#1965 tornado

[deleuziandaughter]

palm sunday 1965 tornado picture

[backspacekey]

Tornados and Talmud Torahs

We’ve been hearing this week about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the worst incidence of deadly tornados in Twin Cities history, May 6, 1965. Thirteen people died and 700 were injured. One in four homes in Fridley were destroyed, and there was much damage in other locations too.

On that night, I was a 9-year-old kid riding home from Hebrew School--actually named Talmud Torah of Minneapolis--on the “Hebrew bus.” Hebrew School was something we did after a full day of regular school two nights a week AND Sundays.

We must have been coming home around 6 pm. I don’t remember the bus racing home at top speed, but I do remember my father was waiting outside the house, anxious to pull me inside and down to the southwest corner of the basement. We were the second house from the corner. The story for years afterwards was

“That bus came around the corner on two wheels!”

Thinking about the tornado, then the Hebrew bus, made me think of my sister’s objection to the fact that in the Coen Brothers movie A Serious Man, set in the mid-60s, the name on the side of the bus used Hebrew characters to spell out “Talmud Torah” (similar to this one, but this one says a bunch of other stuff too).  The bus we, and apparently the Coen brothers, rode, said in English, Talmud Torah of Minneapolis. 

And then it hit me: 

This is how the movie ends. At Hebrew School. Twister touchdown.