by Lily Brett
I decided to look for a synagogue. The large number of synagogues in New York didn’t make things easier for me. There were also so many different sorts of synagogues. There were orthodox synagogues, conservative synagogues, reconstructionist synagogues, reform synagogues, liberal synagogues and some newer synagogues that were impossible to categorise.
The Actor’s Temple on West 47th Street was founded in 1917. Its congregation had dwindled since the days when Shelley Winters, Al Jolson, Jack Benny and Edward G. Robinson attended the services. There were now just over one hundred members. At the risk of sounding like Goldilocks, that felt too small. Although I admired the fact that the Actors’ Temple rented out rehearsal space to dance companies and sometimes to theatre groups.
I wondered if the name of the New Shul on Park Avenue South was a pun on the highly regarded New York tertiary institution, the New School. The word shul is Yiddish for school and is often used in place of the words synagogue and temple. I liked the fact that the New Shul provided a list of the top ten reasons why you might never want to join a synagogue but might still want to join the New Shul.
The top ten reasons included a lack of belief in God. The New Shul countered with the fact they were all still grappling, doubting and exploring. A dislike of organised religion was another of the top ten reasons. The New Shul stated, ‘We’re not that organised.’
The City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism on West 28th Street sounded good. They welcomed non-Jewish partners of Jewish members, adoptive families, blended families and straight, gay and transgender members. My husband is not Jewish, one of my children has adopted children and one of my children is gay.
The SoHo Synagogue, founded by Rabbi Dovi Scheiner and his wife Esty, who grew up in the Lubavitch community in Brooklyn, was the closest synagogue for me. The SoHo Synagogue has the most stylishly dressed congregation. It would be a headache trying to work out what to wear to their services. Its members, often financiers, investors and designers, are young and hip. I am neither young nor hip, and my idea of financial planning is to buy a lottery ticket.
Food and drinks are served before the services. And the SoHo Synagogue’s associate rabbi, Mendel Jacobson, is reputed to wear tight shirts and ripped jeans. Last year, the Scheiners hosted a SoHo Synagogue event in Los Angeles with a DJ and two open bars. A DJ, two open bars and a rabbi who wears ripped jeans? That was definitely not the synagogue for me.
The Village Temple on 12th Street sounded perfect. The Village Temple emphasised that it was a place of connection and inclusion. It was also a fifteen-minute walk from where I live. I rang them up. The woman I spoke to was very warm. She didn’t ask if I was Jewish. And I am not sure that, apart from my anxious tone, you could tell from my voice alone that I am Jewish.
‘We welcome everyone who would like to join us, Jews by birth, Jews by choice, interfaith couples and non-traditional families, believers and sceptics,’ she said. I told her I had never joined a synagogue before. ‘We would love to have you,’ she said. ‘You can join now, over the phone, or just come to any of our services.’ I said I would come to the Friday-night service.
I called my father. ‘I’m thinking of joining a synagogue,’ I said.
‘I am not joining with you,’ he said.
‘I didn’t think you would,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to make sure that you wouldn’t mind me joining a synagogue.’
‘Why would I mind?’ he said. ‘After all, you are an adult.’ He sounded slightly displeased. I didn’t feel like an adult.
I felt slightly more adult when my father called me back to ask if I could check out any possible good card players among the congregants. He said he was getting bored with his usual card-playing partner.
Now I felt almost obliged to go to synagogue. But I couldn’t. Friday night after Friday night passed. And each time I had a reason why I couldn’t make it, until suddenly, too many Fridays had passed and the urgency of my need had diminished.
My father prodded me a few times. He had been looking forward to having a new card-playing partner. But, I think he understood why I couldn’t join the synagogue, even though I myself didn’t. And still don’t.
When we moved to New York from Australia in 1989 we brought over many of the large and small bits and pieces that make up a life. The large things were easy to deal with. The smaller things like papers and documents were not. I put them into filing cabinets and added to them over the years.
Earlier this year I decided to go through the papers and documents in the filing cabinets. I was motivated to sort through all of these documents in order to find whatever was relevant to the papers that the National Library of Australia was buying from me.
Libraries do writers a great service. They preserve and catalogue our papers. Pages of papers used in the writing of books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays. They also preserve photographs and tapes and just about anything to do with the writer’s life. Most writers use up a lot of paper. Even those who mostly write on computer.
Sorting through papers of any sort is something I will go to great lengths to avoid. Going through papers and documents makes me nervous. I had been nervous for weeks at the mere thought of wading through all of that paperwork. Almost frightened about what parts of my life I would unearth. Not that my past is that murky. I just prefer the thought that most of its documentation is safely in folders and drawers.
As soon as I decided to sort out the papers, I suddenly thought of several other things I wanted to do. I wanted to explore Brooklyn and Queens. It is hard to get me to leave Manhattan for one of the other boroughs of New York. Faced with files and drawers of documents, I wanted to visit all four of the other boroughs that make up New York City.
I also wanted to take really long walks. I decided that before I began sorting, I would walk to Chelsea, which is on the far west side of New York, and pick up some dried tomatoes at the Chelsea Market. Then I would walk to the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant, on Second Avenue. I would have walked to the moon in order to get out of having to sort through drawers and drawers of documents.
I hadn’t been to the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant for years. We used to go there regularly when our children were much, much younger. I loved the decor. It was so 1980s Eastern European. Doilies and vinyl tablecloths. You could have been in Poland or Russia or Ukraine. The price of the meals also didn’t seem very Manhattan. They were and still are very cheap.
Our children loved the pierogi and the gigantic potato pancakes. My husband loved the beef stroganoff and goulash, items you hardly ever see on a menu today. He was also very fond of the combination platter. A platter filled to the brim with pierogi, stuffed cabbage, kielbasa, sauerkraut and kasha. I ate the salad and complained about the lack of low-calorie food on the menu.
The entrance to the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant is down a rather bleak hallway. It looks more like the entrance to a funeral parlour than a restaurant. But don’t be put off by the entrance. It is worth going there for the pierogi.
Do not, however, use the bathroom. I think it is unnecessary to say more than that. Anyway, it is not easy to use the bathroom. The bathroom is downstairs and you have to be buzzed in by a waitress who is upstairs. The fine choreography and timing needed to buzz open the bathroom door often doesn’t work.
I didn’t make it to the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant on my walk. Halfway there, on 14th Street, I bumped into someone I knew I knew, I just couldn’t remember who she was. She looked as though she, too, was trying to recall how she knew me.
‘Hi, I’m Jane,’ she said.
‘I’m Lilt,’ I said. Lilt? How did Lilt come out of my mouth? It was my iPad’s fault.
For weeks, my iPad had been calling me Lilt. Every time I signed off as Lily, the iPad made a change so swift you had to be hyper-alert to spot it, to Lilt. For weeks people had been receiving emails from me signed Lilt. An agent I don’t usually have much to do with replied with ‘Dear Lilt’.
Lilt, on i
ts own, sounds okay. But teamed with Brett, it is a mess. Lilt Brett is not a name that easily rolls off the tongue. My name had already been changed from Lilijahne to Lily. I did not now want to be Lilt.
‘Of course, Lilt, I knew it was you,’ the woman on 14th Street said. We chatted for several minutes and then said goodbye and went our separate ways. I left as Lilt. I still couldn’t work out whom I had been talking to.
I decided to go home and start sorting my documents.
The first filing-cabinet drawer I emptied contained a pile of folders of documents almost two feet high. I took a deep breath. Two hours later I was still holding my breath. I had been reading notebooks filled with daily notes. From my first marriage. Ordinary notes. Notes about work I had to do. Shopping lists, meal ideas, vacation plans. Interspersed with the daily notes were drafts of letters to friends. Reading through the notes and letters, I was really struck by the fact that it looked like a good life I was living. Full of plans, activities and hope. And two children.
It all looked so happy and wholesome and normal. Why then did I fall madly in love with someone else? I guess because a lot of things that look okay are not quite as okay as they look. And maybe okay is not okay enough, although we may not know it at the time.
We may not know it until someone else comes along and shakes up our universe. The someone else I fell madly in love with and I have been together for thirty-five years. I uncovered several folders with small and large details of the passion I felt for him. And still do.
I found poems I had written to him. Poems that made me blush. I could never write like that now. I found letters I wrote to him. Letters when he was away. And letters when he was in another room.
I spent days and days sorting through piles and piles of papers and notebooks. I didn’t realise I had written so much. I am not talking about books. I’m talking about letters, plans, notes, lists. I didn’t know I had made drafts of almost every letter I had ever written. I didn’t know I had been writing like this since I was a teenager.
I also didn’t know I had so much of it left. I had lost thirty years of diaries, thousands of books and photographs and many other things in a large fire we had in our apartment, in 1997.
A surprising number of the lists in the old notebooks are almost identical to the lists I write today. Like the contents of my coat pockets and my handbags, my lists seem to remain the same. I could open any one of the handbags I have accumulated over the years and I would find some Kleenex tissues and some peppermints. Although when my son, in his twenties, asked me why older women always seemed to have a tissue in their hand, I vowed I would try to never again carry a tissue.
In this sorting marathon, I uncovered a box of photographs of a trip to Poland with my father that I took about twenty years ago. I thought I had lost those photographs in the fire. Some of the photographs were dirty and creased, with bits of grit encrusted in them. Someone, probably one of my daughters, must have rescued them from the ashes. There were small black flakes of burnt paper in the bottom of the box. I thought we had got rid of every piece of evidence of the fire. I held the black, burnt pieces of paper in the palm of my hand. For some reason I wanted to frame them, enshrine them. I don’t know why.
The photographs were in a funereal-looking black box. I don’t think that was by design. I think the box was probably just the right size. Our trip to Poland wasn’t funereal. It was, in many ways, triumphal.
I also found letters. So many letters. Letters written to me. And letters from me. I found letters from other writers. Letters from people who were no longer alive. Letters from former close friends. I was surprised at the intensity of some of the friendships I had when I was very young. I was almost bowled over by the level of honesty of the exchanges between us. Maybe when you are older you never again write like that to a friend. Maybe when you are over forty or fifty you never again talk like that to a friend.
I have a bunch of letters from one friend in particular. I have hardly seen her in the last thirty years. How do such intense friendships evaporate? I don’t know. I suspect that small hurts and insignificant incidents coagulate and create a blockage.
There was whole drawer of letters to my parents and letters from them. I found long letters and faxes from my father in which he told me, over and over again, in his broken English, how much he loved me. He also loved his fax machine, which is why he continued to send me faxes even when we both lived in New York City. When he occasionally went away for the weekend, he would take his fax machine with him and fax me from wherever he was.
I found letters I had written to my mother. Letters I didn’t know she had kept until quite a while after her death when I helped my father clear out her things. I had been writing letters to my mother since the first time I left Australia, when I was eighteen. The last batch of letters I wrote to her was from Paris.
For years we spent much of the Australian summer school holidays with our children in Paris. All we had to do was get ourselves there. Our dear friend, the French painter François Arnal, gave us his large apartment. It was in an industrial building designed by Gustave Eiffel.
We had no credit cards and very little money. We shopped at the Marché d’Aligre, always just before closing time when prices hit rock bottom. You could buy a large wheel of brie cheese for a dollar. Or, if you felt like it, a goat’s head for the same price.
In my letters, I told my mother about our daily lives. How my then ten-year-old daughter did the supermarket shopping on her own using every one of the thirty French words she knew. How my son, within minutes of arriving in Paris, had organised monthly Metro passes for all of us.
And I told my mother, in letter after letter, how much I loved her. Before we left for Paris we had been between houses and were living with my parents. We would live with them for another six weeks when we got back.
Two weeks after we moved into our own home, my mother, who looked so young, fit and healthy, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Four months later she was dead. Although I had grown up surrounded by the dead, my parents’ dead, I had never really understood how very gone you are when you are gone.
I cried my eyes out reading my letters to my mother. You would think, after twenty-eight years, that I would miss her less. I miss her more.
In the last of the file folders, I discovered photographs of me and my husband. Years of photographs. Photographs of us when we were in our early thirties, our forties, our fifties and, recently, our sixties. Compressed together they made it seem as though the time had passed even faster than it already felt it had. ‘We were so young,’ I wailed to my husband. ‘We still are,’ he replied. I am never going to be able to turn him into a depressive or a pessimist or even a realist.
Finally, I had three large boxes packed and ready to be picked up and crated and shipped to the National Library in Australia. I was so happy that this job was done. The rest of my files were, if not in alphabetical order, all labelled very clearly. I felt very, very happy.
In an email, I told my younger daughter that I had finished all the sorting. The mail went off signed by Lilt. In a subsequent email, I explained that my iPad had decided to rename me Lilt. She wrote back with what, for her, was an unusual lack of grace. ‘Lil, have you noticed that the letter t is just to the left of the letter y. You are calling yourself Lilt. You are just making typos.’
After that news, I really needed to go for a long walk. I set off for 29th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. The street is full of stores that sell everything you will never need. Odd hats, odd outfits, odd collections of odds and ends. And tons of bags. Weird bags. Bags with fake-gold skeletal bones of a human hand glued on to them. Glittering, beaded bags. I often walk by and fantasise about buying one of the bags or hats.
Hiroko’s Place is a cafe and restaurant at 75 Thompson Street. It is a place that is almost impossible to describe. I keep going back there. I’m not sure why.
I really wish I knew what fascinated me about Hiroko’s. It is not
the decor. Although, in its oddity, the decor is oddly relaxing. Walking into Hiroko’s feels as though you have just entered the home of your quirky Japanese aunt, who has always wanted to run a restaurant and overnight turned her living room into Hiroko’s.
There is nothing classically Japanese about Hiroko’s. There is nothing classic at all about Hiroko’s. The tables and chairs are all mismatched. There is a very homely sofa and there are shelves filled with Japanese books, Japanese graphic novels and an assortment of Japanese magazines. There are also display cabinets filled with trinkets and knick-knacks. And a piano that is too hemmed in for anyone to play.
Hiroko’s is owned by Hiroko and her brother and father. It is a family-run business. Hiroko and her family live above the restaurant. Last year Hiroko’s mother died. Many local people, many of them customers, attended the funeral service and the wake. Hiroko’s brother works in the kitchen and Hiroko’s father often sits on the restaurant sofa.
The flowers at Hiroko’s are not the luxurious displays delivered fresh daily or weekly to many New York restaurants, hairdressing salons, beauty parlours and, sometimes, doctors’ waiting rooms. Hiroko’s flowers are home grown and look as though they have just been picked from a rather sparse garden.
I am definitely not beckoned back to Hiroko’s by the food. The salads are okay. The mushroom salad is made up of warm sautéed mushrooms on a bed of lettuce. It comes, as do the seaweed salad, the asparagus and avocado salad, and the tofu salad, with a carrot and ginger dressing.
After the salad course, the menu becomes incomprehensible. There is the neapolitan spaghetti with Japanese sauce and vegetables cooked in ketchup. I hate ketchup. And I am not sure how neapolitan that spaghetti sounds. On the menu, neapolitan is spelled napolitan. I have always assumed that it was one of several spelling mistakes on the menu. I don’t want to find out that napolitan is a Japanese word that totally alters the meaning of the dish and makes ketchup essential.