What does it mean to be a woman in a tradition that teaches its men to rejoice in
not
being a woman? What does it mean to have self-abnegation built into the very principles of your religion? Unless we address these questions and stop hiding behind the “huddled masses,” we cannot claim our birthright: free expression. What might Jewish-American women's writing be like if it stopped crouching behind social meliorism and dared to wholly express what is in our own hearts?
How ironic that we have celebrated such freedom in African-American women writers while denying it to ourselves! Why are we still pretending assimilation into a white male society that wants us only as cultural caretakers, not as artists? I foresee a flowering of expression by Jewish women writers if we dare to answer that question.
It is odd that so few of our writers have dared to claim their particular female Jewishness. And the ones who
have
begun to explore itâLetty Cottin Pogrebin, Phyllis Chesler, Anne Roiphe, Marge Piercyâhave sometimes been denigrated by the same critics who applaud ethnicity in African-American or Asian-American women writers. This difficulty of claiming double identity of woman and Jew troubles me because I see the poets who should have followed in the footsteps of Nelly Sachs and Muriel Rukeyser turning instead to a false solidarity with Jewish men who would never accept their prayerful presence at the Wailing Wall of literature!
Cynthia Ozick and Grace Paley are among the few Jewish women writers who have been permitted to display both feminism and Jewishness and have not been stoned for it. But their feminism is mostly ignored as one of the wellsprings of their talent.
Much remains to be done. We must confess our double self-hatred to ourselves first of all and then to our writing. We must stop wearing leather leggings and chesterfield coats. We must put our immigrant class snobbery behind us and stop pretending we can pass as Jane Austen. We must reclaim Emma Goldman and Muriel Rukeyser and the strength their voices represent.
We ourselves have absorbed not only the misogyny of our culture but also the anti-Semitism. We ourselves equate Jewishness with vulgarity and loudness, and thus we are tempted to soft-pedal it. We leave our Jewishness to be expressed by our musical comedy stars and comediennes. Perhaps the Jewish woman terrifies because she represents strength, sexuality, a loud voice. In fact, we have never needed her courage more. I do not mean that we should balkanize feminists into Jewish-American, African-American, Asian-American, Native-American. In truth, the universality of our experience is far more important than the specifics of our differences. I am only pointing out the oddity of our suppressing our ethnicity while celebrating the ethnicity of other groups. If we really believe that self-knowledge leads to freedom, we should allow ourselves the same exploration of ethnicity.
After fifty, I begin to question my ambivalent relationship to my Jewish identity and the unexamined assimilationism I have written about earlier. It seems astonishing to me that a woman born at the height of the Holocaust should not have been trained to a stronger sense of Judaism. And I also begin to regret not having raised Molly more Jewishly, and not having had more Jewish children to replace those lost among the six million. Lately I have begun to yearn for solidarity with other Jewish feminists, to join the search for nonsexist Jewish rituals, to celebrate my Jewishness without shame, without internalized anti-Semitism, and to embrace my Jewishness as part of my search for truth in my writing. In this, I have been inspired by African-American, Asian-American, and Native American writers who have already overcome the false assimilationist stance. As a secular Jew, I will have to
invent
a heritage as much as rediscover it. For the first time, I am willing. My heart is open.
16.
Woman Enough: Interview with My Mother
Believe me, the world won't give you any gifts. If you want to have a life, steal it.
âLou Andreas-Salomé
Â
A prison gets to be a friend ...
âEmily Dickinson
Â
Much that you need has been lost. The poems that we know are merely fragments.... We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
âAdrienne Rich,
What Is Found There
Â
Â
The first thing I remember about coming to America was my father meeting me at the dock. “He's not my father!” I spat out. I hadn't seen my father since he left for New York when I was two, and I must have thought he would look like my Uncle Borisâwhom I adored.
We lived in Bristol with my Auntie Sarah, my mother's sister, and our two cousins Minnie and Lennie. From time to time, my mother and aunt would fight bitterly and we would move out to a rooming house
â
though less and less after my mother became tubercular and grew skeletally thin.
We came to America on a boat swarming with soldiers returning home after the Great War. Even skinny and ravaged, my mother was always a beautiful woman who was noticed and admired by men. She did not notice being noticed.
Crossing to America, I was playing behind the lifeboats (where there was no railing) and I nearly fell into the sea. A soldier scooped me up and saved me. We became the talk of the crossing. I was the little girl who was saved!
The first place we lived was somewhere way up in the East Bronx. We were dressed like nice little English girls with hair bows and we knew how to curtsy and say “Please, Miss So-and-so” or “Thank you, Miss So-and-so. ” Compared to the kids in the Bronx, we were royalty. So, of course, the teachers, who were creaky old Irish-American women, thought we were just wonderful. They took us around the school as examples of how you should look and dress and act. That did it. The kids waited for us after school and beat us up. We became American fast. No more good little English girls after that. We wore woolen stockings and something called “round combs” just like the tough kids in the Bronx.
Mama missed her garden in Bristol, so Papa moved us out to this deserted suburb, Edgemere, Long Islandâa formerly fashionable resort, now down on its luck. The sea was gray and cold. I had a girlfriend there whose father was a musician at the Capitol Theatre and I remember thinking that we were both children of artists who didn't want us. At that time, Papa had a studio on Fourteenth Street at Union Square and he rarely came home. When he did, he and Mama would have hideous fights. There'd be screaming in Russian, and Kitty and I would hide under the kitchen table. Once I remember Papa breaking the glass door with his hands and marching into the sea. He came home with his trousers soaked and his hand still bleeding. Mama was sobbing into the kitchen table.
Later, I remember her having an abortion on that kitchen table
â
something secret and horrible and also whispered about in Russian. She was rushed to the hospital after that
â
butchered and bleeding. Kitty and I knew that something awful was happening but we weren't sure what. Only later did we understand. Papa didn't want another child and that was that. He made all the decisions. Mama wasn't merely unhappy, she was absolutely miserable. It never occurred to her she could leave.
But every summer, as long as my grandparents were alive, we went to England. That was the great escape! Papa was making enough money to send us. We'd go to visit my grandparents when they still kept a grocery store in the East End of London. My grandmother had bright blue eyes and my grandfather had a goatee and rode horses. He never bothered to speak to girl-children, thought they weren't worth the trouble. But my grandmother adored us. My grandfather had been a forester in Russia, a timber merchant who bought up stands of trees
â
though of course Jews weren't allowed to own land. He rode beautifully and when his only son, Jacob, made a fortune
â
first as a furrier, then as a motion picture exhibitorâhe and my grandmother retired to Jacob's horse farm in Surrey, thatched cottages, paddocks, and all. Of course Uncle Jacob dumped his Jewish wife and married a shiksa. Horses and shiksas
â
proofs of grace for Jewish boychiks. He brought my grandparents to his farm and rescued them from the grocery store. In his old age my grandfather studied to be a rabbi. Naturally, he still didn't talk to girls.
My father must have made a small fortune in the twentiesâfirst ghost-painting for those agents he called “picture-fakers,” then painting the heads of the movie stars on posters for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They did piecework then
â
like the catalogue artists. Some people specialized in heads, some in bodies. He did heads.
The “picture-fakers” were guys who'd set themselves up as artists in resort towns like Palm Beach. They'd have a grand studio, wear a beret, a flowing smock, and chat up the society ladies. They'd pose as the artist, keeping the canvas carefully draped from view. Then Papa would sneak in at night and do the portrait from a photograph, a hank of hair, a swatch of fabric. He did hundreds of those portraits.
He once told me he had lost more than
$100,000
in the Crash of
'29
â
so
he must have been the equivalent
of
a
millionaire then
â
and all from painting. He had to build his fortune all over again after the Crash.
I could have gone to college anywhere I chose
â
but since Kitty quit school and went to the National Academy of Design, and since she was always coming home with stories of how splendid it was, how many handsome boys there were, how much fun it was, I decided I wanted to leave school too. Papa let me. He had nothing but contempt for formal education. He was an autodidact himself. At the National Academy of Design, the teachers always twitted the boys:
“Better watch out for that Mirsky girlâshe'll win the Prix de Rome,” which was the big traveling scholarship. But they never gave it to girls and I knew that. In fact, when I won two bronze medals, I was furious because I knew they were just tokens
â
not real money prizes. And that was because I was a girl. Why did they say “Better watch out for that Mirsky girl!” if not to torment me?
I would never have met your father if not for a friend of Papa's named Rebas, who was a White Russian. He was one of those catalogue artists who specialized in heads, and he and his friend, a certain Mr. Hittleman who played the fiddle, bought a resort in the Catskills and called it Utopia. I was supposed to be there as a sort of children's counselor. I was seventeen. But Mr. Rebasâfor some reasonâinsisted on sleeping in my room. He said it was to protect me. He never laid a hand on me. I think he was gay and I was the beard. Anyway, when your father arrived with his band, it must have seemed as if I was sleeping with the owner of the place. And I wore wonderful clothesâa black velvet cloak that I made myselfâand fabulous hats. And I would float through fields of cowflop like an apparition out of
Mid
summer Night's Dream. So your father was determined to have me. And he was very good-looking. And very aggressive.
He had blue eyes and light brown hair. He was the tummler, the director of the rec hall, the band leader, the main skit writerâhe did everything. I thought it was absolutely shocking how bad the skits wereâhow shameless the jokes. The level of humor was abysmal. Friday nights, they'd joke about the stiff train arrivingâthe horny husbands from the city.
But my darling sister never saw anything that belonged to me that she didn't want. So as soon as she came up from the city, she made a play for Seymour. If she hadn't made a play for him, I might not have been so sure he was the oneâbut that settled it. If Kitty wanted him, then I would have him. Such was our sisterhood! I didn't see any point in getting married. I was a free spirit, an artist. Women were supposed to be free. My idol was Edna St. Vincent Millay. And even my mother, who had such a terrible marriage, was most proud of that friend of hers who was a woman dentist. She very much believed in what you would call Women's Lib. She wasn't one of these women to go out and march about itâbut she believed in it. When I was having problems with your father before you were born, she said, “Leave him if you want to. I'll help you all I can.” She wanted me to have a better life than she had had. She didn't want to see me trapped in a bad marriage.
Once, on a trip to Japan with Daddy, I had a dream about my mother that I'll never forget. Her legs were cut off and bleeding and she was tied to a column, or the top of a church steeple, and I remember myself crawling on the ground and crying at the sight of her, but she kept saying: “It's all right, darling, it's not so bad. ” That epitomizes our relationship.
My father was no kind of father when Kitty and I were little, but when your sister Nana was born, he discovered fatherhood like it was going out of style. He never could get along with my mother, so he insisted on our all living togetherâroping us in with this big apartment and making the baby the center of everything. I was the maid, your father was the butler, Mama was the cook. Papa was the king and your sister the princess. Soâthe grandfather you loved so much was a recent invention. He was no father at all to me. You have such wonderful memories of himâand to me he was nothing but a bloody tyrant. He practically cornered the market on male chauvinism! He treated Mama like she was an idiotâtore her down constantly. I had to be a fighter to grow up with a father like that. Then, with his granddaughters, he became a saint! First he ruins my life, then he kidnaps my children!
When you were born, during the war, you practically died. You were the only baby who survived. I always felt I loved you most because I had such a struggle to keep you alive.