I had very different ideas about the need for women to go husband hunting when they were still so young.
“I don’t plan to marry till I am at least thirty,” I airily announced one Saturday afternoon in the women’s section to no one in particular.
“Then you will die an old maid,” Estrella, my friend Gracie’s aunt, shot back.
Edgy, fun-loving Estrella was from Mexico, where a large contingent of Syrian Jews had settled, and she had an acid tongue.
“Thirty is a woman’s most beautiful age,” I replied, echoing a line that my older sister, still unmarried, had been spouting of late.
“See who will marry you when you are thirty,” Estrella sniped as the rest of the women burst out laughing. Although their reaction stung, they weren’t being hostile or malicious. On the contrary, most were sweet, traditional women, waging a hopeless battle to hold on to the ways of their old cultures in the wilderness of New York.
A hauntingly pretty woman with large dark almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones turned around and told me quietly, matter-of-factly, as if she were speaking to another adult: “I don’t think you will feel that way in a few years. I think that you’re wrong.”
I was startled into silence. The woman we knew only as the Great Beauty wasn’t a regular in our congregation, yet here she was chiming in to the group discussion. She made her point thoughtfully, while examining me closely, as if trying to figure out when my pretty little-girl face would grasp the enormity of growing older. I was so surprised she was even talking to me that I merely nodded meekly, my usual bravado gone.
I experienced Mrs. Menachem very differently; whatever she said made me bristle.
I am not sure exactly when it all began, but from my earliest days at the Shield of Young David, Mrs. Menachem seemed to take a dislike to me. She would make me the target of her taunts and admonitions. Originally from Israel, she was a devout woman who covered her head, which was more the tradition of Eastern European Jews. She favored stiff wigs that made her stand out from the other women who wore at most a flimsy scarf or small lace kerchief on their hair, in the tradition of the Middle East where the pursuit of modesty was a theoretical exercise.
Oddly, she and my mom enjoyed a perfectly amicable relationship. They rather liked each other. Mom viewed her as a formidable woman who was trying to anchor us in this post-Cairo exile of ours where there were few standards and we all felt unmoored. And I am sure that Mrs. Menachem felt sorry for my mother and saw her as sweet and refined, overwhelmed by having to raise a difficult daughter in rough, uncertain terrain.
Mrs. Menachem launched a battle to persuade Mom and the other mothers to enroll us at the House of Jacob Academy. Madame Marie, desperate to find a way to tame her rebellious daughter, dispatched Celia in a uniform to Borough Park to mend her ways. In my case, Mrs. Menachem made an even more impassioned plea. Only at Beis Yaacov—the House of Jacob—she told my mother, with its single-minded focus on discipline and faith, did I have a chance of escaping the path I seemed so intent on pursuing, the path of an assimilated young woman growing up in an America even Americans found troubling and bewildering.
Assimilation—such a natural process for most new immigrants seeking to make their way—was anathema to my community, to be avoided at all costs. Mrs. Menachem, the schools she advocated, and, of course, my synagogue were all trying to create safe harbors, to keep us shielded from the temptations of this alluring culture beyond.
My mother was sorely tempted. Mrs. Menachem arranged an interview with the principal. He looked me up and down, clearly disapproving of my casual appearance in a short blue-and-white knit dress, then sighed and agreed to admit me: I was so clearly a lost soul and he had been briefed about my dire situation by Mrs. Menachem.
There was a catch. The students at the House of Jacob studied Hebrew as intensively as English. Since I only had a slight knowledge of the language by their standards, I would have to take Hebrew classes with the kindergarten students.
I balked to no avail. Off I went to the House of Jacob to attend classes with pupils several years my junior.
I lasted five days. By then my sister had staged an intervention. She warned Mom that if she let me continue at the House of Jacob, I would be married and wearing a wig by the time I turned eighteen. My mother found that sobering. She had no desire to see me rushed to the altar at an early age.
My father stayed out of L’Affaire de la Yeshiva. I am sure he would have loved to see me enrolled in a Jewish parochial school and immersed in religious studies. But he didn’t weigh in very much on my upbringing anymore. Since we’d arrived in America he had suffered a drastic loss of confidence. He had been a prosperous, aggressive businessman in Cairo, a lover of fine restaurants and white sharkskin suits. But here in New York, unable to find meaningful work, he had become a tie salesman, wandering the streets and subway stations selling imitation silk ties. He barely scratched out a living, and in his humbled state, he became, as it were, mute. He spent more and more time at the synagogue down the block, the Congregation of Love and Friendship. He deferred to Mom on most questions about my upbringing, including my education.
The following week I was back at PS 205, my public school around the corner.
From then on, Mrs. Menachem regarded me as a lost cause and, worse, dangerous. She was determined to stop me from spreading my subversive ideas to other girls and began to quietly approach mothers of my friends.
She’d contact them during the week to urge them to keep their children away from me. I was shocked and distraught when I learned of the phone calls. I realized that if she could, Mrs. Menachem would destroy all my friendships.
But the women behind the divider were a loving bunch, each one a surrogate mother. They shook their heads at my antics and seemed mostly amused by my epic battles with Mrs. Menachem. I offered a welcome diversion from Rabbi Ruben’s solemn speeches and the honeyed chants of the cantor.
They also liked me. In a congregation of foreigners, she was the foreign one, the woman who insisted on covering her hair. They simply ignored her warnings and let their daughters play with me, and I was more popular than ever.
I stuck close to Gladys, who loved to cook, to eat, and to feed me. I had noticed her crying during the services—we all did—but no one, not even Mom, was willing to explain to me why she was so often distraught. Finally I persuaded one of the women behind the divider to enlighten me.
Gladys, married to a quiet man named Saul who was some years older than her, hadn’t been able to have a child. She was completely grief-stricken. If she could produce such magnificent kiddush meals, enough to feed an entire congregation, why couldn’t she produce a small infant? Unable to find a satisfactory answer, she wept, prayed passionately for a miracle, and cooked for us abundantly.
We learned to expect the most grandiose meals precisely when Gladys seemed the saddest and had no recourse but to flee sobbing into the kitchen. I suppose that she longed so much for a little girl of her own that she adopted me and tried to shield me from Mrs. Menachem, and to fatten me up with bowls of all-American tuna fish.
I had been in love with Maurice since I’d first arrived at the Shield of Young David and glimpsed him beyond the divider. I lived for Saturday morning when I would enter the women’s section and find him standing there, quietly praying in his corner on the other side of the wooden barrier. He was to me the epitome of style—manhood in a dark red blazer—though he never spoke to me, never so much as acknowledged me.
The rest of my week—school, teachers, my classes, my friends—seemed vague and unimportant in comparison.
Nothing mattered as much as that moment when I would be reunited with him, with only that slender partition between us.
The intensity of my feelings, the fact that I could have a full-blown crush on this older boy and think of little else but him, would surely have taken aback the adults around me had I ever confided the full extent of my yearning. They would have been troubled by the unrem
itting nature of my attraction, the fact that I’d entertained a rich fantasy life and had spun a romantic web around this boy since I was eight years old.
Maurice was Marlene’s younger brother, and the older brother of my closest friend behind the divider, Diana. I didn’t breathe a word about my feelings to either, at least not at first. In Marlene’s case, I suspected that she and the other grown-ups who were always hovering near us would be dismissive, that they’d laugh at me like Estrella, and see this as another fanciful ploy of mine to get attention.
Could a little girl fall in love? Was a child capable of great passion?
Hard as I tried, I could never get Maurice to notice me. Perhaps the wooden separation really worked: I didn’t receive more than a brief, absentminded nod—if that—a fleeting recognition that I was there Saturday after Saturday.
Maurice had a close friend, Joseph Hannon, who was also handsome and reserved. The two boys sat near each other, and I could see them occasionally speaking quietly together. How I envied their bond. When I went to his sisters’ house Saturday afternoons, I would find the two of them reunited, chatting or shooting pool at the small pool table Maurice had purchased. I longed to be asked to play, or at least join in their conversations. But Maurice, whether at synagogue or in his own home, seemed to inhabit his own world, a world that excluded pretty much everyone except Joseph Hannon.
I redoubled my efforts to woo him. Maurice of the green eyes and the gold-buttoned blazer had to fall in love with me. He had to like me because I would outshine all the girls behind the divider—do better in school, wear more striking outfits, be as fearless and accomplished as Mrs. Emma Peel. I thought that it was enough to be an agent extraordinary, to be the Avenger of Sixty-Sixth Street, to capture his heart.
I didn’t understand yet that passion is fickle, that it is not possible to earn someone’s affection, that love is not a meritocracy.
I was nine years old, on the verge of turning ten. Whenever I needed an infusion of courage, I repeated the Avengers’ mantra out loud: Extraordinary crimes against the people and the state have to be avenged by agents extraordinary…
As little girls we had one enormous advantage. Adults tended to give us the benefit of the doubt, believing we were innocent and without guile. We weren’t, of course—we were filled with dark thoughts and tormented by our own demons and obsessions that were every bit as terrifying as those that plagued our elders.
I often left my mother’s side to huddle with my friends. She didn’t really mind, but she always noticed when I was more restless than usual. “Loulou, reste ici près de moi,” she’d say. Loulou, please sit still beside me.
But she couldn’t dictate what I did.
Not here, not at the Shield of Young David. Though we enjoyed some privacy at the back of the women’s section, I preferred retreating to the courtyard downstairs where we could play—and talk—in peace, without fear of being overheard by our mothers or by Mrs. Menachem, or chided by the men for making too much noise.
The concrete yard was the center of our universe. It was the common ground where four separate houses of worship, situated on two parallel streets, converged. The Congregation of Love and Friendship, where the newly arrived Egyptian immigrants, including Dad, prayed, was located on Sixty-Sixth Street, but had a back door that led to the courtyard. Its members, shy and poorly dressed, often strolled outside for some fresh air, as their little synagogue, housed in a two-family home, was overflowing with new arrivals. Next door was the Synagogue Without a Name, where the Eastern European Jews gathered in a grand majestic building. We’d heard that men and women regularly sat and prayed side by side—an arrangement that sounded both tantalizing and shocking.
But I never dared to go in to see for myself.
The courtyard also served the worshippers at the Big Shul next door to us, on Sixty-Seventh Street. That was the temple of the Syrian dowagers, an imposing building that dated back to the 1920s, with stained-glass windows and a domed ceiling painted with an azure sky. I occasionally wandered into the Big Shul simply to stare at its painted sky as well as at the rich older women in their mink stoles and gold bangle bracelets who sat in the balcony.
Most of the congregants at the Big Shul were from Aleppo, once the capital of Levantine Jewry. Syrian Jews had been dispersed all over the world, and wherever they went they made great fortunes and built large synagogues. The Big Shul was still thriving in the 1960s, though many of its members had moved away. Applying the lessons they’d learned in the Aleppo souk to the bargain stores and electronic shops they opened in New York, they made money and purchased imposing homes near Ocean Parkway ten minutes away. Those who stayed behind included many elderly who came faithfully week after week, the men in their impeccable suits, the women with their bracelets. It was said you could tell a Syrian woman anywhere in the world by the rows of gold bangles on her left arm.
The Shield of Young David was a newer, scrappier congregation, and none of the women wore mink. It drew Jews from all parts of the Arab world—Moroccans, like Madame Marie and her family; Yemenite Jews, including our cantor; some younger Syrian Jews, like Marlene and her siblings; a sprinkling of Turkish Jews; and a small Cairo contingent.
We were all Arab Jews, a culture most Americans found puzzling and that even other Jews viewed with suspicion. We had no choice but to band together, and seek comfort and protection among one another, shunning the world outside.
The courtyard was usually vacant, a kind of no-man’s-land. But I loved it and considered it as my own secret garden, albeit one without any trees or shrubbery, only a vast expanse of gray cement, where I could wander or have quiet conversations with select friends. But during holidays, when services could stretch from morning until evening without a break, worshippers from all four synagogues would pour out for fresh air and linger chatting in the courtyard and it became a social epicenter.
The disparate congregations never really mixed or mingled. It was as if we were prisoners of where we chose to pray—the Syrian aristocrats didn’t deign to socialize with the new Egyptian immigrants, and no one ever spoke to the American Jews who attended the Synagogue Without a Name. I never had a conversation or played a game in the courtyard with an Ashkenazi child.
To us, the Americans were the ones who were foreign.
Rabbi Ruben’s daughters usually kept their distance from the rest of us, but I made inroads with Miriam, the oldest, a gentle, thoughtful girl. We would exchange favorite books, and one day she lent me a thick tome she loved called Rejoice, O Youth. It was an attack on the modern world written in the form of a dialectic—an older rabbi answering the questions of his young disciple—and it challenged among various popular notions Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Rabbi Avigdor Miller, the author, argued that evolution was a sham, a cruel myth. Darwin’s theory was a “thick cloud of falsehood,” he said, a “fable.” I was riveted by the back and forth between the rabbi and his student, which cast a contemptuous eye on so much I was learning in school about prehistoric men and fossils and the like.
“What about the fossils, which the Evolutionist claims to be the remains of prehistoric men?” the student asks.
“There are none… There are none whatsoever,” the rabbi tells him.
It was all fine and good to believe men were descended from apes, but much of Darwin’s theory rested on the “missing link,” Rabbi Miller contended, the notion that there had been a creature who was literally both man and ape. But “Not a single one of these legendary ‘Missing links’ has ever been found,” so where was the link, he kept asking.
I found Rabbi Miller’s arguments stirring and persuasive, possibly more persuasive than what I was being taught about evolution in school. And so in the same way that at temple I questioned the need for a woman to get married, in school, I began challenging the sacrosanct theory of evolution.
I was being true to my contrarian nature, I suppose, when I raised my hand in class and demanded to know, “Where
is the missing link?” I even argued with my teachers. In this battle for my soul that was waged behind the divider, this epic war to keep me and the other little girls safely shielded from the seductions of modern life, my assault on Darwin was unquestionably a breakthrough for the women of the Shield of Young David. While Mrs. Ruben worried about the toxic influence I could have on her daughters, the opposite was turning out to be true. I wasn’t corrupting Miriam or her sisters—they were the ones who were prevailing, who were persuading me of the primacy of their ideas, at least when it came to Rabbi Avigdor Miller and his withering take on Darwin and the theory of evolution and the elusive missing link.
· 7 ·
Passion Play on Sixty-Seventh Street
I was already known as a drama queen; now, I was going to be a star.
The women’s section of the Shield of Young David was putting on a show, and I had landed a plum role.
At least, it seemed like a plum.
“Who is that dog of a dog who dares not bow down to me?” I thundered, standing in front of the mirror at home. I repeated the line again and again, emphasizing different words and trying hard to appear haughty and ruthless as I marched up and down the house. “Who is that dog of a dog who dares not bow down to me?”
We were reenacting the biblical story of Purim and I had been picked to play Haman ha Rashah—Haman the Evil One—the adviser to the king of Persia who decrees the murder of all the Jews of the kingdom, but finds himself thwarted and outwitted by the beautiful Queen Esther. In the last scene, I was to be marched off to the gallows, my head bowed in shame.
The Arrogant Years Page 10
