InteGRATion into GRATeFULLness
Singing&Sounding keeps me Sound

For Ayelet on her 12th birthday - see below

Ayelet ba-sadae hi la-mayim tzme'ah,
Ayelet ahavim hi la-khaesheq kme'hah,
Ayelet-ha-shakhar ba-shamayim ge'ah,
Ayelet zot tikhyaeh be-simkhah mele'ah!

If a painful wreath of thorns is, what you love...

2007_08_14

lyrics: Natan Jonathan tune: Gidi Koren

Thank you, Keren Krotchik, for having taught me this song in one of our deep encounters in "Succah in the desert", in 1995. To my regret I have no photo of you, but if you scroll down the first page of "Fight for a Tree and Flight into Egypt", you'll find yourself...

Dedicated in love to the thorny relationship with my granddaughter Ayelet,
who today has become nine years old,
and who is exactly sixty years and one day younger than her grandma.

the hands of my two youngest granddaughters

And here are my memories around my 9th birthday, 1947:

For the very first time I was invited to spend a holiday with another family.
I could not hide my crazy excitement.
This provoked my mother to some ghastly, painful remark....
Still, I arrived at Hechingen with utmost joy.

The family existed of four daughters around my age, a mother and a father.
At that time it was rare to find a family with a father.
This one had been a colleague of my father during his one year of working as a judge, 1938-39.
They lived in a nice, little town, Hechingen, in the mountenous area of the Suabean Alb.

A couch or sofa was not available, so I had to squeeze myself into a baby bed,
a torture for someone who had a hard time falling asleep even in a proper bed.

I liked drying the dishes, when the mother washed them,
because sometimes we sang together.
It was then and there, that I learnt "True Friendship"...

I also loved to play with the girls.
At home the was not much opportunity to play.
Too many chores, household, standing in line in shops,
to get some bread, some vegetables...
And I already earned "an egg", by knitting socks,
a story which was followed by a terrible drama,
decisive for my growth, as I understood already at the age of 14.
So it was wonderful to be allowed to play.

But then came my birthday.
My mother succeeded in sending a parcel across the border.
For Stuttgart was occupied by the American,
and Hechingen (and Tuebingen and Metzingen) by the French.

The parcel contained some of those rare sweets available at the time.
The whole family watched me unwrap the parcel,
and the parents dictated:
"You have to distribute the sweets between all the children!"
I was a good girl and my naive Christian faith demanded this anyway,
but to be commanded like this ... hurt me.

Dinner-time came and I felt, that on this day I could ask for some more potatoes.
"No!", I was told, "your mother hasn't provided you with Lebensmittelmarken."
[the food was rationed, and one needed little slips of paper to be allowed to buy something]

Some other day the Fabarius family was visited by friends.
It seemed to me, that they were received with joy - and how could it be otherwise?
But when they were gone, the father and the mother got down on those people,
slandered and besmeared them .
I was shocked to the innermost of my bones.

I had not yet learnt about hypocrisy,
but I had learnt to keep my mouth shut and hold my pain inside...

The end of the two weeks had a compensation in store.

Since I couldn't go through the passport control myself,
"Uncle Helmut", also a friend of my dead father, fetched me.
We interrupted our journey by train twice in one day.

First we visited Helmut's sister and mother in Tuebingen,
where I later would study at the university, from 1957-1959.
I was allowed to sit in a big garden under apple trees,
and to read a book!
This was truly Heaven on Earth for me.
Imagine - a garden!
Trees and Shade!
And most wonderful of all: a book to read!
and nobody disturbed me,
nobody scolded me,
nobody demanded anything from me.
Even now warm feelings of GRATe-FULL-ness engulf me.


But the best thing was yet to come.


Towards the evening we arrived in Metzingen, at another sister's house.
This one had four children and , of course, was very busy.
But when the time came to go to bed - a good bed! -
this dear mother - I'm crying now - was sitting next to me,
let me say my prayer
and then --- can you believe it --- my tears now run down my cheeks -
she gave me a kiss!
a kiss on my forehead!

This kiss was not only a compensations for all the lack of kisses I remembered in my nine years,
it was also a kiss that helped me bridge nine more years until the first guiltless kiss from my first love.

A coincidence:
On this very day, at night, a saw a German movie called "Kuesse, Kuesse",
a sad drama on the background of "illegal foreign workers" - no Heaven-on-Earth yet..
What is more - the last weekly 3 SAT movie, on August 7- was called:
Hexen-Kuesse, witch-kisses.
About this I had something to note in "Conditions for Heaven on Earth"!

to former song    to next song

2010

For Ayelet's Bat-Mitzva
- celebrated at her home one the exact date of her 12th birthday, on Aug. 14, 2010,
with only the family of her father's side,
and again celebrated with the entire family and friends on December 27, 2010,
a "lupa" book, initiated and edited by Efrat, my daughter-in-love.
My part was to choose the images of Ayelet till the age of 4,
right the introduction and create the song

The Life of Ayelet which Ayelet has not known (i.e. the first 5 years, when consciousness does not yet exist really)


When the book was finally ready, after 5 months, and Mika handed it to me,
when she came with her mother to Ayelet's celebration on Dec. 27, 2010,
I photographed the two double pages with compositions of the "Quartet"

This time I did'nt take photos of Ayelet or my other grandchildren (only Tomer and Alon were missing)
nor of my children and their partners ( Immanuel was on flight) or my stepchildren and their families.
Nor shall I take pictures during the Bar-Mitzva of Itamar, my youngest grandchild except for Mika (5!).
Itamar, my daughter's fourth child, and the closest in age to Ayelet, will become 13 in February 2010.

As I said:
my assignment as grandmother has come to the same kind of end after 23 years,
as my assignment as mother came to an end after 23 years, when Elah was born.

Rafael Rosenzweig , 1922-2001, was married to Ines Cohn from 1946-1963 and to Christa-Rachel Guth from 1964-1981

Rafael Rosenzweig's descendants

One small, but significant experience I want to remember : When the guests had not yet arrived, I took Ayelet aside: "I want to bless you again with the song I created for you. But this time I want you to understand the second line! How often a week does it happen that you have no khaesheq (zest to do anything)? "Oh, very often!" she answered, "So know, that the second line is wishing you khaesheq!" She politely listened till I finished singing the song, and then pointed to my throat: "Didn't you have a chain with figures like a mother and a child? I was stunned: "How come, that you, the only one, are noticing this? I, indeed, removed that symbol of arms in form of a heart." She didn't ask, 'why did you remove it?' nor what the heart-symbol meant. But I stayed with the wonder: how come, that exactly this actress in my drama noticed it? Nobody noticed, that since Ireland, July, the chain with the amethyst heart was missing from my throat. Not even Efrat, who was the one, who let this chain prepare for me for my 71st birthday, nor did she notice, that the heart had returned, but that now the Tomer symbol was missing. [s. the composition with the Tomer symbol on Dec. 25, 2010 in Learn&Live 13 and see the amethyst heart at the end of Learn&Live12, and how I refound it in "The Heart is Awake" >Dec.21, 2010

From the material which I prepared for Ayelet's Book: Watching the Desert Watching the Sea Watching the Future [See the beginning of the sequence of most of the original photos, which I had collected for Ayelet's book from my folders between 2001 and 2003]

January 5, 2011 - I no longer took photos of the family, nor of Ayelet,
but her uncle Hovav did and sent them through the Picasa-Program.
How much better in quality these photos are than mine......

my daughter-in-love with her daughter

Ra'ayah between her religious sister-in-laws

Brother Arnon,
who compiled 344 photos of his sister, to be shown continuously on the big screen during the party,
and his aunt, my daughter.

Continuation of the sequence about Ayelet's Bat-Mitzva Ceremony,
photographed by her uncle Hovav,
in "Grateful to the Seven"

After all this search for empty space in old, somehow related pages,
the number of pages with pictures of Ayelet turned out to be ~~~ 23!