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Wow, hello, journal platform people! It's been almost a year! You can always find me at [twitter.com profile] annagenoese, and right now I'm doing tumblr at [tumblr.com profile] dngrcpckwithmurdericing, although that's in no way professional at all and mostly hockey players doing hockey and shoving each other. (Insert joke about how that's the same thing here.)

Today I am here to recommend a great book I read on the bus this morning: Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains

This is the autobiography of a Ukranian Jewish woman who traveled from Ukraine to the United States in 1894 to marry a (Jewish) man she'd never met and start a life with him. She tells about how they decide to homestead in rural northeast North Dakota with his family, and the perils and successes. This is not a Jewish Little House -- this is much more stark, and much more to the point about poverty and privilege. It does not read the way current autobiographies/memoirs do -- it's much more like a letter Rachel Bella Kahn Calof wrote to her descendants so they would know about her life and struggles, so they would be able to know what her life had been at the turn of the century.

The autobiography itself is bookended by an "acknowledgments" that discusses the way the autobiography was discovered in historical archives, written in Yiddish on a "Clover Leaf Linen" writing tablet and translated into English and typed by children and grandchildren and then an "epilogue" written by the youngest son, who tells of what his mother leaves out about the rest of her life, giving an "ending" to the story, so to speak. At the end of the book are also two great, if much more academic, essays about Jewish homesteaders in the history of the United States, which I very much enjoyed reading.

I know a lot of you are interested in Jewish history the way I am, so I thought some of you might like to read this!


TW: Pet death )


I hope everyone is having a good Friday! Have a great weekend! Read some good books!
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Last week, I rather unexpectedly adopted a cat. Back in January, my beloved Shiksa died of a heart attack. I thought to myself, Two cats is enough. But Vincent and Theodore have been rather lost without a third -- without an alpha female bossing them around. And one of my close friends found a post about a DC-area alpha female who needed a home.

Just a few days later, I'd adopted her.

I named her Queen Esther, but have ended up calling her Hadassah all the time. (I have had to explain to a lot of people why Queen Esther and Hadassah are interchangeable names to my mind. Even Jewish people. ngl, that is very surprising.)

Here are some pictures:


She is tiny -- she weighs about 7 lbs. To give you a sense of scale, Vincent weighs 19. Shiksa weighed 26.


...Now. Book log.

I am still struggling with Ancillary Justice. It is just really not for me.

Last night I read the new Tana French - The Secret Place. I thought she did an amazing job with the voices of the teenage girls, but I did not understand at all what the hell the paranormal elements were doing in there.

The mystery was okaaaaay but I am tired of books narrated by dudes that are books about women. The book would have been plenty interesting if it had been narrated by the woman who was the lead detective investigating the case. I didn't have any empathy or interest in the male narrator observing all the women who he continually reminded us he could never understand because he's a man. Tedious.

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anna genoese

November 2015

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