Witches, it was believed, went unbelted.

[kleenexwoman]

Lookin' up Russian folklore and fairy tales, particularly death folklore. I love Baba Yaga stories, but I realized I haven't read that many, and I conflate Baba Yaga with the fairytale function of witches in general, which naturally has been highly informed by Grimm's fairytales. Russian folklore is amazing. I wish I still had Gail around so I could ask her stuff.

This is proving to be very useful.

Comments

[josephwaldman.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I never did BB, but my sister did, and she fucking hated it. She doesn't look Jewish at all, and the fact that she was only a halfie and from Southfield turned everyone against her. I always felt totally out of place in Hebrew school. It was so obvious the teachers couldn't stand me because I refused to deny that my Jewishness was just an ethnic thing, and a half ethnic thing at that.

When I was up in Ann Arbor this weekend with my friends David and Josh we spent three or four hours just bitching about how screwed up most of the Jews in metro Detroit are. David went to high school with me, but Josh's parents moved up to West Bloomfield before he started middle school, and he says it was the worst place on the face of the earth. Everyone up there is a fucking fraud.

I got the token Jew vibe in college, too. We had slightly under two thousand students and of those maybe 25 were Jewish (or at least that's the number of Jewish-ish names I counted in the directory). The faculty had a bit more. But it was quite a culture shock. "Everyone here is white! And from farm country! What the fuck?"

Oh, your nose isn't big. You have kind of off-kilter geeky good looks. (Here's something interesting you could try this summer, though, just for fun: get your hair straightened and see just how long it would be. I'm guessing it'd be down to your waist.)

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Man, the B'Nai Brith girls I was in the group with looked goyish, acted goyish, had way more money than we did, and just happened to be on the Conservative side of the Reform line. They tried to straighten my hair (which I've cut recently anyway) and asked me when I was getting a rhinoplasty. I'm damn proud of my 'fro and my nose (wish it was bigger), not to mention the Philip Roth-esque lower-middle-class vibe of my upper-middle-class family, and took major offense. I think the last straw was when we went to a Denny's during the big BBYO convention and I got cheesy hashbrowns and a big side of bacon and a six-girl lecture about eating treyfe. It's a family tradition to buck tradition, dammit, and I'm not breaking that tradition just so I can fit in with a bunch of holier-than-thou nouveau riche teenyboppers.

[josephwaldman.livejournal.com]

Pffft. Yeah, like the way they live their lives is in any way in line with authentic Jewish tradition (biblical or cultural). Gimme Oak Park Jews any day of the week. Well, not the Hasidim, but the good solid almost working-class salt of the earth types.

I wish my hair were a bit more like yours. I know it's probably a bitch to deal with in the morning, but at least it's all-out curly, and therefore somewhat manageable because it's compact and fairly uniform. Mine is somewhat frizzy but it puffs up in ungodly ways, and I have never been able to get it cut in a way that makes it work. It should either be frizzier or else already starting to thin, and it ain't gonna do either anytime soon.

I've probably told you this before, but my grandparents were nominally Orthodox, went to shul regularly and all that, but they lived in Georgia, and there was no way on earth they were gonna keep kosher. I recall holiday meals where the main courses were matzoh-ball soup, brisket, and a big platter of ham.