“. . . Some secrets ennoble/their guardians, others speak from dark closets in language we no longer understand.” Dr. Carol Alena Aronoff writes here of the latter, Conversos “in sixteen hundred’s New Mexico,” whose lives depend on withholding the secret of their Jewish lineage. Exiled by the Spanish Inquisition on pain of burning, these secret Jews can be condemned by the food they serve, old ballads, the six pointed star on the side of an old grave stone, her Abuelita’s whispers – the Sh’ma – and more – “stars within crosses” – even a cross hung by the doorframe where the mezuzah would go. These exquisite poems in Spanish, English, and Hebrew reveal the stories of brave people whose descendants still observe HaShem’s presence among us. With a comprehensive bibliography, Tapestry of Secrets is a treasury of information and poems. We need it to flourish.
–Hilda Raz, author of All Odd and Splendid
Questions, unquestioned discoveries, and answers in parable and rhyme…. This collection records a journey starting with a 1960s retrospective and the first man on the moon, moving to a new millennium welcomed in with a terrorist spin, family crises,
