Told through the kind eyes of a gift journalist (Anne Fadiman), The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is the story of cross-cultural communication gone out. 

I got switched on to this as a vid-libro evolution out of "Gran Torino" the macho-mushy excellent film about the hardened racist who finally ends his days "at peace" thanks in part to his Hmong neighbors.

Focused on the trials and tribulations of a small Hmong girl who suffers from epilipsy, Fadiman's work tracks what happens when the best intentions of western medical professionals and the unique, feeling culture of the Hmong cannot find common ground.

Boule is whimsically asymmetric and wrested from the oven w. Harrod's mits.

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Are you down with www.yiddishhustle.com

6:18 and the mid-sized boule lands in a corn-meal dusted 450 degree zone!
Wolfing down Fage and Muesli recovering after the hills. . .

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Are you down with www.yiddishhustle.com

It is 22:54 the evening before a team offsite.  I am blogging a big game to bake fresh bread in the morning.  Need to have the bread proofing by 5:15 for a in oven slot of 6:00.  Will pull the boule @ 6:32 and cool to rack until 6:50 if all goes well!

After months of research and preparation, I am humbled and honored to launch Sumilu! 

The Natsu 5769 Vintage is now available, and the use cases are almost too many to name.  Wonderful to open the most exciting chapter of this journey, and bitter sweet as it comes shortly after Grandma "Bubbeh" Lu's passing.

Special thanks to the crew that got me this far, especially my amazing wife, Megumu!  Her love, understanding and encouragement were the jet fuel behind this launch!


Aj

The year is 1995. It's 3:21 AM on a chilly September morning, and I am
standing on the corner of Union and Laguna in San Francisco's Cal Hollow
neighborhood. I am making a career change.

Penn graduate and White House policy wonk-come-street walker? It would make
for a fabulous and juicy posting. And it would not be true.

What delivered me to that corner and time was an odd series of events that,
in hindsight, seem perfectly natural. A month before I was sitting in the
(barely used) office of Noah Alper, the undisputed King of Bagels west of
the Mississippi. I had been delivered to Noah via the mesh and web of Bay
Area Yiddishkeit, and, as luck would have it, he hired me.

You don't learn bubkus about bagels here at corporate headquarters, he
explained to me. You need to embrace the experience at its very pith. You
need to get baking flour on your hands! "Retail," quipped Noah, "is
details."

So, on that September morning, I reported for duty. . . as an Assistant
Bagel & Bialy Baker. Over the next three months I would come to know and
understand the intricacies of dough. Rising, proofing, steaming, baking and
busting bagels became soulful for me. It was my white picket fence in a Tom
Sawyer-meets-the-schtetl kind of way.

I never fretted about the early starts, and I always enjoyed the High-C's of other bakers. Bern Katz was an enormous, LA-raised Rastafarian nice Jewish boy, replete with natty dreadlocks. There was Rafael, a single
father from Honduras. And my favorite, Miguel Zuniga. Miguel hailed from Zacatecas in Northern Mexico. He instructed me, quite patiently, in the art of hand-crafting bialys.

Over the next couple of years @ Noah's I would rise into management roles,
mentored by the legendary retail ops guru, Jim Mizes. Jim (and most of the
rest of executive management) would pop into the bakeries and get behind the
counter. No one was above *schmearing* a bagel for a happy Noah’s patron.. Jim
gifted me with “milk crate management” pep talks. Sitting in the cramped
back of the house area (on milk crates, of course), Jim would coach me on
how to keep labor costs low, how to turn c-sat issues into sales
opportunities and how to live through firing people.

1997 I left Noah's for Kellogg, and I traded in my dungarees and arm burns
for an HP 12C calculator and an MBA. But I still wax nostalgic for those
days in front of the 550 degree Revent oven and the behind the counter of
ACME chums and Green St. Babka.

Back in my bagel baking days, I used to know a thing or two about yeast.  My game has been shamelessly rusty of late, so I have started @ Genesis with a catch new work with a straightforward title: "Artisian Bread in Five Minutes a Day".

A collaboration between Jeff Hertzberg (kind of a regular dude) and Zoe Francois (kind of a kick ass chef), it presents ex-bakers like me a Class II rapid on regaining our game. 

The book is presciptive and slightly technical for righ-brainers, but keep on it!  As Collette Tatou chides Alfredo Linguini, "Follow the recipe!"

Baking bread is soulful, tasty and transportive.  It is floured-out therapy for a high-fructose corn syrup world.

Yesterday, our sweet Bubbeh Lu passed on peacefully after 91 amazing years of Life.

As we made our pilgrimage to Florida (where else) to shepherd her through the transition, I learned many things:

1. Hospice care is truly amazing; the caregivers are kind, intuitive and filled with grace.  Curiously, Hospice in the U.S. (which now serves 1.2M citizens each year), got it start under the Reagan Administration.
2. Being with someone when they pass on is a mitzvah.
3. Grandparents matter.

So on #3, my analogy is this; if parents are like video footage, tracking every moment from the most minute to the big ones, then grandparents are like cover-of-Life photos. 

When I consider how my Bubbeh and I meshed together, it seems to be a highlight real.  The perfect Florida holiday, replete with that moment when I would splash her "Friday hair-do" in the pool.  Taking me to the PUB ROOM in Miami Beaching and allowing me to select the audacious rum raisin dessert log from the tray of delights (yes, I got sick).  The journeys ot Sea World, Disneyworld and EPCOT Center (yes, got sick there too, thanks to the cotton candy Grandma Lu would score for us). 

Lipstick on my cheek at my Bar Mitzvah.  Lipstick on my cheek at my brother's Bar Mitzvah.  Lipstick on my cheek for graduating from Penn.  Lipstick on my cheek for graduating from Penn.  Lipstick on my cheek just because.

Driving on A1A near South Beach and calling out another driver as an A-hole.  (Grandma Lu would henceforth admit that she sometimes employed the "F-word" while driving.  "I don't say it, Adam.  But I think it!"

I cannot recall a single savory dish that my Bubbeh made in the kitchen.  But I do remember that she ordered Dover sole at fancy joints, and that she baked the meanest mandel brot this side of Keltz.

All the Yiddish. . . seiz keit (sweet thing), shana punam (pretty head), a glic gut mier gatrufen (how lovely for you . . . as in "thanks for interrupting our discussion to share about your new promotion at work. A glic gut mier gatrufen!"

Talking on the phone instructing her how to operate the new Sony VCR we had gifted her one year.  In the end, it was simply letting her know that the green button curiously labeled "Power" was a good place to start.

By now, it is my hope and expectation that you are waxing nostalgic over your own highlights of why your zadies, bubbehs, nonnas, abuelitos, oji-san's, pop pops and grandmas matter.  They are that singular soul who spawns endless,, grand memories.

With Grandma Lu's passing this week, a nod to the *nosher* in all of us:

Tea ceremony --
fragrant steam perfumes the air.
Try the cheese Danish.

Testing the warm milk
on her wrist, she sighs softly.
But her son is forty.