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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.
Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.
Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.
The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.
To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.
In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?
From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”
When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”
A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.
That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.
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Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, nearly three quarters of voters decided that Graham Platner — Iraq War veteran, oysterman, Reddit misogynist and SS tattoo bearer — was their best hope to defeat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, come November. While the result was wildly cheered by his supporters, other Democrats and independents were left deeply uneasy.
There are good reasons, philosophical no less than political, for this disquiet. For some Democrats, the winning approach to the election is not necessarily one that leads to victory, but instead one that leads from virtue.
Much attention has been given to the political issues raised by Platner’s candidacy. His embrace of economic populism and excoriation of our country’s oligarchy, his denunciation of forever wars and defense of the common man were and remain compelling stances. That Platner speaks his own mind, and does so simply but rarely simplistically, rather than from a script bolted together by handlers, is clearly a plus as well.
But the matter of his character also raises a serious ethical issue not just for Platner, but also for those who voted for him this spring and plan to do so again this fall. It is less a matter of achieving a good result, than of affirming the good itself.
Moral philosophy comes in three flavors: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. For reasons of space, let’s focus on the first and last. As the name suggests, consequentialism focuses not on the means but instead on the ends. But this does not mean, as some think, that any end can justify any means. Instead, philosophical consequentialists argue that acts must be judged by a simple measure: seeking the greatest good at the least moral cost.
For a hypothetical example, say I have a student who is floundering in one of my classes. They are doing their best, but for various reasons their best will probably not help them avoid a failing grade. Afraid to disappoint or depress the student, I allow them to continue in the class. Consequently, the student sinks rather than swims by semester’s end. Or, instead, I can sit down with the student earlier in the semester and suggest that they withdraw today and try again a later day when they are better prepared. The result is the least cruel and most good: some suffering in the short term rather than greater suffering in the long run.
Yet, consequentialism can be complicated. Consider the election of John Fetterman to the Senate in 2022. Faced by the prospect of voting for the Republican candidate, Democrats and independents gave Fetterman the winning margin despite a stroke he suffered during the campaign, one that raised serious questions about his capacity to hold the office. For reasons that are hard to parse, Fetterman has since broken with his fellow Democrats on several vital issues.
Rather than realizing the greater good, some Pennsylvania voters may now realize their reasoning was misplaced.
This brings us to virtue ethics, which is now enjoying a second wind among moral philosophers. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, virtue ethicists are less concerned with actions than they are with character. As the philosopher Todd May writes in his book The Decent Life, the key question for consequentialists (and deontologists) is “How should I act?” But for those who promote virtue ethics, the question is “How should I live?”
By this, they mean what Aristotle seems to have meant: how can we live a happy or flourishing life? The answer is by living that life in accord with virtue.
Simply put, virtues are those traits of character — think bravery and constancy, sagacity and generosity—crucial to human flourishing. And to flourish as humans requires a deep disposition to see and feel, choose and respond to the world and others in ways that align with those virtues. In the words of the late Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher who reintroduced virtue ethics to modern readers, “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Inevitably, just as with the other ethical theories, there are problems with virtue ethics. But there are also advantages, principally that it seeks to build character rather than build a calculus of the highest good. This brings us back to Graham Platner. What is at issue with his campaign is not just the character of the candidate, but the character of the nation we wish to realize. The unavoidable question is not whether the ends justifies the means, but whether the means justifies the end—in this case, a nation dedicated not to winning a Senate majority, but to one dedicated to reversing the waning of virtue. Even if this means giving Susan Collins 6 more years.
Modern Jewish thinkers find ties between pagan and Jewish ethics. Yonatan Brafman, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points to fascinating parallels between the writings of Aristotle and the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. The latter, Brafman suggests, sought various ways to encourage the practice of generosity. “Fulfilling the commandment of matanot le-’evyonim (gifts to the poor) and even prioritizing it over other commandments both expresses and fosters the virtue of generosity,” Brafman writes. “Moreover, in Maimonides’ view, this virtue is central to human flourishing. Generosity enables an individual to achieve divine joy.”
Of course, the exercise of generosity should apply to Platner, a man who insists that he has changed. Come November, we will learn whether this is true for our nation. As for Platner, who insists he has changed, it may take much longer for all of us to know.
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What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
What does Gwyneth Paltrow have to do with a new luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya?
Not much, it seems, judging from a new ad that dropped this week. It features Paltrow going on a morning jog in the city — New York City, that is. She wakes up, voices some pat complaints about why “mornings have to be so early” and how her “coffee needs a coffee,” before she heads to Central Park. She comes home, showers, then asks her driver to take her to 51 Park.
Her driver asks if she means New York. “Herzliya, Israel,” she clarifies, smiling into the camera, as though the black SUV can drive across the ocean.
The ad makes so little sense that my first instinct was to think that it must be some sort of AI rendition of Paltrow. But a LinkedIn post about the project, from Gabi Attal, the CEO of the ad agency Why Worry, which made it, says that they did indeed shoot the ad in real life, in New York City, and that Paltrow is the face of the ad campaign behind a luxury apartment building called 51Park in Herzliya.
51Park is the name — though seemingly not the address — of an enormous new apartment complex that does not appear to exist yet; the website for the building is written in future tense. In renderings, two 51-story glossy towers, with — depending on which part of the website you read — either 636 or 733 apartments total, shine over a park. The neighborhood, it promises, is about to become the beating heart of Herzliya, bounded by highways, the light rail and Herzliya Park.
Paltrow, who is Jewish, has hawked a lot of weird products in her time — vagina-scented candles, anyone? And in some ways, the luxury building makes sense as a product for the actress, who has often flaunted her wealthy lifestyle. But everything else about the 51Park campaign places it back into Paltrow’s stranger offerings.
First off, of course, is the simple setting of the ad, which is nowhere near the apartment building Paltrow is lending her face to.
“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle and uncompromising quality,” Attal wrote in the LinkedIn post about the ad.
No one behind the ad responded to my questions about how Paltrow was selected except the director’s agent, Tal Nathan, who said that he couldn’t comment beyond saying the actress “looks absolutely fantastic.” Still, Paltrow certainly embodies a certain kind of “premium lifestyle” — her lifestyle brand, Goop (tagline: “beauty as wellness”), sells such wealth signifiers as a $425 black tank top and a $55 “sex oil,” and also partners with other luxury brands to market expensive jewelry, clothing, and wellness accessories via Paltrow’s own website as “Gwyneth’s picks.” (These include a $225 “eyelift bioremodeling peptide matrix” and a cream for “mindfulness and intuition.”)
The actress has made her name, at least since her Oscar win in 1999, by defining an ideal of minimalist, luxurious perfection — one with little care for qualities like accessibility, approachability or reality. (She had to pay a fine after Goop sold bespoke jade eggs promising questionable health benefits for one’s “yoni.”) In fact, part of her allure is her lack of those values. Her aesthetic seeks to soar above plebian concerns like pragmatism or cost. Who cares if that $491 pewter cocktail strainer requires regular polishing to maintain its silver sheen? It’s covetable. Similarly, who cares where your luxury building is, the 51Park ad seems to say; the important part is the luxury.
Still, it seems odd to market the building to Israelis via an ad filmed in New York City, in English. Sure, New York might signify wealth and luxury in the international market. But the ad doesn’t highlight the amenities 51Park actually offers, such as proximity to Herzliya Park; it shows Paltrow in a luxury apartment in New York with convenient access to a different, and more famous, park: Central Park.
Instead, it feels as though the ad is directed at Americans, selling the idea that New York City and Herzliya are the same. That’s patently absurd though — even if we were to equate Tel Aviv and NYC, which are really not very similar outside of being their respective countries’ most cosmopolitan cities, Herzliya is neither; it’s a separate, much smaller city. Which means Herzliya is, at best, Hoboken. Perhaps that’s why Paltrow didn’t even bother flying to Israel to film the ad.
Marketing an Israeli home to Americans, however, is a controversial proposition. Over the past couple of years, Israeli companies selling homes and land to Jewish Americans, often at fairs held in synagogues, have been a target for protests. Sure, Herzliya is not in the West Bank. But for an actor to wade into obvious controversy like this, especially when she has a new major project coming up — starring as Belle Burden in an adaptation of the heiress’ best-selling memoir Strangers — is a confusing choice.
The ad was reposted by viral celebrity gossip account PopBase, leading to thousands of retweets and comments accusing her of supporting, as many commenters put it, “gwynocide.” Others said it was tone deaf to market luxury apartment buildings only a few hundred miles from razed apartments in Gaza, and compared her to the Nazi wife who enjoys her garden outside Auschwitz in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
Yet, in the ad, Paltrow seems blissfully unaware of all that, or at least doesn’t betray the slightest political statement. It’s not the first time Paltrow has been impressively out of step with public opinion — for example, saying that being a mother while working on movie sets is harder than being a “regular” working mother who is not extremely wealthy and famous, or that she would rather die than let her child eat a “Cup-a-Soup” and would rather do crack than eat cheese out of a tin.
Paltrow’s serene smile in the ad implies she can just float above the political realities tied to Israel without touching them. The idea that one can move to Israel and live a life indistinguishable from the one you once had on Park Ave in NYC, is fundamentally a political statement, of course; not everyone has that freedom of movement, whether due to financial or political realities. But Paltrow has not responded to criticism online or to journalists reaching out to ask what she meant to say with the ad. Though she voiced support for the hostages after Oct. 7, she hasn’t implied that her ad for 51Park is any kind of statement. In fact, she’s carefully avoided making one.
Instead, Paltrow — as is so often the case with the actress famed for her snobbery — has demonstrated that she is not as interested in Israel, Gaza, the war, or Judaism as she is in the disembodied ideal of luxury. As she once said, she “can’t possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” The rest isn’t important; she can ignore it.
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