Jewish Mothers Never Die

by Natalie David-Weill

  “You describe Cohen as a cynic when, in fact, he was an idealist. I was deeply moved by the beginning of Belle du Seigneur. I’ve read it a dozen times, and it’s still the most beautiful declaration of love I know. He has won his beloved Ariane and he wants to live a love that is pure and unique and absolute. So he disguises himself as an old, poor, ugly and toothless Jew and he demands her to love him. He believes in her, he does everything in his power to convince himself she will be different from other women. He carries off the subterfuge admirably and he believes for a moment that she loves him too because she says she will kiss him, but she throws a glass at him instead.”

  “Yes, and he is disappointed to learn that two teeth are all that stand between him and the great love he idealizes,” Rebecca agreed. “It seems absurd but it’s true. Should that be so surprising? I wonder. We love our children unconditionally, but we choose our men. Love doesn’t fall from the sky, no matter what Anna Karenina says to justify her affair with Vronsky. She insists her love is God-given, that they were meant for each other, that it was her destiny to cheat on her husband. Albert Cohen, on the other hand, knows that if Vronsky had been ugly or a man of lesser rank, she would have never looked his way. Anna Karenina is no different than most women, Ariane included: only the strong and handsome will do, not the toothless old men.”

  Louise Cohen was mesmerized by the vigor of their discussion and the conviction with which each of them argued her point. She followed the exchange of volleys between Jeanne and Rebecca as if she were watching a tennis match. Minnie cut their debate short:

  “Groucho was a realist; he held no illusions about love. One of his favorite stories goes like this: a woman tells him she loves him, so he asks her if she would feel the same if he were poor, to which she replies, ‘I would, but I wouldn’t tell you.’”

  In the heat of their conversation, they emptied glass after glass drinking too much.

  “Look at Woody Allen’s movies,” Rebecca said. “They always rest on a communication problem between two lovers. Everything is complicated: boredom, sex, self-esteem. By definition, a relationship is unhappy and deceitful.”

  There is a scene in Annie Hall where Alvy and Annie have just returned to Annie’s apartment after a tennis match and are standing on the balcony. Subtitles appear, revealing what they are thinking,

  as opposed to what they are saying. Alvy is talking about all the photos on the walls of the apartment but he can’t stop wondering what Annie looks like naked. Annie is telling him about her photography classes but is ashamed to hear herself talk: An imbecile capable of only the most banal statements, she thinks. Alvy’s not listening to a word, though, because he has already fallen for her. Being in love means never having to listen to each other!

  “Do you know that Woody Allen joke?” Minnie Marx asked. “A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, ‘Doctor, my brother is crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken.’ The doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you get him institutionalized?’ ‘I would,’ the brother says. ‘But I need the eggs.’ Woody tells the joke to describe relationships: ‘They’re irrational and crazy and absurd, but we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.’”

  Rebecca was daydreaming. Even if she never met Nettie, she would always have the same image of Woody Allen: funny and pessimistic at the same time. Her opinion of Freud, Einstein, Proust and the others had evolved, however, since she met their mother.

  Louise Cohen continued to drink, but the alcohol wasn’t improving her mood.

  “Woody Allen and Marcel Proust are pessimists, but Albert was the most unhappy person who ever lived. He was bored his entire life. Can you imagine what it’s like to need to invent stories for your wife just to create some kind of excitement? Like Sheherazade, he knew that his life was nothing if it weren’t for the tales he told. So he imagined Solal for Yvonne Imer and Belle du Seigneur for Bella, but it all started with his first wife, Elisabeth. He insisted on the seriousness of their relationship; he was her lord and she must worship him. And since he would not tolerate any fun and games from her, she stopped talking. There was nothing left for him but to take over the conversation.”

  “She let that happen?” Rebecca asked.

  “Let me read you one of her letters; she describes the awe in which she held him: ‘My master and my friend, have you really chosen me to be recreated in your image? The honor is too great, too strong for my humble self.’ She admired him unconditionally. But she could hardly do otherwise: he forbade her to have any interests that might distract her from him. Their sex life suffered, too. He says through Solal that he was ‘tired of the voracious lips and tongue of women’ and he laments about the ‘peculiar suction that glues male and female together.’ Can you write such a thing if you’ve never felt that way?”

  “You’re tough on Albert. Was he really as egomaniacal as all that?”

  “He was obsessed by the horrors of conjugal life, the toothbrushes, the flushing toilets,” Jeanne continued. “He wasn’t the only one who detested all that.”

  “He would never have had such thoughts if he had loved his wife,” Louise replied. “As for me, I can still remember how happy it made me to lie alongside my husband’s warm body and to feel our chests rising and falling in unison. Nothing was ever as soothing to me.”

  “Yes, well, a hot water bottle does the trick just as well,” Jeanne.

  Louise Cohen was changing physically before their eyes. The more she talked about her son, the more deepened the lines on her face. Dark circles appeared, and her complexion became mottled.

  “Albert Cohen was incapable of love,” she declared. “One of his mistresses, Jane Fillion, said, ‘Albert Cohen never loved anyone except Albert Cohen. But he loved that man with all his heart.’ He wasn’t capable of any sacrifice or compromise for the simple reason that no one else existed for him. His second wife said as much: ‘He denies you even the right to be a human being.’ She wore herself out submitting to his demands and then left him, finally. The people he loved had no actual substance. Like Solal says, they were ‘dream figures’ only.”

  “In fact,” Rebecca began, following a new idea that had just come to her, “Belle du Seigneur’s title is saying that the woman loved is both beautiful and belongs to her master. She has neither identity nor substance.”

  “It’s my fault that Albert was impossible to live with,” Louise lamented. “I never taught him how to get along with people. For me, he was such a priceless treasure that I used to move out of his way to leave him all the room he needed.”

  Jeanne was compulsively tidying up the remaining bottles on the table. Rebecca was helping her, but her mind was running over their conversation and the questions it had raised. To what extent were these mothers responsible for how their sons turned out? Why were they all unhappy lovers? What could explain Cohen’s tyranny, Proust’s solitude, Romain Gary’s suffering, and Woody Allen’s complexes? They all needed to be loved and reassured. They sought an image of themselves so they would not suffer. The only relationship they could tolerate was one that excluded the other, in a fusional love.

  Amalia Freud poured herself a shot of whiskey.

  “Sigi demanded constant proof of Martha’s love for him, which he always doubted, because he was wildly jealous. He was extremely fond of his wife and believed her to be more powerful than she probably was. How could he compare her to Melusine, a female spirit with total power over

  her husband? Was it because he feared she would turn him into a weak human being? Sigmund never failed to tyrannize her and, when he felt she had regained the upper hand, he no longer paid any attention to her. He made her life hell because she had to agree with him on everything. Even her own family had to be sacrificed in her all-consuming devotion to him. He didn’t just want her to criticize her mother and her brother but to stop loving them entirely. If she didn’t share absolutely everything with him, she no longer deserved to be his wife. I found a letter Sigi wrote to Martha during their en
gagement: ‘Nothing pleased me before I met you, and now that you are mine, in principle at least, my only purpose in life is to possess you completely. If I fail to do this, I hold my life to be of no value.’ In the guise of a love letter, he wrote only about himself. It’s a shame he never made the effort to see Martha as she really was: devoted, spirited, organized and loving. He didn’t know her at all.”

  Rebecca recalled that Freud spent his holidays with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, while Martha stayed at home with the children. He claimed he needed these vacations for his health. His intimacy with Minna was a source of speculation, and there exist ample descriptions of the places where they vacationed and the hotels where they stayed. Biographies of Freud usually mention that she lived with the Freuds and slept in a bedroom that adjoined the couple’s own, a fact that displeased their daughter Anna.

  “Their relationship has been quite thoroughly dissected,” Rebecca said. “But were they or were they not lovers?”

  Her question upset Amalia.

  “Those rumors were spread by Jung after he had a falling out with my son. Sigi was faithful to his wife; he had six children with her, and I can assure you that he had nothing to reproach himself for. He had lunch with me every Sunday; I would have known.”

  “He stopped having sexual relations with Martha when he was forty,” Rebecca reminded her.

  “What of it? He was depressed, and sex no longer interested him.”

  At the opposite end of the garden, Amalia Freud made herself comfortable on a rocking chair. She felt weary and alone. Rebecca and Jeanne soon joined her. They hoped Amalia would be able to tell them more about the complicated relationships Freud had had with his family; they weren’t about to let drop such a fascinating subject. Jeanne in particular wanted to know everything there was to know about Sigmund’s friendships.

  “Freud maintained very close relationships with his friends. Could this be why he stopped paying attention to his wife? He wrote two hundred and ninety-five letters to Wilhelm Fleiss over seventeen years.”

  “And to think we’ll never know if Marie Bonaparte purchased those letters,” Amalia replied, avoiding the matter of his abundant correspondence.

  “All of his friendships were intense,” Jeanne continued. “Breuer, Jung, Adler, Rank, Ferenczi: they traveled together regularly and wrote to each other daily.”

  “His letter writing began during his four-year-long engagement to Martha. After they married, he looked for other people to write to. He liked to confide his thoughts and feelings to friends in letter form; he claimed it helped him think and see his theories more clearly,” Amalia argued in his defense.

  “Martha was extremely jealous of Wilhem Fliess, with whom Sigmund had the same close relationship that he had with you. You only have to read his letters to understand the intensity of his feelings for Fliess: ‘People like you must never go away,’ he writes at one point. Another time, he thanked him for his consoling, his understanding, his encouragement at a time when he felt alone. He added: ‘You helped me grasp the meaning of life.’ That’s a declaration of love if I ever heard one, especially coming from a psychoanalyst! He is completely honest about it, admitting that his friends are more important to him than anything, calling it ‘a need I have in me, something in the feminine part of me.’ With Fliess, he shared a bisexual fantasy and argued so much on the subject that they broke off.”

  “He broke ties with all of his friends, in fact,” Rebecca remarked. “Breuer didn’t share his opinion on the importance of sexual factors, Brücke refused to accept his theories on the sexual origins of neuroses, Adler rejected the Oedipus Complex, Jung, in whom Freud saw his successor, had an affair with a patient, something Freud could not accept.”

  Amalia lost her temper:

  “Does it make you happy to discuss my golden Sigi’s latent homosexuality?”

  Their line of questioning was much too aggressive for her liking. Why must they remind her that her son was inflexible and could not tolerate the slightest difference of opinion? Why did they insist on digging up his homosexual tendencies? Ferenczi had criticized him for being too rigid during a trip to Sicily in 1910, to which Freud replied: “Part of my homosexual investment in our relationship I removed and used to develop my own ego.”

  “Martha stayed with him until she died,” Amalia added. “The only thing she ever reproached him for was for his practicing psychoanalysis, which she considered immoral. For someone as puritanical as Martha, it was worse than parading about naked.”

  “I can understand her point of view,” Jeanne said.

  Silent now, they gazed up at the sky. Had they reached a truce? None of them wished risking a falling out.

  “I think that the end of a friendship is as painful as a romantic breakup,” Jeanne observed.

  “Oh no! You aren’t going to start criticizing my son again, are you?” Amalia cried.

  “I was thinking of Marcel, who disparaged all forms of friendship. He thought they were a waste of time that took him away from his novel. Nevertheless, he needed the company of others, a weakness he detested because, as he said, friendship ‘is directed towards making us sacrifice the one real and . . . incommunicable part of ourself to a superficial self which finds—not like the other, any joy in itself, but rather a vague, sentimental attraction.’”

  “It’s true that his homosexuality complicates the matter,” Amalia added. “None of his friends are above suspicion on that score.”

  “That’s ridiculous! Everyone adored him. Some of his friends even visited him in the middle of the night. It was an honor for them.”

  And so the conversation went . . . Who would have the last word? They shot quotations from their respective sons as if they were poisoned arrows. Jeanne was the one who concluded at last:

  “A true friend never judges and is always there for you. In fact, he’s like a mother.”

  12

  Cutting Ties

  Very few people survive their mother.

  Woody Allen

  Yet, he loved her like a mother, and he hated her like a mother.

  Albert Cohen

  Coming into the world is not the same as being born.

  Romain Gary

  It was so dark in the living room that, at first, Rebecca hesitated. The blinds had been lowered and the curtains drawn as before a lengthy absence. She took a step in and discerned in the gloom the prostrate, immobile, seemingly overwhelmed figures of Amalia Freud and Jeanne Proust. Jeanne’s hands were crossed on her lap. Amalia Freud was staring at the wall in front

  of her. They sat in silence, a glacial air lingering between them. What had happened? What would happen next? Rebecca observed them, torn between her curiosity and the fear that this microcosm of women where she had finally begun to feel at ease might be under threat. She felt like someone who has just learned she has a terminal illness: on the one hand, she wanted to know everything—the recommended course of action and treatment, its length and side-effects, chances of survival, statistics and whatever information she could get her hands on. On the other hand, she wanted to remain oblivious and still believe, hoping against hope, that the diagnosis was false.

  Not knowing what to do to ease the anxious knot in her stomach, she wandered in the direction of what appeared to be a formal vestibule. There she found Pauline Einstein seated at a grand piano, playing the Aria in C minor from Bach’s Italian Concerto. The energy and enthusiasm she put into her playing was out of keeping with the melancholy tone of the piece. Deeply moved, Rebecca stood listening a long while, until Pauline noticed her.

  “I still can’t manage to play it with the right tempo, after all this time,” she said when she finished the last measure and stood up.

  Rebecca begged her to continue.

  “Would you like me to teach you how to play?” came Pauline’s reply.

  “Unfortunately, I have no talent for music.”

  “My son said the same about his skills as a cellist, yet he was a fine musici
an. Of course, I kept at him; I made him practice every day. I can’t stop feeling that music is essential. For Albert, it was vital that he have a distraction from his work.”

  “Could you be persuaded to play something light and gay for the others? They’re in a somber mood.”

  “I think you have something to do with that.”

  “What?”

  “Your questions made them realize that their behavior with their sons was excessive.”

  “They only realized that now?” Rebecca burst out laughing with relief. Pauline, however, didn’t share her comic view of the situation, and scolded her instead:

  “What do you find so amusing? No one ridiculed you when you arrived here with a heap of insecurities of your own.”

  “You’re right; it’s terribly difficult to be a mother.”

  “I’m glad you agree. You have to indulge them a little. You’ve rattled these poor women.”

  “But the difference between us is that they never doubted themselves, whereas I always considered myself to be a horrible mother. With Nathan, I felt guilty about everything I did. I was bad-tempered, demanding and impatient. Like every single mother, I had too much to do and I criticized myself for not being available enough for him. I only had time to put out all the little fires that blazed around us: Why was there never any milk in the refrigerator on Sunday nights? Why did Nathan wait until after dinner when everything was closed to tell me he needed to photocopy a paper for school? Why did he lose his new winter coat in February, just when the stores were starting to carry summer clothes? How did his feet grow so quickly? I had to check on him in bed at least fourteen times every night if I ever hoped to get a minute of sleep. Whether I told him yes or no, I was sure he was going to wind up in the therapist’s office. Just thinking about his future traumatized me. In fact, I’m rather happy I can finally rest here.”

  “You do seem different from when you first arrived: More self-confident.”

  “It’s thanks to these mothers; I feel better just seeing their determination and their optimism. I realize now that they aren’t as tough as I thought at first. I never imagined they could be hurt by anything I had to say.”