Contributing writer Jenna Zark is a local Jewish playwright whose plays have been produced at Circle Repertory Company, Illusion Theater, History Theatre, Minnesota Jewish Theatre, Blank Slate and elsewhere. Jenna's new novel, "The Beat on Ruby's Street" focuses on a young Beat girl in Greenwich Village in 1958 and can be found at www.jennazark.com. Jenna is also a member of the Twin Cities musical theater collective Prosody.
My mother was like most American Jews in the sixties who wanted to hold on to pieces of the culture and assimilate at the same time. But why did she send me to an Orthodox day school?
“I looked up at her as she smiled. Those slender white fingers with perfectly polished nails were going out at night and washing dead people. What’s more, they were people Nancy knew. As she started cutting and layering, I knew I had to learn more.”
How do you create a wedding ceremony without a rabbi that honors your heritage when you’re not getting married to a Jew?
At this age, it is supposed to cause a minimum of pain and will never be remembered by the baby. At least that’s what some people say. But they also say lobsters don’t feel pain when they’re being boiled to death. I wonder if the lobster knows better.
Seeing “The Possession” in the movie theater this week made me realize that exorcism wasn’t started by Catholics.
He was eighteen when his family heard he would be drafted. He would be stuck in freezing barracks, getting up every day at the crack of dawn.
What I love about the ancient prayers is they’ve been recited and chanted for generations. What I don’t like about the prayers is they’ve been recited and changed for generations. Who knows what we are saying, anyway?
I began to lead a double life, steeping myself in Jewish culture like a tea bag every morning and leaving it after school. Leading a double life as a child led to a search for peace; and Shabbat gave me more than I expected.
Trying to get to minyan was so hard, I just had to write a play about it.
There is something else every cantor needs to do, the old blind cantor told us. But I can’t tell you, because you either know it—or you don’t.
By the year 2050, Minnesota’s cases of Alzheimer’s are expected to grow to 200,000. Those who have it may be us. I would like us to see them, though we mostly ignore them. I would like us to see them differently. Maybe Hanukkah is a good way to start.
Does Torah make you happy? Not a cynical question. But on Simchat Torah, shouldn’t we ask?
There is something about a circle of close friends that makes you taller, more beautiful and stronger.You can be who you are, and all you have to do is walk in the door and fit like a puzzle piece into a world you own.
I can’t remember when she started telling me the truth about what was happening at home. I just remember picking up the phone one day and going still, hearing words like “bruises” and “black and “blue.”
She stares at me, wondering why I don’t wear a scarf like her mom. Am I married? Of course I imagine this; we haven’t said a word.
I’m seeing a 1930s movie star, someone snarly like Bette Davis, saying “God has nothing to with it,” in the middle of a party on Park Avenue. How would she have written the book of Lamentations? I see her laughing when I ask.
“Look at your hands,” John says to me one night, when I am sobbing that “I think we may really be alone down here.”
“Look how cool they are,” he says. “Who else could do that but God?”
He is holding his mother’s hand as they get out of the car, but his head swivels to catch sight of the protesters in front of him. As he approaches the door, they scream “Zionist pigs!” with little thought as to how this might be affecting him.
My sister’s experience with antisemitism lead her to conclude it was easier not to be a Jew. I am still wrestling with her decision.
Watching Josh that evening, I finally understood the saying about all of us escaping from Egypt every time the story is told. Because very likely we are all trying to escape.
I know you’re out there—a single parent, newly minted and not expecting to be.
