Though I could never speak the language, fluently, I was able to identify most of the expressions spoken in my home, especially when around my grandparents, used mostly to hide information from us… the younger generation, who they referred to as: the “kindele.”

Many times, I remember hearing: “sha, sha, not in front of the kindele,” words that immediately sent me leaning into doorways to spy and listen. Yiddish phrases were always so vivid and paired with emotion, making many words easy to figure out. Some were not for children’s ears, but were often the best way to describe someone. “That guy? “Zeya schmuck!” or another favorite of my family: “Kish m’in touches”, meaning kiss my ass. That one I heard a lot, as well as the horrible sin of wasting money by spending on something ridiculous: “Aroisgevorfene the gelt”. I added “the” because gelt means money and that was the way they said it.

What amazed me most in writing my novel, inspired by some of my family’s greatest joys and tragedies, was how easily the Yiddish language popped into my brain while writing from different points of view. There were words that I loved like “shana maidele”, used to tell my cousin and me we were pretty, or “meisgeit”, usually said with a laugh, to describe some poor soul that was homely. Often, Yiddish words popped out of my characters mouths and surprised me that I remembered so much of this interesting and humorous language of my ancestors. I actually heard my grandmother scorn someone for eating a steak that was “traf”…non-kosher, and I heard my mother refer to someone as that “balabusta”… a homemaker capable of doing so many things.

I was happy to learn that recently there’s been a resurgence of Yiddish classes taught in college, many at the graduate level. And it is always a joy to hear someone, not of the Jewish faith, shout out a Mazel tov or oiy vey during the weather report or late night TV.

Here’s a list of 40 words you might want to know in case you happen to run into the ladies who are the experts…or their grand-daughters riding the crosstown bus. You never know, the words might come in handy. Enjoy!

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/the-yiddish-handbook-40-words-you-should-know/

“Of course,” I say, and we finish lunch locked in a hammering silence.
I am tugged back to 1951, a time of post-war jubilation. Our family, following many of our closest cousins, had packed up and said farewell to Brooklyn, taking up residence in the second promised land—the wide-open-spaces of south shore Long Island. Adored grandparents and favorite aunts were no longer a jubilant skip or hopscotch away. Visiting anyone meant nauseating car rides on rutted roads, causing me to vomit in the backseat.

Maybe that was why Aunt Jean, already in her 40’s, decided to try her hand at marriage. She was brave, then, to become a bride to up and leave her brother’s comfortable Brooklyn home and the family’s lucrative knitting business where she had worked since the age of sixteen. For her husband, she chose an affable blue-eyed man she knew briefly through business, whose forearm bore the indelible stamp of Auschwitz. His name was Max, a Polish Jew, who was not, at all, reticent when it came to recounting the horrors and turbulence of a world Jean had deserted thirty years prior. I vaguely recall his warm cheer while he responded to the many rapid-fire questions I asked while perched on his lapmy fingers tracing the blurred gray numbers emblazoned under his shirtsleeve. With heads barely touching, Aunt Jean and Max formed a loving arc above my choppy bangs and pigtails.

Then, like a random flurry in April, my aunt vanished from my life. Desperately needing answers, I became a champion eavesdropper, hoping to decipher the strange, broken Yiddish the family spoke mostly around the kinder.

Shaped like a beanpole, I leaned into dim-lit rooms, and listened to the tribal sounds of grief: wailing, muttering, shushing always followed by loud, almost comical nose-blowing. But the only truth was the vivid imagination of a young child left to fill in the blanks—a child, whose suffering multiplied inside a fragile shell of the unknown.

Day after day, while my mother primped me for school, I tried cracking the secret code: “Mommy, please tell, where is Aunt Jean?” And whenever she responded with more than a shrug, she said my aunt and her new husband had gone on a “far away” trip. Some long honeymoon, I thought. And why never a postcard to her favorite little niece− the one she called shana madele?

I became sullen, then angry at both of them for abandoning me so easily. They had to have been the biggest fakers. Then, one night, on a sleepover at my cousin Franny’s house I was enlightened by her younger brother, Richard. Uninvited, he came galloping through the bedroom wearing his cowboy Dr. Denton’s and a homemade noose around his neck.
“This is how Aunt Jean died,” Richard croaked between giddy yaps, jumping on and off the bed while I lay frozen in horror.

Everything clicked. Floating fragments of a naïve hope settled on the swirling carpet, instantly banishing the lie. Soaked in sweat and shivering with fear, I begged to be driven home.

Though my parents offered more outright denial, now, at least, there were discussions─ a hinting of my aunt’s previous, undiagnosed depression. Another secret is revealed: there was a younger brother who had decided to remain in Riga while his siblings fled to America. During the war, he, his wife and baby daughter were murdered when, during the high holy days, the Nazis set their synagogue on fire.

Jean took this news the hardest. She stopped eating, barely slept and became plagued with hallucinations. Once, while working in the knitwear factory, sewing gold fleur de lis crests on a slew of cardigans, her entire body began to quake. She pleaded with my grandfather to quickly remove the crests, convinced they were Swastikas.
It became convenient to hurl blame on Aunt Jean’s husband for sharing the atrocities he’d witnessed in the concentration camp. Some surmised these tales triggered her survivor’s guilt and each new bout of depression. Everyone had a theory, including that my aunt had not been prepared for her husband’s sexual advances. Could she have felt repulsed or defamed, trapped in humiliation and knew no other way out?

As I grew older, I hated that our family’s shame about Aunt Jean’s death served to eradicate all memory of her. It was as if she had never really existed. Hadn’t she, as a kind, loving person, deserved reverence? For too long, they shared a lie about her death rather than celebrating the fact that she had lived. Ten years after Jean’s death, my grandfather bought a plot for himself and twelve remaining relatives. It was 50 miles from the cemetery where his sister was buried− a place, nobody visited.
After lunch, Aunt Irene hands me the rest of her “important papers,” bundled in thick pink rubber bands. A thumbnail photo of Jean spills from a plastic holder onto the oilcloth. I press it close to my face; “Oh, how beautiful, she was.”

My Aunt hears me, though our eyes never meet.

At that early hour, of course, there was not a morsel remaining in my stomach from dinner the night before. I’ve wondered over the years if this could have been a case of bulimia or anorexia, but I don’t really think that was the case. Yet, had I been born decades later, most likely that would have been the diagnosis. There was much to make me anxious during the days of my small, isolated adolescence within our perfect little pink house. By keeping my fears inside, I believe I had made myself chronically sick.

My mother continued to rant whenever my father went traveling, and my relatives, having gotten older, where not always the dependable buffers and protectors I had relied on as a child. My favorite aunt was now dead, and yet so much felt unfinished that I began living a split life. My focus was half in the past, and half in the future. Dread wrapped around me like an invisible shawl, as well as the anticipation of more bad things to come, for me, and those I loved.

When I gazed in the mirror, I saw a pathetically thin child, no visible signs of a budding teenager at all. If I was toting hormones, they had not yet secreted from my endocrine glands. At 12, I was the only girl I knew that had not yet menstruated. In school, I hid in the locker room shower stall while I changed. I lied to my gym teacher saying I had my period and awful cramps. She must have lost track because I did this every other week. Whenever the gymnastic equipment was out on the floor, I practically ran to the nurse’s office because I was terrified of the buck and parallel bars. Because I was small, Miss Klapkin, a sadist who happened to be my gym teacher, often used me to demonstrate. Didn’t she see I was shaking from head to toe, my pee about to trinkle down and stain my bobby sox?

Most of the time, I felt like a freak of nature, and yet, the subject of my physical immaturity never once came up at home. Not once. When I went for my end of the summer check-up, before the new school year, not one person asked if I’d gotten my period, not even our doctor. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it to a soul, though it was always on my mind, like a scratchy record stuck in a groove. I looked inside my panties at least ten times a day, confusing the sensation of wetness and perspiration for what I prayed would be the prune-colored stain to announce to the world: I was a woman.

Still, I was afraid to probe, and while I desperately wished to look like the other girls, I was aware of the distinct advantage of being small-boned and petite, lithe, and waifish. Lots of boys teased me but would later, much later, confess to having secretly loved me. Tough girls protected me from the back stabbers that tried leaving me out and the bullies who pushed me around.

My Campbell’s variety of teachers crooked their necks and smiled, demonstrating patience with me. I was the youngest, the most timid, and definitely the flattest, who slowly evolved into the funniest, because finally I discovered something I could do and do well. I could make the others laugh. I could use my insecurities to my advantage by mocking myself and exaggerating my fears.

Although my mother never found me funny except when I directed short little skits in our house and performed them in front of my parents’ bed. Their favorite act was when I gave each of them flashlights to point and jiggle up and down at Markey, Ricky and me, so that we resembled a Charlie Chaplain routine. I could see my mother deliberately holding back laughter sometimes in the same way she held back complimenting me whenever I looked pretty.

Performance was what my parents respected and rewarded. After every dance recital, they would hand me a big bouquet of flowers, followed by a family trip to Jahns, the popular ice cream parlor 20 minutes away, that served this ridiculous mountainous sundae called: The Kitchen Sink. It was so huge and deep that if I fell into the bowl, I might have disappeared.

Whenever any of us children succeeded at anything, my mother was quick to spread the word to all our extended family and friends. I still remember that unique sound of pride in her voice, kind of sing-songy. She told the others of my and the boys’ achievements, followed by a precise description, as if she had performed that tap dance number, “the boogie woogie,” or sang that solo in the special assembly, or hit that home-run, bases-loaded, on the dusty field behind Lakeside School on a cool May evening.

It was always those days and hours afterwards that confused me. Sparse with affection, my parents were even sparser with words of praise meant directly to us. There were few, very few, “hey, good job kiddo!” or “we are both so proud of you!” Though the truth was they were proud. I had witnessed that pride on their faces, and could hear it in their voices when they telegraphed our achievements to the outside world. But because they came from a place of shush shush, you’ll fill their heads, I think they believed it was better for us to know there was always the need for improvement.

Mornings, and the anticipation of anything required of me, caused my entire body to cease its normal functioning. First came the awful wave of nausea, followed by a cold sweat that began at my forehead and worked its way down to my neck. Sometimes the room began to spin under my feet, the cold blue floor moving like a choppy sea as I made my way to the bathroom. I wanted so badly to tell them, but I knew it would do no good.

They might look at me and not notice my red-rimmed eyes, or blotchy skin, beginning to pale into shades of putrid green. Alone, in my bedroom, surrounded by so much pink, I taught myself how to relieve that nausea. Crouched over the bowl, I’d stick two fingers far back against my tongue and gag, until the fluid made mostly of my own bile pushed its way up and out of me, restoring me to that empty and reliable place without worry or fear. A place where nothing was expected of me.

Excerpt from Memoir in Progress c.2013

On the night my little brother Ricky was born, I ran a very high fever. Since my father, recently home from his stint in the Navy, was at the hospital with my mother and her parents, my sitter for the night was my Dad’s older brother, Uncle Barry, who woke me from my delirium with the bad news.

I did not want another brother. I pulled the blanket over my head and wailed, but Uncle Barry sat on the edge of my parent’s bed shaking my foot. “Come on, Sande,” he repeated, “you have a new baby brother!” So many years later, I can remember the tugging pain of disappointment, and the sensation of loss. I already had a brother, an annoying one at that, and I had prayed every single night for months for a sister─ someone to take care of but mostly to play with, enjoying the games I’d vividly imagined, like tea parties, paper dolls, and baking cookies. Now that I was past seven, I imagined my baby sister would look up to me, and ask me to read her stories like Cinderella, Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel. If she became frightened by scary witches, or mean stepmothers, I would hold her tightly against me and rock her, kiss the top of her head until she stopped crying.

But now as Uncle Barry felt my forehead for the tenth time, my brother, Marky, galloped through our parent’s room, the only bedroom in our apartment, yelping with joy. Only fifteen months younger than me, Marky was already excited about his new brother and soon-to-be roommate in our new home when we moved to the suburbs in the fall. I remember all the car trips we had taken looking for our special house. The one my parent’s had chosen was somewhere near sprawling white beaches and the big Atlantic Ocean, which we saw whenever we visited Coney Island.

“Oh honey, you’re burning up, but don’t worry, your Daddy will be home soon.” I didn’t believe a word my uncle said. First about the reality of another boy and that I didn’t know when my mother would be coming home from the hospital. Finally, the huge dam burst wide open, and I began sobbing into my pillow. Uncle Barry looked puzzled, as if he didn’t know what he should do. I’m sure he felt terrible because when it was time for me to go to sleep, he let me remain sprawled on my parent’s bed instead of making me go across the room and climb into what my mother called “the children’s daybeds.” She always used that term with a hint of a British accent, which didn’t fool me but might have impressed others. The fact was, until we moved, we all slept together in that one big room. And now there was going to be yet another child, another boy no less.

Daybed was a glorified label for what was Marky and my original cribs – where we had both slept since the day we were brought home from the hospital. The cribs were placed parallel to my parent’s huge bed, and we were separated by a blond wood double dresser. If we stood up in our cribs, we were able to easily lean over and reach inside that forbidden land: Daddy’s top drawer. And it was obvious from the drawer’s contents that my parents had never considered childproofing their bedroom, which had become our bedroom as well. Inside that mysterious drawer, we discovered packages of razor blades, strange-looking coins, packets of little rubber disks (we’d broken and tried blowing up one or two), but best of all was this especially delicious chocolate candy in a bright blue wrapper that we ate only once before learning a most uncomfortable lesson.

A few months before, when my cousin Arnie, Uncle Barry’s son, was babysitting for us, he most likely assumed we were fast asleep. Sharing a bedroom with our mother and father had taught us to be very quiet, especially during our mischievous times. Arnie, a handsome, body-builder type was probably down the hallway and in the kitchen, talking on the phone to one of his several girlfriends. Maybe an hour went by, maybe less, when Arnie heard the scampering of his charges’ little feet as we rushed into the only bathroom, Marky and me, doubled over with the most awful stomach pains, practically tearing each other from the toilet seat. By the time we were discovered, we had shared an entire bar of Ex-Lax, which caused much discomfort that continued well into the next day. Only after a few mashed bananas did we begin to feel better. It has always amazed me that, even having experienced that sickening incident, I became and still am addicted to anything chocolate.

But that night, the night my baby brother was born, I lay in my parents’ bed shivering. I could fall asleep only after I heard the front door open and shut, and recognized my uncle’s and Dad’s voices as they laughed together out in the dark hallway. Knowing how I had felt that night, the wretched disappointment, I’m sure I must have thought: Sure! Right! They are both so overjoyed. Doesn’t everyone love little boys, especially fathers who dream of baseball, games of catch, and fishing? Aren’t they so much more fun than us silly girls? At school, on the playground during recess, I’d already noticed how the girls were always being teased, how they seemed to be their own worst enemies as they hung around the boys waiting for a twig of attention. Yet girls were the best at taunting one another while the boys looked on with either boredom or a detached fascination. If only the girls knew then that they might have benefitted had they bonded together. But what was most noticeable and caused a kind of festering resentment, was how the women in our family performed an almost sun-worshipping, mystical dance around our family’s eclectic troop of men. It was not uncommon to hear things like: “shush, shush, they’ll be home soon, we shouldn’t upset them, or use of: “my Charlie, my Nate, my Fred, my poor boy, Roy,” all said with a strange mix of devotion, responsibility, and possessiveness. And so now there was another they could add to their list.

Excerpted from my memoir in progress

Suddenly, there is a half-naked man in the movie and he is running away from a tribe of natives chasing him with spears. They look furious and are yelling words I do not understand. Though he keeps running, the man is frantically checking behind him, his face contorted with fear. Banging into trees as he runs, the man stumbles over a pile of branches and debris and quickly struggles to get up. He tries pulling on some branches and vines for leverage, but nothing helps. The man is stuck. And the natives are getting closer. They are chanting loudly. I hear myself saying: “Quick, quick, get up.”

One hand shields my eyes. I don’t want to see where any of those spears land.

Stuck in the murky mud below him, the man seems to have lost both legs as he sinks deeper and deeper into the ground below. The look on his face turns to terror, and yet he is still struggling, using all his strength to try and lift himself back unto solid ground.

Next it is his torso that disappears, then lower and lower, I watch the man sink. I am both fascinated and frightened, not understanding what is happening. There is a close-up of the black mud now bubbling all around him like the erupting of a volcano. His neck and shoulders are soon covered in a dark, dirty blanket of mud. The man is screaming, his head stretched toward the sky. I put my fingers in my ears to stop the sound. I have a hard time watching, and yet I must watch, up to the very last second and bubble that sucks the man in, and gobbles him up like any hungry beast in the jungle in search of his prey.

The natives, his enemies, have left the scene, all stopped short in the circle of quicksand that had opened and closed before their eyes. I didn’t know what it was called then, but for years, and even sometimes now, I will stare down at the most ordinary of surfaces, not trusting its solidity for a second or what lurks underneath.

When I dream about my father, he is usually teaching me something. His voice is firm, bellowing through the room like a sergeant with a new recruit.

Sometimes his hand flies up to gesture and I flinch, duck my head, afraid that he might rap me for having my attention wander.

A few months after my birth, my father was sent by the U.S. Navy to Officer’s Candidate School at Cornell University. He was among a very select group of men chosen to complete the equivalent of a college education in just three months. The Navy called them “ 90 Day Wonders.” In his mostly ordinary life, it became an extraordinary achievement and probably why he expected nothing less than academic excellence from his children. To my father, second best was a close cousin to failure.

While visiting my parents’ Florida home, I watch my father proudly show me racks of golf slacks hung meticulously and arranged by color in his closet. Then he lifts the bamboo shade and gestures towards the sun, gloats, as if he were responsible for it being there. It’s a great day for the driving range. And at last, he can hit that little white ball again. Today I, reluctantly, agree to let him give me a golf lesson.

Just a year ago, the choice of what to wear seemed insignificant, almost banal, among decisions of what stocks to buy or sell, or where to travel during his comfortable state of semi-retirement. Then, like a flash tropical storm, his life changed dramatically. Two days after elective bypass surgery, at 72, he suffered a massive stroke.

He had decided on the surgery after several consultations and opinions. The consensus being, it could add ten, maybe twenty years to his life. And the operation itself was a clinical success. He said he had felt minimal pain and discomfort. So on the second day, he became a little stubborn, insisted on a trip to the bathroom over the indignity of using a bed- pan. It may have been the mistake of his life. He became paralyzed on the right side, indicating that a blood clot had lodged in the left portion of his brain—the part that controls patterns of speech, communication, and the memory bank of learning. All Dad’s words and thoughts lay trapped inside his brain.

I flew to Florida immediately, not knowing what to expect, shocked at the sudden change in his condition. My mother begged me not to be emotional when I saw him. She instructed me to talk very slowly. Then she announced, “The man in that room is not your father.”

Those words echoed through my mind as I walked down the endless corridor to his room. He was propped in a huge vinyl chair with support bars. Twisted tubes connected him to a machine that made loud pumping sounds like an aquarium. His left arm was bent, the hand pressed against his cheek, holding up his head. He looked a hundred years old. I gulped hard, choking back tears while I stood frozen at his right side.

“Hi Daddy,” I said, the words startled me; I hadn’t uttered them in years. He groaned and I bent over to kiss him chatting nervously, trying to avoid his sad liquid eyes. But they searched my face looking for answers to all the questions he could not ask. “Don’t worry,” I said, “everything will be all right.”

In the days that followed, doctors rotated in and out of his room looking for hints of improvement. They did not recognize the vibrant man that had marched into their office just weeks before methodically gathering information. Now they seemed to press hard asking him for the names of his children and his wife. He looked at them with disgust—annoyed at this test. They dangled simple familiar objects in front of his face… a comb, a ball, a cup. When he shoved the rubber ball into his mouth, I threw myself over his chest, squeezed his cheeks until he released it. He could name nothing, but once in utter frustration, he screamed, “Get out of here, all of you!” Involuntary speech unleashed by pure anger.

The speech pathologist reported that further testing had revealed his impairment was severe. There was a chance he could endanger himself, misusing a razor, a fork, a knife. Recovery would be an uphill battle. It would depend on his willingness to relearn the simplest of concepts, and loads of sheer luck.

Within a few days, in the same hospital, he began his rehabilitation. Although he suffered bouts of depression, he waited anxiously for his daily speech and physical therapy. He sat staring at his watch—always ready for someone, anyone, to knock on his door. Could he really know the time, I wondered, or was it habit? Like a toddler, he struggled with a spoon trying to feed himself. And he was insistent on trying to walk, grunting if you dared stop him. He developed a new vocabulary of four letter words, commonplace for stroke victims. The staff cheered him on as he marched tentatively down the long hospital halls in his first pair of high tops. He responded like Rocky with raised arms, and garbled words that sounded like, “I’ll do it. You’ll see.”

In less than three weeks, my father walked unassisted, and was discharged. He continued speech therapy at home on a computer. He sat for hours mesmerized by simple images on the screen. The therapist used pre-school programs that would help him link new words with sounds. And most of them were truly new words. Dad was starting over. I told the therapist that he would work harder than anyone. I told her of his passion for knowledge… about the Navy and Cornell…how he was constantly sending us, his children, articles to read. They were words of advice or concern, substituting for words of love. She listened, but turned away from me and my pleading eyes. She already knew what I was afraid to hear—my father would no longer be the man I had known, and she would not dare forecast his future.

Dad’s emotions have taken the place of much of his language. And while watching him through this struggle, still, I am learning from him, this being the gentlest of his lessons. His little notebook lists addresses and our names, names he might never say. And he gives out business cards, describing his disability, to anyone who looks at him with trepidation.

Sometimes, when our family gathers around the dinner table, his head darts back and forth desperately taking in the nuances of our conversation. No matter what, he has made up his mind to be an active participant. He laughs when we laugh, leans in when we whisper. I watch him struggling to understand, and my heart pounds wishing everyone would please slow down. When they don’t, often his eyes meet mine. “Oh God,” I hear him whisper.

I’m startled, when my father walks from his bedroom modeling lime green golf slacks. Smiling broadly, he says, “Good, huh?”

What can I possibly say but “yes, perfect!”

Sande Boritz Berger
Note: Used by the Stroke Foundation of NYC in meetings with families of stroke victims.
Published in Cup of Courage by Adam’s Media

When I was an awkward adolescent in braces, my family of five traveled by car to Miami, my brothers and me in the back seat playing endless games of Ghost and reciting silly knock- knock jokes, then pinching and fighting till my father’s hand reached back to slap whoever he could. We spent a week at a motel on Collins Avenue, swimming until we were shriveled and burnt like toast, but happier than we’d ever been.

Less than a year after I married my first husband, my father retired and moved to Miami Beach with my mother and youngest brother, both reluctant to go. After I had my two baby girls, I would visit them once or twice a year, helping to ease my mother’s obvious loneliness. I wanted my children to get to know my parents, and had an even stronger desire to share this important part of my life with them. There were so many visits filled with activity, fun, and joy that helped bridge the distance between us and reignite our relationship… until my children got older, and trips became harder. Then my father took ill, and everything changed.

It is almost three decades later that I am here, on a vacation, having landed in Ft. Lauderdale, close to where my parents once lived. I haven’t been in this airport for a very long time. In the tiresome walk from the plane to the baggage claim area, I am recalling all those visits, the sweet anticipation of seeing my parents, who were waiting anxiously at the end of the carpeted tunnel filled with plans and hopes to make-up for all they had missed by moving away.

I blink and there they are, just within my reach, the tallest among the rest. Mom a frosty blonde, and he, so healthy and tan. How many times had I made this walk, straining my neck up, up, up to see them, to be seen? But there are no children by my side. They are all grown with children of their own. Their image fades and my heart breaks just a little, once more. The meaning of love, of loss, and all that came before.

Saved By The Music

From the time she entered kindergarten, Jennifer Pacht Goodman, my daughter, had always struggled in school. Short and petite for her age, she was, nonetheless a fiery ball of energy… tremendously well-liked, and possessing an enthusiasm that was sometimes distracting to both her and her classmates and would definitely, one day, need to be channeled.

The youngest child of a complicated divorce, Jenn approached most of her studies and assignments with a painful level of anxiety that immediately set her up for failure. Concentration was usually difficult, the act of sitting and learning, even harder. Not all teachers were as patient and understanding as others. One had compared her to her older, quieter sister, who excelled in school, which pressured Jenn even more.

Yet, beyond the usual subject matter, she was soon to discover her niche, something uniquely hers and an incredible booster of self-confidence. From the time Jenn could talk, she had been extremely musical and blessed with a singing voice that could shatter windows. Music was not only in her genes, it lived within her heart and soul. Here was the opportunity to cultivate what would give her that confidence she’d been lacking. While others excelled in gym and extracurricular activities, Jenn attended B.O.C.E.S., which provided a wonderful musical theatre program and offered an outlet for her energies and talent.  

Jenn evenually attended The Boston Conservatory of Music and after graduation enjoyed several years of travel on European Tours of Broadway shows and performing on cruise ships, but it wasn’t until she took her first music therapy class, enrolled in NYU Graduate School that she found her true calling:

“I can remember, like it was yesterday, where in the classroom I was sitting, when I suddenly knew in my heart I wanted to be a Music Therapist.”

Today Jennifer Pacht Goodman is the owner and lead therapist for the Jammin Jenn Music Therapy Program in New Jersey, where over 50 children receive one on one therapy at: Jammin Jen’s studio located in Watchung, NJ. In addition, she conducts programs in ten private and public schools reaching dozens of additional students diagnosed with Autism and other special needs.

She has come full circle from that young kindergarten girl, and her energy and will to do better has never waned.

website: http://www.jamminjenn.com/JJMTC/Welcome.html

                                                                       

I was a war baby, the first child and only girl. In the years when I could finally understand, my mother never missed a chance to tell me that she had suffered two awful miscarriages before me, so I understood that I was her third, and lucky try, yet if not for the difficulties during those previous pregnancies, I would have never arrived. The thought of that was unimaginable to me and more than a bit shocking.

How could my entire existence be so precarious? Instead of a girl, with big hazel eyes, and chubby thighs, I might have been just another egg, sloughed off with all the dozens of others that came before me.  Oh, and then the other story she liked to tell was that I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around my neck and nearly died. Though these tales fascinated me, I was always aware of my mother’s matter-of-fact approach in their telling. I think what I wanted was to hear how happy she had finally become, or that something miraculous had now changed her life for the better, and that the something was having me, finally, a healthy child- a daughter. I wanted to know that my birth and entry into the world was not paired with memories of remorse or regret.

Fifteen months later, with the war over and my father safely returned from his stint in the Navy, my mother gave birth with little complication to another child, this time a boy. Since we lived across the street from my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn, there were always surrogates to help out with babies. Besides my grandmother, there were my two unmarried aunts. Both were happy to look after their niece and nephew, intent on earning their keep so far from their homeland in Vilna, and living since they were teenagers in their brother’s house.

In most of the baby pictures of me, which are just a few, I appear owl-eyed and cautious, even a bit worried.  Told again and again that I was a terrible sleeper, I was tossed around a lot, passed from body to body, from scent to scent. Was I searching for her, my mother? A lifetime later, I am still restless.

excerpt from Memoir in progress.

I hated Dad’s European business trips the most. Not only because they were the longest, sending him away for weeks at a time, but because my mother often became that screwy, unpredictable woman who sauntered through rooms staring at herself in mirrors (of which there were many) and performing one of her scariest rituals. These were a series of quiet, yet monotonous mumblings, accompanied by her simultaneously crossing and uncrossing her fingers behind her lower back.

It was difficult to guess when Mom’s “Jewish voodoo” would be called to task.  But there were a few anticipated occasions, like whenever she pulled the glass thermometer out of our cold, little asses, and wiped the Vaseline on a tissue to read the mercury’s verdict. That’s when she would surely say one of her little prayers, while we watched sweating and shivering flat on our tummies, our pale skinny necks strained trying to interpret her expression. Are we going to live or die? Could it be polio?

The voodoo kicked in almost always if she tried to reach my grandparents, and they were unreachable for longer than she could tolerate, which was by dinner time, always whenever Dad hit the road, or in the much anticipated case of his long awaited trip to Belgium.  He’d already been gone two weeks, and was to return very late at night with his business partner, a very nice and older man than him, named Fred Becker. I was overjoyed that he was coming home, and looking forward to Mom resuming her role of housewife again, because clearly, single motherhood did not work for her. My mother was completely indecisive and ignored most of our questions, and we kids had a load of them, especially with Dad out of town. I know she missed my father terribly because I heard her complaining to whoever would listen.

 “My Nat, my Nat, my sweet darling,” she would say to whoever she spoke to on the telephone, and I felt this weird feeling, a kind of embarrassment that she would speak about him that way to friends or family. Although, by now, I was in Junior High and even though I had my more than fair share of crushes, I found most boys my age pushy, pimply, mostly groping, and anything but darlings. I could not imagine growing up one day and calling someone I loved, darling, even though I heard Bette Davis use that term of endearment in most of her movies.

 It is the middle of the night, and now my mother is standing at the foot of my bed, her head peeking below the white organdy canopy and staring at me. I hear her calling my name. She is weeping, trying to catch her breath. I sit up, instantly scared. It is rare for my mother to visit here or my brother’s room – she hates climbing the stairs. She says it is bad for the heart, though everyone has told her it is just the opposite.

            “It’s Daddy,” she says, crying louder now.

I don’t even know what has happened, but I am suddenly whimpering too, when she quickly switches gears and tries calming me.

            “Shh, everything is okay now…we must not wake your brothers. They have school tomorrow.”

             “Huh, but where’s Daddy? Is everything all right?”

             “Well, I was watching the news in bed,” she tells me, while staring at my wallpaper, “and the newscaster announced there had been a plane crash from Belgium en route to NY.”

            “Oh God. No, no.”

            “Shh! Listen. So, I got on the phone and dialed the airline. The lines were busy forever, but finally I got through.”

By now I feel like I am going to throw-up. My mother is now sitting on the edge of my bed not looking at me. I can see she is in one of her long, faraway trances.  As she speaks, she prays, her long manicured fingers crossing and uncrossing behind her back like pointy scissors slicing through air.

            “What did they say, Mommy, please tell me?”  I’m out of my bed, ready to get dressed, ready to go anywhere. Anywhere but here with her taking so damn long to finish and scaring the crap out of me.

            “Thank God,” she finally says, just as I am about to punch her into unconsciousness. I have no patience for her obvious need to recite the story she has already memorized probably an hour before, while I was fast asleep.

            “The airline confirmed that your father and Freddie caught the earlier plane. They were already in the air when the crash occurred.”

I look at her flushed and puffy face and see a little girl with big feet and crazy red hair. I lean into my mother and hug her tightly. Her body feels clammy, and my room suddenly appears a lot smaller. In almost complete darkness, I follow her downstairs to her bedroom. Without saying a word I crawl under the covers on Dad’s side of the bed.

 I doubt I will ever fall back to sleep. Instead, I will lay awake till morning waiting for the evidence that my father did not perish in some fiery crash in mid-air.

I want my present from that place called Belgium. The chocolates he said he would bring me.  I want my Dad.