Thanksgiving Weekend

Well, Thanksgiving weekend is over, but we had a really nice time.  We did nothing on Thursday, but on Friday, Lisa and I went in to London while Adam and Meyer were at school.  We took a walking tour of the radical Jewish East End by author and tour-guide David Rosenberg.  Lisa's colleague from her fellowship, Arie Dubnov arranged it, and we went with him and his two kids and another fellow fellow, Michal.  David did an amazing job showing us the remnants of Jewish radical past in the East End, including the site of the first English-language Jewish daily newspaper, a hall that hosted Emma Goldman, among many others, the biggest synagogue of 1890s London (formerly a Hugenot church, currently a mosque), and the site of the terrible Yom Kippur riot of can't-remember-the-year (a riot between Jewish anarchists and Jewish non-anarchists, not between Jews and nonjews), which also happens to be the street that he lived on as a small Jewish child in the sixties.  We planned to have lunch at a nearby Ottolengi restaurant (Ottolenghi is the author of my favorite cookbook), but ran out of time.

The next day, Saturday, we were back in London, but this time with Adam and Meyer to see a play at the National Theatre.  The play is called The Red Barn, and it stars Hope Davis, who happens to be the wife of my childhood friend Jon Walker.  Adam and Meyer absolutely loved the play, which was fantastically staged and acted.  Then Hope was able to give us a short tour of the backstage area after the play.  The Theatre is amazing, and we got to see the vast backstage area, and the ways that complete sets (even for the next production) are all assembled on trucks that run along tracks to move in and out of the stage area. Again, we hoped to eat at Ottolenghi (dinner this time), but Adam left his phone on the train, and we had to race back after the play to recover it (which we did), after which we ate sandwiches from the station.

Finally, yesterday (Sunday) we had the equivalent of our Thanksgiving meal with our friends Steve and Sarah (and Posy and Lila), and some of their friends.  But instead of Turkey, we had a South Indian feast cooked by Sarah (who is an historian who studies South India).  But it had all of the essential elements of a Thanksgiving meal, which I have come to recognize as (1) a warm cosy room, (2) friends, (3) food, (4) drink, and (5) complaining loudly about Donald Trump.