Fear of Fifty (49 page)

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 it—Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Phyllis Chesler, Anne Roiphe, Marge Piercy—have 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.

Believe me, the world won't give you any gifts. If you want to have a life, steal it.

—Lou Andreas-Salomé

A prison gets to be a friend ...

—Emily Dickinson

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.

—Adrienne Rich,
What Is Found There

 

 

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
—
though less and less after my mother became tubercular and grew skeletally thin.

Later, I remember her having an abortion on that kitchen table
—
something secret and horrible and also whispered about in Russian. She was rushed to the hospital after that
—
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
—
though of course Jews weren't allowed to own land. He rode beautifully and when his only son, Jacob, made a fortune
—
first as a furrier, then as a motion picture exhibitor—he 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
—
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 twenties—first 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
—
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
—
so
he must have been the equivalent
of
a
millionaire then
—
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
—
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 girl—she'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
—
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. Rebas—for some reason—insisted 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 clothes—a black velvet cloak that I made myself—and 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.