagogues (one still working - the Romaniote Kehillat Kodesh Janina, one that is now Seventh-Day Adventist church, and one - the Erster Varsha - that is now a sculptor's studio. I wonder which alternative the founders of the congregations would have considered worse), a Chinese temple to the god of wealth and business, and walked through a few different parks, of which the largest was the Sarah D. Roosevelt park, named after FDR's mother, parts of which have been taken over by the community, in one case for a community garden like we have in Beit Hakerem, and in another case by Chinese men who bring their birds to socialise in a specific spot. The tour ended up at the Essex Street Market, but unfortunately for us, many of the food places were already closed. We had some time between the two tours,so we backtracked to a cupcake bakery I had spotted, and had amazingly good cupcakes and hot chocolate, before going to learn about life in garment production in the Lower East Side. The Tenement Museum offers a number of building tours, we took the Sweatshop Workers ("Pay a visit to the Levine family's garment workshop and the Rogarshevskys' Sabbath table at the turn of the 20th century, when the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place in the world. Explore how immigrants balanced work, family and religion at a time of great change.") This time, the guide and all the participants were clearly Jewish, and had ancestors who had lived in similar tenements. We saw a census from 1900, and all the names there were from ADC's family album. There was even a brother and sister called Fanny and Abraham, just like his grandmother and her brother. The census was fascinating in and of itself: the difference between children who had been born in the old country and had gone to work on arrival contrasted with the American-born siblings, who were in school or college; the men all spoke English and could read and write, while this was not true of all the women. We were there in the late afternoon, and the Levines' back room which served as a sweat shop was already quite gloomy. I was very impressed by the weight of the coal press - no wonder a man was employed to press the garments! I would have liked more time to wander around the other rooms, especially the Rogarshevsky family's other rooms, which we got to see only quite briefly. We did see, however, a special additional prayer that women would say while lighting candles, in which they hoped that their family would be able to earn a living while being able to observe Shabbat - as people moved from backroom sweatshops where the owner knew you and was most likely Jewish himself, to factories that had to abide by New York state blue laws forbidding work on sundays, it became more difficult to keep Shabbat, and for many people this was a serious problem. The last thing we did there was hear an oral history, taken from an elderly lady who had lived in the building, Josephine Baldizzi (her family's story is the subject of a different tour). She described how she would be called to light lamps on Saturdays, and how proud she was that she was able to help by doing that. All in all, it was very moving, and I'm glad the boys are old enough to have enjoyed it, too.
Our last day in New York was spent at the American Museum of Natural History. One of the perks of ADC's job is having friends at all the major natural history museums, and not only were we able to get in for free, we saw an IMAX show and a special exhibition for free, too, thanks to the curator of invertebrate zoology. We didn't have enough time at the Museum. We saw the dinosaur exhibition, which is very up to date, and which was a must because the Smithsonian's dinosaur hall is being refurbished, then hurried to the IMAX. I felt that we could have done without this, in retrospect, but S really wanted to see it: "Tiny Giants" was a heavily anthropomorphised story of the challenges facing chipmunks and grasshopper mice, which I found a bit too cutesy. After that we went to the special exhibition on natural disasters, Nature's Fury, which was really quite scary. I am very glad I don't live in the tornado corridor of the central USA. By the time we were done there, we had to start counting down to catching the train home and we went to see the dioramas of American nature. I think I saw a (stuffed) real road runner for the first time, and I was surprised at how different they were from the Beep-Beeps we had seen on Sunday. We nearly missed the train home, since for the first time we approached Penn Station from street level, rather from within the subway system, and we had difficulty finding the right entrance. Luckily, with a burst of speed we made it, and we even managed to sit together.
ADC stayed on in New York to give talks at the AMNH and at NYU, and by the weekend, we were all exhausted - besides, it was supposed to snow then, too. We spent a peaceful weekend, without leaving the house. On Saturday KM and his family came to visit from Baltimore. The plan was to eat cholent and then go to a museum, but by the time we finished lunch (this involved a 45 minute break while vanilla soufflé was prepared and baked), the four boys were resistant to going anywhere and they spent the afternoon playing board games in the basement, joined at one point by their fathers, while AM and I talked and played with baby CM.
On Sunday, the main thing we did was watch The Sound of Music, which was surprisingly long, and very enjoyable. S has been singing bits and pieces of "The hills are alive" and the Do-Re-Mi Song ever since. Both boys had fun pointing out the tropes while we were watching. I completed the back of GB's vest over this weekend, and I will finish it - seaming and neck/armhole bands - after I get back from Princeton. [In the meantime, the vest has been completed and sent to Tel Aviv.]
Princeton was really fun. Sabine Schmidtke picked me up from the bus stop and I slept over in her enormous house - where she lives alone most of the time, as her partner works for the World Bank and spends Monday to Friday in Washington. I had lunch with Patricia Crone!! I still can't get over it, it was so thrilling to actually meet someone whose books have blown my mind. When I was practically learning some of them by heart for my MA exam, I never thought that someday I would actually meet the author. She was delighted to hear that ADC and his father had read and enjoyed her book Pre-industrial societies. the talk itself went well, I thought. Heinrich von Staden, a classicist who specialises in Galen, came too, and I nearly had a panic attack. But he was very kind about my lack of Greek, and thought that I was doing interesting work, so that was great. He had to leave before the end of the session, and after he left, the others asked questions more focused on the Arabic texts I was using, and I came away withholds of ideas for going forward.
It took a long time to get home. The train from Trenton to Washington was half an hour late, and I think went more slowly than usual so that I arrived home a good hour later than I had expected. I got a lot of knitting done, though. Luckily I brought it along, as I finished my book while still at Trenton. No more travelling for me for the next month or so - I'll be glad for some weekends at home.
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