Lisa Niver's Blog: We Said Go Travel, page 47

THE LETTERS PROJECT: A DAUGHTER’S JOURNEY

[image error] THE LETTERS PROJECT: A DAUGHTER’S JOURNEYBy Eleanor Reissa

The Letters Project is about big history, the Holocaust, but it is also an extraordinarily intimate personal narrative—a rare blend of informative, poignant, excruciating, startling, humorous, and ultimately inspiring storytelling.

In 1986, when her mother died at the age of sixty-four, Eleanor Reissa went through all of her belongings. In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a large wad of folded papers. They were letters. Fifty-six of them. In German. Written in 1949. Letters from her father to her mother, when they were courting. Just four years earlier, he had fought to stay alive in Auschwitz and on the Death March while she had spent the war years suffering in Uzbekistan. Thirty years later, Eleanor—a theatre artist who has been on the forefront of keeping Yiddish alive—finally had the letters translated. The particulars of those letters send her off on an unimaginable adventure into the past, forever changing her and anyone who reads this book.

“‘The Holocaust,’ Eleanor Reissa writes in this unforgettable and courageous book, ‘is attached to me like my skin and I would be formless without it.’ A very personal story that begins with her discovery of some sixty letters written in 1949 is also a fundamental one of a woman trying to make sense of her life and family and of the shadows that go back before she was born. There is plenty of feeling and sentiment but it never feels sentimental. Her inimitable wit leavens the sadder scenes. This journey of discovery is riveting, told with tender insight, at times heartbreaking and at times heartwarming just like the Yiddish songs that have delighted Ms. Reissa’s audiences.” —Joseph Berger is a New York Times reporter and author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust

CLICK HERE TO BUY THE LETTERS PROJECT

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“The Letters Project is a wonderful book—funny, heartbreaking, and ultimately transcendent. Eleanor Reissa’s journey back into her family’s past makes for a gripping—and very human—international mystery. I highly recommend it.” —Tony Phelan, TV Showrunner for: Grey’s Anatomy, Doubt, and Council of Dads

“Eleanor Reissa has written a gritty, fearless yet funny memoir about herself, her family, and the Holocaust. Once I began reading it, I was completely swept away until the journey ended. I was moved by the power of this uniquely personal yet universal story.” —Julian Schlossberg is an American motion pictures, theatre, and television producer

The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey

Excerpt from the book: The Letters Project by Eleanor Reissa. Copyright © Post Hill Press 2022.

I begin to walk down the very long hallway, slowly and deliberately, looking at those mighty iron doors on each side. Left foot, right foot. It is an effort to move my legs.

I stop. I look. I listen. I am like Superman. I have x-ray vision.

I see them. My family. I feel their lives here. Their breathing. From behind the doors and in the halls. They are flying all around, phantom shadows in the gray air. I hear babies crying and Yiddish and Polish and shouting and occasional laughter and the footsteps of the children, clopping, running, shrieking as children do, and fathers’ yelling and women weeping. A dream within a dream. I inhale them into the center of my soul. I swallow this fortress and I become the whale.

Then I see my grandparents, my beloved grandparents, of blessed memory; the mourning in their eyes, so evident in the photos. And my mother, so young and beautiful. And my brother, such a skinny knobby-kneed little boy who had travelled hither and yon, from pillar to post, knowing more hardship than any young boy should ever know. I hear them and I see them all around me. I want to touch them. Maybe if I stand here a bit longer, they will materialize and come to me. That is my wish. And I am certain that they would be happy to see me too. I have never been more certain of anything in my life. I do not move. I will not leave. Oh my God, why would I ever leave this place? I want to be preserved here, happy to be like Lot’s wife. Frozen in time. I want to wait for them. I know they are here. I am submerged with the ghosts, and I want to swim with them forever. (pg. 82-83)

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The Letters Project by Eleanor Reissa, Read by the Author

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Feeling Our Way with Cantor Emma LutzThe post appeared f...

Feeling Our Way with Cantor Emma Lutz

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Finding Freedom and Fireworks in Our Hearts with Cantor E...

Finding Freedom and Fireworks in Our Hearts with Cantor Emma Lutz

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Remembering our Scars, Finding our Strength with Cantor E...

Remembering our Scars, Finding our Strength with Cantor Emma Lutz

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Installation of Senior Cantor Emma Lutz

[image error] Installation of Senior Cantor, Emma Lutz
Friday, March 25 at 6:15 p.m. | In-person and OnlineSince joining Stephen Wise Temple & Schools in 2016, Cantor Emma Lutz has made a significant mark on the Wise community. She has guided our Wise School students, mentored our youth, shared moments of joy and sorrow with our families, and brought beautiful, soulful music into our Sanctuary.

On Friday, March 25, we will officially install Emma as our senior cantor. As part of a special Shabbat evening, we will host incredible cantors, rabbis, and musicians from around the country—as well as young singers from our Wise community—all gathering on our beautiful hilltop campus to celebrate Cantor Emma Lutz with joyous song. 

We hope to see you here in person for this this momentous occasion, which will be followed by a celebratory reception on Nahmias Plaza. The service will also be streamed online.

​​​​​​​We look forward to being together for a special evening of song, as we mark this meaningful milestone in our community.REGISTER [image error]

When I was a little girl, my grandmother shared with me the story of how she became the first bat mitzvah on the West Coast. In May of 1939, when so much of the world was shifting and even crumbling around her (a bit like today), she stood on the bima at Temple Sinai in Long Beach and proudly led her congregation in prayer. Later on, when she was installed as president of her Hadassah chapter in 1998, she was honored in a special ceremony on the bima at Stephen Wise Temple for those two great accomplishments achieved some sixty years apart.It is no accident that I also ended up on this bima. As you well know, the hard work, commitment, and generosity of those in our family and extended family so often lays the groundwork for our own stories.Please join us for a special Shabbat service & celebration on Nahmias Plaza at 6:15 p.m. on March 25 when I am officially installed as Senior Cantor of Stephen Wise Temple & Schools. The service will, of course, be accompanied by great and prayerful music, lifted up by the voices of our youth and so many cherished cantors and colleagues from around the country. And yet, it is the presence of our community–your presence–that will make the evening truly sacred.

REGISTER

Remembering our Scars, Finding our Strength with Cantor Emma Lutz

Finding Freedom and Fireworks in Our Hearts with Cantor Emma Lutz

Feeling Our Way with Cantor Emma Lutz

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Why Didn’t We Watch the Olympics This Year?

Photo from NBC News

Several weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me about the Olympics, being held in Beijing, China. As someone who lived in Beijing for 4 years, I was both intrigued and confused at the fact that I was barely aware the Olympics were even taking place. I’d like to explore why I, and some of my readers, were so blissfully unaware of the Olympics this year, at least compared to past years when the Olympics were at the center of the zeitgeist.

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There’s several factors to consider here. I’m going to make many comparisons to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a mere 14 years ago. The Olympics happened two years before I moved to China, which would have made me approximately 10 years old. However, I remember the construction of the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube Arenas, and their world debut at the Opening Ceremonies. I remember the running and swimming competitions most, with athletic titans Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps leading their respective packs.

[image error] Brandon Cohen in China, Photo from Cohen Family

This was, of course, a Summer Olympics, which boasts events involving track, field, court, and pool, encompassing popular games such as soccer, basketball, and volleyball. Sure, the Summer Olympics have their fair share of ancient and/or publically inaccessible sports, such as the throwing sports (javelin, shot put, discus, and my personal favorite, hammer-throw), but the vast majority of the sports represented at the Summer Olympics are things the average person can see themselves reflected in and strive to improve at. Running, swimming, jumping, and recreational sport played at their highest possible professional level. The average person has access to all of these things, which helps to draw viewership and keeps watchers engaged from event to event.

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This is less true for the Winter Olympics. The nature of the games itself has an air of pretension and privilege. Most of the sports require expensive external gear or specialized training and knowledge inaccessible to the average person, especially those living in warm climates. Arguably the two main sports of the Winter Olympics are skiing and snowboarding, and their dozens of variations including slalom and jump. If you’re from a landlocked, flat area, it’s likely that you’ve never had access to snowy mountains on which to practice your skills. This disconnect would make you either less inclined to watch professional versions of the sport, or alternately, more inclined, out of pure fascination and desire to become familiar with the sport. It seems, of my friends at least, that this year, many chose to ignore the games altogether, or were vaguely aware they were happening but paying no attention to individual events. This is a far cry from 2008, where families gathered in their living rooms with ample appetizers and liquor to watch each event meticulously and root for their home countries.

[image error] Photo from Cohen Family, A Wedding Couple in front of the Birds Nest Beijing

If skiing and snowboarding are inaccessible, it’s almost not even worth mentioning the vast majority of other sports represented at the Winter Olympics. How many individuals do you know that have been bobsledding? Or gone curling? Luge, anyone? Do any of my readers even know how they would go about getting started at the luge, ignoring completely the regional accessibility? I suppose you’d start out as a kid sledding down hills and develop a desire to go faster and faster, eventually upgrading your sled to sport-regulated gear and changing out small hills for more dangerous, steeper inclines that have you hurtling downhill head-first as fast as a car. The sheer danger of the sport alone is enough to make most rational humans turn away, and the sport’s history of injuries and death supports this. This is not to shame the specific sport, but to highlight the disconnect between the Winter Games events as a whole with the population they assume will watch.

Beijing National Stadium (Bird’s Nest): Olympics Venue from China Highlights

It’s impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging current events. First of all, COVID-19 is still running rampant, despite relaxing mask mandates and declining hospital admission rates. We’ve lived through at least four variants of the same virus, and been forced into quarantine at least once, twice if you’ve caught the virus. This has had a predictable impact on the general psyche of this generation, and has shepherded many formerly extroverted people into lives of solitude. Viewing parties, if they happened at all, were likely few and far between, and the shared sense of camaraderie and pride for our home team was masked along with our faces. COVID also delayed the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games by a full year, making it less than a year since we’d seen the Olympics, a marked difference from the two-year gap usually left to give audiences a break between the athletic festivities. We also just had the Super Bowl, a grandiose spectacle of American might in athleticism and global musical contribution. All of these make for a fairly overstimulated audience member, especially a casual sport-viewer with little investment in the success of any particular team or athlete. On top of this, many Americans still view China in a negative light, in many cases falsely blaming them for the creation and spread of COVID-19.

[image error] Beijing National Aquatics Center, Photo from West China Tour

Beijing hosted the Olympics only 14 years ago, albeit the Summer Games. Part of the allure of watching the Olympics is the new, remote destination of the host city (ie. Rio de Janiero 2016), and the unique culture the host country brings to the games, both through the infrastructure and the Opening Ceremony, which is usually a massively televised event. I remember in London’s 2012 Opening Ceremony, where both the Queen and Mr. Bean represented pinnacles of English culture. Then there were the 2014 Sochi Olympics, which happened in spite of global tensions with the host country, Russia. We got a view of a beautiful Russian city and the most expensive Olympic Games ever. Two years later, Russian athletes were banned from participating in the games under their own flag, however still being allowed to participate as the Russian Olympic Committee (arguably acting with impunity and skirting any form of punishment). This caused some viewers to distrust the politics of the Olympics, especially in the wake of recent Russian military involvement in Ukraine. The same Russian Olympic Committee sent a 15-year-old female skater to this year’s Olympics, who publicly failed a test for performance-enhancing drugs, and yet was still allowed to compete in her events (in stark contrast from American runner Sha’Carri Richardson, who was forced out of the Summer games last year for testing positive for marijuana after the death of her mother).

[image error] Beijing Water Cube Water Park, Photo from Cohen Family

There was supposedly a “media boycott” surrounding the Olympics this year, and if this is true, it certainly worked, regardless of the political motives behind it. Some boycotted because of China’s treatment of its ethnic Uighur group; others boycotted for China’s treatment of Taiwan, which grew in relevance as they threatened to use the global chaos surrounding Ukraine as an excuse to invade Taiwan. Regardless, the Olympics came and went with minimal coverage. The only major headlines surrounding the games were that of Eileen Gu, an American-born athlete who competed, and won medals, for China. This unfortunately served to heighten racial tensions at a time when Asian-Americans had already been the target of much public scrutiny, resulting in a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes.

[image error] The Water Cube becomes the Ice Cube for the 2022 Olympics

On a different note… just curious, how many TV subscriptions do you have? Personally, my dad subscribes to family plans for Amazon Prime, Netflix, HBO Max, and Hulu. We don’t pay for, and therefore don’t have access to, Peacock, Paramount Plus, Roku, and dozens of other streaming services that have popped up in the wake of Netflix’s breakthrough success in the mid-2010’s. Which begs the question: which of these were the 2022 Beijing Olympics available to stream on? If you know, you’re likely in the minority here.

Before subscription services, during the Olympics, you’d turn on almost any major TV channel and be immediately indoctrinated in whatever sport was occurring at that very moment. We had around-the-clock recap coverage of sports that had happened earlier in the day, so you didn’t miss a moment while watching another event happening simultaneously. This year, however, I was barely aware of each event as it occurred, making it impossible for me to tune in and watch the few events I would have cared to see.

Granted I’m not the biggest sports fan, but our family has always watched the Olympics together in celebration of our country and its athletes. I yearn for a post-COVID world where viewing parties come back in full swing, and we can watch and break bread together like in the old days. However, that simply wasn’t in the cards this year, and I had to resort to watching highlight compilation reels on YouTube.

International athletic events are the news-worthy events that used to grab our attention in year’s past, but with a world in flux, torn apart by disease and war, it’s hard to focus on the beauty of figure skating or the speed of a slalom run. The Olympics have a complicated political history, looking back to when Jesse Owens travelled to Nazi Germany and pissed off Hitler, or when Israeli athletes were slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists in Berlin, or when a domestic terrorist’s bomb went off at the Games in Atlanta, Georgia in 1996. Given all of this and the state of current events, it seems almost ironic that the Olympics were held this year in Beijing. All of this being said, I look forward to the Los Angeles Games in 2028, assuming I’ll be wealthy enough to afford a ticket.

[image error] Los Angeles 2028 Olympics

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Niver In PRINT: Blog Bytes January 2022 Jewish Journal

Thank you to the Jewish Journal for publishing me online for over a decade. [image error] Since they resumed print publication in Fall 2021, I have been in the Blog Bytes section more than sixteen times!Here are the three issues that I was in during January 2022: Jewish Journal Jan 7, 2022: p.30

From my article, “Grateful for Your Support:”

“I hope in 2022 we can safely celebrate with family and friends. I hope that you are making small steps each day to make your dreams come true!” See all of my 2021 content here!

[image error] [image error] [image error] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtz7B...Jewish Journal Jan 21, 2021: p.30

My article about “Creating 2021 Content during COVID-19“

“I appreciate being able to create new content during this challenging rollercoaster COVID-19 2021 year.

[image error] [image error] [image error] Jewish Journal Jan 28, 2022: p.30From my article, “DEMA Show 2021: In Vegas, I learned to TikTok!”

“At the show, I started a social media challenge of 5 videos a day for 30 days. Thank you to everyone for being in my new videos! It was so much fun to see everyone in person and talk scuba!”

[image error] [image error] [image error] THANK YOU TO THE JEWISH JOURNALSee my stories that were in the September print issuesthe October print issuesthe November print issuesthe December print issues [image error]

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