Jewish Mothers Never Die

by Natalie David-Weill

  “When I found out that the smaller vaudeville troupes were paid by the number of members in the company, I persuaded my sister Hannah to perform with us, so we could be paid three hundred dollars instead of two hundred.”

  “What if none of you had been talented? I suppose that wouldn’t have bothered you?” Mina asked with a touch of malice.

  “Certainly not.”

  At forty-four and forty-two the sisters dressed up as schoolgirls and took off their glasses. When they sat on the same chair, it collapsed under their weight. And that was the end of their show business debut.

  “We had to rename ourselves ‘The Four Nightingales.’”

  Rebecca was thrilled by Minnie’s energy and confidence.

  “How did the Marx brothers get their start? Beyond the name, which might have been a problem, did you envisage specific roles for your sons?”

  “Except for Harpo, they all had nice singing voices until they reached puberty, and then I had to develop their act,” Minnie remembered, as if it was still 1918 and she was looking for ideas. “Groucho pretended he was a German actor, and Chico debuted his famous Italian accent, which he had copied from his barber. He only had to imitate him and people burst into laughter. It amused him, so he continued the act in the theaters and then in film.”

  “Did you write the shows?”

  Minnie sighed. Was she offended? There was no way of knowing, since she abruptly left her plate half-finished and began pacing up and down the room, breathing like a bull.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Coming from a chatterbox like Minnie, it was a short “yes.” Rebecca couldn’t resist the temptation to ask again, prompting her to finally admit that the only time she had been absent from the troupe, they had had their biggest success ever.

  “They were in Ann Arbor, Michigan,” she began. “I had told them to end with a song. ‘If they whistle at you as you’re leaving the stage, you’re done,’ I told them. But they didn’t agree with me; they wanted to end on a comic note. We left it there because I had to go find a tenor: ours had flown the coop, but his operetta solo was the highlight of the act. ‘Schooldays,’ it was called. Worse, he had left with the only tuxedo we owned. It’s true that it did belong to him . . . Groucho decided to take matters into his own hands by proposing to sing Verdi’s hit, La Donna è Mobile. I told them, ‘That’s all well and good, but what about the tuxedo?’ I was serious; it gave the act a touch of class. Chico found the solution: he told me to fire the pianist and, with the money saved, to rent a tux. I thought it was all settled when I left.

  “Groucho kicked off the act as the tenor but suddenly stopped. ‘I don’t like your key, Giuseppe,’ Chico told him, then sang the same piece in A minor. ‘That’s worse!’ Groucho yelled at him. That’s all they needed to raise havoc: Harpo ran back on stage, threw Chico off his stool and started playing. Since he didn’t miss a beat, Groucho kept singing La Donna è Mobile, in Italian.

  “That’s when they went crazy: Chico on the piano stool, Harpo on his shoulders and Groucho who could just reach the keys by wrapping his arms around Chico from behind, and singing all the while. Eventually, they all fell over. They were called back seven times for a bow. For the first time, the Marx Brothers were in all the papers.”

  “What was your reaction?”

  “Well, I never found a tenor, so I came back empty-handed. Then when I read the review, it was like a punch in the chest, all the more so because they did their number in the second act, which was supposed to be the musical half of the show. By nature I’m pretty stubborn and I never admit I’m wrong. I began whistling La Donna è Mobile to myself, wondering what I could possibly say to them. Then I found it: ‘You know, I always told you that comedy was our forte,’” I said.

  She laughed heartily.

  “They would never have amounted to anything without me. Never.”

  Jeanne Proust came in, looking surprised. “I wasn’t expecting to find you still here. I finished eating hours ago.”

  “Today, Minnie isn’t going anywhere,” Mina remarked dryly.

  That was good news to Jeanne Proust. She could eat breakfast all day if it was to talk about her Marcel! She knew she had a sympathetic listener in Rebecca.

  “Did you let Marcel decide what he wanted to do with his life?” Rebecca asked her.

  “Do you remember what Madame Santeuil says to her son? She tells him he’s free to choose as long as he becomes a judge, a lawyer or a diplomat.”

  “That’s fiction,” Rebecca reminded her. “What about you? Did you worry about that kind of thing too?”

  “Adrien wanted Marcel to have a serious occupation so he found him work at the Mazarine Library. I was the one who made it possible for Marcel to dedicate himself to writing, and I convinced Adrien that our son should no longer waste his time in an unpaid, meaningless position. He needed regular hours but not an office.”

  “You got him started by forcing him to translate Ruskin.”

  “He didn’t have a gift for English so I translated it and he rewrote it in good French.”

  “I don’t mean to question the scope of your influence,” Rebecca began. “But don’t you think he would have become a writer anyway, with or without you?”

  Jeanne threw Rebecca a look of pure hatred. If she could have made her disappear, she would not have hesitated. She began to shake, her chignon came undone and she turned red in the face.

  “I did everything in my power to help him, to wrest him out of his intellectual stupor. I watched over him, I taught him how to apply himself, to be disciplined. Write on his own? You must be joking!”

  Rebecca had finally had enough of these conceited mothers who considered themselves indispensable to their children’s success. She shouted back at Jeanne:

  “But he waited for you to die so he could write Remembrance of Things Past!”

  Jeanne jumped, her inflamed cheeks now pale. She took a moment to calm herself. Mina patted her forehead with a damp napkin, while Minnie poured her a glass of water. Amalia, who had come back in time to witness the scene, suggested she needed something stronger and handed her a glass of straight scotch.

  “No, it’s too early for that,” Jeanne Proust managed to murmur. She never lost her good manners.

  “Oh, go ahead,” Minnie encouraged her.

  Jeanne took a sip, sighed deeply and turned to Rebecca:

  “The discipline and routine I imposed on Marcel are what allowed him to write Pleasures and Days and Jean Santeuil. We woke at the same time, we ate our meals together, and that’s how he was able to write his masterpiece.”

  “It seems to me that didn’t really work,” Rebecca insisted. “He soon returned to his old habits of working at night and sleeping during the day, living in his bed.”

  “Just like Minnie, I had to finally acknowledge that I could do nothing more for him. The main thing was that he continued to work hard.”

  “But if you had seen the superhuman effort he put into writing thousands of pages, you would have stopped him from killing himself at it.”

  “That may be true,” Jeanne admitted. “Nothing is harder on a mother than to see her son suffer.”

  “He managed fine after your death. I doubt he would have been able to write so candidly if you had continued to be his principal reader.”

  “If you’re referring to his homosexuality, he knew that I knew, without saying it in so many words, of course.”

  The other mothers were surprised to hear Jeanne Proust speak so openly about Marcel’s private life. This haughty woman had never before even alluded to the subject. They looked at each other for an uncomfortable moment, then Minnie broke the tension with a question for Rebecca:

  “In the end, what was it that your Nathan was good at?”

  “Reading,” Rebecca said in a low voice.

  They all began to laugh, with the exception of Rebecca, whose embarrassment they didn’t even notice.

  “Didn’t you say you were a French literat
ure professor?”

  “Yes, precisely. That’s probably why I never glorified reading. When that’s all you do, you cut yourself off from other people’s preoccupations and lives. You become a misanthrope. Excessive reading is an obstacle to accomplishing anything.”

  Jeanne Proust immediately burst out:

  “But that’s ridiculous!”

  She had struggled so hard to instill a love of literature in Marcel.

  “How can you be cultivated without reading?” she wanted to know, as if it was the only thing that mattered.

  “What’s so important about being cultivated? If it’s to be boring, it’s not worth it, unless you enjoy it, of course.”

  “But, you didn’t prevent your son from reading, did you?”

  Jeanne, who had received a much more solid education than most young women of her day, knew what an intellectual life was worth, and now she was almost purple with indignation. When she was young, girls were trained only in hygiene, cooking, cleaning, and deep breathing to help tolerate the pain of tightly laced corsets and narrow shoes. Jeanne was something of a phenomenon in her time, having learned Latin, English, German and the Classics from her mother. At first, knowledge had pleased her, then it became vital to her happiness.

  Louise had returned and, for the first time, they were all assembled in one room: Amalia Freud, Mina Kacew, Minnie Marx, Jeanne Proust and now Louise Cohen, too. What had brought them all here? The desire to see their sons become successful. Louise, however, did not share that view.

  “Mothers aren’t the only explanation,” she countered. “We do what we can to help them in life but, in the end, they are who they are. In fact, I wonder why we were all killing ourselves for. Love and success are two different things. Albert was assigned to the diplomatic mission of the International Labor Organization in Geneva, and I can assure you that I had nothing to do with that.”

  Rebecca had to agree with Louise. In those moments when she had been proud of her son, she had not felt that she was personally responsible. So many other factors combine to make a successful individual: environment, biology, genes, energy, motivation and luck.

  “It’s possible that the Marx Brothers never would have existed,” she argued, addressing herself to Minnie, “and Romain wouldn’t have become Gary, but I doubt it. I think Albert Einstein still would have been a genius with or without his mother’s help!”

  Rebecca watched as a look of unease went around the room. They were observing each other, silent, in shock.

  “What did I say?”

  Minnie broke the uncomfortable silence.

  “Without his mother, Albert Einstein would have wasted valuable time before becoming a physicist. He was three years old before he ever spoke a word. Mentally retarded or simply caught up in his emotional world? Who can say?”

  Jeanne Proust explained that Pauline Einstein was so horrified by Albert’s deformed head when he was born that she decided, then and there, he would have to be a genius. From that day forward, she was particularly tough on him.

  “Albert didn’t have anything specifically wrong with him,” Jeanne continued. “But Pauline always made believe he was the top pupil in his class. Everyone knew, of course, that he didn’t do very well at school. He said himself, later, that he ‘wasn’t a particularly good student or a particularly poor one.’ His biggest trouble was with rote memorization, especially of texts.”

  Rebecca remembered a story about Einstein and his father, when he was about four or five years old. Albert had been ill, so his father gave him a compass. Einstein could still remember his astonishment, sixty years later when he told the story, when he first saw the compass needle in its glass box. Sealed under glass, it was isolated and untouchable and yet it was irresistibly attracted by an invisible force that moved it to the north. It was a discovery that changed his life, or at least his conception of it. He was a genius!

  “It’s thanks to his mother that he turned out as well as he did,” Minnie interrupted. “His father was against Albert embarking on a long course of study, just like me with my boys. He would have preferred to see him go into electrical engineering. But a mother’s will always prevails, particularly when she’s made an idea her hobby horse. Don’t forget that Albert Einstein had a habit of repeating under his breath the same words he had just said. That would sound very strange indeed. Can you imagine?”

  Minnie did an imitation of what Einstein would have sounded like, which provoked wild laughter all around. Satisfied that she could still win over a crowd, she stood up and adjusted her corset.

  “It’s unbelievable how much I love to laugh,” she said. “Good thing for me I wasn’t Albert Einstein’s mother. It would have been a disaster, I’m sure; I can’t vouch for his talents as an actor or even his sense of humor, even though his own mother assures us he was hilarious.”

  During this lengthy exchange about Albert Einstein, Rebecca wondered if his mother was somewhere and if she was going to suddenly appear in the flesh, so to speak. To prepare herself, she searched her memory for anything she knew about Einstein’s parents. Nothing, except that they had made a fortune as grain merchants and had even been licensed to sell corn to the Württembergs: The royal family, no less.

  “You’re a walking encyclopedia!” Minnie marveled.

  “Let’s go to the library. I want to look up a few things,” Rebecca said. To her surprise and pleasure, all five women followed her. She was one of them now!

  To hide her emotion, she quickly looked up the entry for Pauline Einstein: 1858–1920.

  “Just seven years difference between the two of us,” Minnie Marx smiled.

  “Both Germans too.”

  “We have a lot in common,” she grumbled.

  Rebecca paused, expecting Minnie to say more as she typically did when contradicted, but she was silent. Rebecca was impressed once more by Minnie’s uncompromising character. She couldn’t help asking:

  “Won’t Einstein’s mother join us, or will she keep to herself like Woody Allen’s? I still don’t understand this place at all.”

  “Take my advice: Don’t ask too many questions,” Amalia replied.

  “Shall we go somewhere where there’s a little more light?” Minnie suggested.

  Back in the living room, as Louise Cohen was discreetly leaving, Rebecca stretched out on a soft sofa since Minnie was starting to tell Einstein’s life. “When Hermann and his brother Jack emigrated to Milan with their wives and children, they left Albert in Munich so he could finish his year at the Gymnasium. He was fifteen at the time. But when it became apparent that he was as hated by his classmates as he was by his professors, his mother sent for him to join them in Italy. This meant the end of his formal schooling, of course. However, his math teacher had written a letter attesting that he had a university level of knowledge and capabilities in math. So, after a year off, he took the exam to enter the Polytechnicum in Zurich to study civil engineering. He failed it . . .

  “But he passed his physics and math exams brilliantly, leading the director of the university to personally counsel him to return to school in Aargau and earn his diploma there first,” Jeanne interjected. “By then, he had already wondered what a light wave looks like. What fifteen year old asks himself such a question?”

  “I’m guessing he passed the entrance exam the second time for the Polytechnicum,” Rebecca wondered out loud.

  “Yes, thanks to Pauline, who never stopped believing in his extraordinary potential,” Minnie reminded everyone.

  “Either that or he was born a natural genius,” Rebecca replied.

  Minnie Marx yawned. She had a quick wit and was easily bored, unlike Jeanne Proust and Amalia Freud, who never tired of talking about their sons.

  “Shall we play a game?” Minnie asked.

  “What kind?” Rebecca wanted to know.

  “Let’s play ‘The Most Successful Son’ because I have a feeling I’m going to win it today. After all, didn’t the Marx Brothers bring out thirteen movie
s in twenty years, make a fortune and lose it all, while their fame never waned?”

  “Who in the world gives you the right to declare yourself a winner? Where’s the game in that case?” said an exasperated Mina.

  “Go ahead then,” Minnie challenged her, sounding like a referee in a boxing match. “Your turn!”

  “Romain won the Goncourt book prize twice,” Mina shot back. “The first for The Roots of Heaven in 1956 and the second for The Life Before Us in 1975. He would have easily been elected to the Académie Française, but he didn’t put forward his candidacy.”

  “Yes, but he cheated!” Jeanne Proust exclaimed. “He published the second book under a pen name, Émile Ajar, because you can’t win the Goncourt twice. Marcel won it by six votes, beating Roland Dorgelès by four votes. He was also decorated with the Legion of Honor in 1919.”

  “Marcel was incredibly talented, I’ll give you that,” Mina conceded, “But he was only a writer. My son, on the other hand, was a Companion of the Liberation before he began in the French diplomatic service, which sent him to Bulgaria, Switzerland, Bolivia and New York, where he worked for the United Nations from 1952 to 1954, and then Los Angeles, where he was the French Consul General from 1957 to 1961, when he finally retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

  “Citing dates doesn’t make him more important,” Jeanne chided. “Romain Gary was an important man, and you certainly did well for yourselves but look where it got you!”

  That was the final straw for Mina: Jeanne was wicked to have alluded to Romain’s suicide. Pale and haggard, she was preparing to leave when Louise Cohen rushed in.

  “Don’t tell me I missed a round of ‘The Most Successful Son!’”

  “You’re just in time,” Jeanne said, patting a few loose hairs back into her chignon.

  “The Marx Brothers were the most influential!” Minnie asserted, returning to the attack. “I only have to remind you of a few of Groucho’s famous lines; they’re common parlance now. For example: ‘I must admit, I was born at an early age.’ Or, ‘Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.’ Or, ‘I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.’ Remember this one? ‘Why should I care about posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?’ But my favorite is this one: ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it.’ I wonder actually if I didn’t come up with that one myself.”