So on the day of the event, standing at the podium before an assemblage of strangers who called themselves my relatives, I stumbled in broken Hebrew, without a clue, through the traditional ceremony, a tradition that was unrecognizable by the time I had finished with it. Then came the speech I didn’t write, expressing from the bottom of the rabbi’s heart all my gratitude. And the job was over.
The party was held in our apartment, barely big enough with its two bedrooms for a family of five, impossibly jammed with, it seemed, thousands of strangers streaming in to celebrate Jules, whom they recognized by searching out the shortest male in the welcoming committee and shoving a present at him. What they really were celebrating was themselves—the reunion of a family I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
It frustrated my mother that beyond uncles, aunts, and first cousins I remembered no one on either side of our family. My mother, who had no friends, kept in careful touch with family, had stories to recount about family, retold every story and every anecdote dozens of times. So you might think I’d remember one. But I had a delete button in my brain, and any information not directly related to comics, movies, or radio was excised to make room for the important stuff. Like why was Pat Ryan, my favorite hero, absent so long from Terry and the Pirates, and when was he coming back? Or what did Mimi, whose opinions held great sway over me, see in Frank Sinatra, who didn’t sing nearly as well as Bing Crosby and wasn’t as witty as Crosby, who was almost as funny as Bob Hope?
This was the sort of stuff I had to make room for in my brain, so how in the world could I squeeze in the Zaras and Sams and Als and Doras? But there they all were, piling through the door. And Dave and Rhoda and Frances and little Jules, now a man, stood smiling in cramped tableau. My mother tried introducing me to the guests as they hustled by, but each introduction made me withdraw further. So she gave up, with a look that read, “We are going to discuss this later.” An extra fuss was made over the Cohns as they arrived. Al was a state supreme court justice in the Bronx and a power in the Democratic Party and used to a lot of deference. He was married to the prune-faced Dora, who looked like a character out of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. Dora was the sister of Alva, who was the widow of my father’s wealthy brother Sol. The Cohns lived on the Grand Concourse (lots of money!) and Al, being a judge, had a chauffeured limousine that, a couple of times a year, wound its way over from the west Bronx to Stratford Avenue to deliver cartons of hand-me-downs belonging to Al’s son, a straight-A student at the Horace Mann School, three years older than I and acknowledged to be brilliant and on his way to the top. This meant to me that I should steer clear of him out of fear that there might not be room for two brilliant young men in the family. Though I avoided my rival, I accepted his hand-me-downs and made occasional use of a collapsible tin water cup that bore his name in tape on the handle: Roy M. Cohn. I saved it in a box somewhere.
Of all the presents, there was actually one that meant something to me. It was from my father’s brother Adolph: a wristwatch. Yes, the bar mitzvah boy’s traditional watch, but this held special significance. At first sight, I imbued it with magical qualities. First of all, it was a splendid-looking, seriously grown-up Longines Wittnauer seventeen-jeweled wrist-watch with a luminous dial. A watch that I had known about for years from radio commercials. From the time I was six or seven, mellifluous voices (Harry Von Zell, Don Wilson, Milton Cross) spoke glowingly over the airwaves of this wondrous instrument for keeping in touch with the world. This watch said more to me of my impending stature than a dozen bar mitzvahs. And it was from my second-favorite uncle, after Eugene, Adolph.
In this unwanted crowd of family, strangers, and near strangers who seemed to be having a perfectly good time without me, Uncle Adolph’s watch stood out as the one honest representation of love to come my way that day. I withdrew with my watch into the back bedroom, the one I shared with Mimi, who in the dark one night from my bed I watched undress through half-closed eyes. At the moment of truth, the moment I’d been waiting for as she unhooked her brassiere to reveal her naked seventeen-year-old breasts, too good to be bad, I clamped my eyes shut.
Now, sprawled on that very bed where I had come this close to seeing my sister naked, I lay propped on my elbow, holding Adolph’s watch in the palm of my hand. Through the door I had softly closed, the party sounded less intimidating. I stared and stared at the watch, waiting for it to rescue me, or at least make the time go faster. It didn’t do either, but it was a comfort nonetheless. And I was a boy in desperate need of comfort, so who knew how long I spent on my bed in a semifetal position examining the watch.
My aunt Frances knew. She burst into the room. “What are you doing in here?” It was like a police raid.
“I’m resting,” I said.
“What do you have in your hand?”
“Nothing.” Feeling guilty, I held out the watch for Frances to see, this gift from her beloved brother. Surely she would think better of me for valuing it so.
Frances snatched it out of my hand. “That’s your Uncle Adolph’s watch. This is a very expensive watch. You must be careful to take good care of this watch. You can’t treat this watch as a toy. When you wind this watch, you wind it by the stem like this. But not too hard or too fast. Gently. And that way you will have this wonderful watch for many—”
And as Frances sermonized, the stem came out between her right thumb and forefinger. She did a quick appraisal of the crime scene: watch in her left hand, stem in her right. She didn’t waste another look on me. She barreled out of my room, back into the party, crying, “Look what Jules did!”
Do I need to tell you that at this celebration of my entry into manhood not a single soul, especially my parents, believed me when I said Frances broke the watch?
My memory is that the watch was sent away to be fixed. But I have no recollection of getting it back or ever wearing it. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t. It may be like some men in combat: you block out the worst—an undiagnosed case of post-traumatic Frances syndrome.
Bar mitzvah boy, 1942
A JEWISH MOTHER JOKE
When I was in my late thirties and a famous cartoonist and, more recently, a playwright, I could not let my mother attend my plays. They used language that would have shocked her and, even worse, I portrayed mothers onstage whom she might rightly conclude were based on her. Satiric and not all that lovable. When I was in that time where I had—or thought I had—a handle on our age, our politics, our sociology, and just about everything else that defined America’s near nervous breakdown in the Cold War years, when I was riding high as the country was sinking low, my mother called me as she did (or I did) a couple of times a week. And this is what she said, almost word for word: “Sonny Boy,” she began. Sonny Boy was my mother’s code name for me. “I read in these magazines I get, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, these stories of mothers and their famous sons. And the sons are always so angry at their mothers for something or other they did in their childhood. And I couldn’t help wondering, Sonny Boy, is there anything I ever did to you that you resent me for?”
And there it was. My opening. She was finally, after thirty years, inviting me to tell her of the bitterness that I’d been swallowing for a lifetime. Where to begin?
Should I talk about the countless times since earliest childhood she’d been taking me aside to trash my father: that he wasn’t a bad man, only a weak man, that he couldn’t be relied on—but no man could be relied on—that she married him as a working woman in her early thirties with a nest egg of $5,000, and my father had borrowed, stolen, and squandered it all on failed businesses, on drunkenness, or other undescribed weaknesses that I was too young to hear about? Someday when I’m old enough. I should never grow up to be like my father (or, for that matter, a man), she told me any number of times. It was to be avoided at all costs. I shouldn’t break her heart as my father had so many times, as my older sister, Mimi, was doing even as we spoke.
Should I bring that up to
her at this moment when she asked me on the phone if there was anything in my past that I resented her for? Or should I talk about my puppy, Rex, given to me by my uncle Adolph, my father’s brother (who gave me the bar mitzvah watch). Adolph was sweet like my father, but, unlike him, was able to keep a business going. Adolph was a barber in D.C. He had other businesses as well, investments, he had money. All my father’s brothers had money. Sidney in Florida had a thriving jewelry store on Lincoln Road, Sol in New York was rich in real estate, money to burn. Even Frances, his big sister, owned a successful men’s shop in Atlantic City.
But Dave, my father, lacked the family touch, couldn’t make a dime or, when he did, couldn’t hold on to it.
Should I mention Rex, the beagle pup, given to me when I was seven? Rex, who was my friend in a friendless world, who sat in my lap with me cross-legged on the floor worshipfully gazing up at the old Philco console as it played my favorite radio serials. Rex, who followed me, jumped all over me, licked my hands and face, Rex, who when I came home from school one day in early spring and looked for his leash in the kitchen closet and didn’t find it, and called his name, “Rex! Rex!” repeatedly and Rex was nowhere in sight …
I found my mother bent over her drawing table, in the far corner of our living room behind the piano no one knew how to play. I asked her where Rex was. And this is what my mother told me in this Jewish mother joke: “I can’t talk, can’t you see I’m busy?”
But I insisted. “Just tell me where Rex is.” Most of my young life, I didn’t have the nerve to insist to my mother. I was no match for her. She could outtalk, outthink, and intimidate while, at one and the same time, manage to make me pity her for how much she had sacrificed and how little she was thanked for it.
I was putty in her hands, but not at this precise moment. I wanted to know where my dog had gone. And I knew she was holding out on me. Finally, after much prodding, she came out with the truth. My mother had given Rex away. To a farmer. Who had a little girl. Who would give Rex a good home in the country, better than a cramped apartment in the city. And she hadn’t told me at first because she knew I’d go and make a scene. And with all that she had to do—cook, clean, make a living to see us through the Depression—with all these responsibilities she couldn’t take on the extra responsibility of a dog—
I had no way of absorbing and/or making sense of her revelation.
“But I take care of Rex!” I cried.
My mother countered with her very different, entirely speculative take on the situation, which sounded perfectly plausible in her eloquent delivery. She said that, whatever my good intentions, I wouldn’t have gone on taking care of Rex. I would have gotten bored or forgotten—I was, after all, a little boy—and left it for my mother to pick up the pieces (she was always picking up the pieces). She picked up the pieces for my father when he let her down six or seven times a day. She picked up the pieces for Mimi a hundred times a day.
I stood, steamrollered, by the side of her drawing table, struck dumb by her brilliant advocacy. Earlier that day she had, without warning, behind my back, given my dog away, and now she was explaining what she’d done in a defense that subtly hinted that the fault was mine: I did not take good enough care of Rex—not now perhaps, but sometime in the future—thus forcing my mother’s hand. I left her no choice. As a result of my sure-to-be forgetfulness, my gross and future irresponsibility, she had to give my dog away. And in so doing, she had done nothing less than save him.
This fairy tale farmer and his daughter, they would lavish on Rex the care that I, Dave Feiffer’s son (and clearly every bit as unreliable), would not. Sometime next month or next year, my mother had me convincingly fated to “fall down on the job.” Fall down on the job was a copyrighted phrase of hers.
So here I am, many years later, living in the middle of this Jewish mother joke where she asks me: “Sonny Boy, is there anything I ever did to you that you resent me for?”
And I respond, “No, Ma.”
I may be resentful, I may be bitter, I may want to murder the woman, but I don’t want to wound her after all these years.
Also, I am not stupid. I didn’t want to walk into the trap she had set for me. I had been in therapy on and off for eighteen years. I was not a fool, not a patsy, had found my tongue in my adult years, could even, when push came to shove, argue with her, force her to retreat—or pretend to—which was, as far as I was concerned, more than enough of a victory, especially with a past such as mine, where I had never won a fight with my mother.
But she was no fool either. She was not going to accept my “No, Ma.” She carried on because she, too, was living in the middle of a Jewish mother joke: “Because you see, Sonny Boy, it was the Depression and I had to work, because your father’s business failed and he couldn’t keep a job, and I had to be away from home a lot, and maybe when you were little, you resented me for that.”
I was not about to be suckered in. “No, Ma, I understood all that.”
“Because who knew about psychology in those days?” The woman was not about to give up. “Maybe there were things I would have done different if I knew better. All these famous men hold it against their mothers. You sure you don’t hold it against me?”
And I said, “No, Ma. I understood.”
She continued to circle me. “Because with the best intentions in the world, I could have done something to hurt you and I don’t want you to hide it from me after all these years.”
Will she never let up? This was going to take weeks. I had important things to do. I didn’t know what, but the most important was to get my mother off the phone. And, because of all my years of psychotherapy, I coolly analyzed the situation: she wasn’t going to let me off the phone, even if she had to go on talking forever until I conceded her something.
So I scripted inside my head lines that let me surrender. A smidgen. In a tone meant to be offhand but affectionate, I said, “Ma, what does it matter, whatever happened, happened so many years ago and during such hard times, that I’ve long since forgotten and forgiven you.”
I wasn’t crazy about the way it came out. I held my breath. Five endless seconds went by and then my mother, in a voice dry and bitter, said, “Is that the thanks I get?”
As I lay spread out on the floor for the eight count, I thought in admiration and pride, “My God, she can still do it!” She was seventy-five.
In the Village Voice on December 17, 1958, I ran what I believe was the first Jewish Mother cartoon:
I took great pains in drawing this cartoon. My first pass at it made the woman look like my mother, a no-no. She would see it. She would be upset. I was after plausible deniability. So I tossed the first art and redrew it. This time I did better, or so I thought. I took it down to the Village Voice on a Monday and looked for it when the paper came out that Wednesday. And in my regular spot on page 4, running across the bottom of the page, there was my strip, and it was an eight-panel portrait of my mother.
How could I have screwed up so monumentally? I swear it didn’t look like my mother on my drawing table after I drew it. It didn’t look like my mother the next morning as I packed it in an envelope to take to the Voice. At the Voice, admiring it as I showed it off to members of the staff, it didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to my mother. During all these exposures of my original art, I was proud to observe that the mother in the cartoon was a perfect stranger. Otherwise, I think I would have noticed.
But reduced on the page to almost half size, a stunning and unwelcome transformation took place. I was staring at it when the phone rang.
“Hello, Ma,” I said into the phone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ma. No … it doesn’t at all look like you, it’s not supposed to, the mother talks with a New York accent, you don’t sound anything like that … I’m sorry you’re upset but you’ve got to believe me. It’s my friend Norton’s mother. It looks exactly like her. I hope she doesn’t see the Voice, I’m afraid she’s going to be upset.”
I’ve lied to my mother all my adult life and the better half of my teenage life. The choice was either lying to her or never seeing her again. I didn’t think my mother’s crimes against me were so serious that I should stop knowing her. And even after I learned to fight back, which took too many years, I didn’t believe that continually confronting a woman who never in her life admitted she was wrong would make for a satisfactory relationship.
So I compromised, because life is made up of compromise. I withheld my thoughts, opinions, feelings, and judgments from this woman who gave me life and, beyond that, her consent to pursue my dreams, which she could have quashed in ten seconds flat had she chosen. My compromise was to never tell the truth to her about anything that I cared about.
It was exhausting. Just as I submerged myself from my entire family, most of my friends, and all of my relatives as a child, so I continued to submerge myself from my mother as an adult. But when I was a kid, it took less out of me. I had twenty-four-hours-a-day practice, so I became acclimated to hiding out as a way of life. I hid in my sleep. I hid in my dreams. I revealed myself only in comics, which were the embodiment of my dreams. I was trained (by myself) to be a marathon submerger. It didn’t tire me because I didn’t know any other way existed. I accepted as a given that I was to hide out underground until I was old, say, twenty-one.
But now I was well past twenty-one. I was out in the open and famous for it. I said what I thought once a week in my Voice strip, and what I thought was way out there. It was radical. My open aim was to overthrow the government. I saw myself as a wry, self-effacing, hard-hitting lefty. The acceptance that fame brought turned me into a talker, a wit, an actual conversationalist, well on my way to occasional eloquence. I had emerged from the underground as this humorist charmer with whom I had no previous acquaintance.
So when I finally surfaced, after all those years, a complete surprise to myself, I was, of course, thrilled. I managed to hold my own with Alfred Kazin, Dwight MacDonald, Lillian Hellman, Kenneth Tynan, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Rahv—intellectuals and artists with opinions no less strong than my own and a lot better informed. I was amazed that I was listened to, that I, who thought I had to be funny to be noticed, could be serious and noticed. I had opinions, evidently, that counted, though I made them up as I went along. After a few drinks, no one seemed to care.
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