Alef Betty: Modern Hebrew Arts

Introducing the Pines brothers, a well groomed lot (left to right): Alex, Leon, Danny (my father), and Ophry. These ears are just asking for it.

The bell at the front of the store was your cue to duck. My dad and his three brothers learned that lesson the hard way, sitting in Mr. Nozzle’s barber chair. His place was next door to my grandfather’s grocery wholesale business in Bulawayo. The barber shop was in the back, and the latest in men’s fashions were in the front. Moving a pair of scissors across your head was no excuse for Mr. Nozzle not to offer helpful advice to someone who had come in to browse. He was a multi-tasker.

“Mr. Weiss! We just got a new suit in. You would look wonderful in it. It’s on the rack to your right. No, the other one. Yes, that’s it — it’s right behind the blue one.” Your ear would be bleeding by this point.

But that’s not what this story is about.

This story is about Chester House, the local diner that housed a row of pinball machines, where all the bikers with their ducktail haircuts would hang out. My uncle Leon held the pinball record there. You don’t just hold this sort of record for nothing, obviously. It requires commitment and, more importantly, pocket change.

Surely, you can see how spending money on a haircut by Mr. Nozzle would seem frivolous when there were important goals to meet, like maintaining your lead at Chester House. Anyway, that was Leon’s reasoning the day he was given exact change for a haircut.

A plan formed. My uncle Alex, the eldest of the four brothers, volunteered his services to the cause. He would cut Leon’s hair, and no one would know the difference! Pinball dominance would be financed for another day. He set to work. With concentration and precision, he cut and shaved. And so it was that my uncle Leon ended up with two perfect rectangles shaved around his ears. On the upside, neither ear was bleeding.

Bertha Spiro’s mother, whose dress changed the course of a family’s history.

It’s the turn of the century, and Solomon Bienenfeld is a teenager on the run. He’s smuggling goods across the border from Germany into Poland: 6 pairs of long underwear, all of which he has on. The police have caught wind of him and they’re closing in. He boards a moving train just as the doors close, and he thinks momentarily that he’s gotten away. But the police are still after him–they made it on board before the train pulled out of the station. He runs from car to car, with the officers in pursuit.

He’s come as far as he can. It’s the last car. He looks around desperately and then he sees her: the matriarch of the Spiro family from Mlawa, his village! Their eyes lock in recognition. She is also smuggling, and is wearing 5 dresses. She motions him under her skirt, and he gratefully ducks underneath. But he is not alone. She is hiding Bertha, her 7 year-old daughter, to avoid paying the extra fare. He has never noticed her before, this young girl. They huddle together. Bertha and Solomon will later marry.

Generations later, my good friend Katie Hisert tells me this story, one of her mother’s family’s most well-known and well-loved pieces of lore. I’ve known Katie for over 20 years and this is the first time I’ve heard this story, the first time I’ve seen the photos of these family members.

Every family has its mythology–the stories that the whole clan knows, that form a shared identity. What are yours?

Pictured: Scenic tour of Lake Tahoe, Nevada with Uncle Linky and Saba Misha.

Family trip

This is the memory I have of almost every trip we took as a family when I was growing up:

• We arrive at the hotel.
• My mom immediately begins looking for a better place to stay.

Finding a better place to stay is the point of traveling, as far as my mom is concerned. It’s a sport. There was one trip in particular that typified this pastime: a summer trip we took to Lake Tahoe.

But I should first mention that before this trip, these were the scenic landmarks we had visited in Lake Tahoe:

• The pool inside Caesar’s, where there was an artificial cave and a waterfall that my brother and I hoarded every half hour when it started up.
• The arcade in Harrah’s, where I surrendered many quarters to Mrs. Pacman.
• The all-you-can-eat buffet at any number of fine establishments along the strip.

To be fair, there was one time we stopped at Emerald Bay for long enough take a picture. We had planned a longer sightseeing interlude, but my uncle Leon hit his stride at the craps table, and you don’t mess with a good thing.

This may or may not have been the time when the men in the family ran out of reserves, only to be brought back from the dead by my enterprising mother. She took a five dollar tip someone had left on the neighboring table, played a round of Keno that hit the numbers pretty big, and doubled the waitress’s tip before she even came to take our order. Then it was back to the tables.

Moving on up

But I digress. The summer trip we took involved swimming in the actual lake (who knew there was a lake?), riding bikes, and otherwise enjoying air that hadn’t been enriched with oxygen or cigarette smoke.

Cut to my uncle Leon, walking outside and starting to cough, “What is this?!?!”
My dad: “Fresh air.”

Of course, with all this recreation, my mom needed a project. From the moment we arrived, she started working on moving us from the cabin they gave us–room 515– to a room in the main condo building adjoining the grounds. We were there for a week and everything was booked solid, which is her most favorite challenge. She worked the front desk every day. Finally, halfway through our stay, a room opened up. It was a fancy one, too–a corner suite with 2 bedrooms, one for my parents and the other for me and my brother. Excitedly, we packed our bags and relocated.

Halfway through our first night in the suite, we realized that we wouldn’t be sleeping a wink. Our room was right above the main social area for the resort and people were out making noise until all hours. My brother and I couldn’t fall asleep and we crept over to see if our parents were awake. They were, of course. We all took one look at each other and started laughing hysterically. “Tomorrow,” my mom said between gasps for air, “back to room 515.”

Today’s story comes from Sarah Howell. Do you have a story you want to share? I want to hear it.

My story begins at the beach. My great grandfather came to the United States to escape the Russian conscription laws and settled in the South as part of a vibrant and active Jewish community. My grandmother grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina and spent her summers in a house on the beach with her mother, sister and brother that her family shared with her cousins. After she married my grandfather they moved farther inland to Fayetteville, North Carolina but continued to bring their three daughters to the beach during the summers.

My grandmother and her daughters in the 50s

Early in my parents’ marriage (my mother is the middle of the three daughters) my mother and father began renting a house at the shore for a week every summer. At first they came with friends and later with my younger aunt and her would-be husband. The tradition continues every year and the small rental cottage that held everyone in the seventies has transformed into three multi-bedroom houses all in a row holding a riotous collection of family and friends. We fill the rooms with children and grandchildren, cousins of the first, second or removed-by-marriage variety, girlfriends or boyfriends, and even a pet or two.

Mother, daughters and the first grandchildren in the 70s

It is a week filled with laughter, love and the occasional tear. It’s where I most appreciate the strength of my family and most feel the influence of our past generations. It is where I beg my grandmother to repeat her childhood stories again and again so that I may cement them in my memory. Her father was part of the generation of early Jewish merchants selling goods door to door, and that business set the foundation for my family’s good fortune. And though I may learn more about Jewish traditions and ceremonies at other times during the year, that week at the beach surrounded by all the women in my family in the place where we all began, is where I learn from them all about what it means to be a Jew.

My grandmother and grandfather in the 90s

Though my family has traveled the world and some of us have settled far away, we always return to the North Carolina coast, just miles from where our grandmothers grew up, to spend our summers and celebrate holidays. The stories we tell and the images we cherish are almost always staged at the coast – almost every photo of us that exists shows us in our bathing suits framed by the sun and sand. It is the bond that connects and centers us. It is the place where I feel at home.

The cousins in 2009

Share your story

Do you have a story you want to share? I want to hear it.

I was 6 years old when my family moved from Israel to Berkeley, California, so both Hebrew and English were spoken in our house. My brother and I each had a Hebrew alphabet poster from Israel hanging in our rooms when we were growing up.

There are some interesting words in this poster. Words like “loneliness” and “illness” alongside more benign words like “artist” and “tall.”

It’s hard to imagine someone designing a language poster now with words like that. But it was good for me to be surrounded by this wide range of letters and words. It made me wonder about life.

I spent a lot of my childhood looking at this poster, and I realized recently that I wanted to design a different kind of poster. I wanted to make something with the Hebrew alphabet, but I wanted it to be modern.

Designing a modern Hebrew alphabet poster

I set out to find the best Hebrew typography. Two of the posters I ultimately designed use letterforms based on typefaces from the Hebrew cannon: Frank Rühl and Haim. The former is perhaps the most widely used text face of all time and the latter is among the first modern faces designed, deeply influenced by the Bauhaus.

Both of these letterforms have been retrofitted by quite a few typographers for digital typesetting. I chose versions that were lovingly designed by Hagilda, a duo of typographers named Danny Meirav and Michal Sahar working in Israel. They are each accomplished designers and their type library is super fun.

The third poster uses a typeface called Beit Hillel by Oded Ezer, a well known Hebrew typographer working in Givatayim, the city where my family lived before we moved to the States. I saw him speak in 2006 at a type conference in Israel and instantly fell in love with his work, some of which is experimental and daring, and some of which is practical and useful.

The next generation

I was aiming to design a set of posters that people would want to hang in their homes today, so that another generation could grow up looking at these letters.

What did you have hanging on your childhood walls?

Pictured: Henia Pines, right and Malca Pines, left. Best friends, later sisters in-law.

I grew up on stories. My family has lived on 5 continents over the course of 3 generations, and story is the thread that ties us all together. Some are funny, some are harrowing, and some are wise. Much of what I have learned about life I learned first through a story, and then through my own experience–the story itself served as anecdotal evidence of something larger and true.

My family

My father’s parents lived under British rule more than 3,000 miles apart and met in Cairo. My mother’s parents met in a German refugee camp before getting visas to Israel. I grew up hearing about my father playing hooky from school in Bulawayo and my mother getting all the neighborhood gossip in Ramat Gan. I feel connected to the people in these stories–some of whom I know well, and others whom I only know from the oral history.

When I married my husband, I inherited his family stories, as well. His family is from all over Europe. Some have been in the States for several generations. Their New York experiences were entirely different from mine, but I absorbed them, and now I share in their history.

This is not unique, by any means. It’s a microcosm of the human story, of immigration, of the world in which we live. It’s the story of the Jews, of the Israelis, of the Americans–all of which I am–and of everyone else, as well.

Storytelling connects us

Oral history and storytelling are powerful and humanizing–they connect us to each other. My favorite books and movies explore this personal terrain, and I return to them again and again. I love Goodfellas as much as the next girl, but what I love even more is Martin Scorsese’s parents talking about their family. Don’t even ask me how many times I’ve watched Radio Days. This is the good stuff.

I believe that we recognize our own humanity in the specificity of another’s stories. I want to share my stories with you here, and to hear yours.

What are your family’s stories?