If youre looking for something to do this evening, come to the Caldwell Library, 268 Bloomfield Ave., where Ill be reading poetry at 6:30 with my colleague Adele Kenny as an extension of the Caldwell University Poetry Service Project. Heres something this page inspired: OUR TOWN, REVIVED for us Now on Facebook, Jewish Roots in Paterson. Paterson, Silk City gone sad, once home to Jews by the thousands: shopkeepers, attorneys, physicians, clergy, many from The Old Country, men and women who kept this town humming. My own father Ben, a moving-man, sent his trucks in all directions to carry furniture, sometimes to another neighborhood, from flats in two-story homes to ranches, split-levels, Italianate marble near Eastside Park. Where dress salons, shoe stores, haberdasheries stood, five along one of the shorter downtown streets, there rose bail-bond stores. Where a movie theatre once enchanted us, we see rubble in the lobby, attempts to develop that stalled mid-project. In the glorious synagogue where I walked down the bridal aisle under a stained-glass star, prayers no more. The gilded art deco choir loft where the hired alto stunned us with her voice a resonant reverberation on marble surrounds: an empty cavern. The promenade in front where we looked for our high school crushes: cracked, dry grass peering up. But we come alive again on Jewish Roots—someone places a question, do you remember this school, that shul, this house, that deli? A diligent member drives around town, photographs homes, our old addresses. Oh, the comments: I remember your mother, your dog, we rode the bus to day camp together, I can’t believe we live just two towns apart. Whispers from the group that started out with a handful turn into shouts from a membership that bursts with familiarity. One thousand voices now call out to each other to hold onto the memories that wrap us in a single warm coat on days that turn cold. —Gail Fishman Gerwin, ©2014
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 13:15:07 +0000
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