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Knitting, dubbed “the new yoga” by some enthusiasts, lets you unwind your mind while staying productive and aware. With its soothingly repetitive motions and clicking sounds, knitting provides a subtle meditation tool; the magic of seeing yarn transform into richly textured scarves and sweaters is a groovy bonus.

“Not only do you connect with the work of your hands through knitting, but you can slow down to enjoy the present moment,” says Tara Jon Manning, author of Mindful Knitting: Inviting Contemplative Practice to the Craft. “While in that space, knitters can simply be still and quiet.”

Unlike other mind-body forms of stress relief, knitting can be practiced nearly anywhere. So while you may not feel like bending back into Camel Pose in a crowded airport, you can pull out your knitting needles whenever you need a moment of calm.

When winter has been with me too long, I close my eyes for a moment and see myself facing the summer shade of my grandma’s house. I lived in the cooling shadow of that tall, white farmhouse all my growing up years. It was only a stone’s throw from my house. Just thinking of Grandma’s farmhouse brings a feeling that time has not erased, even though it was torn down decades ago.

Grandma always had a pie cooling in the window and, through the screen, I could catch snatches of farm market reports from her kitchen radio carried on the breeze. As I sat warming myself on our sun-baked steps and drowsing, Grandma’s bright orange poppies along the foundation of her house bobbed gently in the shade while an occasional whiff from her spearmint plants added to the feeling of well-being.

I remember the racket of black birds rioting in the surrounding grove, the funny sound of Grandma sneezing, Grandpa tuning his fiddle, the distant droning sounds of a tractor in the fields, while contentment settled over me like a cloak. The fresh summer air, the sky more immense than any artist could ever paint–the whole beautiful world–felt contained within that still, sacred space between the two houses. To me, as a small child, heaven itself could not get any better, I felt as if I were living it on earth.

It’s above all a memory of the glorious power of stillness, the joy of just being and what it is like to live from the inside out. Dawna Markova writes in I Will Not Die an Unlived Life, “I want to know how to lift above and sink below the flow of life, to drift and dream in the currents of what cannot be known.” She also suggests that we do not find joy, we cultivate it, through accumulation of those small, ordinary miracles that strengthen our hearts.

In his classic, Loving Yourself for God’s Sake, Adolfo Quezada says that we have been conditioned to survey our inner and outer landscapes quickly, to select the beautiful or interesting and ignore the rest. He writes, “Go beyond surface consciousness…. Allow yourself to enter the world around you. Come to respect that world–persons and things–as they are, not what you need them to be. Get out of yourself and let the world come into your heart. Hear the voice that comes from the reservoir of all experience and knowledge.” In one of my favorite passages, he writes, “Your whole self can rest in unconditional acceptance and nurturing love as the quest for knowing gives way to the security of believing. The love between yourself and God cannot be exclusively for you. It bursts from your heart into the world to do God’s bidding.”

When I think of the sacred space between my childhood home and Grandma’s house, as an adult, it gives me a glimpse of what that intimate space between God and me should feel like. When you feel that deep familiarity and encompassing love, there is no end to the hope, faith and passion you can bring to the world. God’s radiance fills every nook and cranny, always faithfully reminding us: Stillness first. Empowerment second.

THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY REQUIRED RABBINICAL students to spend one year in Israel, and we decided to go the following fall. One day, shortly before we left, Norman Fischer (Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center) was in New York for a visit and decided to come to minyan at the seminary with me. He had often told me about the intensely Jewish life he had led as a boy. He had been his rabbi’s favorite and had prayed and studied with him every day. When he was eleven years old he had vowed to himself that he would always remain faithful to Judaism, and, as far as he was concerned, he had never broken that vow. He never missed High Holiday services, and it was only because of him that I had begun to celebrate Passover seders again. He bad never felt alienated from Judaism, and he did not see his involvement with Buddhism as posing a conflict to his Jewish identity. In fact, in a way that was often difficult for me to understand, he saw his Buddhist practice as the fulfillment of his Jewishness.

In the fifteen years that Norman and I had been close friends, I had never been in a synagogue with him, and I was shocked when he walked into the minyan and threw on a set of tefillin as if he’d never missed a day in his life. He picked up a siddur and began to daven with great fluency and passion, shukkling mightily backward and forward. After the service was over, there was a radiance on his face I had never seen before, not even after a session in Tassajara. “Now that I’ve done Zen meditation,” he said, “I could do this for the rest of my life and it would be enough. I wouldn’t have to do anything more. But if I’d never done Zen meditation, I wouldn’t even know what this is,” he said. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had felt exactly this way so often in my own prayer life, as if Zen meditation had opened me to the great richness of ordinary Jewish prayer, a richness that was no longer apparent to most Jews.

I have thought of Norman’s remark many times in recent years. I watch Jews come to our morning minyan searching for spirituality–a spirituality which I know very well is there-which I feel very powerfully every morning of my life. A very few manage to find what they are looking for, but the vast majority do not. The power of the service seems lost on them. Or in my friend’s words, they don’t even seem to know what this (the service) is.

Part of the problem is education. People don’t understand Hebrew, and they don’t understand the structure or the function of the service, and this keeps them outside of it–and therefore, untouched by its deep current of feeling.

But that is only part of the problem, and, I believe, not the most important part by far. It’s important to understand the language and the structure of the Jewish prayer service, but I think the real spirituality of the service lies elsewhere–in the rhythm of the service, in the flow of gesture and sound, and in the silences between and behind the language. Spirituality is non-verbal and a-rational. Understanding can certainly enhance it, but it can never contain it, nor even convey it very well. That’s what my friend the Zen master meant. His meditation practice had sensitized him to the non-verbal spirituality of the service. Without that sensitivity, he didn’t even know what the service was, even though as a boy he had davened it every morning of his life.

Perhaps there was a time when Jewish life imparted this kind of awareness automatically–a time when whole communities of Jews were so sensitized to the sacred in the world by rigorous, traditional observance that the spiritual potential of the daily service was perfectly obvious to them.

Meditation has many benefits, and as Aryeh Kaplan, Jonathan OmerMan, and many others have pointed out, it has along and distinguished Jewish history as well. But at this moment in our history, I think it has a particularly important role to play. Somehow we have lost touch with our sense of the spiritual. Meditation, in a Jewish context, can help us get back in touch with it.

Norman had been rising in the ranks at Zen Center. He had gone to Japan to receive transmission. He was now a Zen master, and soon I would be a rabbi. We were each other’s path not taken. The apartment we rented in Jerusalem was built out of chalky pink Jerusalem stone that gave off an odor of old bones in the heat of the day. It was in Talpiot Mizrach, a magical neighborhood of new apartment buildings winding up and down a mountainside where the old U.N. headquarters used to be before 1967. From our living room we could see the hills of Moab and the volcano-shaped Mount Herodian. Spread out beneath our building were beautiful Arab villages. Their cobalt blue windows warded off the evil eye. Loudspeakers on the top of a minaret broadcast the Moslem call to prayer. It woke us up before dawn every day, when it was still cool.

We soon learned to shop at Rail’s, a corner grocery store with a four-sided counter where people of every description crowded around on all sides. We bought our milk there in plastic bags, while Rail ran back and forth dispensing items and making change in Hebrew, Arabic, French, English, Russian, and Yiddish. We had a community center in our neighborhood where Hannah took ballet lessons. There was a Calder sculpture of a red heifer in front. Across from it was a supermarket where all the food was kosher. Sometimes, we would see Bedouins on camels or donkeys in the courtyard. In the bomb shelter–every neighborhood in Israel has a bomb shelter–there was a Conservative synagogue. Religious politics being what they are in Israel, it was hard for a Conservative congregation to have a regular synagogue. That is where we went to pray on Shabbat. There were a lot of Conservative Jews in this neighborhood, many of them Conservative rabbis. But they didn’t have a daily minyan. For that, I went to a little Orthodox shul in a geodesic dome across the street.

I don’t own a single Elvis album, but I’ve always believed that visiting Graceland is something that every Southerner should do. After all, his big white house is the No. 2 most recognizable home in the country-second only to the one in Washington, D.C.

Once a year, you can visit Graceland for free, by candlelight, alongside thousands of people. The hush of the crowd and the sea of white candles casts this iconic mansion in a whole new light. If you’ve ever wondered how a man who died 29 years ago continues to touch lives around the world, visit Graceland on August 15. On this evening, thousands of people gather for a candlelight vigil that lasts into the early hours of the anniversary of Elvis’s death. One needn’t be an Elvis fan to appreciate the strange wonder of this night, a singular event in American pop culture.

They Come From Around The World

Every year in August, flights arrive in Memphis filled with people who save their pennies, earmark their vacations, and cross oceans to attend Elvis Week.

“This is our Christmas,” said Chris and Stella Drummond, who first came here from Australia on their honeymoon. “This is all of our holidays put together.”

I met Chris and Stella just after midnight munching hamburgers near a chalk portrait of Elvis sketched in the middle of Elvis Presley Boulevard. They had parked their lawn chairs in the street in front of Graceland, which the cops block off for the candlelight vigil.

The couple was part of a peaceful crowd of thousands of fans who light white candles promptly at 9 p.m. This starts a quiet walk through Graceland’s Meditation Garden, where Elvis is buried. That may sound morbid, but it’s actually quite touching. And it offers a sense of why a man who died so many years ago remains relevant today.

Though Elvis fans generally are not the same people you see walking around Memphis in white jumpsuits and gold glasses, the idiosyncrasy of their gathering is not lost on them.

“Where else on the planet could you sit in the middle of the street at 12:30 a.m., burn candles, and eat a cheese-burger with 10,000 other people?” Chris asked with a smile.

Big Changes Ahead

Elvis once again made national headlines in 2005 when a billionaire media mogul purchased Elvis Presley Enterprises for $114 million. Buyer Robert F.X. Sillerman plans to overhaul Graceland. He intends to build additional hotels and a complex of shops, eateries, and more.

In March 2006, Graceland was named a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior. To fans’ relief, the mansion that Elvis called home from 1957 to 1977 will not be changed, but “visitors can expect a better presentation of the Elvis story,” explains a Graceland representative.

This is a case history of a dermatomyositis patient treated with Transcendental Meditation and visual imagery without drugs for 294 days during which the patient recovered, a low-probability event without conventional therapy. Regression analysis of periodic measures of arm strength, rash, and pain vis-a-vis application of mind-body treatments found significance for both Transcendental Meditation (p=0.02 to 0.001) and visual imagery (p=0.02 to 0.002). Stress had a significant negative impact on skin symptoms but not arm strength. Beneficial effects of meditation had half-lives of 48-59 days for skin symptoms and no detectable decay for arm strength. Benefits of visual imagery were more transient (half-lives 4-18 days). The effects of stress had half-lives of only 1-3 days.

Collins MP, Dunn LF. The effects of meditation and visual imagery on an immune system disorder: dermatomyositis. J Altern Complement Med 2005; 11:275

COMMENT: These data demonstrated a significant relationship between meditation practice/imagery and recovery from dermatomyositis, possibly mediated by influences on the humoral immune system. The decay rate of meditation and visual imagery was much slower than that of stress. Since dermatomyositis is a humorally mediated immune microvasculopathy, these meditation and imagery benefits support growing evidence showing that these techniques influence immune function. A single case report can point the way to the need for large controlled studies, but the concern for side effects attendant to the use of pharmaceuticals is absent here. The greatest risk with meditation and visual imagery is that it might not work.

The practice of exile is deeply rooted in Jewish history, stretching back to ancient times and traversing context and place. Its backdrop has been forced dislocation, suffering and death. Today a new exile is being created and practiced, but this time against the backdrop of Jewish affluence and power. The Jewish exile of our time seeks to address the empowerment and expansion of Israel and the silence of Jewish leadership in the United States in the face of that. Indeed, a civil war has broken out within the Jewish community over the issues of empowerment, expansion and silence, even as they become the central question of Jewish identity, history and the future. Against the Jewish establishment in Israel and America, Jews of conscience speak boldly this truth: the dislocation, denigration and destruction of Palestinians and Palestine bears the same consequences for Jewish life. For speaking this truth, Jews of conscience are exiled-within power and affluence–to a place beyond geographic designation and with out destination. It is an exile at the end of Jewish history as we have known and inherited it.

There are many elements to this exile, some ironic, others paradoxical:

Jews in exile are almost to the person completely secular, though, as it turns out, in a peculiarly Jewish way. Many of these Jews of conscience are within Israel or, reversing the theological claim of ingathering, have left Israel and enliven the Jewish diaspora. And yet the haunting question remains: are these secular Jews of conscience carrying the covenant into exile with them?

Jewish academics, once denied employment and status, and programs of Jewish and Holocaust studies, only coming into being within the last decades, rather than critically evaluating Jewish power and ideology, are in the vanguard of disciplining Jewish dissenters, preventing their employment and censoring speech on campuses across the nation.

Christian renewal in the West, so indebted to Jewish scripture and reflection on the Holocaust, has become silent on the Jewish civil war, and liberation theologians, including most feminist theologians, are more concerned about their own empire building–as it turns out the same kind of empires they correctly criticized their patriarchal foes for building and maintaining–than they are about Jews of conscience.

In the academy the double standard toward women and people of color now applies to Jews and often is enforced by those once-insurgent and now established women and persons of color. Name one Jewish thinker at a major academic institution involved in the study of religion who places the possibility of solidarity with the Palestinian people at the center of his or her concern? Name one Jewish thinker at a prominent Christian seminary who thinks through and articulates the violence and militarism that has come to be at the center of Jewish life or seeks a way of creating a future for Jews and Palestinians beyond the cycle of violence and atrocity?

The ecumenical dialogue, once an avenue for Christian renewal, has become the ecumenical deal. The ecumenical deal is simple yet with profound implications: Jews demand that Christians in the West repent for the sin of antiJewishness; the main vehicle for Christian repentance is uncritical support for the state of Israel and its policies. Uncritical support for Israel renders Palestinians and Palestine invisible. Critique of Israel’s policies vis-a-vis the Palestinian people is deemed anti-Jewish and a return to the previous understanding of Jews within Christian theology and practice. Conservative, moderate and radical Christian academics uphold this ecumenical deal. Though in private they may be critics of Israel, yet even amid the resentment and pressure exerted to enforce the ecumenical deal, they remain in public silent.

The Holocaust has become a safe haven for Jews and Christians. Instead of raising questions about power and oppression, the Holocaust often becomes a barrier to speech and activity. For Jews, the Holocaust becomes a place of unaccountability, a fire-wall against critical thought; for Christians, the Holocaust becomes a place of silent retreat, excusing their silence, as another crime is committed in the name of the Holocaust.

That Jews and Christians, worshiping the same God, sharing the Hebrew bible, and embracing a mutually binding covenant are working together to establish God’s reign on earth, is, it turns out, more of a myth than a reality. Jews employed in universities and seminaries are for the most part used to lay a deeper and more expansive groundwork for Christians’ belief. Thus Jews in the field of Hebrew bible, the study of Hebrew, medieval Jewry, even modern Judaism and Holocaust, are employed to romanticize Jewish history as a vehicle for Christian renewal. Jewish innocence and suffering become a way for Christians to recover their innocence through repentance and self-sacrifice.

Critical Jewish thought–especially about the evolving Constantinian Judaism of our time and use of Jewish religious imagery and identity to oppress another people and preserve a sense of innocence and purpose, the very same reality that Jews experienced under Constantinian Christianity and rightly criticized and rejected as hypocritical–is rejected by many Christian academics as an unwelcome and unnecessary intrusion into their religious enterprise. Jews of conscience feel this Christian self-involvement as a power against them and a betrayal. It confirms to Jews that Christians have used them in the past for their own sense of triumphalism and now Christians use them to buttress a sense of humility and innocence. Jews were defined and are defined today in the Christian imagination and for Christian needs. As persons and as a community, in their beauty and limitations, Jews are not important enough to Christians to speak boldly and unequivocally about what is being done to the Palestinians and to the Jewish community itself. Hence Jews are not with Christians; they are alone.

Composition Studies, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2003

Dying is easy / It’s living that scares me to death.

Annie Lennox, “Cold”

Knowledge of your sorrows

doesn’t equal sorrow

. . .

what the letters spell

is not the same

as the letter’s spell

Michael Blitz, Satellite Strains, 47

I am dying to share more than just the talk about family, house and purchases. I need more-god help me if I am flawed in some way, but I need more. I am dying to share-what a thing to feel one is dying from.

Nearly everyone knows how to die-or thinks they do. We’re not so sure. Most of the time we don’t even know how to think about it. As a friend of ours once suggested, not knowing how to die is, nevertheless, unlikely to stop us from doing so. What stops us is living with the idea of dying. Living is scary. It’s an uncharted, dangerous enterprise.

Claude Mark Hurlbert is a professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches in the Graduate Program in Composition and TESOL. Michael Blitz, Professor of English, is Chair of the Thematic Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In addition to many individual publications in journals and edited collections, together they have co-written Letters for the Living: Teaching Writing in a Violent Age (NCTE) and co-edited Composition and Resistance (Boynton/Cook Heinemann).

The two of us have published a number of things that deal with the struggles our students have undergone in the courses, including their composition courses, of their lives. In our own work, we have tried to explore the profound beauty-and sadness-in the writing of our students. Why sadness? Why not focus on the joys and triumphs, satisfaction and optimism that come through in some of the writings? Why not focus on the stylistic elements, rhetorical gestures, discursive modes, or just the general diversity of the subject matter? Because any examination of the literature of composition will show that these investigations have been done, redone, and are still being done. Still, maybe it will seem inappropriate to spend time examining the idea of sadness-or sorrow-in connection to student writing. No doubt some will think it morbid to consider death and dying in the context of first-year composition. But for ten years now, the two of us have been giving our composition students the assignment to write a book about what they are burning to tell the world, and in all these years, more than two-thirds of our students have elected to write about things that have caused them sorrow, about the deaths of loved ones, about the deaths of neighbors, even of hope itself. And this is hardly surprising. As Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch remind us, “Moments die, situations die, and lives end. Even more obvious than the uneasiness of birth is the suffering (and lamentation as is said) experienced when situations or bodies grow old, decay and die” (115).

How we die, we believe, is connected to how we live. How do we live, in relation to the inevitability of death? How do our sorrows and joys instruct us? Do they prepare us, or is it our fear that prepares us? Do we try to avoid death by not thinking about it? By pretending that it will not come any time soon? Are there things we ought to be doing-and teaching others to do-toward “completing” our lives? Is the writing and the teaching we do part of some human project we are “all” working to complete each day without even knowing it?

We are, with our students, living lives of letters and words. We are also working our way(s) inexorably toward dying and death. And not just their deaths, or ours, or yours, but a world that, too often, seems to be hastening the process of self-destruction. Even pretending this is not true does nothing to negate its truth. Are writing teachers teaching people how to create a cultural record? Are we teaching people ways for keeping track of themselves and others so as to bring sense to the trajectory of a lifetime? What equals a life? How do writers take that measurement? In what ways do the compositions that stream from the hands of our students testify to the experiences that define and limit “real” life?

Charles Olson’s phrase, “equal, that is, to the real itself” (181), cuts to the heart of what we want to say about writing and, by extension, the teaching of writing. Writing is not simply a way to learn-and know-about one’s own life and death. Writing brings us as close as we can be to the things we write about, even when those things, and people, have passed away and into memory and, often, sorrow. Writing puts us-and keeps us-in the thick of living because it is an act of living. And it brings us to the brink of dying because every word is a last word. Like an individual lifetime, a word is never repeatable. We can take measure of our words as we can take measure of our lives, but both occur once and only once. Writing is the matter at hand: letters and words and then words turned into letters written as the correspondence between the dead and the living.

How many times have you caught yourself talking on the phone, typing away on your e-mail or BlackBerry and eating a sandwich at the same time? The pressure to squeeze more work into each day takes its toll on your health and can cause you to pack on pounds. Stress, anxiety, sleep deprivation and depression–all symptoms of “multitasking syndrome”–make you less effective at work, at home and in the gym. You can sneak some surprisingly productive downtime into your go-go-go lifestyle with these tips:

* Tend to your body first. If you can work out in the morning, great. If not, make it a ritual to spend just a few minutes doing crunches, knee bends, lunges and light stretching when you get up. Follow that with a nutritious breakfast, such as an omelet or a protein shake. This strategy forces you to focus on you first thing–not your to-do list.

* Engage your brain. Yes, in an ideal world, we would all strive to slow down, but for most of us, it’s borderline impossible. Instead, at least try to be more mindful of what you’re doing, especially during meals (dining on autopilot is a surefire way to overeat). Turn off the computer or television, close the newspaper and savor the taste and texture of your food. The same holds true for your workouts: I always tell clients to “put your brain in your butt,” which means focus on the body part you’re working, whether it’s your backside, your legs or your abs.

* Take a timeout. I am a huge advocate of meditation–not the sitting-on-a-mountain kind, but just pushing yourself away from your desk or going for a walk and reconnecting with your breath and your thoughts. It helps you find your center.

* Refuel with energy fortifiers, not energy stealers. It sounds easier said than done, but when your schedule gets crazy, you’ve got to nosh on food that nourishes you–not on things that will leave you feeling tired. Stash a bag of celery, vitamin C-rich red bell pepper strips or high-protein raw almonds in your bag or desk drawer for a nutritious snack during even the busiest of days.

This Lowfat Egg Salad (find it at Shape.com/davidkirsch) is easy to prepare and delicious. Make it before you go to work and take it with you for breakfast or to ward off those midday munchies.

shape up fast

the ultimate shoulder move

Works shoulders, upper back and core

Heidi Klum, Liv Tyler and Kerry Washington do this toner to get strong, sexy arms. Using the stability ball provides a challenge for your core that you don’t get with normal shoulder raises. Do it in your office (if you can stash a stability ball there) or at home in front of the TV.

* Hold a 3-pound dumbbell in each hand and lie facedown with your midsection centered on a stability ball, feet about shoulder-width apart on the floor (rest on your knees if necessary). Extend arms in front of you, just off the floor [A].

* Keep your abs tight and your head in line with your spine, as you raise your arms to shoulder level in front of you, then draw them out to each side [B]. Lower them almost to the floor again, raise them, and reverse the motion to return to start. Do 2 or 3 sets of 10-15 reps.

“The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; The times are winter, watch, a world undone.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1) knew all too well, as he wrote above, much darkness and winter, but he also knew that “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring.” An earlier fellow poet also knew the movement from darkness to light. In a dark, dingy cell along the Tajo River in Toledo, Spain, John of the Cross (2) was brutally “degraded” nearly to death by his brothers. The Spanish friar compared his captivity to being swallowed by a whale that later vomited him out in an alien land. John’s vignettes of a “cramped prison cell” and of a person “hanging in midair, unable to breathe” were images, we may be sure, derived from his time in prison. Despite his “horrendous night,” the Castilian poet and mystic composed one of the Spain’s most beautiful, powerful and sensuous poems, “Dark Night.” This poem is a celebration of a “night more lovely than the dawn.” For John of the Cross, the dark night experience, for all its feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, is ultimately not about darkness and despair. Rather the dark night is always for the sake of liberation, light and love, always about a movement from darkness to light.

During the terrible and horrendous darkness of the war in Iraq, John of the Cross’ convictions about the dark night inspire a desire and a hope for peace, a peace that must be whole, lasting and binding on all. As Hopkins knew, “piecemeal peace is poor peace.” Shall we not pray that conquerors and conquered will come to know that darkness is for the sake of light and love, that war is “always a failure” even for those who have thought it just?

We must struggle to overcome what Hopkins would call this “sordid turbid time” with mutual growth in love of neighbor, no matter how far away the neighbor may live, whether in Baghdad or Boston, Basra or Bristol. It is incumbent upon us all to pray for a new creation where divine love will wipe away the tear from every eye and “make each morn an Easter Day” (Hopkins). Easter has come late this year, fighting lingers on all too long; in fact, it feels not at all like Easter. However, with Hopkins let us “Breathe Easter now.”

It is also time to beg God/Allah to bless all peoples; to drive the demons from all hearts, whether those hearts belong to the vanquished or to victors. And let us pray that the world may be washed with rivers of mercy, compassion and forgiveness and that this world undone by violence, destruction and death may be redone and rebuilt by the divine Architect.

We who are Christian can look to the Risen Lord, our Morning Star, to be a beacon who dispels “the darkness of this night,” so that, as the church sings out with the Easter Exsultet, a “peaceful light” may shine on and in every human heart. Let us pray, too, that no nation may ever again be abused by its rulers, nor may any nation ever again give up a search for peaceful means to right wrongs, no matter how arduous that struggle may be. May we who have been called Easter people sing only and everywhere a song of peace. And, as Hopkins has written, may we be committed to “Make each morn an Easter Day.”

Pas sa faute si elle souffrait du complexe des victimes et s’identifiait à ceux qui sont poursuivis.

Maryse Condé, Histoire de la femme cannibale

Comment pourrais-je oublier mon passé? dit le Juif. Non seulement il me poursuit depuis ma naissance mais, parfois, j’ai la conviction qu’il sera mon avenir.

Edmond Jabès, Le livre de l’hospitalité

I have come back to Brooklyn today, a return to my native land that constitutes a coming home only because we are here together-”coming home” not to a place, but to the deepening of a relationship that shares mutual concerns over the intricacies of belonging, the struggles around politics of identification and, for you as a writer, the insistence on a certain form of dis-identification necessary to creative freedom. I have responded to your curiosity, Maryse, to your openness, to your queries about a disturbing New York incident by offering to take you and Richard Philcox through the section of Brooklyn known as Crown Heights. This neighborhood was the scene of interracial riots in 1991 between Blacks and Jews after a Hasidic driver accidentally killed a Guyanese-born boy, Gavin Cato, setting off the violence that then killed a young Australian Yeshiva student, Yankel Rosenbaum. You are wondering what such a neighborhood can possibly look like, imagining it, and, literally, trying to figure it. As you have in each of your novels, from unnamed African countries, to Salem, to Ségou, to Capetown, you will combine the experiential, the historical, and the imaginary aspects of this little trip, distilling something from it that, through your writing, will become art.

So we are crawling through traffic on Bedford Avenue, passing jerk chicken shops, coiffeurs advertising braiding (weaving) and corn rows, music shops blaring reggae, salsa, zouk, RocB, hip-hop, fusion music of all kinds. The city grid here, with the Avenues, Franklin, Bedford, Nostrand, New York, Brooklyn, Kingston running North-South, traversed in regular geometrical orthogonals by Streets and Places such as Dean, Bergen, St. Marks, Prospect, Park, Sterling, St. Johns, Lincoln, Union, Carroll, Crown, bring to mind the warp and woof of a textile, adding to the weaving of a friendship that is growing between us. The disparate strands of the weaving, from Africa, South America and the Caribbean, from France and Eastern Europe, through the American South, can all be seen in the urban fabric here. Neighborhoods of solidarity and suspicion, woven by webs of community and wariness, remind us that the ways in which we all do and don’t choose to identify ourselves are multiply determined and often problematic.

Around us, African-American and Caribbean dread-locks give way to pais, Hasidic side-curls; do-rags become streimels, the men’s round, fur-trimmed hats; woven hairpieces are replaced by sheitls, the wigs of the Ultra Orthodox Jewish women, as we slowly cross one of those invisible frontiers delineating neighborhoods found in New York City. Roland Barthes might have spun one of his “mythologies” in Crown Heights, reading racial tensions as being all about hair! Crossing the grand old boulevard that is Eastern Parkway, we have moved from Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, Guyana, to Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Romania, from Creole to Yiddish, from roti to challah, from conch to gefilte fish. You are at home in these shifting borderlands, global citizen that you are, and these are the spaces and places that your protagonists explore on their journeys to self-discovery, from Veronica to Tituba to Marie-Noëlle to Célanire to Rosélie, to name but a few. Your refusal to align yourself with any dogmatic essentialism, be it racial, nationalist, feminist, ethnic, in favor of the continued construction of the true land of the free, that of the literary imagination, is textualized as a willingness to explore difference(s), invent possible new relationships, traverse spaces and cultures. And this has been, for me personally, since our first meeting, the magic of the person behind all the personages as well. Regal in your hospitality, serving savory curried goat in your dwelling on the Upper West Side, you are equally gracious, coming with Richard to dine at my Askenaze Sabbath table in Riverdale. Hospitality, after all, implies reciprocity, as the French word hôte instructs us. In this way do you invite readers worldwide into your fictional universe.

I recount a story about my father, an obstetrician in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn in the mid-twentieth century. At the time, the Modern Orthodox Jewish population was slowly giving way to the influx of the even more traditional Hasidim spilling over from Williamsburg, and the population of my father’s practice became progressively more Ultra Orthodox. As this community does not practice birth control for religious reasons, my father often delivered ten or even fifteen children from the same woman. How I loved his physician’s hands, long, strong, elegant. They were also the hands of a Southern gentleman who returned home one evening, disconcerted and hurt, after having been invited to the wedding of a patient’s child. A woman whose dozen children he had brought into the world had refused his hand extended in congratulations, saying shyly, “I’m sorry, Doctor, but I don’t shake hands with men.” His Southern sensibilities and his professional pride were both wounded enough for him to bother telling us this story afterward. It was as if he was still struggling to understand how the human condition of joy that binds all people at such life events could be overridden by archaic interdictions of law, separating rather than facilitating shared experience. As a Jew from a small town in the South, he was bewildered by the behavioral codes of the many different Jewish communities he dealt with after coming North. The gender barriers prohibiting relations between the sexes among the Ultra Orthodox are not without echoes in the rules forbidding racial mixing in apartheid cultures, and just as shocking to secular liberals.