Jewish Mothers Never Die

by Natalie David-Weill

  Rather than respond to Pauline and defend Nathan, Rebecca decided to find out more about Albert Cohen’s adventures in love.

  The air was cooler than they expected when they went into the garden. It was laid out in a square surrounded by crenellated walls, and all four seasons were represented: to the north were hardy shrubs and grasses, to the south there was a profusion of fruit trees, to the east, the ground was covered with autumn leaves, to the west, there were spring roses. In the middle was a labyrinth made of plants and flowers, herbs and greenery. It reminded Rebecca of the Roman de la Rose, where the rose symbolizes the poet’s beloved, whose affections he must earn by completing an arduous apprenticeship in the ways of love.

  There were cushions scattered on the freshly cut lawn. Rebecca sat among the others in a circle.

  “We can’t choose who our sons are going to fall in love with,” Rebecca began. “There are limits to what a mother can do. On this subject at least.”

  “Albert did as he pleased,” Louise Cohen replied. “His first wife, Elisabeth Brocher, was the daughter of a Protestant pastor. She died of lymphoma. We enjoyed each other, but I tried to stay out of her affairs, even when she lived with me. I never spoke of Albert with her. It seemed improper.”

  “How many times did he marry?”

  “Three. After Elisabeth, there was Marianne Gross, then Bella Berkovitch. She was the only one of his wives who was Jewish. He married her after I died, and he found happiness, finally, with her. He said in the last interview he ever gave: ‘I’m eighty-five years old and I’m going to die one of these days. But I’m happy to love my wife in my old age and to be loved by her in my old age, and this love that is given and received is all that matters to me.’ He loved Bella, and he dedicated Belle du Seigneur to her.”

  In the great romances of the Middle Ages, the courtly lover is set the task of winning his lady through a display of his virtues, of which love is the most supreme. Once smitten, a knight and his lady never worried about what their parents would think!

  You never heard what Lancelot’s mother thought about Guenièvre his beloved!

  Mina admitted she had tried to influence Romain’s choice of women. She believed he had found the perfect one: Ilona, whom he wrote about in Promise at Dawn.

  “We understood each other. We were from the same part of the world. Well, not far, at least. She was Hungarian, Jewish, cultivated, comfortably well-off. Four years older than Romain, he was head over heels and infinitely more besotted than she was. So just before she was to go home to her parents for Christmas, he asked her to marry him. She never returned. Worse still, he lost all trace of her, until 1960, when he found out she had gone mad and had been interned in a psychiatric hospital all those years.”

  “He was lucky she left him,” Rebecca said.

  “Maybe so, but he became a womanizer from that day on.”

  “Isn’t that what you loved about him, that he was a lady killer?”

  “Obviously. Having many women is the mark of a successful man. Romain himself wrote that it goes hand in hand with ‘official honors, decorations, uniforms, champagne, embassy receptions . . .’ He was right of course.”

  “My boys had more lovers than I could count, Chico in particular,” Minnie Marx interjected. “I didn’t have anything to do with it: just by smiling, the girls swooned. He was a compulsive ladies’ man, and it made Groucho jealous.”

  “He must have been the shy type.”

  “The title of Groucho’s autobiography gives you an idea of how he thought about himself: Memoirs of a Mangy Lover. I don’t think he was ever happy in love, but it wasn’t for fault of trying: he married three times.”

  “What were his wives like?”

  “I never criticized them, but I preferred to see them as little as possible.”

  “Divide and conquer: was that the strategy for both of you?” Rebecca dared to ask Mina and Minnie. “That way, you never lose your son to another woman; you’re still the only woman who really matters to him.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mina replied with complete insincerity.

  “Nor do I,” Minnie declared. “All I ever wanted from my sons were grandchildren.”

  “Typical. So you were just like Alex Portnoy’s parents?”

  Rebecca, too, was finding Philip Roth’s book to be a useful reference. Unable to get out from under his parents’ watchful eye, trapped between his hysterical, castrating mother on the one hand and his repressed and literally blocked up father, Roth’s young protagonist waits for the chance to leave his neurotic family behind and see the world, or another part of it than New Jersey, where everyone looks like everyone else. He goes in search of non-Jewish women and non-kosher food, masturbates every chance he gets and struggles to find his much sought for freedom. One of his family’s chief complaints is his single status. How selfish not to want to make such wonderful parents happy by getting married and giving them grandchildren! Hadn’t they done everything for him? Why didn’t he have his sights on a serious young lady? That’s what his father always wants to know. After all, he wouldn’t live forever . . . and he’d like to get to know his grandchildren before it’s too late.

  “Did you lay a guilt trip like that on your sons, too?”

  “Maybe,” Minnie laughed. “If I did, though, my attempts were never as cliched as that.”

  What could be more egocentric than wanting grandchildren and to care about passing on a family name? It would be even worse if they couldn’t stand their daughters-in-law, those unbearable rivals for their sons’ attention . . .

  “It must have been difficult for you to imagine them happy with their wives and far from your grasp,” Rebecca ventured.

  “Not in the least!” Mina exclaimed. “We were irreplaceable!”

  There is no substitute for a mother, and certainly not a mother such as these; Rebecca ought to have known that. Grumbling and grouching about the cramps in their legs from sitting cross-legged in the grass, they got to their feet. Why were they talking about their children leaving the nest, anyway? Any subject was better than that. They found a new spot to rest themselves, under an arbor in the summer quadrant of the garden. A bower of roses provided shade from the sun and was reflected in turn by a pool of water lilies that looked straight out of a Monet painting.

  “Our sons never really went away,” Minnie began.

  “How could they? Only a mother can know her son’s every desire,” Mina commented. “She’s the only one who can interpret his moods and support him, whatever state he is in. She loves him unconditionally. What’s wrong with that?”

  “It makes bad habits,” Rebecca answered, recalling Gary. “He makes it clear that his mother’s love ruined his romantic relationships: ‘You believe that you have it in you to be loved, that it is your due, that it will always be there around you, that it can always be found again, that the world owes it to you, and you keep looking, thirsting, summoning.’ But it’s impossible. ‘You spend your days waiting for something you have already had and will never have again.’”

  “Is that a criticism, do you think?” Mina asked, worried all of a sudden.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jeanne Proust cried. “Could you have acted any differently? You were in an impossible situation, which you met heroically. Were you supposed to stop yourself from loving your son, on top of everything else? Would he have been happier if you had?”

  “I don’t know,” Mina said soberly.

  “This is ridiculous, in any case,” Jeanne said with an offended air. “How could we ever stop loving our sons?”

  Mina was wearing a stunned look; the idea that she might have been a harmful influence on her son was utterly shocking.

  “Don’t believe for a minute that you sabotaged his love life,” Rebecca told her, in all sincerity. “He adored you; you were the center of his attention. He fulfilled your wish for him to become a writer and an ambassador; he longed for your approval. In Lady L, when the protagoni
st is admiring the luxurious apartment where he is living, he says: ‘If my mother could see me now!’ That says it all.”

  “If you had been alive when he married Lesley, would you have approved of her?” Jeanne wanted to know.

  “Romain fell in love with her independence, her sophistication and her haughty manner. She was forty years old; he was only thirty. But their marriage was ill-fated because it rested on a misunderstanding; she was fascinated by Russia and he was fascinated by France. Both of them were in love with a country that only existed in their imaginations, but it was a different country for each of them. Lesley’s Russia was a place of dangerous passions, romantic peasants, sad music, dark tapestries, tragic literature and noble barons. It was nothing like the Russia that Romain fled; the pogroms and poverty he knew were hardly romantic. She thought she was marrying a Russian, but Romain wanted nothing more than to be French. His France was like a heroic, elegant, proud, and beautiful woman. It intimidated an Englishwoman like Lesley. Once she realized that, she became little more than a substitute mother, though not as firm as I was. She educated him, taught him good manners so he could mingle in her world of high society, but she should never have given him so much freedom.”

  “Maybe it was her own freedom that concerned her. She was hardly going to become a housewife at forty.”

  “She certainly never expected him to have so many mistresses.”

  “Since she had her own lovers, why did they separate? They led an exciting life between London, Paris, Sofia and Los Angeles.”

  “Jean Seberg broke that all up. Romain left the ‘mother’ for the ‘daughter.’”

  It was growing darker as the sun set in the sky, but the garden began to glow as lanterns and projectors threw their light upon thickets and climbing ivy and statues.

  “Wasn’t Albert Cohen’s first love also an older woman, like Romain’s?”

  “Amélie Costa was twenty-six, eleven years older than Albert,” Louise Cohen confirmed. “She was a lovely singer who knew how to take care of him. Albert was young and proud to have won her; he liked to show her off to his friends when she picked him up from school in a horse-drawn carriage.”

  “I thought she was a Hungarian countess?” Rebecca said.

  “Oh no! You must be thinking of Béla Fornszek. That was a more serious relationship, and she was older than him too. She was thirty-five when she fell in love with Albert, who was only twenty at the time. He was more like a son than a lover to her and that’s how she treated him. She helped him publish his first essays and she introduced him to influential people.”

  “Just like Romain and Lesley!” Mina was thrilled with the similarity.

  Louise began to pace up and down, lost in thought. She had something to say but she was mulling it over. Minnie, Mina, Rebecca, Amalia and Jeanne exchanged silent glances, waiting for her to speak. Louise Cohen sighed deeply.

  “If our sons—all of them—were attracted to older women, isn’t it our fault? Either they loved us too much or too little; that’s what I was wondering. You couldn’t say they lacked maternal love!”

  “Certainly not!” Mina exclaimed with a tremor in her voice.

  Rebecca didn’t dare speak, lest she be banned forever from their company. Her theory (she always had one) was that these women never allowed their sons the freedom they needed to become adults. Instead, they were forever seeking their mothers’ loving glances: that mirror that always told them they were wonderful. An older woman who was protective, asexual and faithful could give them that. Nothing like the overtly carnal monsters that sickened Solal, who was happy to have an excuse to avoid their company. But illness was only a respite. As soon as he was better, “the life of love” would start again and “the priestess of the swelling jaw muscles would oust the loving mother. Farewell herbal infusions, goodbye lovely poultices!’”

  “Freud never fell for an older woman,” Rebecca observed.

  “That’s what you think!” Amalia shot back. “When Sigi was only sixteen, we sent him to rest in Freiberg, where he was born, but there he fell in love with Gisela Fluss’s mother, though he never admitted it. He wanted a mother figure, just like Albert Cohen and Romain Gary.”

  “But was she ever his lover?”

  “It doesn’t matter if she was,” Pauline replied. “The main thing is that he hid his feelings for Eleanor, all the while pretending he was in love with her daughter, who was sixteen, like him. Eleanor was an intellectual and my complete opposite. I was just a housewife and he was ashamed of me. I realized that.”

  “Why are you so critical of yourself? Sigmund admired you and recognized your power. He tells the story of how, when he was six years old, you explained to him, rubbing your palms together as if you were making knödels so that the dry skin of your hands flaked off, that man came from the dust of the earth and would return to that state. It was a lesson he never forgot.”

  “Perhaps, but I don’t think I was the mother he would have liked me to be. He was always falling under the influence of women who were all very different from me.”

  “Marcel never replaced me, though he wasn’t as complicated as Sigmund.”

  “More introverted, though,” Amalia retorted.

  “Are you insinuating something about his homosexuality?” Jeanne asked, feeling vulnerable again.

  “No, I was referring to his shyness and his oversensitiveness. His sexual preferences are common knowledge; you shouldn’t take offense.”

  “That’s not what pains me, but rather the fact that my little wolf was never happy in love. Marcel knew he would have to leave me if he were ever in love. But that meant risking rejection, and that was impossible for him; it was too frightening. He preferred to stay close to me. He even says in his famous questionnaire that the worst thing that could have happened to him would have been not knowing me.”

  Amalia Freud was disgusted by Jeanne’s contrived concern:

  “You made it impossible for Marcel to live apart from you. He was incapable of a romantic relationship because of that. He didn’t dare risk your displeasure by showing that he could be anyone other than the person you wanted him to be.”

  “I can’t understand a single word of your nonsense,” Jeanne shot back, furious. “I don’t care if you think I was a bad mother; you wouldn’t be the only one here. But if you’re implying that I was responsible for his homosexuality, say it outright. The ‘race of aunts’ he writes about stretches far and wide. And I’m not referring only to Marcel’s fiction, with Vaugoubert, Jupien and Morel, the Prince of Foix, everyone who gravitates around Charlus, Nissim Bernard, the Prince of Guermantes, Saint-Loup . . . He also explores lesbianism at length: Albertine and the girls at Balbec. And how can a mother be held accountable if her child is a homosexual? It’s not her fault.”

  “It seems to me you hide behind what he wrote, and yet you were constantly watching over him, never leaving him any freedom.”

  “He had me; what else did he need?”

  Pauline Einstein was listening from a distant corner of the garden. After having been alone for so long, she shunned group gatherings. Rebecca went to keep her company.

  “Albert didn’t have as many problems as the others, and it wasn’t just because he was absorbed by his mathematical equations,” she said. “He knew how lucky he was and never subscribed to the negative perception of love that our friends’ sons over there shared.”

  Seeing Rebecca’s astonishment, she explained:

  “Proust and Cohen were as tortured by love as by their own pessimism. They believed no more in love than in marriage or even friendship for that matter.”

  Rebecca recalled certain passages in Remembrance of Things Past, where love is a form of torture, swinging wildly between extremes of frustration and suffering. The examples are as numerous as they are unfortunate. Swann is consumed by jealousy over Odette, and he speaks of his love as of an illness that must be cured, before admitting finally that he threw his life away for a girl who wasn’t even his
type. He changed his tastes, his friends, his habits, for her: was it worth it? Saint-Loup lies to Gilberte, though he loves her, and the Narrator loses his head trying to keep Albertine to himself. The only happy lovers are the Marquess de Villeparisis and the Marquis de Norpois, but he has much less to say about them. “I must choose, either to cease from suffering, or to cease from loving,” Proust writes.

  One by one, the others joined them. A candlelit table awaited the assembled party for dinner. The mood was romantic, as if a love potion had been diffused in the air. Louise Cohen wanted to discuss Belle du Seigneur, and no one saw any reason to stop her.

  “Just like his author, Solal tried to keep the flame of passion alive. True love, the kind that grows and lasts, is a contradiction in terms. My son said so: ‘Their words of love had become good manners, a polite ritual, gliding over the linoleum of habit.’ He calls Adrien Deume the ‘stomach-churner’ in Belle du Seigneur. He didn’t have very high-flown ideas about love, you’re right about that, Pauline.”

  “I don’t agree,” Jeanne said. “He was skeptical about marriage but he enjoys describing the blazing passion that consumes Solal and Ariane.”

  “It all finishes badly for them in the end, since they commit a double suicide,” Louise remembered regretfully. “The ‘sublime delirium’ they feel in the beginning becomes a ‘prison of love.’ Their first meetings, the desire, the waiting, the exaltation: none of that lasts. Solal reveals to Ariane his ten-step plan to seduce her, and still she falls in love with him, just as he had predicted and planned. It’s a disaster: he has to keep it exciting, make her jealous, invent problems so as not to succumb to his boredom.”

  “Cohen describes love marvelously, and no one can deny it,” Jeanne countered with immense conviction.

  For the first time, Jeanne was taking the side of someone other than Marcel. Did she have a romantic streak, Rebecca wondered? She had held love up as the most sublime sentiment, her voice filling with emotion, and in her agitation, she creased and re-creased the folds in her dress.