Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (16 page)

Rebecca stretched out on a chaise lounge and listened distractedly to Jeanne, before interrupting her to ask why Pauline Einstein kept to herself.

“It’s ridiculous,” Jeanne answered. “I miss her.”

“What happened? Did you have a fight? I didn’t have a chance to ask her.”

“What? You saw her!” Amalia exclaimed.

“Did she ask how we were?” Jeanne demanded, her voice sounding sadder than she would have liked it to.

“It’s all your fault,” Minnie accused Amalia. “You had to insist that Freud was more important than Einstein because he invented a new science all by himself.”

“Really? That’s what you like to think, but you forget that it was you who made her run off.”

Their voices grew louder and louder: everyone was accusing someone else of offending Pauline Einstein. Hoping to put an end to what she considered a futile argument, Rebecca asked them in a loud voice:

“Why are there no other mothers here? Why aren’t the mothers of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth with us, for example?”

Scandalized, Minnie Marx answered her:

“Didn’t you know that Isaac never once wrote to his mother after he emigrated to New York?”

“I thought he adored her!” Rebecca said.

“Yes, Besheve was a strong-minded woman, talented and charming. In honor of her, he created his pen-name from his mother’s first name and added a possessive pronoun: Bashevis.”

“So? What about it?”

“It was a terribly distressing time for him; he felt he wasn’t fit for anything and that suffering was his fate in life. He also had a terrible inferiority complex. His brother, Israël, was a famous writer who had saved Isaac’s life by paying his passage to America, to join him. Crippled by remorse and lost in an unfamiliar country, horrified by the shocking news coming from Europe, he was completely unable to write. Not a word in eight years, which, for a writer, must be a record.”

“Nothing?”

“It took his brother’s death for him to write again. But it was too late; his mother was dead by that time.”

“I can see why she wouldn’t want to talk about her son with you. What about Philip Roth’s mother?”

“Bess preferred to go back to her husband,” Amalia explained.

“She was here but then she left?”

“When her husband retired, he never stopped criticizing her. He couldn’t stand that she made all the decisions, although that’s exactly what she had been doing for the thirty years of their marriage and he’d never complained then. She’s the very image of the ideal woman and mother. But he was getting depressed, shut up in the house with her all day. His solution was to shout orders and insult her, she who had always been so gentle. She couldn’t take it any more and she died.”

“What do you mean? She just died?”

“It happens to everyone.”

“I know . . . But what happened?”

“She was sick by then but she wanted to make him happy by going out to a restaurant that was practically next door. She was exhausted but she didn’t want to cancel, for fear of offending their friends and disappointing her husband. She had hardly ordered before she was dead.”

“You can’t possibly mean that the last thing she said was, ‘I’ll have a green salad.’”

“I don’t know what she ordered. The subject never came up.”

“What was she like?”

“She was the gentlest of us all, and the most sweet tempered too. She had a heart of gold. Her son Philip described her in her forties, short with black hair that was starting to gray, and expressive brown eyes, thin, attractive and completely American in her ways. He remembers how important a clean, well-maintained house was to her, and how she observed the Jewish traditions out of respect for her family. She cooked kosher, lit the Sabbath candles and followed all the dietary restrictions at Passover. He writes that she hardly ever left her neighborhood in Newark, feeling only at ease among other Jews.”

Rebecca noticed that Jeanne was nervously twisting a lock of hair around her finger.

“Do you have a different opinion?”

“She was perfect, of course, but irksome. She was a true petite bourgeoisie, so materialistic!”

“You’re just a snob.”

“I prefer to be called an intellectual,” she said with a smile. “But I don’t object.”

A few seconds later, she added:

“Not as much as Marcel.”

“He got it from you.”

Jeanne Proust told a story about how Bess Roth used to be terrified that her children would grow away from her. Philip went to college, frequented
goys
and was in danger of losing his Jewishness. He even became optimistic about the future. For an Ashkenazi Jew, unthinkable!

“He considered himself Jewish at home but a ‘citizen’ outside, like most of his friends,” she added. “We wanted our children to be integrated, assimilated, cultivated and influential in their home country, but we were always afraid they would forget where they came from. I would have been heartbroken if any of my sons had become anti-Dreyfusards. It would have been treason!”

“Luckily, they have their fictional alter-egos to explain their Jewishness for them,” Louise Cohen retorted.

They decided to continue their conversation in a neo-Moorish synagogue. It was a dark spot, despite the twelve windows symbolizing the tribes of Israel, but they were happy to be there—Rebecca, Amalia Freud, Louise Cohen, Jeanne Proust and Minnie Marx—to talk literature. Knowing their sons’ work inside and out, they could say with complete confidence that they had been good mothers; nothing in their boys’ lives or even in their thoughts had ever escaped them. Ignoring the balcony reserved for women, they seated themselves downstairs, near the central aisle.

“Albert always denied it but Solal was his double,” Louise began. “He’s in four of his novels, and my clever son even found a way to kill him off in
Solal
and then to bring him back in
Belle du Seigneur
! Their lives were so much alike: Solal struggled to integrate Geneva high society and to become a senior official at the League of Nations. You can see, by the way, how important it was for him to be on top,” she giggled.

After a moment, she began again:

“Solal is magnificent. He steals everything from his boss, Adrien Deume: His job and his wife. He’s torn between the West and the East; one is unfamiliar to him but he is the ‘Seigneur’ in that world; the other he loves, but mostly from afar. He is ambitious and confident, and at the same time full of self-loathing. He complains he ‘is what he isn’t and isn’t what he is.’ He adopts a false identity to find love and turns his back on society as soon as he has risen to its heights. He forces the beautiful Ariane to make anti-Semitic statements to resent her.”

“A true case of conflicted identity,” Jeanne Proust concluded.

“Just like Gilberte Swann, who becomes Gilberte S. de Forcheville! Swann is effaced by a simple initial, as if she wanted to hide her father’s Jewish heritage,” Rebecca said.

“Back then, a Jew either was proud of his identity and saw all doors close to him, or he denied it and he rose in society, like the Narrator’s spiritual father, Charles Swann, refined, elegant, worldly and loved by all the Guermantes,” Jeanne reminded her.

“But Swann changes. Why does the green-eyed, red-headed dandy come back to his Jewishness at the end of his life? Is it his terminal illness, the Dreyfus Affair or anti-Semitic propaganda?” Rebecca wondered.

Jeanne began walking up and down the aisles and answered in a sententious voice that suited their surroundings. In the house of worship in which they had gathered, it almost seemed as if she was preaching.

“Marcel makes Bloch the primary object of his anti-Semitic attack. He’s a mannerless second-rate writer who makes a mess of everything. In
The Guermantes Way
, he places his top hat on the floor next to him in Madame de Villeparisis’ drawing room and then warns everyone who enters to be careful not to tread on it. A few moments later, he manages to smash a vase of flowers, spilling water all over the rug. He quickly reassures his hostess: ‘It’s not of the slightest importance; I’m not wet.’ He is the stereotypical Eastern European Jew, gauche and eccentric, who speaks Yiddish but, far worse, never assimilates into proper French society. He’s ashamed of who he is.”

Minnie yawned and admitted that she never could read Proust.

“It’s not that I didn’t try,” she explained in her defense. “But nothing ever happens! Sorry, Jeanne.”

Jeanne didn’t trouble herself to answer but turned instead to Rebecca.

“Do you remember the scene on the beach at Balbec? The Narrator overhears a ‘torrent of imprecation against the swarm of Israelites’ who have overrun the seaside resort. ‘You can’t go a yard without meeting them . . . You hear nothing but, “I thay, Apraham, I’ve chust theen Chacop.” You would think you were in the Rue d’Aboukir.’ Turning around, the Narrator is astonished to discover none other than his old friend Albert Bloch, repeating the same injurious curses that others had used to slander him. He concludes that Bloch is an ‘ill-bred, neurotic snob.’ Since he belonged to a family that was held in scorn, he had to find the fastest way possible to rise in society. ‘To carve himself through to the open air by raising himself from Jewish family to Jewish family would have taken Bloch many thousands of years. It was better worth his while to seek an outlet in another direction.’ He found it with the Guermantes, precisely, where he manages at last to be admitted, under the name of Jacques du Rozier, the name of a perfect English gentleman. Swann’s route takes the opposite track entirely.

“No one ever called Proust an anti-Semite,” Rebecca observed.

“Oh yes, they did,” Jeanne corrected her, her cheeks flaming from the memory of the abominable, unjustified attacks on her son.

Louise Cohen, sitting down heavily at the back of the synagogue, launched into her own story about the unfair attacks on her son Albert.

“When his play
Ezechiel
was published, he was criticized for his depiction of two characters. There is Jérémie, a pathetic little schemer who, desperate for money, agrees to go to Ezechiel to inform him of his son’s death, although he doesn’t know how to go about it. There’s also Ezechiel, a rich banker from Cephalonia, the archetypal greedy Jewish moneylender. Albert first describes him deep in some complicated calculations about how to save on candles and he concludes that the seven-branched menorah is the ruin of the chosen people; a three-branched one would have done just as well. Well, you can’t imagine what people said! When the play was produced for the first time at the Comédie Française in 1933, it incurred universal wrath: not only the anti-Semitic organizations who saw this as thinly-veiled praise for Jewish values but many in the Jewish community were up in arms, too, because they thought the play was deriding those same Jewish values.”

“And when there was a new production of
Ezechiel
in the 1980s it was the object of more of the same outrage, directed again at its depiction of Jewishness,” Rebecca added. “It’s hard to say though what exactly everyone found so offensive; it seems to me that Cohen was more generally interested in the vulnerability of his ‘human brothers.’”

Lost in a Proustian flood of memories, Jeanne merrily continued her own stream of thought, explaining that Bloch’s uncle, Nissim Bernard, was comfortable in French society but not what you would call assimilated since he never stopped referring to himself as a Jew.

“Your Nissim Bernard is a perfect example of what was happening in America at the time,” Minnie interrupted her. “Christians and Jews hung out together but never married, yet they all considered themselves American. When I lived in New York, every community had its neighborhood: Little Italy, Chinatown, Yorkville.

“You’re becoming nostalgic,” Rebecca couldn’t resist noting.

“I can still remember an old man who only spoke Yiddish. He was moving, and I asked him how it was going, thinking he had just arrived. I couldn’t believe it when he told me he had already been in New York for ten years. ‘Why don’t you speak English?’ I asked him. You know what he answered?: ‘What for?’” And she laughed and laughed . . .

“Wasn’t every author who wrote about Jews accused of being anti-Semitic?” Jeanne asked.

Rebecca remembered how Isaac Bashevis Singer was criticized for caricaturing his own people as “Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes.” His reply was: “Shall I write about Spanish thieves and Spanish prostitutes? I write about the thieves and prostitutes that I know.” If the thief was Jewish, why should the reader infer that all Jews were thieves? It is absurd.

Minnie Marx got up suddenly, stamped loudly and shouted for silence.

“I’ve had enough of your books and all your complicated characters. Your sons might have written pages and pages about how Jewish they were but I’ll tell you one thing: It’s the food that makes a Jew, first and foremost.”

9

I Know What’s Best for You

Self-control, sobriety, sanctions – this is the key to a human life, saith all those endless dietary laws.

Philip Roth,
Portnoy’s
Complaint

Heaven’s kitchen looked so old fashioned that it was hard to imagine anyone could cook in it. A closer examination revealed, however, that even a professional chef would find it more than serviceable. In fact, it had everything! There were two huge stoves, several work counters, and copper pots of every size hanging on the wall from smallest to largest, as well as a full complement of every kind of cookware and utensil imaginable: frying pans, baking tins, peelers, slicers, graters, mincers . . . Minnie, Louise, Mina, Amalia and Jeanne had taken it over. And as usual when no one dared interrupt her, Minnie had monopolized the conversation.

“My mother was obsessed with what we ate,” she recalled. “It was only later that I understood why: She watched us to make sure we wouldn’t swallow anything that was forbidden to Jews. However, it was also a way of treating us like children. She decided when and what we ate and if we didn’t finish everything on our plates, we were punished. She made us feel so guilty! She would say that we didn’t love her enough if we didn’t eat up. Every meal was a scene because my brother, Al, refused to bend to her tyranny. He would spit into his napkin the bits that he couldn’t force down. Sometimes, my mother would grab his napkin before he’d had a chance to flush the evidence of his crime down the toilet. Then she would fly into a rage and make him sit at the table with all the lights out. Sometimes he would be served the same plate for breakfast. Me, I just shoveled it all down.”