fung shin un

I am a writer. I’m not sure I’m a good one, but I do a lot of it. I am the President of The Transverse Myelitis Association, now the Siegel Rare Neuroimmune Association (SRNA). I was the editor of our newsletter and journal for many years. I continue to write for our SRNA Magazine. I wrote a book about transverse myelitis. As a graduate student, I did lots of writing, including a dissertation.

One of the miracles of my writing has been that I’ve kept my opinions to myself. In the 25 years of writing for the Association, I never wanted to offend anyone or turn them off by disclosing my views. I understood how desperately people needed what we offered to a rare disease community. If they weren’t going to get it from us, they weren’t going to get it. So, I sat on my opinions for the greater good. I’m sure the effort has taken years off my life. I haven’t had much control over myself going back to elementary school. I come from a long line of ‘not much control over self.’

The notion of wading into the blog world feels daring, perilous and stupid. I’m watching what goes on in social media, and the blow back people get from sharing what they think and feel. I have a twitter account that I’ve never used. I never read a tweet from anyone unless I’m seeing it on the nightly news. I am afraid of twitter. I hate facebook. I’ll write a blog about it one of these days. I’m only on facebook to keep in touch with the kids from our community and to engage in awareness and fundraising. I only use Instagram because I enjoy and learn from looking at the work of other photographers. I also get to see the SRNA postings. I am hopeful that facebook will eventually be forced to sell off Instagram. I would feel so much better about Instagram if they did.

My values and world view were developed during my formative years. I grew up in an orthodox Jewish family. My mother kept a strictly kosher home. I was raised with Jewish values and was drilled with the importance of a good education. The more education, the better. We didn’t look poor. By any socioeconomic standard, if we were middle class, we were making it by the skin of our teeth. We knew not to ask for anything. I grew up in an industrial, blue collar city (Cleveland). Being a die-hard Indians and Browns fan gave me lots of patience and intestinal fortitude. I grew up in a homogeneous community. Everyone in my life was Jewish until I started school. Almost everyone in my world was Jewish until I started middle school. Then I figured out that the world was composed of Jews and Italians. I started working when I was 16 years old. There weren’t many fast food jobs in those days, so I worked in grocery stores, factories and warehouses. I spent 14 years getting a doctorate in cultural anthropology. I lived for two years on an Indian Reservation and taught social studies for two years at a Catholic Mission School. I was a child in the 1950s and I grew up in the 60s and 70s. These were tumultuous times. The social order in our society was being uprooted in the best of ways. It was the perfect time for me to develop my sense of the world around me. I was made to grow up in these times. The soundtrack of my generation was the best.

Those were the formative years. I do believe I am still forming.

I’m going to try to do this blog and hope no one becomes upset enough about what I write that they ram their grocery cart into my car. I see no point in doing this writing and not being honest or candid or write about stuff that is important to me. If you are offended, please stop reading what I write. I’ve always been pretty good at seeing good in people. I am capable of seeing good in the biggest jackass. I can usually have a conversation with anyone about anything. I am surrounded in my life by people who disagree with me about most things. I still like them. And in the case of some of these people, I still love them. Perhaps it is the anthropologist in me. I am pretty good at accepting and respecting different.

I know I will learn by doing this writing. I hope other’s will, as well. That would be great.

I thought my blog needed a name. I don’t know enough about blogs to know if this is normal, or if giving my blog a name is like naming my car or my baseball glove. It did seem like the right thing to do.

These are the names I considered in English:

Why would I make my thoughts and feelings public? What’s wrong with me?

Please don’t burn a swastika into my front lawn.

For what it’s worth.

Am I allowed to say that?

Words Should Matter.

I also came up with a list of Yiddish possibilities:

Naches and Tsuris (joy and troubles)

Bubkes (nothing)

Kvetching (complaining)

Farblondjet (confusion)

Fung shin un (you’re at it again).

I’ve decided to go the Yiddish route. My grandparents spoke Yiddish. It was my Zadie and Bubby’s first language. My mother and my aunt didn’t know English until they started school. When I was growing up, I listened to my mother, aunt, cousins, and grandparents speaking Yiddish to each other. My mother still speaks fluent Yiddish. I never learned to speak it, but I learned enough to understand what was being said, and I could swear in Yiddish up and down and inside out. Yiddish is such a wonderful and expressive language. That’s why so much Yiddish has made its way into our lexicon. Often, I will have a thought, and the only words that come to mind describing this thing are Yiddish. When I’m on shpilkes, there’s no other word to describe it. When I have tsuris, I have tsuris. I love the Yiddish I know.

Yiddish is filled with an impending sense of doom and with shtetl optimism. It is filled with pure joy, as well as sarcasm. The words and idioms sound funny. Yiddish can be very funny. Yiddish can be very sad and even tragic. Language and culture are the same. Our language expresses our way of life. Our way of life is organized and derives meaning through our language. Yiddish expresses the way of life of the Jewish Eastern European peoples, mostly peasants, who lived the joyous life of the Torah, and were subject to the vagaries of disaster that came with living among inhospitable peoples who more than occasionally wreaked havoc on their lives.

My grandchildren call me Zadie. My oldest son’s four boys just found out last week that my name is Sandy. I thought that was interesting. I’m called Zadie and I’m always referred to as Zadie. I think of myself as the Zadie imposter. My Zadie was the real Zadie. He grew up in a shtetl, a small village outside of Kiev. The shtetl was not just a place. It was his way of life. He came to the United States when he was in his 30s and he was the shtetl life until he died at the age of 92. He referred to everything with a motor as a machine. I cut his lawn with a machine. I picked him up to take him to the grocery store in a machine. We landed astronauts on the moon in a machine. He was a holy man, true to his Jewish values, to the core. He was a mensch in all ways and the best of role models for his grandchildren. And then my mother would say, ‘he should be a gutta bitten.'

I am going to name my blog, fung shin un. According to the expert (my mother), it translates literally as you’re at it again. From the earliest of ages and throughout my life, I heard this expression used by my father. What I heard was funk sha noon. It is possible that my love of James Brown’s music was an influence on what I heard.

This is not the only example of my serious mish mash of Yiddish words. When I was growing up, I often heard my Bubby and Zadie refer to a chaotic situation as a kesslegarden. Loud talking, people running in every direction, chaos. A kesslegarden. On my first trip to New York, we went to see Ellis Island, the landing spot in America for every member of my family that arrived from Europe. As we were heading down to the very tip of the island, where you can see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island from the shore, there I was standing in the very middle of Castle Garden. As my grandparents took their first steps in their new land, they saw people carrying their entire life belongings, heading in every direction, speaking every language. It must have looked and sounded like total chaos. It was in fact, a kesslegarden in Castle Garden.

From context, my older brother and I both thought fung shin un meant, so what else is new. There was more than a smidgen of sarcasm in how we heard these words. Me and my brother are loaded to the gills with sarcasm. My father said fung shin un with more exasperation than sarcasm, but the sarcasm was present. ‘So, what else is new’ isn’t a question. It is a statement on the condition of life. My father didn’t tell jokes. He loved to laugh at my jokes. He was my greatest fan. He thought I was hysterical. My father was a serious person. In fact, my father and mother were both serious people. I think being of the greatest generation made them serious people. But they did find sarcasm; it came prepackaged in their speaking Yiddish.

The name of my blog is a wonderful way for me to honor my father, alav ha-shalom. I can never hear funk sha noon or fung shin un, without thinking about my father.

I will, in fact, be at it again, with each blog post. Hopefully, through my postings, you will learn something about my photography and my life. I’m telling stories. Please be kind. I’m a delicate flower.