Audiobook!
Kalyna the Soothsayer Audiobook
So, the good news I mentioned last month? It's that the fine folks at Recorded Books will be putting out an audio version of Kalyna the Soothsayer!
Passover, and Haunting Watercolors
It's almost time for one of my favorite holidays. Passover combines communal feasting, storytelling, and social justice with what is possibly the most important part of Jewish tradition: complex rules!
When I was a kid, our Passover Seders (festive meal) always used the New Union Haggadah (prayer book), which is relatively egalitarian, and allows guests to begin snacking much earlier in the night than most haggadot. (This year, I asked Stella to give me a manicure based on it, and she delivered.)
Those childhood seders weren't with our extended family, but with my parents' friends, which meant a constant stream of silly jokes and sincere (progressive) politics. I took that spirit into my adult life and the (boisterous, leftist, anti-Zionist) Passover Seders my spouse and I host for friends in our apartment.
I also kept using the New Union Haggadah, in no small part because of Leonard Baskin's amazing, sometimes creepy, and extremely '70s watercolors. Please enjoy a few of my favorites, ordered by how much they terrified me as a child.
It's a spring holiday, so here are some flowers!
Just a nice, calming way to begin the service.
The four children: wise, wicked, simple, and the one unable to ask.
Their gloopy, metamorphosing hivemind sometimes creeped me out. But I also thought the simple child (right) looked like Commander Data, and that the wicked child (left) looked like Baron Munchausen, so that endeared them to me.
The Angel of Death. (I think?)
Pretty fucking scary when you're, like, seven-years-old and expecting Personified Death to just be a skeleton in a robe.
It's not the skull (also representing the Angel of Death) that bothered me, not really. Nor was it the howling, unreasoning animals at the top. But that butcher, blood red and holding his knife, with an expression so blank yet, somehow, disturbed or in pain... that motherfucker haunted my dreams.