Sydney Blum, 74
W earing a Star of David is something I had never done. With the current climate of antisemitism, I felt a private need for something special and simple that could lay close to my heart, day and night. I had an artisan craft one, inspired by a simple mil- itary-issue one that I had carried in my pock- et. Even here in northern Nova Scotia, there’s enough antisemitism that I found myself hid- ing it under my clothes. I decided to take it off and put it in a special little box on my dresser. My parents grew up in the boroughs of New York City. They were poor, but valuing educa- tion got them both to college. My father spent
a research program studying the kibbutz and moshav . An ear problem prevented him from flying, so we took a boat from New York City to Israel. I remember arriving in Haifa and feel- ing this enormous sense of relief surrounded by Jews; it was a wonderful feeling of not hav- ing to hide who I was. After returning from Israel in 1968, I took a three-week trip to Prince Edward Island to visit a friend who moved there to avoid the Vietnam War draft. I was always drawn to re- mote rural locations, so many years later—af- ter several false starts and several degrees, after designing transparent Western clothing
his academic career at Colgate University in central New York state; we were the only family where both parents were Jewish. We kept our ethnicity hidden. Colgate had a Hillel group, and a couple of students gave me Hebrew les- sons and introduced me to some of the trad- itions. I learned to sew on a sewing machine when I was four and was drawn to vivid colour and heavy embroidery. I would fantasize that I lived in Poland, where my paternal grand- mother was born; my aesthetic was shaped by the ethnic crafts of that culture. When I was 17 years old, my family moved to Israel for the year: my father was pursuing
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