Don't Gel Too Soon

A New Gig and New Ways to Make Change - Care2.com

This is pretty exciting. I'm now Managing Editor for all the Causes channels at Care2. It's a unique organization that provides essential information on critical problems and the people who want to change them. Unlike many such groups, Care2 combines information and action - offering members both the information they need on the issues they care about and the tools to take action on those issues. I hope you'll come by and take a look; the issues range from Environment,and Animal Rights to Women's Rights, Human Rights, Civil Rights and  Politics to Health Policy to  Global Warming .

I'd be particularly grateful for your observations about the organization and its 11 million members!  Comment here or write to me at cindys@earth.care2.com. 

You Mean There Are Jewish Neighborhoods in PARIS????

I've been to Paris probably close to 15 times in the past 30 years; never has it disappointed me. But until I began living a more Jewishly observant life, I'd missed a huge part of it. Like virtually every other city in Europe, Paris has a "Jewish neighborhood." Like virtually every other city in the world - (if they hadn't been thrown out altogether) the Jews moved out of their old neighborhoods, as they did on the Lower East Side, leaving their stores and delis behind. This neighborhood in Paris, in the Marais, is somewhere in the middle. Plenty of Jews are still there; plenty more have moved on. But the services, and especially the restaurants, groceries and bookstores -- and several synagogues large and small -- they're still there. This is the bookstore where you can buy prayer books and Jewish history and Shoah books as well as candle sticks and other Jewish necessities. It's not far from a primary school whose front entrance includes a tribute to the more than 100 Jewish children seized there during the German occupation of Paris, never to be seen again. Stand outside that door and you can't help but imagine how it must have looked and sounded and felt that day.

 

On a lighter note  though, since we're Jews, there's food. This is one of two competing falafel stands on Rue de Rosiers and the lines were enormous on this hot, sunny Sunday. In addition to residents and Jewish tourists wandering by, whole tour groups arrived to try the native fare. It was quite festive, actually.

Oh, and there's a photo missing here.  I was scared to take it.   We were approaching the former home of Jo Goldenberg, the legendary Jewish restaurant in the neighborhood, internationally known even before it was bombed in the summer of 1982, killing six and injuring several others.  It's gone now, a victim of the times, but as we neared the empty building, police sirens in the ooh-aah sound European sirens make, blasted us, close by.  They screeched to a halt outside and a policeman cautiously approached a bag siting on the stoop outside the former deli.  Clearly frightened, he gingerly picked up the bag to put into the police van and move it from the area, now so full of tourists and shoppers.  Unnerved, my husband and I sped away.  

So you don't get a photo.  But I can tell you that the cop looked very scared.  And just so you don't think this is a lot of melodrama, I was in a synagogue in Vienna EXACTLY one week before it was bombed.  I had my young son in his stroller.  That next week, a mother died throwing herself on top of her child - in his stroller.  So there's more to hanging around a famous Jewish neighborhood that candlesticks and shwarma.

One more thing.  It looks as if, again, like the Lower East Side, gentrification may complete the job that first persecution and then upward mobility began.  Last year, a story appeared in AFP - the French wire service, with the headline: "Paris Jewish quarter fights tourism, commerce in battle for soul."  Fashion retailers and other high-end businesses want to be in what is now the "cool" neighborhood and let some of that cache rub off on them.  The Jews?  Well they're fighting to keep their institutions and to remain a distinct community, but there's no guarantee they'll succeed.  Until then, the Marais, in addition to great coats, shoes, bags and jewelry, remains the "Jewish neighborhood."  So get there while you can.

Paris is a Movable Feast - and We Are Making the Most of It

Ernest Hemingway is pretty passe these days, but in his wonderful memoir of his time in Paris, he wrote something that returns to me every time I'm here "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast."  And so it is.  Right here it's going to rain, and the sky is far more grey-blue forbidding than I could get the camera to record, and it's around 4 PM and we've been walking since 10 AM this morning.  And we haven't really done anything - not in the way tourists go into museums and enrich themselves.  For us these streets, and the Seine, and the beautiful old buildings and boulevards - well, they're the richest of all.

It's pouring rain on the bookstores of Boulevard St. Michel on the Left Bank near the Sorbonne, but that doesn't stop the book shoppers. Paris is a city of readers, one where great writers have been held as heroes and mourned by the city - and much of the entire nation when they died. There are many restaurants and cafes on the Left Bank, which had been home not only to Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach but also to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre and so many others. They are crammed with people all the time - whether it's the Deux Magots or the Brasserie Lipp or Cafe de Flore because these places have an enormous literary history and those who visit here know that these are the places to visit even if they've never read The Second Sex or The Sun Also Rises or even The Great Gatsby.

Or maybe they just know, like these two troubadours, that Paris, when you're young, (or, hopefully, any other age) is still a gift. So many have already written better words about the indelible impact of this lovely place; I'm really just here to agree with them.

It's Pretty Different for an American in Europe With President Obama in the White House

At the big Paris flea market, Marche aux Puces St-Ouen de Clignancourt, which takes up several city blocks, this portrait was among the items for sale. I've seen people reading Dreams from My Father on the Metro (seriously, the guy next to me, honest) and everyone wants to talk about him. What a difference!

Kevin Spacey, David Letterman, Twitter and Moms Rising - All in One Post!!!

OK so I'm in London and a friend posts this on my Facebook page.  And I should be telling you more about London and that we're leaving for Paris this afternoon (on the Eurostar!!) for the weekend but this is just fun.

ALSO on that same Facebook page though, from Moms Rising, is this:  

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner “...we are now lagging behind the rest of the world in closing the gender gap. According to the World Economic Forum, the US ranks 31st of 128 countries overall, but 76th in educational attainment, 36th in health and survival, 69th in political empowerment, and 70th for wage equality for similar work. In the representation of women in our Congress, we rank 71st."

Reps. Maloney, Biggert reintroduce Equal Rights Amendment

Source: maloney.house.gov

Congressman Carolyn Maloney

So when you're finished laughing at Kevin and Dave, think what we can do about these devastating numbers!l   I've just gone to work at Causes Managing Editor at Care2 and we have an active women's rights section there - and we all know plenty of other places to raise some hell.  Somehow, seeing it all aggregated like this makes it worse, no?

One of the Many Reasons to Love Christopher Wren: St. Paul's Cathedral

It's late and I'm tired from a probably too-long walk and probably too much work. So I'll leave you with this picture of the wonderful St. Paul's Cathedral, taken from the very center of the Millenium Pedestrian Bridge  that crosses the river from the Tate Modern to this old masterpiece and the bustling legal community close by.

Brick Lane in the Real World - Things Have Changed in London

You can see it there - the street name in English and,  I think, Bengali - the street brought to life in Monica Ali's wonderful book.  Brick Lane was a sensation, well reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, as well it should have been.  Reading it, a reader not only felt the feelings, but also heard the voices and smelled the cooking smells of a crowded immigrant neighborhood in London's East End.Well we went there today, expecting to see the veiled women, street food and crowded food markets that orient us in a neighborhood like the one we lived in as we read Brick Lane.  But the book was published six years ago.   And Nazneen, her sad husband, lover and daughters have surely moved on.  

Gentrification has arrived - as surely as this old shop will soon be transformed into a web-connected, foam and half-caf coffee joint.  As we walked the streets today, they were full of cool people in multiple earrings, tight skits, hip tee shirts and modern demeanor, and with the goods to satisfy them.  Revealing, low cut short skirted dresses, funky feathered jewelry, pork pie hats and weird purses hung from stalls in side markets and on the Lane itself.  Music was bluegrass and Hendrix and newer than that  -- nothing remotely ethnic.  There are lots of curry and other ethnic restaurants but they have wine lists and chic fonts for their menus.  And there are liquor stores.

I'm not sure precisely why I'm telling you this except to remind us to be grateful for gifts like this wonderful novel.  Things have surely changed here on Brick Lane, but thanks to Monica Ali, her ear, her eyes and, especially, her heart and empathy and imagination, we have a lovely document of life as it was here just a decade ago.  This immigrant literature, whether it's Ali, or Lahiri or Henry Roth or Saul Bellow or Amy Tan or Betty Smith, provides historical scrapbooks as communities shift, or are displaced.  So it's nothing new; it's just so dramatic to arrive on the Tube at a place so recently real to me and to see it, already, well past the point it lives in in my mind.

Another Day in London Town and Some Questions About This Health System

You can get an MRI in 24 hours in London.  Of course it will cost you L250 and is not covered by the National Health Service --  but you can get one.

How do I know this?  I walked into a spa-like place on Drury Lane to find a massage for my husband and there on the reception desk was a brochure announcing the opportunity.  Why?  NOT because National Health doesn't provide MRIs, but because you can wait as long as 6 months to get one.  That's one of the legends of National Health that looks like it 's at least partly true.  Then I had a tiny experience of my own.

A small disaster and quick work.  I was up very late last night talking to a friend in DC -' til 2 AM.  So when I got up this morning I was a little raggedy.  And in the process of slicing bread the knife slipped and I stabbed myself in the left hand.  Bled like anything. There I was, alone in the apartment, bleeding and imagining sliced tendons or non-stop bleeding or God knows what.  

I was impressive though.  Stopped the bleeding with pressure and ice, called our local Boots' pharmacist, who told me to call a walk-in clinic who told me they were NOT insured to apply a butterfly bandage and gave me the name of a doctor far far from here.  Not too reassuring.

I struggled into some clothes and walked to Boots to beg for help, and even though they'd refused on the phone, help me they did.   Looked at the "wound," told me I'd "done all the right things," sold me some special band-aids and anesthetic disinfectant and sent me on my way.  But it' clear nothing is ideal.  The pharmacist says that the services are often "abused" and that we in the US have "the right idea."   I'm going to try to figure out more about National Health "on the ground" while we're here.  It's always different when you're right on top of it.  In the meantime, I seem to be fine; pain diminished, bleeding stopped at least for now. More later.

Lovely London Day 5

Yes, those are polka dot trees, adding a little color to the South Bank promenade from Waterloo Bridge down toward Parliament. I'm loving these walks although with the Sotomayor hearings (not carried on the BBC, at least in the cable systems in this apartment, (which doesn't offer CNN either until evening), I feel pretty cut off from home. I've chosen just to go with it though. It's so lovely to work for a while, spend an hour walking along the Thames, then return, take a shower, read Wired while I eat lunch and then work once more, and it's only five weeks, so I'm just going to enjoy it.   

For now, here are a couple of others photos from today's wanderings.  

You know what this is, but it's fun to stand across the river and see it right before you.

This is a sanctioned skate park with permitted graffiti and it's right along the river in the showcased, artsy South Bank area.  I tried to catch a kid on one of the ramps but I had only my phone and not my camera and it just wasn't fast enough.

See you tomorrow!

One More Day!