![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() For years, the book I carted with me from one side of the river to the other was Gordon Korman’s This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, the first in a series set, in the way I like my books, somewhere thrillingly just beyond the world I lived in: Children of divorce learn to manufacture their own forms of certainty, and for me that lay in the books I put in the black back-and-forth bag, the alternate universes to which I could depart upon demand. We had a library card for each side of the divide, separate Blockbuster memberships, different breakfast cereals. This all took place in the not overwhelmingly Jewish state of Wisconsin, although where precisely we lived was hard to say, since we commuted between our parents’ two houses, duplexes located on opposite sides of the Milwaukee River. ![]() On Fridays we had an assembly called Shabbat Sing, where we sang the Israeli national anthem before adjourning to our classrooms to bless Dixie cups of Manischewitz grape juice. The flavor was a loose mix of denominations, prayer preceded graham cracker snack time, and the basketball team, called Judah and the Maccabees, always beat our Orthodox school rivals, who had to pause and bless their yarmulkes when they fell off during the course of a game. As children my brothers and I attended a Jewish day school. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |