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Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel: Unearthing Ashkenazi herbalism practices
84 Plays9 months ago
Partners in life and work, herbalist Deatra Cohen and reference librarian and researcher Adam Siegel are the authors of the incredible resource Ashkenazi Herbalism. Together they spent years researching little known texts, translating ethnobotanical surveys and cross-referencing cultural databases to unearth lost Ashkenazi plant practices from the pale of settlement region. They share the stories and traditions of a few of their favourite plants along with Deatra’s own journey to plant healing work.
Bio:
Deatra Cohen is a former reference librarian and herbalist who trained with the Berkeley Herbal Center. She also belongs to a clinical herbal collective and is a Master Gardener at the University of California.
Adam Siegel is a research librarian at the University of California, Davis, and a historian of Central and eastern Europe, studying issues around cultural contact and plant knowledge in the region. Adam is also a literary translator, focusing on works in Russian, Czech, German, Croatian, Serbian, French, Italian, Swedish, and Norwegian. In 2014, he was awarded a Literary Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This conversation is produced by Catherine Polcz and music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgements
00:00:09
Speaker
I'm Catherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording In Beautiful Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay respect to their elders past, present, and future.
Overview of Plant Kingdom Podcast
00:00:23
Speaker
Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature, and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers, writers, and healers. We release two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with plants and nature.
00:00:37
Speaker
We discuss their work, stories, and reflections from the field.
Meet the Authors: Dietrich Cohen and Adam Siegel
00:00:42
Speaker
Today's conversation is with Dietrich Cohen and Adam Siegel, authors of the book Ashkenazi Herbalism. Together, they've created an incredible resource of ancestral herbalism practices pre-Holocaust from the Pale of Settlement. I've been reading it over a month and I've personally found it so meaningful. It's such a rare work of Jewish plant practice.
00:01:05
Speaker
Many of the plants listed will be familiar and have traveled around the world with people who use them. Many I remember from my fieldwork days in Ontario. They were the weeds that were growing in waste places and fields, and it's been so special to rediscover them and to learn how they've been cared for and used in herbal medicine. I'll now introduce our incredible authors, partners in life and work, Ditra and Adam.
00:01:31
Speaker
Dietra Cohen is a former reference librarian and herbalist who trained with the Berkeley Medical Center. She also belongs to a clinical herbal collective and is a master gardener at the University of California. Adam Siegel is a research librarian at the University of California Davis and a historian of Central and Eastern Europe. He studies issues around cultural contact and plant knowledge in the region.
Frustrations and Research in Ashkenazi Herbalism
00:01:55
Speaker
Adam is also a literary translator focusing on works in Russian, Czech, German, Croatian, Serbian, French, Italian, Swedish, and Norwegian. In her research, Dieter became frustrated with the lack of practical herbal information about Jews of Ashkenazi descent and related Eastern European traditions. Ashkenazi herbalism was written to reconcile this gap and is the first work in any language to document the herbal practices of Ashkenazi Jews.
00:02:24
Speaker
Adam conducted the non-English research for this work, reviewing literature and scholarship in Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Polish, and Hebrew. Here's our conversation. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation about
00:02:48
Speaker
our connection to plants, our connection to nature.
Childhood Memories and Connection to Nature
00:02:52
Speaker
And of course, this is something which changes over our life, but I always like to really start at the beginning in the environments where people grew up in. You both grew up, I believe, in the Northeast of North America. Can you describe a bit about the environments you grew up and were plants part of your childhood and something you noticed or not really preoccupied with other things?
00:03:18
Speaker
Well, definitely preoccupied with all kinds of stuff. But yeah, me and my father and I used to go walking in the woods near our house. And I grew up in Philadelphia. So if you're familiar at all with that terrain, I like to describe it like a lot of little villages that are kind of strung together in a big forest. And Philadelphia, even though it's a big city, it's got lots of little
00:03:46
Speaker
pockets of woods and parks and you can walk for miles and really not see a car and just kind of be in the woods. And so me and my dad, we used to like to walk our dog in the woods and he used to love to go take us for drives. And so, yeah, I spent a lot of time in nature and around plants and just some of my favorite memories are those.
00:04:13
Speaker
Did you want to say anything? Well, Dietrich and I grew up in the exact same part of the world. I certainly enjoyed being outside. I wasn't particularly plant focused, although I had a very keen sense for
00:04:32
Speaker
trees for some reason. I was always really good at tree identification. That was important to me. Climbing them. Climbing them too. I mean, the aromatic domain of plants was something that I must have taken in very deeply because even now I go back east or I'll smell something and it'll remind me intensely.
00:04:58
Speaker
of childhood, that sort of pristine effect, like new berries, the chestnut trees, certain types of pine sap. Yeah, so I mean, it was all around us. But I wouldn't say that either one of us, or certainly not, I wasn't particularly immersed in plant lore when I was young. Yeah, I love just the notion to talk about aromatic plants and plant smells when I come back.
00:05:25
Speaker
to Australia as soon as I arrive at the airport and come out like it's so fragrant in Australia with Jasmine and Fran Japani and all the plantings there. I don't know if the heat carries it in a different way, but it always makes me feel like I'm back.
00:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, and thank you. I love hearing those stories because I'm from not too far, that same kind of Carolinian mixed deciduous forest region. And I love, Ditra, how you described it, as the villages in the forest. It's that continuous. There's a border there.
00:05:55
Speaker
But it's all the same, the same natural area. Yeah. I mean, it's something that I'm always living here in Northern California. I mean, it's beautiful, but it's not the same as being back East. And I often just long to be back there, you know? And that kind of like humid, kind of sweltering, kind of lush,
00:06:17
Speaker
Environment yes it's beautiful here too but it's a different kind of environment for sure it's dryer i mean it's just so dang i mean there's just there's just fresh water everywhere and it just seeps out of everything.
Historical Context: The Pale of Settlement
00:06:35
Speaker
And I especially love the spring and the summer, like the early spring, you know, when everything like the, it's almost like steaming, you know, with life and just, just that, I don't know, I just had a, just a
00:06:51
Speaker
invigorating smell and feeling about it to come out of the snow and just, just see all this life happening, you know, just suddenly it's kind of, I don't know, every year was like a miracle, you know, but yeah.
00:07:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's bliss. I still think that's what I'm like happiness to me is still spring in Ontario and just the feeling of everything, waking up and even just the colors like how vibrant green is the greens are different and all the I don't know the freshness of the baby leaps and the baby grass they change over the season. Um,
00:07:30
Speaker
And I wanted to cross the Atlantic now and talk about the Pale of Settlement. And this is a place in a region that you've done a lot of time thinking about and researching with Ashkenazi herbalism, which we'll talk about. And I guess the Pale of Settlement is a bit of a historic place. What is that and where is it? Yeah. I mean, the Pale of Settlement is really just
00:07:59
Speaker
a sort of an administrative border that was applied to those parts of the old Russian Empire, you know, the 19th century and into early 20th century Russian Empire where Jews, you know, were allowed, Eastern European Jews were permitted to live because they'd always, they'd always, they'd been living there for hundreds of years beyond the line.
00:08:20
Speaker
you know, into other parts of Russia, they were discouraged or prohibited from settling, but within that region. And the region corresponded, corresponds for the most part to what today is, you know, huge chunks of, you know, the fallen countries, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarusia, Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova, and some, I'm, hopefully nobody,
00:08:50
Speaker
pedantic will tell me that I forgot, you know, forgot like, I don't think I forgot anything. But yeah, that's right. Yeah, no, maybe a teeny little sliver of Romania. But yeah, so it's basically anywhere from the from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. And that's, you know, that's sort of the the home homeland, the home territory of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews from, you know, say the for the for 1000 years or so 800 to 1000 years.
00:09:19
Speaker
And is that where your Ashkenazi families are from? Yeah. My family on my mom's side is from Poland. The biggest town around there is Zamos. And my dad's family is from Belarus and Ukraine around Kiev. And what about you?
00:09:42
Speaker
My dad's family are from Poland, Poland, Lithuania, just north of Warsaw and on the Polish, current Polish-Lithuanian border in Vilnius. Have you ever been there or any plans to go? You've been there in your mind. You've been there in research. How have been? We've had a couple of trips that have been scuttled for a variety of reasons over the last three or four years. Yeah, we were supposed to go in. Unfortunately, my mom passed away.
00:10:12
Speaker
And we had to cancel our trip.
Dietrich's Transition to Herbalism
00:10:16
Speaker
So we're hoping that in the spring we'll be able to get out there. Amazing. And you'll have your field guide with you. And Deetra, you turned to herbalism after a career as a research librarian. Was this something that you were wanting to do for a long time? What inspired you to take that dive?
00:10:37
Speaker
Well, I've been kind of around the idea of herbalism since I guess I was a teenager and my stepmother kind of introduced me to herbalism when I was a teenager and then I kind of got more into it as a young adult. I bought my first book probably in the 80s. It was like a German herbal and so I made some things from the recipes in that book like
00:11:03
Speaker
I made a sleeping pillow, I made some teas, and I just was really fascinated by it. And then, you know, I mean, I focused on being a librarian, but always, I always had a garden, but I always loved having plants around. And so finally, you know, when I had the chance, yeah, I was very excited to jump in and study it more formally. I actually, I really didn't realize, like,
00:11:29
Speaker
what I was getting myself into. Even though it was overwhelming, I just totally like stuck to it. It was like I was obsessed with it and I just, I could not, I could not learn enough. And I don't know it was, it's interesting. I mean, I had,
00:11:45
Speaker
I hadn't really thought about it this way, but for so much of my life, I had this kind of logging that I could never really put words to, and I really couldn't identify it. And it was kind of this gnawing thing at me. And I always thought, well, if I could just do art, that would satisfy this logging. And so I did art for a long time. In fact, I got my undergraduate degree in art studio, and yet I never was able to overcome that feeling until I went
00:12:15
Speaker
to herb school and started really in earnest studying plant medicine. And I have not had that feeling since then. I love that. I think there really is.
00:12:27
Speaker
of patience to the study of plants. And I can really identify to them, you know, when you start learning about them, then everything opens up to you what you what you don't know. And there's so much to learn on that journey. And you can't really engage with what you're what you're not knowledgeable in. And then when it starts unfolding, it's really
00:12:47
Speaker
It's lifelong learning. Yeah. It's like a never ending. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's amazing. And it remains mysterious. But that's part of the wonder of it. It's a mystery that you'll never know. And yet you can still engage with it and just, I don't know, kind of, I don't know. It's a relationship, right? Yeah.
00:13:16
Speaker
It's definitely a relationship. When we spoke previously, you told me about your earliest plant memory and that being an early exercise that you did in your journey into herbalism. Can you tell me about that?
00:13:34
Speaker
Oh, that was kind of a more recent thing. I mean, when I think about my earliest memories of plants, some of them are kind of a little woo. You know, I mean, Adam talked about smells and aromas, and I just remember the scent of lilacs. And I remember being a little kid and finding lilacs and taking the flowers.
00:13:56
Speaker
you know, if you suck on the back end of a lilac flower, it tastes like honey, you know? And I remember doing that a lot as a kid, and I just love the scent of lilacs and lilacs and honeysuckles. And I just, you know, those are kind of my earliest flower memories. And I remember walking to school and feeling very protected by these giant plane trees in Philadelphia.
00:14:20
Speaker
and just feeling like they were my grandparents, you know, and they were very protective of me as I walked to school. And then, so I always thought those were my earliest memories, but recently, probably in the last year, I did this exercise that a local American herbalist named Cammy McBride put like an exercise out for people to do.
00:14:44
Speaker
And she sort of, it was like a guided meditation. And so I thought, oh, this could be interesting. And I just really didn't, I didn't know what I would get. It was to see what your earliest plant memory was. And so I kind of went through it and this like vision kind of came into my mind's eye of like this of a violet, not a violet, but a pansy. And it was just the most amazing thing because
00:15:14
Speaker
It was surprising, but also so familiar. I almost remember looking at a pants really close up and seeing all these colors merge together. It was like a burgundy with a black interior with a yellow center. It was just with the gradations of the colors. It just blew me away that it must have been a really, really early memory that I had of
00:15:42
Speaker
looking very closely at a pansy. And I remember the smell of pansies. They have a really distinctive scent, and it's very subtle, but it's beautiful. Yeah. And was that surprising to you for that image to conjure up of the pansy? Yeah, it was. It was so surprising. It was completely surprising, but at the same time, it was so familiar. It was new and familiar at the same time. I had seen it in my mind's eye.
00:16:13
Speaker
a long, long time ago, and there it was again, just kind of revealing itself again.
Personal Meaning of Herbalism
00:16:22
Speaker
So, so nice. And what is herbalism, that practice? If I were going to define it on a personal level, it's kind of like having that relationship with the plant world in a way to heal
00:16:42
Speaker
I guess heal is a word, but to interact with your body in a way to bring it into balance. If it's out of balance, like if you have a pain or a wound or a nervous condition, that's an off the cuff definition. Yeah. Well, it's a relationship.
00:17:09
Speaker
with plants and healing goes back as long as we do and certainly has changed so much over time with where you are in the world and across cultures.
00:17:20
Speaker
And thinking about healing, did you have any plant healing traditions in your family? Well, when I think back on some things that my family did, I can think back to my grandmother who always had raspberry jam on the table with rye bread and unsalted butter. And so it wasn't specifically a healing tradition.
00:17:44
Speaker
in terms of fixing something, but it was definitely like a food culture with that particular plant, which having studied herbalism in the Pale of Settlement, I can now connect those two things, the healing properties of raspberry with my grandmother's very insistent
00:18:06
Speaker
choice of raspberry jam and she always got it with seeds. My mom when we were sick always gave us tea with lemon and honey and another thing that she did that was I found later
00:18:19
Speaker
was when we bumped our heads, she would take the flat side of a butter knife and put it on the bump. I always thought, well, that's weird. I guess everybody does that, but it is a specific healing modality for
00:18:36
Speaker
I don't know if it was just Jews, but people in Eastern Europe to either take like a flat metal object, like a knife or a coin and press it into the bump. So that's not really a herbal remedy. It is kind of a folk remedy that my mom used to do. And those two that I can think of off the top of my head, so to speak. And can you tell me about your book, Ashkenazi Urbanism?
Motivation Behind "Ashkenazi Herbalism"
00:19:12
Speaker
It's definitely like a labor of love and a combination of our interests and talent.
00:19:19
Speaker
It came about, you know, I was in school and we were encouraged, students were encouraged to talk about their ancestral healing practices and everybody, just about everyone in my class could come up with something. You know, some people came up with ginger, some people came up with lemon. People had answers to this question and I really couldn't think of anything except for like the tea with lemon.
00:19:46
Speaker
honey. And so, but I really thought, well, if I do a little bit of research, of course I'm going to find something, you know, because Jews are so like into medicine and there's so much written about their history prior to the world war. But when, you know, and I figured, oh, I'll find tons of stuff. I'm a librarian, you know, that's what I do. Well, when I started to look, I couldn't find anything. And, uh, somebody else in my class who was similar background, she goes, well, you know, at least we had chicken soup. And I, and I just thought, well,
00:20:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. I like chicken soup too. And you know, my parents or my mom gave us chicken soup when we were sick and at other times and it's a perennial favorite, but I couldn't believe that that was all there was. And so the book is
00:20:32
Speaker
basically a evidence that I just could not stop researching until I found something that was a little bit more definitive because I knew my heart that there had to be a plant legacy of healers in
00:20:49
Speaker
the Pale of Settlement. It didn't seem right to me that that couldn't be the case. It took a lot of creative digging and searching in languages other than English. That's when Adam became a really crucial part of the research. He can fill you in on his part.
00:21:17
Speaker
sort of discovered something of a Rosetta Stone that documented, albeit in a super duper obscure way, plant medicinal healing practices by Jews in various parts of Ukraine before the Second World War. And that was basically the linchpin for writing Ashkenazi herbalism. And of course, once she found documentary evidence that there were
00:21:47
Speaker
towns that were, the plant healing practices associated with communities that, you know, as the cursory look at, you know, that gazetteer again, or the internet would reveal where, oh, these towns are 80% Jewish, or these towns are 75% Jewish. The informants, you know, are statistically likely, are highly likely to have been Jewish, you know, before the Second World War.
00:22:11
Speaker
Oh, Adam's talking about a book that I had been relying on for plant medicinal information. I used three books mainly to look at the people that I figured my families would have lived around. And one was a Russian herbal, one was a Polish herbal, both in English. And then the third one was this obscure paper that was published by the New York Botanical Society in
00:22:39
Speaker
the 1950s and it's called Herbs used in Ukrainian folk medicine. I just assumed that it was about ethnic Ukrainians. But I knew there's something really weird about the book because it was organized very, not erratically, but not in a way that I would have organized it. It was very eccentric. But I've come to find out that it was probably organized in a way that was familiar to the author who had come from Ukraine. So I decided at one point,
00:23:09
Speaker
kind of far along my studies that I wanted to know more about the people who were reporting to this survey. It was a survey of Ukrainian folk medicine that was done between the First World War and the Second World War, but it was completely anonymized. And I figured if I can't know about the people, there are a couple anecdotes in the book, but nothing like concrete. So I figured, well, she did report where these
00:23:34
Speaker
informants lived, but it was organized in such a way that you couldn't really tell from the bulk of the text. You had to go through this appendix, which I hadn't really paid much attention to. So I thought, well, if I can't figure out who the people are from the writing, maybe I can learn a little bit about the towns where she was getting her informants. So when I went back to the appendix to look for it,
00:23:59
Speaker
I started to just look the towns up on the internet. And every time I looked a town up, the first hit that I got was this website called Jewish Gen, which is a Jewish genealogical site. And I had done some genealogy with some cousins of mine. So I thought it was really weird that, you know, these Ukrainian towns were coming up as these Jewish
00:24:21
Speaker
shtettles, basically. And so that was kind of my first breakthrough. And so I spent a really long time picking that book apart geographically by the plants.
Collaborative Research and Linguistic Aspects
00:24:35
Speaker
And I did a lot of demographic work. I built a couple of spreadsheets based on the plants and where they were located. And so
00:24:43
Speaker
that was what Adam and I came to call what he named the hidden herbal because really it is herbal within an herbal and so I guess that kind of sums up that book and that is kind of the heart of Ashkenazi herbalism and the thing is I ended up writing my final paper in my class on my findings
00:25:07
Speaker
But I didn't know what to do after that because I thought, God, if I am interested in this, this is important to me. There must be other people who would be interested in this. So I wrote a an article and it was published in the American herbalists Guild. And then I realized.
00:25:27
Speaker
I'm kind of shy and it doesn't come naturally to put myself out there, but I thought I have to do this. I have to make myself write a book that other people will find exciting and useful for their own lives. That's where Ashkenazi herbalism came out of, just the realization that I had to make this more accessible to people because it's basically impossible.
00:25:56
Speaker
It's an amazing piece of research too. And how long was that research period for you? Was that over a few years or? It was probably three years, three years overall. You had to put it together.
00:26:12
Speaker
And I mean, I should also say that Adam has a, not only does he has a background in linguistics and speaks just about all the languages that we had to cover. And he has a lot of knowledge and a background in the history of that region. So he was like totally instrumental. I could not have done this without his input. I mean, it's both of our books. And what Adam, like the plants when they're introduced in the book,
00:26:40
Speaker
They're introduced with their names in a few different languages. How many languages did you work with in the book and anything interesting about the names?
00:26:50
Speaker
Oh, boy. Yeah, so we tried to make sure that there was a glossary for the folk names for plants in all languages of the region. The glossary should include the Yiddish name, if we could find it, the Hebrew name, the Russian name, the Ukrainian name, the Polish name.
00:27:13
Speaker
Lithuanian name and the German name which is often a control for the Yiddish name and then of course the taxonomic name and its common name in English. It's funny because herbs used in Ukrainian folk medicine is basically the project of somebody who was herself a lexicographer
00:27:32
Speaker
she wasn't an herbalist the author of the book she was sort of a an ethnobotanical lexicographer and her job was to go around these plant surveys in the soviet union and record the local folk names for the various plants you know mallows and asters and oaks and violet peony clover etc and there is you know it's i've we've come to really
00:28:01
Speaker
value that that kind of work is incredibly important because you get a real sense for how essential a given plant is to the life of the community.
00:28:13
Speaker
by the number of names or the way or the names that it goes by. Yeah, and there's because there's a lot of information that is in a lot of those names too, right? Like I'm thinking about language in Latin, you know, it's the plant by the river or the plant with a lot of hair or plant discovered by so but where there are a lot of healing, healing information in the names. Yeah, totally. You know, there's a there's a book by
00:28:40
Speaker
another lexicographer, Mordka Schechter, called Plant Names in Yiddish. And Ditru went through all what, 2,000? Yeah, there's like 1,500 plants about in that book. And I've been through it and just recorded. I made three different spreadsheets of like 500 plants in each and just trying to get there.
00:29:07
Speaker
languages and just notes on the plants and their locations. That's an amazing book and I'm so thankful that it exists. I would love to be able to see his archive one of these days. But yeah.
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah, but for instance, I mean, he records plants that have, there's a term in Yiddish and Hebrew called a rafuah. Oh, right. A remedy, it literally means remedy. So there's a lot of plants whose Yiddish name includes the word rafuah. It's a rafuah plant, which means it's, we're here to tell you, it's got medicinal properties that are really important to us.
00:29:49
Speaker
And that may be a name that's not showing up in, you know, one of their neighbor, the neighboring terms, like the Polish name or the Ukrainian or the German name. No, the Yiddish name says, so that you know that the Ashkenazi Jewish community, that that plant was seen as a really, really crucial component in the local plant material medica. So just things like that are help guide the research, the ongoing research.
00:30:19
Speaker
How many plants did you end up including in the book? How did you decide which ones? In that book, there are 26 plants. The plants that made it into the book had the highest usage in the towns in herbs used in Ukrainian folk medicine with the highest Jewish populations in 1926.
Cultural Impact of Ashkenazi Herbalism
00:30:46
Speaker
So that was the basic criterion. And there are a couple in there that don't fall under that category. One of those would be Nutmeg because it's part of a formula. And we were both intrigued by this formula. I wanted to know what the history was. How did Nutmeg get into these towns at the beginning of the 20th century? So that was kind of
00:31:13
Speaker
an attempt to trace that path of how the plant got there. I was surprised. That's a story that's to be continued in our next book that we're working on now. We're looking at at least a 100 plants for our next book. A 100? Wow. Yeah. We've lost count at this point, but not all of them are going to have the lengthy,
00:31:43
Speaker
stories associated with them, but we're hoping to do at least 25 kind of longer profiles. I love that. It's a story, of course, about plants, but about culture and practice and also migration to something that I really loved about the book. A lot of these plants
00:32:03
Speaker
are also naturalized in North America is looking at a lot of their origins. A lot of them are from Eurasia and North Africa, but they've traveled with people all over. And that was really, I wish when I was, you know, stomping around Ontario that I knew some of these stories about these plants and not just, oh, there's chicory, a weed or St. John's ward or the stories that each of them could fill.
00:32:28
Speaker
book too. I was really interested to see horse tail in there too. It's never something that I would have thought of as being medicinal. Yeah. I mean, in modern or contemporary herbalism, people look to it because of its high mineral content and just for urinary tract issues. Amazing. And do you work with many of the plants in your own practice that are in Ashkenazi herbalism?
00:32:57
Speaker
I tend to have the ones that I rely on more than others. I would say the ones that I'm working with nowadays, they're not the ones in Ashkenazi herbalism because for that book I was concentrating more on the findings.
00:33:16
Speaker
that we had come across and their significance in the towns. I've had some criticism about the book being not personal enough. I guess that is a shortcoming. People do want to read about your own personal connections. I'm doing a little bit more of that with this upcoming book, but
00:33:38
Speaker
I mean, I do work with violet, and that is in Ashkenazi herbalism. Raspberry, for sure. Strawberry, definitely. I do. Aloe, but not for the reasons that it's in the book. Definitely St. John's Whort. Mallow's, I love Mallow. So I do work with a lot of them. And it's an incredible work doing exactly that, uncovering
00:34:08
Speaker
lost or severed cultural knowledge. And I was wondering what's been the impact on the Jewish community? Have you had a lot of people reaching out to you or sharing other stories or research with you?
00:34:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, we get a lot of just people who just love the book and they're just very excited about having these severed connections reconnected. A lot of people are like teaching the book or practicing.
00:34:40
Speaker
you know some of the plants that are in the book and it's really exciting to see that on instagram to get emails from people and it's just been really warming some people like people say it's changed their lives which is really just like i don't know it really is touching yeah so we've got a lot a lot of positive feedback and
00:34:59
Speaker
it's been really exciting. There's the Jewish Farmers Network here in the US. They reached out to us, I think, right after the book was published. Since then, there's been a subgroup called Jewish Herbalists that's on a listserv. That meets regularly, and I try to attend those meetings as much as possible. Last time we spoke, you talked about the impact that it had on you. It's changed the course of
00:35:26
Speaker
your research, you're putting a lot of time into it. Has it kind of healed you in a way or what has it meant for you to work on this? Is it anything that you would have anticipated when you started it?
00:35:39
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Like I said, the one piece that I mentioned was just this longing that I've kind of lived with my whole life, and then being more involved with herbalism, that just sort of disappeared. I really don't have that. I can't even explain it, but it's just like a missing piece of my life was just kind of like a puzzle piece, just kind of found, and I just feel so much more content.
00:36:08
Speaker
was not raised religiously, so I really am very ignorant about Judaism, but I've always felt culturally Jewish. And at the same time, I've always kind of felt like an outsider, like I had no real
00:36:23
Speaker
connection and it always kind of made me feel weird and just sort of left out. And yet at the same time, I wasn't interested in the religions. I don't know, I guess I had all these contradictory feelings, but having researched all this and found all this history and these people, these healers that have never really been acknowledged or honored, it's just really given me just a
00:36:48
Speaker
a way of feeling Jewish without having to be religious.
Synergy and Diversity in Healing Practices
00:36:52
Speaker
It's kind of an odd, it's hard to describe, but it's just really given me more of a grounding, so to speak, in my identity and just feeling good about not having to be religious to feel like a cultural identity. Yeah, no, definitely in the practice and the tradition and connecting to those cultural
00:37:17
Speaker
traditions and how people lived and what they did and how they healed. Exactly. Yeah. Just how they were connected with their community within their community and outside of their community too. And it's just really a just like kind of like an inner world feeling of connectedness.
00:37:34
Speaker
And how about for you, Adam, did you know what you were getting yourself into? It's been fun for, I mean, in a lot of ways. I mean, I mean, I come at it, I guess, not quite at an angle, but I mean, I've been just as Dietra's been sort of immersed, this love of plants in the natural world and plant healing and felt drawn to it and finally felt completed to a certain degree once.
00:37:58
Speaker
Her herbal medicine, you know, became sort of practical practicing life. I have had this very long standing engagement with the languages, you know, language and culture of Eastern Europe. My own roots are there as well. And my own life experiences is has sort of involved me from a very early age with
00:38:17
Speaker
with, you know, Eastern European languages and literatures, you know, for since I was, you know, like 18 years old. And it's really fun for me to sort of cycle back to concept, I mean, a lot of it sort of scholarly stuff, but just this sort of having like, here's a Slavic philologist that I last encountered when I was taking a class as an undergraduate decades ago. And oh, it turns out that he wrote about
00:38:45
Speaker
this stuff to look here's this you know his field notes from the graphic research he conducted in ukraine in the eighteen nineties you know there's like a dozen of these guys and i first encounter them as linguists you know when in the early nineteen nineties you know when i was in college and now i find myself reading them again but with completely different perspective and it makes me.
00:39:04
Speaker
feel not so wacky as, um, uh, you know, a researcher because I'm, you know, I'm just dipping back into the same well, that's of a holistic, uh, line of inquiry. That's, and it's fun. It's, uh, I, again, it's also very, and I, I love, I love finding little puzzles and little mysteries and trying to solve them, at least in a, you know, not too long a time.
00:39:28
Speaker
It's like, to us, it was kind of amazing that these things that we were both interested in kind of came together in this book. And it's just like, it's, you know, both of our talents and interests and they just kind of coalesced into this thing.
00:39:43
Speaker
including the librarian piece. I mean, the linguistics, the librarian, the plants, and the names, and just the whole thing, and the geography, and the history, and our own backgrounds. And it just came together in this beautiful way that I don't know. It's hard to believe that it never happened before, but I can kind of understand why nobody ever did this because it's just so complex.
00:40:08
Speaker
And again, like Peter said, like life affirming to have like this shared project that we both find utterly gripping and engrossing and at the same time have these sort of complimentary things that we bring to bear on it. It's great. Yeah, it was waiting for you. Exciting. It's exciting. Yeah, every day is fun. You know, we just get start working on some
00:40:30
Speaker
Whatever the problem of the day is, today's problem was, is it trifolium or tripolium? What the hell plant is this that Cohen is talking about? It's linden. Yeah, linden is definitely a linden. It's a plant that he calls trifolium. We thought it was trifolium, which of course could be a clover, but I think it might be this early modern Hebrew for an F. So maybe it's tripolium, which actually is the second name for a lot of plants. There's an astro-tripolium.
00:40:59
Speaker
And then he says, and then there's this weird gloss in Hebrew, meaning something like Attilia, Linden. And then he gives a bunch of names for Linden. In Greek, Turkish, and the Ashera tree. It's very interesting. And you can't go back and ask, can you?
00:41:21
Speaker
There's something I wanted to ask kind of backtracking a little bit about the book, but is there kind of an overview of the ways that Ashkenazi communities used herbalism and used the plants? Well, I guess that's complicated because there were different kinds of healers. You could break it down by professional versus folk or by
00:41:45
Speaker
women healers versus men healers. I would say different kinds of skills. Bone center versus midwife. That's true. A medic versus physician. And then there's like a magical healing versus practical. Yeah, it's definitely, I don't know that you can generalize. Probably I did read somewhere and I've never been able to find it again, but generally speaking,
00:42:10
Speaker
People look to tease and decoctions and infusions for remedies and also poultices, salves, things like that. And a lot of incantations in the woo section and rituals.
00:42:27
Speaker
and superstition, a lot of superstition, a lot of superstition around fear, around the evil eye, substances like iron, things like that. So it kind of really ran the gamut from like very kind of superstitious and magical to very practical and scientific. And a lot of these plants were used by the Jewish communities, also the ethnic Ukrainians, also at different times
00:42:53
Speaker
Greek, the knowledge of these uses, I guess, came from so many different cultures and times and practice. All of that is true. And wherever Ashkenism lived, they were definitely communicating and working with people from all the cultures that they lived around. And people shared their knowledge and they shared their healing and they took care of each other.
00:43:18
Speaker
Do you want to say anything about that? One of the things that we're working on now for the next book is to show just what a melange these folk healing cultures of Eastern Europe were in this region where we really have communities that up until 19
00:43:34
Speaker
the late 1930s, where sometimes, you know, had a perfect balance, you know, like these villages or towns that are one-third Jewish, one-third Polish, one-third Ukrainian, and we can find, you know, this evidence of research that was conducted. They, you know, they really had some divisions of labor in some towns, like there was a Jewish midwife that people went to, and there was a Christian midwife that people went to, and there was no, it wasn't segregated by religion. In some parts of, like, Lithuania, you'd go to see
00:44:04
Speaker
Depending on what the religion your healer was, they may be better at treating respiratory ailments or digestive ailments. You wouldn't distinguish. If you have a respiratory ailment, you go see the Muslim healer. If you have a GI problem, you go see the Jewish healer. It shows clear evidence of all kinds of things being brought by all kinds of people from all different directions, be they Western Europe,
00:44:25
Speaker
be they from the Far East, be they from India, be they from the Middle East, Siberia, it's just, it's really wild. The Tieria Medica, and these little tiny towns that have populations of like a thousand people or less, and they had all sorts of, they had plants from New World plants, East Asian plants, they had everything. And you had to incorporate them into very complex formulations.
00:44:53
Speaker
And they would have moved the plants around too. Is there evidence of that? Certainly they would have.
Symbiotic Relationship Between Humans and Plants
00:45:00
Speaker
Some stuff. I mean like tobacco, for instance. And then it was obviously imported. There was extensive commercial tobacco plantation, you know, agriculture, especially like in Southern Ukraine and, you know, Moldova. So that's a new world. Star-Sapparilla, quinine, the chocolate, just distilled spirits.
00:45:22
Speaker
was stuff that would not grow in the region but had to be imported from like Indonesia like nutmeg and mace and cinnamon from India ginger various kinds of Siberian ginger rhodiola there's all sorts of stuff yeah you're just gonna be blown away when you get the same time there's this huge stock of native yeah i mean like native native for the region malin and linden
00:45:47
Speaker
It's kind of interesting. I mean, just the other day I was just saying to Adam that it's almost like it's just like kind of like this bridge between the East and the West actually start to look at it. You're like blown away by like what you said, the sophistication of these plants that a lot of times came along the spice route, you know, or they were replanted, you know, in different areas because they were used for things like
00:46:12
Speaker
dies and medicine. And so here they are making their way from the East to the West. And in between, here they are in the Pale of Settlement, having a life of their own with the people there who are coming up with these formulations.
00:46:28
Speaker
that some of them are coming directly from the East and just being reformulated because they were imported right there and being bought by the peasant. It's just amazing. I'm totally inarticulate, but I'm also overwhelmed by just the amount of just amazing stories that we're able to tell now that have not been known because they're not in English and nobody ever thought that they were important enough.
00:46:58
Speaker
Yeah, such rich traditions. Yeah, it's really interesting the ways that we use the plants for our own healing. Do you think the plants are using us too? You've gotten them around, you're taking great care of them. Yeah, I do, I do.
00:47:17
Speaker
It's a mutual, a mutual relationship. Because I think about all the plants that have gone from the new world to the old world and vice versa. And they naturalize, you know, in these different places and they've been able to make their way in ways that they might not have been if it hadn't been for humans. You know, we've been not just us, but I mean, just the entire
00:47:42
Speaker
Wheel of being that keeps all of life in balance and i guess most the time on our better days humans are positive part of that but sometimes i'm pessimistic and i don't feel that way but we are co dependent.
00:47:58
Speaker
I think we need them more than they need us, for sure. But they're very, very generous. It's so abundant. And they constantly remind us how there's so much generosity in the world. And they just keep coming back and keep coming back. And this is our lesson, to be generous and to be giving of ourselves. And we have so much to learn from the plant world, just so much. I love that sentiment that plants are
00:48:28
Speaker
are generous in ways that we don't even know. And I did want to talk to you about some of the plants that I think that you are working with now in
Significance of Ella Campaign and Mullein
00:48:38
Speaker
your practice. I know Ellicampane is a special plant for you. Can you tell me a little bit about Ellicampane, what it looks like, where it's from, how it's used?
00:48:51
Speaker
Yeah, Ella campaign. Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you exactly where it originates. The first time I saw it was in the UK, and I was just totally entranced by it. It's very tall. It's very statuesque and graceful. It has huge leaves that are kind of like lance-late shape that are dark green on one side and fun white on the other side.
00:49:18
Speaker
grows to I've grown it here in our yard and it's been over six feet tall and it's got these like sepals underneath that are very kind of like muscular and then outside of those come these little tiny not tiny but delicate
00:49:33
Speaker
long petal strands of yellow, like a kind of like a wispy sort of dandelion. And so that's kind of what the plant looks like if I had to describe it. And it's just very elegant, beautiful. But the part that is medicinal, at least now and what I've mostly read about and what I myself have taken is the root. The root is kind of perennial. Every year you'll see it, it kind of plant dyes
00:50:03
Speaker
back and then the root puts itself back into the ground and hibernates. But in the spring, you'll see these little red nodules, triangles poking up and that's the beginnings of it coming back up. But the root, I've never dug up our own roots because I don't really dig up our plants. I tend to buy them already cut and dried.
00:50:27
Speaker
And the root I have tinctured and take it as a tincture, and I've heard it described as peppery mud tasting. I don't describe it that way, but I think it has kind of a seizure-like flavor. In the past, it's been made into candy for children.
00:50:43
Speaker
If you like a sweet, spicy-ish sort of taste, it's a little spicy like ginger, but like I said, it kind of has a more of a cedar-y flavor. And it's always been talked about as something to help alleviate coughs. That is definitely how I have
00:51:01
Speaker
experienced it in fact my own personal experience has been when i was in school i remember one day i started to get a cold and i got this cough that just was like a tickle that just irritates your throat and then you can't stop coughing and you can't sleep and i had that for like two days but in those two days i was like
00:51:20
Speaker
kind of in days and kind of walking around and chanting a word to myself that I wasn't really conscious of. And when I became conscious of the word, I realized that what I was chanting was the name Ella campaign, Ella campaign. And I thought, Oh, maybe I'll try some of that because I
00:51:36
Speaker
had some samples from my class so I tried a couple of drops and that night I like had the most deep sleep I didn't cough and when I woke up I had this weird memory of having been like held like a baby all night and my cough was basically gone and my cold
00:51:57
Speaker
was pretty much gone after that. And so I've often recommended just a few drops and a little bit of water for anybody who has a dry, irritating cough. And I gave it to Adam a couple of years ago, and I didn't tell him about the feeling that I had when I woke up. He had the same feeling after he took it. And I'm not sensitive.
00:52:22
Speaker
So I just, I love Elle campaign so much. Beautiful. Yeah, I wish I knew that about it. And I was looking it up. It's from native to Eurasia in Spain. So it's one of those plants that's naturalized in North America. Brought by people for these reasons exactly. And I wanted to ask you another one too, another one. Yeah. Can you tell me about mullet? You were talking a bit about how you use it and how we need it more.
00:52:54
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely, Mullen probably falls into the category of the respiratory herbs, especially like in modern Western herbalism. And it definitely has the ability to soothe a dry cough. I've also found it to be really, really relaxing.
00:53:13
Speaker
And if I'm agitated at all, I can just take a few drops of mullin and I just really kind of like smooth out. It's a beautiful plant. It lives for two years. It starts out as like a little fuzzy rosette, you know, on the ground. And in its second year, it grows a stalk and it will grow this stalk. I've seen it grow over six feet tall in our yard. I actually grow kind of near our adult campaign.
00:53:41
Speaker
It produces yellow flowers that kind of pop out like popcorn, you know, not all at the same time, but like intermittently. And the flowers can be dried and into olive oil and made into like a mullein oil and you strain them out and you can use that for ear aches. And then I have never done this. I've heard from different colleagues that the root
00:54:05
Speaker
and possibly the stalk as well can be tinctured and you can take that tincture for chronic back pain and it produces an incredible of seeds. Unbelievable, like millions of seeds will come out of a mullein plant and especially here and possibly in Australia, it's a good plant to have around for fire season. Yeah, what is that?
00:54:30
Speaker
Oh, for breathing. And you know, people have a hard time breathing and mulling can really help support your lungs if you're having a lot of smoke in the air. Very, very familiar to us here. Yeah, I always have just loved it. It was one of those plans, you know, it's hard to articulate, but it has like a very friendly, welcoming presence to it. Maybe it's just big, fuzzy leaves. Not sure, but I always loved it.
00:54:56
Speaker
I totally love it. In Yiddish, it's called, I think it's Kvoirus Minoirus, which is a cemetery candle or cemetery candelabra. And so I've kind of imagined it as something that lamenters would take into the cemetery when they were going to talk to the ancestors. Because in British herbalism, like Maude Greve, one of the
00:55:26
Speaker
names for it is, I think it's candelabra because they would dip it in tallow and then light it and use it like as a torch. But I haven't seen anybody but Yiddish talk about it in terms of a cemetery candle. And so I've thought that that was really kind of a sweet thing to have that plant with you when you went to talk to the ancestors.
00:55:52
Speaker
That's so interesting and I think that's exactly the work that you're doing too, right? In re-imagining, re-finding these practices, writing Ashkenazi herbalism like you are.
00:56:05
Speaker
connecting to ancestors in a very real way. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you almost have to reimagine their lives because we haven't really been told anything about these day-to-day just activities that people did. And, you know, what do we know about that? Except what we've seen, you know, in the movies and there are hardly any really that are look at the lives of
00:56:29
Speaker
Daily people just it's just so rich and colorful textured and the plants almost can help us reimagine the daily lives of our ancestors and especially molyne when you think about it being a way to light your
00:56:44
Speaker
light your path into such a sad place as a cemetery, just to bring that warmth and coziness with you. And you have spoken a little bit about it so far, but wanted to have one last question for you just about your garden. And can you paint the picture of your garden and the story of your garden?
Dietrich's Experimental Garden
00:57:05
Speaker
Oh boy, it's a mess right now. It's covered with leaves. It's covered with leaves. We have an old walnut tree that just kind of lost all of its leaves, so I need to kind of rake a path through there. But we've got mullins growing, and ela campaign, and motherwort, and lemon balm, and mints, all kinds of mints, and vervein.
00:57:31
Speaker
and sages and a fig tree, and a lemon tree, and an orange tree, and an olive tree, and a present tree, and an apricot tree. This yard is about the size of a MacBook Pro. And I try different plants just to see if they'll have me entertained being here, a couple of Artemisia.
00:57:54
Speaker
Yeah, I've even tried nettle right here desert. It's like I it was very happy. I keep it very yeah It did really well at points of seeds. In fact, I had to take a couple nettle plants out. It did so well It's very happy as long as it gets watered and has some shade. Oh and lots of violet Yeah, yeah lots of violet lots of violet
00:58:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's actually it's my birth flower. It was here when we moved here and it's just kind of like stuck around and you know found new little niches for itself and it grows around the persimmon tree and it grows right next to these strawberries and the and the nettles and it just seems really content. Yeah, gardens are so experimental and you said if they'll have you like they they will let you know doesn't it takes time to learn what can grow
00:58:47
Speaker
if it's happy, you're working for plants again, keeping them happy. And that you gift seeds or you've been gifted some of the plants, it's that you share plants. Yeah, I try and give people as many seeds as I can because it's so important to have these plants around. I forgot to mention the
00:59:10
Speaker
marshmallow. Oh, and the elder, we have an elder. It's so prolific. Every year we marvel at just how abundant one little tiny postage stamp of soil will be if you're just a little bit kind to it. It's amazing. It really is.
00:59:45
Speaker
That was my conversation earlier this year with Dieter Cohen and Adam Siegel. Thank you for listening and huge thank you to them for sharing their work. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Katherine Paulds. Our music is by Carl Dider. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom.earth.
01:00:16
Speaker
you