4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
LOVED IT!, September 30, 2009
This review is from: Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie's Adventures in Love, Loss, and the Lotus Position (Hardcover)
I love all things yoga and I especially love books focusing on yoga. Yiddish Yoga is an absolutey delightful little book (just a little over 100 pages) of musings on Yoga by the author (in the voice of Ruthie our main character) Lisa Grunberger.
Ruthie is an older lady who has just lost her husband - somewhat lost, her granddaugher decides to pay for Ruthie's yoga lessons. However, Ruthie has never done yoga and is skeptical - still she agrees to go.
What follows is an hilarious, touching and absolutely wonderful book of Ruthie's musings about yoga and about yoga/life in general. For example, as Ruthie learns Warrior 1 pose - she comments that she is now "a Senior Citizen Power Warrior Bubby". I loved it.
This book is an easy read, but I chose to read only a few pages a day - kind of like a daily meditation because Ruthie and her love of life was so engaging that I felt as though I needed to carry her with me on a daily basis. She will also make you want to take up yoga classes.
This book is inspirational and cute and poignant and lovely.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Possibilities Of The Obvious In Time, January 25, 2010
This review is from: Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie's Adventures in Love, Loss, and the Lotus Position (Hardcover)
A writer friend of mine once said to me: "The obvious takes time to become obvious." What's obvious about "Yiddish Yoga" arrives instantly in the reader's apprehension and affection--and then takes time to become obvious: This is a Yiddish folk tale, subtly, playfully, unaffectedly drawing upon, and immersed in, the great lineages and currents of Jewish literature and storytelling. This, I believe, is the 'secret' of what is so "obvious" about it, and even those readers, Jewish or not Jewish, who know nothing of these literatures, instantly feel it. And they, we, are moved intimately, as the best of storytelling does move us, with a resonance at once intensely personal to each and universal to all. This is one of the outstanding accomplishments of the author's writing, one that is entirely expressive of the generational effect of the best of Yiddish literature and storytelling.
The author's life lineages are as much "Old World", of European Jewish worlds lost, gone, surviving and lived in memory, as they are the singularities and experimental possibilities of American Jewish life. She writes, and this is obvious too, from a profound, life-long love and respect for, and familiarity with, the elder generations in her life: family, friends, as well as the stranger, the ever-present self-defining 'other'. If there's one Jewish teaching that Ruthie knows, through and through, and though she does not speak of it (may not even be aware of it as such), it's that because the Jewish people were slaves in Egypt, we must welcome and care for the stranger. Perhaps, first of all, that 'stranger' within us, provoked and mirrored by the strange 'other'. Read the book for this kind of depth, among others, and the full dimensional powers of its folk tale will arrive in no time.
In short, in her writing, she inhabits earlier and older generations which themselves once were the full life of the Jewish people in this country but now live more in their stories and private silences of those who still know and remember.
"Yiddish Yoga" thus, and to insist on this point, is a resonant combination of the interior themes and musics of the Yiddish and Jewish literatures of its main character Ruthie's generation with (`translated' here into English and narrative) the very genius of the Yiddish language itself, one in which the most disparate, unlikely, the subversive, the deeply emotional, the penetratingly intellectual, the `foreign' and `other' merge in a humanness everyone knows like their favorite pillow. Ruthie is a character who is seriously, earnestly at play in, and who first dreams, then finds herself living in, the unexpected life and world that she discovers between two traditions, two languages. The author and her main character equally, and with receptivity to the `revelatory' capacity of pun and word-play, revel in words and language, which too is Yiddish's uninhibited delight in the ways language illuminates life. The reader's thought and imagination are provoked, while s/he is entertained and made to laugh. Laughter is prayer for Ruthie, and when the reader laughs with her, the soul claps its hands like a child and she or he is near to a moment of `Yidsight'.
Simply, subtly, lightly, playfully, anecdotally, "Yiddish Yoga" discloses something essential to all accomplished Jewish and Yiddish storytelling: the Jewish people have always been an 'in-between' people, a people of transmission and interpretation between 'others'--different traditions, peoples, modes of thought and life. Ruthie--very much herself 'in-between', after the death of her husband and the end of their life together, is an embodiment, in her character, of the singularly Jewish 'feel' for inter-faith (inter-Jewish too!)and inter-generational relations. Ruthie's character is one of possibilties, the possibilities that, in our time as much as ever, are inherent in the production of specifically Jewish literature--including especially fiction and poetry--in short, Jewish storytelling immersed in its millennia of heritage.
Indeed, sometimes the obvious takes time to become obvious.
Reader in need of the nourishment of story: take your time with what is instantaneously obvious about this book and its story, and it will impart to you so much more of the time that is yours. Generations of life and storytelling, a long Yiddish novel's worth, with self-effacing craft, and with excellent good humor and gentle satire, reach to you, in the very act of reading, through an unfailingly felicitous choice of words.
-- Robert G. Margolis
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A humorous read about overcoming grief through enlightened exercise and activity, October 23, 2009
This review is from: Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie's Adventures in Love, Loss, and the Lotus Position (Hardcover)
The page format remined me of "Haikus for Jews," with a few short paragraphs per page or two, and then on to the next topic. It makes for an easy read, and let's you jump in and jump own when time permits to cotinue the story. The author of this slim book takes yoga concepts and translates them into the fictional mind of a Jewish widowed woman who is 72.
It is a well meaning book and includes a glossary of Yiddish terms followed by a glossary of yoga terms. The author is the daughter of an Israeli mother and Austrian Jewish father and she grew up on Long Island. Her character, Ruthie, was red haired, big bosomed and svelte. She is recently widowed and feisty yet depressed. Her granddaughter has purchased a year of yoga classes for her. Will Ruthie use it to overcome grief and learn to embrace the present?
With each new yoga lesson, Ruthie translates the yoga concept into a culturally Jewish idea. But, I must admit, at first, I found the language unnatural. It is as if someone throws the word matzo ball and kvetch into a sentence and thinks it will be funny and Jewish. At first I could not connect with the story and book, just as Ruthie could not connect with yoga. For example, after her first yoga class, Ruthie says that she hasn't moved like that since she LOIFED to a Loehmann's 50% off red tag sale. After sitten zazen Indian style with crossed legs she wishes for a Percodan. Um.. I think that unless you grew up watching comics in the Catskills, the jokes are not initially going to work for you.
Her teacher is a nudnik named Sat Yam, formerly Sam Lupinsky. Instead of wearing a yoga thong, she wears a blue and white velour sweat suit from Macy's that she and her late husband bought for their trip to Israel. Ruthie remembers Kapala (skull) cuz it sounds like keppeleh (little head). She joins her index finger and thumb (or ego and Brahmin unity) and tries to be humble. Yet she is not so humble when a substitute yoga teacher arrives 20 minutes late, and instead of apologizing, the sub teacher merely says it is a test of student patience. As you can see, the story grows on you with each chapter.
Ruthie relates asana to yahrzeit candles, and a vriksasana tree to an apple tree in the Fall of the Jewish holidays. During camel pose ustrasana she thinks of the Negev. For Garudasana, she things of a twisted braided challah. As the year progresses, we wonder if she will accept her husband's death, empty his closet, open herself to meeting other men for friendships, or even make peace with her estranged sister. A unique read that put yoga into an understandable perspective
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