Of course, none of this mattered.
The prospect of going to Seth Low was awfully remote. I was completely caught up in Mom’s fantasy about the lycée and believed I’d never be a public school student again—I was simply going through the motions.
Seth Low did have a major draw—on that morning, I was on the lookout for the one person I knew who was a student there.
It didn’t take long for me to spot Maurice. He was on the stage with the rest of the band, hovering intently over his bass, the strange instrument I’d never heard him play, which was always shrouded in its brown cloth cover in the corner of the living room of his family’s house on Seventieth Street. The band struck up the theme to Man of La Mancha; the show was so popular in the spring of 1967 that everyone seemed to be humming or singing “The Impossible Dream.” Maurice seemed to be focusing intently as the song came to its euphoric climax, “This is my quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far…”
We were told by our hosts that each and every one of us could learn to play a musical instrument. We, too, could join the Seth Low Junior High School band. Edith didn’t seem impressed by this claim or by the rest of my description of my day at Seth Low.
She had no intention, she reminded me, of letting me attend une autre terrible école publique, yet another awful public school.
As the day of the exam neared, Mom’s lessons intensified. I practiced conjugating a jumble of verbs in a dozen tenses, one more bewildering than the next. “Loulou, le passé composé,” Mom would call out, the past tense. “Et maintenant, l’imparfait et le passé simple,” she’d say, switching to the past imperfect and the past historic. There was also the passé antérieur—the past anterior—and the conditionnel passé, the past conditional, and I couldn’t tell one past tense from the other.
Nothing stuck.
No matter how often she reviewed the tenses with me, I was always, always getting them confused.
My mother soldiered on; she wanted to leave nothing to chance. I had to submit to constant dictées from the old grammar textbook. Some of the passages were so lyrical, excerpts from long forgotten works of literature, and they often had a moral lesson. I preferred the dictées to conjugating verbs or taking one of her impromptu quizzes. I even had a favorite: a passage called “Pierre et Lucette dans un Jardin Abandonné” (“Pierre and Lucette in an Abandoned Garden”). The ancient grammar book we used had a drawing of my mischievous namesake playing hide-and-seek with her friend Pierre far from the eyes of prying adults.
There were stepped-up math lessons—multiplication tables, complex divisions, percentages, even a hint of beginner’s algebra. The quizzes she liked to give both at home and on the street became both more frequent and rigorous.
Edith was a born grammarian, a natural speller, an elegant stylist. It all came so easy to her, and I think she was genuinely puzzled by how much I was struggling, how hard it was for me to grasp these elemental lessons.
My schoolwork as well as my Hebrew classes fell by the wayside those final weeks. When Edith saw me stumbling over the passé composé, she’d remind me of all the pleasures that awaited me once I entered the lycée—the lifestyle that I would enjoy among “des jeunes filles de bonne familles,” those upper-crust young girls from good families who crowded the lycée’s halls and classrooms in navy blue blazers over exquisitely pleated skirts.
She begged me to concentrate, to please apply myself, to focus—“Loulou, tu est la rose de la famille,” she’d say; Loulou, you are the rose of the family. It was all within my grasp if only I put my mind to it.
I wasn’t so sure: The more I studied, the more I realized the immensity of the challenge—and the less confident I felt.
A couple of days before the lycée’s exam we took a break. Mom decided that I needed a special outfit for the occasion, which she assumed would include meetings with the lycée’s teachers and administrators. I was always game for a shopping expedition, although this one seemed to be more pressured than our usual meanderings through bargain stores. We agreed that Brooklyn wouldn’t do—neither Mays nor our beloved Berta Bargain Store on Eighteenth Avenue could possibly have what I needed to make a good impression at the lycée. Instead, we traveled to Alexander’s, the discount Manhattan department store that was slightly more upscale than the shops we patronized. It also had the advantage of being on the East Side, which gave us a hopeful feeling, as if we were inching closer to that world we were trying to penetrate.
It was a season of fanciful clothes in vivid colors. The mod look had spread far beyond London, and there were minidresses and flowing dresses with accordion pleats, and empire dresses and sheaths. I pounced on a blue-green print dress made out of delicate voile. It had a low-waisted skirt that swirled round and round, with a velvet ribbon as a belt. It was the kind of dress I could wear to a party, but Edith wasn’t sure it was sober enough for the lycée, and we continued our hunt.
Finally, we spotted it—“un tailleur bleu marine,” my mother squealed—a navy blue suit. It had an A-line skirt, simple and severe except for the red-and-white lace trim around the jacket and jaunty bell sleeves. Without even blinking at the price, she bought it for me.
The day of the exam, I put on my new navy suit and went to PS 205 as usual in the morning. I felt elegant and transformed and utterly superior to my classmates—as if I had already left them and Brooklyn behind for the greater empire of Manhattan. Mom came to get me at lunch; she told the principal that I had an important doctor’s appointment and needed to be excused from class. We traveled together to East Seventy-Second Street, the vast luxuriant street where the lycée was located.
Once we arrived, there were no social niceties. I wasn’t taken in to meet madame la directrice or monsieur le président. It was all strictly business as I was whisked to a classroom upstairs to take the test.
I don’t think anyone even noticed my impeccable blue suit.
Only a handful of us were taking the exam. I was struck by a young boy my age, perhaps a bit older, who wore a formidable blue blazer with a white shirt. He seemed confident and relaxed and patrician, as if this test was merely an amusing formality that didn’t faze him a bit. He chatted amiably with the teacher in a fluent, upper-class French she seemed to appreciate. I had the feeling he was a shoo-in, either because he was qualified, or rich, or most likely both.
I glanced at the test and panicked. I could barely understand a single question—not in grammar, not in composition, nor in mathematics. Nothing in the exam made any sense to me. And when the teacher gave us a dictée, the words sounded strange and unfamiliar and I struggled to keep up and jot down what I could. Whatever Mom had tried to teach me all these many months—all these many years—hadn’t penetrated or hadn’t been nearly enough. I felt as if I were hearing a foreign language.
And maybe I was.
It dawned on me that I was no longer at ease in French, my native tongue.
I am not sure how long the exam lasted. The afternoon was a blur from start to finish—the questions, my answers, what the teacher-supervisor gave by way of instructions, the charming boy’s light running banter, and the fact that I kept obsessively staring at his navy blazer when I should have forced myself to calm down and figure out which questions I could tackle. My throat felt parched, but I was so terrified I couldn’t muster the courage to ask permission to get a drink of water. Even in the examination room, I realized that my mother’s quest was hopeless, that her graceful letters to the honorable Edouard Morot-Sir and Monsieur Galy, the lycée’s esteemed president, had all been for naught.
When I went downstairs, I found Edith at the same spot where I’d left her. She had sat there, afraid to move, for the entire duration of the exam. I couldn’t even look at her. As we rode home on the subway, she anxiously pressed me on the types of questions I’d fielded: Was there a dictée? Had I been asked to conjugate many verbs? Did I remember my passé composé? I didn’t have the heart to tell her how poorly I had
done—that I didn’t think I had been able to answer more than one or two of the lycée’s questions.
She wouldn’t have believed me.
I was the last crucible of all her outlandish hopes and ambitions, her last chance at a new and better life. She was so convinced I had it in me to realize her dreams—Loulou, il faut reconstruire le foyer, she would say over and over again; you must rebuild the hearth. She was sure I would find a way to recapture my family’s lost place in the world and the Lycée Français was the crucial first step.
And I had listened to her, my tender false messiah of a mother, who always seemed to be pinning her hopes—and mine—on the unattainable, who was always dreaming the impossible dream.
I imagine that the lycée found an exquisitely polite yet firm way to tell her that I wasn’t going to be admitted to the school. My mother spared me the news. The lycée was simply never discussed again, and I braced myself to enter, come fall, Seth Low Junior High.
· 13 ·
The Advance of the Little Porcelain Dolls
Edith finally—finally—got her wish: I was offered a scholarship to start high school in a tony private girl’s academy.
The chance to escape the public school system couldn’t have come fast enough for Mom or me. The last couple of years at Seth Low Junior High had been a nightmare of unwieldy classes and insipid courses, punctuated by two teachers’ strikes including one in the fall of 1968 that went on for months.
That was the last straw.
Mom found it incomprehensible that teachers would walk out on their jobs. What about the children, she kept asking. It was yet another example of the fatuousness of a system she had despised from the time I’d entered it.
I had my own grievances—the ethnic divides I’d first spotted at PS 205 were even more in evidence at Seth Low, where Jewish kids dominated the “SP” or honor class, while Italians seemed to be relegated to less intensive programs. I was transferred into the honors group shortly after I arrived, and immediately regretted it. I had long ago found a way to coexist with the Italian children who admired my academic zeal and seemed to cheer me on in my unrelenting drive to excel. Not so with the “gifted,” overwhelmingly Ashkenazi kids in the “SP” class. They were clannish, animated by a sense of their own superiority over the rest of Seth Low, and didn’t see me at all as one of their own. I was, to them, an outsider, an intruder. How dare I challenge their intellectual dominance?
Which, of course, I relished doing.
The girls with the golden chais, with names like Gross and Grossman and Friedlander, were out in full force, chatting excitedly about their upcoming bat mitzvahs—the coming-of-age ceremony for girls that was such a distinctly American phenomenon, completely unknown to me and my friends at the Shield of Young David. The girls of Aleppo and Cairo simply didn’t have bat mitzvahs.
My new classmates seemed more affluent. They dressed a cut above the rest of the Seth Low girls, in a kind of uniform that included expensive beige woolen coats. They’d come back from winter holidays with tans, talking about family vacations in Miami Beach. I had absolutely nothing in common with them, with the exception of one gentle, brainy girl named Carin Roth, who seemed to be respected by her peers, and yet devoid of their arrogance. I bonded with her but kept my distance from most of the others and wandered through Seth Low as if in a bad dream.
Then the chance to begin high school at the Berkeley Institute came along with financial aid, and Mom and I seized it. Berkeley wasn’t the lycée, and it wasn’t in Manhattan. It didn’t even have a uniform. But it was an old-line private school, quite aristocratic in its own way—catering to venerable Brooklyn families as well as the gilded nouveaux riches.
Instead of seamstresses and firefighters and sanitation workers, I found myself starting high school side by side with the children of doctors and lawyers and even the Brooklyn district attorney, Eugene Gold, whose brainy, no-nonsense daughter Wendy became my friend.
Mom was overjoyed; “Monsieur Le District Attorney,” she dubbed him.
She was so thrilled when the DA’s black chauffeur-driven Cadillac pulled up to our door on Sixty-Fifth Street. The DA would be in the back with his wife—the car was so roomy it fit several of us comfortably. My friend was as nonchalant about her means of transportation as she was about her status as the district attorney’s daughter. She came to school by limo every morning with her bodyguard-driver and it would have astonished her to learn that my ride in the gleaming Cadillac—even more than the scholarship to Berkeley—was the talk of my family, one of the high points of our five years in America.
The neighbors noticed, of course, as did our new landlords. In a year of changes, we had been forced to leave our beloved apartment on Sixty-Sixth Street after a dispute with the new Italian landlords. We now lived on the bottom floor of a two-family house situated on Sixty-Fifth Street, only a block from our old digs yet it felt a thousand miles away. Our apartment was much larger, but there were so few of us left we felt lost in it.
The Shield of Young David had also closed—suddenly and much to our chagrin. For months, there’d been rumors that it might shut down, but it was impossible to get a straight story as to why—what had gone wrong?
Perhaps those of us who’d remained loyal didn’t want to face the simple truth—that we were yesterday’s news. Our community was moving away, one family after another, and reconstituting itself by Ocean Parkway.
I was about to turn thirteen in the fall of 1969, tall and confident in the chunky brown heels and green tweed minidress I’d purchased both to enter high school and to wear on the High Holidays.
In one last-ditch effort to keep our congregation together, we gathered at a nearby Veteran’s Hall for the Jewish New Year. An effort had been made to replicate our old shul down to the women’s section, but I felt disoriented when I walked in.
Then I realized that everyone else was also trying to make sense of the new environs.
We couldn’t quite figure out what happened, why this Veteran’s Hall was all Rabbi Ruben could muster. It was packed for the New Year prayers—all the old faithfuls were there, which made me wonder why we had shut down in the first place. Surely, it wasn’t for lack of attendance—Ocean Parkway or not, we still had enough Bensonhurst stragglers to fill a synagogue.
To add to the surreal quality of the day, I found myself drawn into one final melee with my childhood nemesis, Mrs. Menachem.
It was a balmy September morning, and my friends and I were chatting amiably outside on Twentieth Avenue. We returned to the makeshift sanctuary only when the Torah scrolls were brought around, a high point of the service. As the men solemnly carried the scrolls past the women’s section, I reached out to kiss one, putting my hand through the new divider, which was a lot flimsier and more porous than the one we’d had at the Shield of Young David.
Suddenly, I heard a scream.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Menachem was yelling in a voice the entire women’s section could hear above the hymns and chants. I turned around to face her, thoroughly confused, not realizing at first that her words were aimed squarely at me. “What are you doing?” she repeated. She was now standing very close to me and her face was red, and I felt as if she were about to hit me.
Didn’t I know that I wasn’t allowed to touch the holy scrolls? she asked. That I’d reached an age when I couldn’t go near them?
I was too shocked to reply; all the women were staring at us, as were many of the men. I ran out and went home. What had seemed so exciting in the morning—wearing high heels and a short dress and feeling grown-up—Mrs. Menachem had used as a battering ram to put me in my place. Once a young girl reached adolescence, she was considered “impure” according to Orthodox Jewish dogma, and by that definition, she wasn’t allowed near any holy object. That was the point of the divider. That had always been the point, but while I could ignore it all these years, it was inescapable now.
I was almost a teenager, and that meant I was impure.
>
But I’d never thought my Levantine congregation took the law literally. The women behind the divider were always rushing to kiss the Torah, to physically grasp its maroon velvet covering as it came around. Sure enough, I heard that in the afternoon several of them had confronted Mrs. Menachem and told her she was in the wrong. How could she be so cruel—and on such a holy day—they’d said, springing to my defense.
I was moved by their efforts, but the damage was done. Mrs. Menachem had completely humiliated me—exactly as she had so many years earlier when she’d called me “a silly, silly little girl who was trying to change the world.”
I was starting a new life at Berkeley; why bother with this little VA hall pretending to be a synagogue, anyway?
In all the years Mom had plotted and schemed to have me attend a private school, she hadn’t anticipated the daunting logistics—the fees that even scholarship students were required to pay, the wardrobe needed to keep up with my well-heeled classmates, and especially the long, arduous commute. Both PS 205 and Seth Low Junior High had been within walking distance, so while my mother worried about me constantly—worried about the quality of education I was receiving, the “ruffians” I was befriending—at least I was close by.
Berkeley, located near Prospect Park, was practically at the other end of Brooklyn. I needed to take two trains to get there every morning, followed by a brisk walk through Park Slope, a neighborhood that like so much of New York in 1969 was a strange mixture of the elegant and the seedy, with magnificent old brownstones next to boarded-up homes and dubious characters lurking on street corners up and down Seventh Avenue.
The Arrogant Years Page 17
