getting some nice stuff off my mind and into yours

I've been receiving some heartening emails recently, and since - as per the last entry - I can't throw them out, I would like to share them with you.  

My friend Irene wrote last week about the blog itself: "Each episode seems like an effortless chat, engaging and interesting."  

Which makes me glad, because I have wrestled with what and whom this blog is for.  A "track statistics" site tells me that I am getting an average of twenty visits a day, 600 visits a month. This number thrilled me until I wondered if many of those visitors aren't actually me, checking to be sure the site is still there.

I've had some mail about the book, including a note from Tom Oppenheim, the actor Jacob Adler's great-grandson who was featured in the New York Times last month, which is how we got in touch with each other.  He wrote that he had read my book "with interest and pleasure." A relief, because when writing such a book, the author is aware that though all the protagonists are dead, their descendants are quite alive and up for a challenge.  

A friend of a friend, Perry Coodin, wrote recently, "What a wonderful book!  The extensive research you did to uncover this important story, the heartfelt and beautiful writing, the family connection, make for a riveting read.  Aside from the story of your great-grandfather himself, I love the picture you paint of immigrant Jewish life on the Lower East Side of that era.  This is an important book."  

I did not pay Perry any money to write this.  

And this just in from a new Ryerson student, who in the second class "jumped off a cliff" into her most important tales: "I want to thank you for creating such an incredibly safe place in your classes to tell our stories.  I've been wanting to tell this story my entire adult life.  Thank you." 

That's it for the Blowing my Own Horn department today, Sunday of a grey Victoria Day weekend.  Spring is still showering us with petals, scent and colour, and there are brand new babies at Riverdale Farm - seven kids and a lamb, and the piglets due to arrive today.  

Please feel free to write to me yourself, if the fancy strikes, even if it isn't paeans of praise. Though paeans gratefully accepted, and even reproduced.