Steven Kleinman MHDC Personal

Hi blog world. Let's get personal:

As many of you east coasters know, huge storm last weekend. 24 inches at my house outside of Philadelphia where I was visiting for an event in Mount Airy. Anyway, huge amount of snow, and across the street from my parents house there live a number of older families. As I helped my dad shovel out the car and shovel out the walkway and the stairs and the walk from the house to the sidewalk, I watched neighbors finish their own work and go over to check on the old people.

Seeing this, I was reminded of being a small boy and helping out my grandmother to her car. I remember I did it as an assignment from jewish school to do a mitzva. This surely is the season for Mitzvot and it made me wonder how to make sure to incorporate caring for those in more need into our houses programing in January. Not the big sort of planning thing, but the down and dirty. Specifically setting up a group of folks to feed the homeless.

Steven kleinman MHDC April 2009

The other night we had our third Writing Group.  It was very small as most of the regulars had to cancel for differing reasons.  Bummer.  Hopefully with more work we'll get a larger crowd next month as this is one of my favorite events.  Anyway, Allan Scott came out from MHSS and while the two of us were left to our own devices, we had this wonderful conversation about being a Jewish writer, Jewish writing, and writing around the Holocaust.  There were lots of great things talked about, but I don't want to misrepresent Allan or our time together so I will just send out some highlights just in case anyone is interested in reading some wonderful poems surrounding being Jewish post Holocaust. 

The best of the poems as far as I'm concerned is "In the Midst of life" by Tadeusz Rozewicz. Others include just about everything from Paul Celan, "After Auschwitz" by C.K. Williams, lots of poems by Czeslaw Milosz but in particular there is a poem where he stares into a gheto as a small child.  It's a wonderful poem.  Google that.  And I guess that was mostly what we talked about as far as poems surrounding issues of moving past the Holocaust, but now that I'm thinking about it Steve Olsen has a great book about being a Jewish American, and Ilya Kaminsky wrote a wonderfull book on being a Ukranian Jew during the fall of the Soviet Union.  Hope you have a chance to check out any of these poems.

Steven "Michael Jack Schmitt" Kleinman March 5, 2008

Today is of course the first day of baseball.  I am very excited, especially after my dreams of a big five team winning the NCAA tournament were dashed last night by UNC beating NOVA.  Bummer right?  Well except that NOVA is my second least favorite big five team.  I guess the funny thing is that Drexel, St. Joes, LaSalle don't really count.  It's mainly that I like Temple, actively root against Penn, and for the most part like but don't love NOVA.  Any Philly ball team with the exception of Penn is great to root for, all I'm saying is that NOVA can also be a bit lame as a place of education, not as lame as Penn, but still up there. 

All of that seems to be a bit of a transgression.  What I really want to get at real quick is a short list of the events of our month, some things we're looking forward to, and maybe some gruff about biking.  So as far as events are concerned, we had a good month in March.  The most exciting event was our Date Auction.  I went for $45.00.  Not bad.  But I haven't gone on my date yet.  In other news, I started dating a girl who was there that night, she didn't buy me, but it was still a good event for my personal life.  I also lost my voice at the event because we had so many Gesher city Schmoes shouting.  it's like being in Old City Philadelphia on a saturday night, just about everyone was new to the environment and acting like their parents didn't teach them better.  That's one of the major reasons that I'm coming to really love our shabbat dinners.  I think we are starting to get a more regular crowd.  And while some folks still treat our house like a restaurant/bar/late night motel, we are really starting to iron out a group of folks who truly care about what we are trying to do.  For this reason March brought with her two great shabbat dinners.  They were a bit small in numbers but the people were really great at both.  

Biking stuff:  I've decided to start riding riser bars.  I know I know, too trendy right?  Well listen, mostly I ride my bike in the city, and it pays to be upright.  For longer trips I agree that drop bars are more ergonomical.  But on a shorter - say sub 10 mile - trip, it pays to not have to strain my neck.  There was talk of a riding trip with some MH guests on Friday at shabbat.  I think I'll try to debut my new style for that trip.  Also, I want to learn how to do track stands better so that I can wheelie.  I think the two go hand in hand.  

OUT.

S