Painting Advice/Кто красить умеет?

На прошлой неделе мы с женой покрасили комнату дочки. Неплохо покрасили, надо сказать. Однако есть одна мелкая проблема: как покрасить за батареей отопления? Там узкая щель, и я покрасил так глубоко, как мог достать кисточкой. Но всё равно через батарею видна старая краска, т.е. как-то предыдущий хозяин туда залез? Если у кого есть опыт, поделитесь, пожалуйста. (Именно опыт - эксперименты типа "привяжи кисточку к хвосту палке" я и сам могу придумывать.)

Last week my wife and I painted our daughter's room. Did a pretty good job, even if I do say so myself. One problem: how do I paint behind the radiator? The opening is narrow; I painted as far down as I could reach with a paintbrush, but you can still see the old paint through most of the radiator, so the previous owner did manage to reach there somehow. How? If you have experience with this task, please share. (And I mean proven experience - I can come up with "tie the brush to a stick" experiments myself.)

Sephardic Literature: The Real Hidden Legacy

Reviewed: The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature, Ilan Stavans, editor. Schocken, 2005, $ 27.50
By David Shasha

I am a Sephardic Jew with what most would consider a strong Jewish education--yet nothing I had learned growing up in Brooklyn or attending the Yeshivah of Flatbush gave me any reason to think that Sephardim had contributed at all to Jewish culture, especially modern Jewish culture. We were taught Buber and Soloveitchik in Jewish Philosophy, Wiesel, and Potok in our English classes, and the less said about our Jewish History program—where the teacher once told a cousin of mine that Sephardic history was not taught because “Sephardim have no history” —the better. We passed our high school years blissfully unaware of Hispano-Jewish poetry, Kabbalah, Maimonidean rationalism, the picaresque Arabian-style tales of Judah al-Harizi, the seminal grammatical studies of the Sephardi balshanim, and the poetical insights of Moses ibn Ezra. We had no notion of the historical works of Abraham ibn Daud, Solomon ibn Verga, and Joseph ha-Kohen, no hint of modern Sephardic Jewish writers, and certainly no clue that Sephardim, too, had experienced anti-Semitism, participated in Zionism, and suffered during the Holocaust.

The Argentine-born Syrian Rabbi José Faur, then a professor of rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, opened my eyes. In a lecture that shattered my world view he introduced me to two Sephardic writers I had never heard of, Edmond Jabès and the Nobel Prize winner, Elias Canetti. These two very different authors wrote from a perspective utterly different from any I had encountered before, a distinctly Sephardic point of view that was at once eminently modern and grounded in the cultural values and the epic history of the Jews of Muslim Spain and the East.

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