The Lilith Blog

September 23, 2020 by Liba Vaynberg

We Are Still Being Called to Action

It turns out revelations can still be scheduled. 

Even with empty theaters and bare music halls and staggered schooling and limited services and vacant pews, it turns out we can still be called to action. By now I should know that it’s built into the Days of Awe, those ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but every year I’m surprised. Every year, I’m stunned. And this year Ruth Bader Ginsburg died right as Rosh Hashana began. 

The Lilith Blog

March 16, 2020 by Liba Vaynberg

Notes from a Pandemic: On Chains of Isolation, and Transmission

I’m alone in my apartment, trying to understand what a city is. The internet assures me only that there is no clear answer—even the United Nations has three definitions for what constitutes a city. I’m fixating on population size, but even that’s slippery. An “urban area” can apparently be distinguished from a “metropolitan area,” but somehow the largest “urban area” in the United States is called the “New York metropolitan area” (wait, what?) which has recently been more broadly identified as a “metropolitan statistical area,” throughout which one large urban center spreads its web but the whole of which is not legally incorporated as a city. I look at the satellite image of a bright core and then yellow sparks clustered along the Atlantic Ocean, spreading. My head aches; all I see is a never-ending chain.

The Lilith Blog

February 25, 2020 by Liba Vaynberg

My Father’s Daughter

I couldn’t shut up about Papa. In fifth grade, this kid Neil was sitting next to me on the bleachers. Los Angeles. We were sweating, waiting for a parent to put us in a car and out of our misery. I must have been going on. Finally, Neil turned to me and said, “Is your dad dead or something?”

I went red. Then silent. Then I must have cried. The next day Miss Campeau insisted that Neil apologize.

Papa shaved in the mornings with a little yellow brush while I read the back of the cereal box and listened to his pocket radio on the kitchen table. Then the drive to school: major battles of World War II and how to orient yourself using the sun and how to spell state names on license plates. “Mississippi” amazed him every time. I always got it right.