The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  So there I sat in Iris Nails on that Friday evening in September, as the hands on the oversize wall clock moved inexorably forward and the shadows lengthened outside, paging through a month-old copy of Vogue, waiting for my toes—freshly polished in some subtle shade with a coy name like Allure or Delicacy, some imperceptible variation on the same basic pale-pink theme—to dry.

  All around me for the past two hours the salon had been emptying out of its devoutly assimilated Jewish clientele, women with toned bodies and cosmetically altered faces who had just minutes earlier been on their cell phones busily discussing their various plans for breaking the forthcoming fast. One coiffed woman was expecting forty for dinner the next night and worried whether she had enough dessert plates; another described a less ambitious scheme to order takeout for her family. I sat there and eavesdropped disapprovingly, a spy in the House of Iris, wondering whether any of these women were real Jews—educated Jews like me—and knew enough not to wear their Louboutins or Manolos to shul (the wearing of leather being one of the holiday’s prohibitions), or whether they had only recently jumped on the newly fashionable ethnic bandwagon and viewed Yom Kippur as just another pretext for a dinner party.

  Did they understand, for instance, that it was crucial to be on time for Kol Nidre, that only the religiously ignorant and the compulsively unpunctual sashayed into synagogue after the service had begun? This lesson had been conveyed to me in my girlhood, and I, in my turn, had repeatedly impressed its importance on my adolescent daughter for the past two days, reminding her to be ready to leave in her sneakers and shul clothes by 6:10, 6:10 sharp. I’m not coming late to Kol Nidre, I warned her. If you’re not ready, I’m going without you.

  It was now eleven minutes past six. Twenty blocks away the same chazzan who had serenaded me fifteen years earlier as I stood under the chuppah (how was he to know that the marriage would be over in a few years, a minor blot on the golden record of family ceremonies at which he has continued to officiate?) was about to commence with the solemn prayer that announces the start of the twenty-four-hour fast. What on earth was I thinking? Here I had been alerting my daughter to this defining Jewish moment as though it meant something to me and by extension should to her, and now I was keeping her cooling her sneaker-shod heels while I sat in admiring contemplation of my toes.

  I had to get out of there, fast. I gestured wildly to the shy young woman who had plied her fine-tuned, underpaid skills for the past two hours, trying to communicate some sense of urgency in spite of the fact that I appeared to have all the time in the world. My faith was on the line, but how was she to understand my predicament if I myself couldn’t? More important, how had I managed to arrange my life in such a fashion that more than four decades of roiling conflict about Jewishness had come to a head right here in Iris Nails? On the one side were the hallowed claims of a patriarchal religion presided over by a grim and reclusive (and, needless to say, male) God, who couldn’t be expected to understand the significance of socioeconomic factors in the formation of one’s approach to shul-going: What did He care if I associated Yom Kippur with the Upper East Side synagogue of my childhood, where the often newly Judaicized wives of the synagogue’s multiple tycoons showed up in the front row of the middle section of the women’s balcony in their designer duds only for the High Holy Days and then disappeared into their glamorously secular lives?

  On the other side, there was my feminine instinct to compete—or, at least, not to be entirely outshone—by these buffed and lacquered women, whom I had been eyeing in some form or other ever since I was a girl. The fact that I still attended this same synagogue (although, truth be told, I was a rare visitor) did not speak to a deep conviction about its suitability as a place of worship or even a commendable sense of loyalty on my part (I disliked it as much as an adult as I had as a child) but to an inability to figure out where else I might go.

  I may as well admit, for the record, that, back at the nail salon, I didn’t make much real effort at speeding things up. I had seen customers in a hurry get their freshly done toes Saran-wrapped for extra protection before putting on their footwear, but I wasn’t willing to risk messing up my own polish. Besides which, even I could calculate that there was no way I could get home, dress, and be at shul all within the next fifteen minutes. And who was He (if He, indeed, existed) to me, when it came right down to it, that I should be rushing myself for Him? Hadn’t I tried to find a religious footing for myself all these years, with a degree of good faith that had included my briefly taking private Talmud lessons in the hope that I might settle on some sort of locution for myself in its disputatious language? At the Jewish high school I attended, I had always warmed to the abstract reasoning of the Talmud, while the picturesque but pedantic tales that we studied in my Bible classes left me cold. The cerebral sparks given off by the various Talmudic commentators with their differing interpretations of a particular phrase reminded me of the splitting of semantic hairs that I found so intriguing about the analysis of literary texts. But none of this was anchor enough to keep me from scrambling around wildly in my head, hurling accusations at myself for failing to provide a proper role model for my daughter, failing to provide a role model for myself—failing, failing, failing at the Jewish thing.

  Iris Nails is a prettier salon than many, mind you, and priced accordingly. It’s not one of those fly-by-night affairs that tend to dot the urban landscape, put together with spit and a coat of quick-dry polish, a freebie wall calendar with photographs of kittens adorning the cheaply painted walls in lieu of interior decor. No, this is a plush oasis of a nail salon, replete with a crystal chandelier. The manicurists’ stations are set luxuriously far apart, and there is a sparkling, peach-toned Italianate landscape painted quite convincingly on the walls so that if you half close your eyes and shut your ears to the indecipherable chatter of the Korean staff, you can imagine yourself on a sun-splashed terrazzo.

  These incidental details matter, if you are ever to get the setting for this tale of divided loyalties and split identities more or less straight in your mind. If Iris Nails had been a less appealing place, for instance, instead of representing a sanctuary of sorts— a haven in a heartless world—perhaps I would have been less likely to linger among the shy manicurists, the soft lighting, and the trompe l’oeil Mediterranean backdrop. But as it was, I couldn’t bring myself to leave this refuge in the midst of the gleamingly impersonal city I had grown up in, a city in which I had always felt spiritually homeless. And so I sat on, in my padded chair with the buttons that enabled you to get a heated back massage while reclining, immobilized by the comforting atmosphere of the salon and by my consuming ambivalence over Judaism—an ambivalence that led me to judge other Jews by my own lapsed Orthodox standards, as though I were a rebbetzin in disguise, even as I indulged in pork-filled Szechuan dumplings. It drove my daughter mad, the way I kept a foot guiltily in both camps, and tonight’s behavior would only further the crazy-making confusion.

  Perhaps, too, if I had ever succeeded in finding a shul that spoke the language of a welcoming home to me, instead of returning, lemming-like, year after year, to the same congregation that had made me feel acutely uncomfortable ever since I first stood in my hand-smocked Shabbos dress and black patent leather Shabbos shoes, gazing down at the men’s section where everything worth watching was taking place, things might have worked out differently. Would I have felt the pressing need to paint my toenails at just this pre–Kol Nidre moment, for crying out loud, as though I were going to be inspected for trophy-wife-level grooming standards before being allowed into the women’s section?

  Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not. As you can see, my Jewishness and I are a vexed pair from way back. It’s as though we got soldered together when I was still young and impressionable, and now I’m doomed to drag this ancient, sober-minded belief system around for the rest of my life, like a giant ball and chain clanking behind me, dogging my every move. Like Ruth and Naomi, wherever I goeth, my cumbersome Jewish
shadow will go.

  The problem with this kind of tortured relationship, as with all tortured relationships, is that at some point it is no longer possible to conceive of having any choice in the matter. Letting go seems no more of a resolution than holding on. My Jewishness is further complicated by my blue-chip credentials—otherwise known as yichus, also known as lineage. Although I have rarely met a Jewish person, of however attenuated an identity, who didn’t in some flimsy fashion try to link him- or herself up to an ancient towering sage like the Baal Shem Tov or Maimonides, I can lay claim to the Jewish equivalent of being able to connect your Wasp ancestry directly to the Mayflower. My family history has produced generations of great scholars and influential community leaders. This foamy bloodline comes to me on my mother’s side, which featured various founding fathers of modern Orthodox Judaism, including my great-great-grandfather Samson Raphael Hirsch, who paved the way for the unique approach to living in two competing worlds—the secular German one and the ritualized Jewish one (torah im derekh eretz)—that characterized German Orthodoxy. Then there was Hirsch’s grandson Isaac Breuer, my grandfather, who, alone among his celebrated family, embraced the Zionist ideal when Israel was still only a gleam in the eye of Theodor Herzl, and emigrated to Palestine from Frankfurt in 1935.

  My mother, meanwhile, had been the only one of her immediate family, which included four siblings and their collective twenty-four children (the obligation to breed and multiply being one that the entire Breuer clan took to heart), to abandon a life of high principles and scant material comforts in the fledgling State of Israel for a life of less obvious principles and visible affluence on Park Avenue, with no sign of a camel or a kibbutznik in sight. And yet I wonder, do one’s origins ever explain as much as they obfuscate?

  At an age when I was still too young to comprehend the historical evil of Nazism in any but the vaguest terms, I had a clear grasp of the way Hitler’s web had disrupted the natural course of my mother’s life, leading to two emigrations, one forced and one voluntary. It was because of the Nazis that in 1935 she had to leave behind her beloved Frankfurt with its famous zoo, which she had regularly visited on Shabbos afternoons, and immigrate to what was then Palestine, together with her family. A decade later, in the wake of her father’s death, in her late twenties but not yet married, she left Israel for what was to have been a year abroad in New York to teach at a religious day school that was part of the thriving Washington Heights German-Jewish community, established by her uncle Joseph Breuer (as fervent in his anti-Zionism as her father had been in his religious Zionism) after he had fled Frankfurt.

  Early in her stay, at one of those dinner parties expressly designed for matchmaking purposes that people used to be in the habit of giving, my mother was introduced to my father, an Orthodox bachelor of long standing and fellow yekke (as Eastern European Jews referred to their haughty German counterparts with an uneasy mixture of admiration and disdain). After a stop-and-start courtship befitting a man and woman who had resisted the lure of matrimony until the ripe ages of forty-two and thirty, respectively, they married on the roof of the St. Regis hotel and produced six children in rapid succession. My parents spoke to each other mostly in German, a language that always makes me think of swastikas, and gave off a general air of living in New York only under sufferance since it was all too obvious that America and its Orthodox Jews with their casual ways couldn’t hold a candle to the Old World restraint and formality of their lost communities.

  What all this percolated down to was a childhood bombarded by more mixed messages about what it meant to be an authentically Jewish person than you could juggle with three hands. For one thing, I was given the sort of predictably schizophrenic amalgam of social mores and moral guidelines that modern Orthodox Jewish girls are heir to, stemming from the vast and uncrossable gulf between traditional ideals of modesty, purity, and imminent wifeliness/helpmateness, on the one hand, and the brutal realities of the contemporary dating marketplace and current expectations of female self-definition, on the other. To get a sense of the confused atmosphere, you have only to stand outside a Jewish day school like the one I went to and watch the girls emerge in clothes that are maximally revealing while being at the same time appropriately unscanty—an aesthetic approach typified by long, tight denim skirts slit up the back or side that look difficult to navigate in without resorting to the kinds of mincing steps characteristic of Chinese women with bound feet.

  But the messages we received in my immediate family about being properly Jewish went well beyond this in scope, covering every aspect of our presentation to a watchful world. This externalized aspect, bewilderingly enough, was what seemed to count most both for my mother and for the shul with the lacquered ladies that my father had helped found and over which he had presided for four decades. Although religious belief was presumably a manifestation of your inner life, Judaism struck me as a resolutely social institution, more about group behavior than private wranglings with God or faith. No one, it seemed, gave a damn whether or not you sinned in your soul, or hated in your heart, or fantasized about group sex right in the middle of the rabbi’s sermon. Primitive convictions about the transparency of your spiritual failings were fine for Southern born-again types like Jimmy Carter, who confessed to Playboy that he had lusted in his heart. Jews—Jews like us—were more sophisticated than that.

  This meant that in my family there was barely any mention of God and none at all regarding the vicissitudes of belief. The German approach emphasized rules and more rules—as well as the solemn aesthetic context surrounding their observance, the beautification of ritual that is referred to as hidur mitzvah. My mother was particularly proud of this aspect of her upbringing, and it undoubtedly added something to our Friday evenings: the table was beautifully set, flowers abounded, and we got dressed in Shabbos clothes, no lounging about in robes or sweatpants as I saw my friends do. But with so much stress on form, I began to lose sight of the priorities—whether it was more important that I look good (which meant Wasp good, as in understated: not too much makeup, certainly no red nail polish) or pay attention to the davening, or whether the most important thing of all was that I arrived in shul on time and didn’t meander in when services were almost over.

  * * *

  I came home close to seven that evening. My pedicure had dried, Kol Nidre was well under way, and I immediately broke into tears. I insisted to my somewhat bewildered daughter that it was now irrevocably too late to go to shul—too late for Jews like us, who knew better. Mine was the emotionally dissonant (and perhaps unfathomable) logic of a lapsed Orthodox Jew. Confronted by the gap between my adult disregard for the unbending religious approach of my childhood and the powerful nostalgia invoked in me by memories of rituals scrupulously observed, I froze in my tracks. Even if I no longer believed in the letter of the law, I just as strongly believed that there was only one right way to observe the law—if, that is, you were going to bother at all.

  My daughter is a wise soul, and I like to think she understands that my abiding sense of conflict speaks to some sort of passion, a connection rather than a severance. How else to explain my perplexing behavior that evening or on the following day, when I attended shul from late morning until the end of the fast, barely lifting my head from the machzor, like a person in a trance.

  I wish I could end on an epiphany, on a note of true faith, as if I were a character in an old-fashioned story by Sholem Aleichem. For now, though, it will have to suffice to say that I am a woman haunted by a complicated past who is, ready or not, required to live in the turbulent present. And that nothing in my experience of religious life, then or now, has clarified for me in what, exactly, the essence of Jewishness—its meat as opposed to its husk—resides. But perhaps that is the point of so devotional and demanding a religion: one arrives at its larger meaning only through the petit point of observance. Or perhaps I will come upon the enigmatic heart of the matter one evening when the light is fading and everything seems momentarily
serene, somewhere on the road between a pedicure and a prayer.

  THE UNBEARABLE OBSOLESCENCE OF GIRDLES

  2008

  Where are the girdles of yesteryear? The ones women of all ages once wore as a matter of course, huffing and puffing as they tugged at the reinforced elastic and lace, the better to encase their bodies to trimmest effect. The ones that were so pivotal that the sexologist Havelock Ellis felt compelled to weigh in, insisting that girdles were “morphologically essential” because the evolution from “horizontality to verticality” was more difficult for women than for men. (Without them, Ellis grandly theorized, “woman might be physiologically truer to herself if she went always on all fours” rather than try to imitate men by “standing erect.”) How is it, as I discovered when I went in quest of a girdle, that this once culturally mandated undie has disappeared from the sartorial landscape like so much melted snow?

  I remember the fascination girdles used to hold for me as a child growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, the unvarying feminine ritual of them, taken on—or so it seemed to me—as a burdensome birthright. It might have been catching a glimpse of the pinkish rubbery garment with hooks and eyes up the front, custom-made by a European corsetiere, that my grandmother used to wear under her button-down shirtdresses when she came for her annual visit from Tel Aviv. Or watching as my mother prepared to go out for an evening, stuffing herself into a less sweat-inducing but still body-transforming version before she bent down to fasten her stockings to the garters and then, looking like an apparition out of The Blue Angel, walked into her bathroom to apply makeup. Where had my mother’s mercurial ungirdled self gone to? I wondered. Did her inner dimensions change along with the outer, becoming more streamlined and compact? In my mind there was something immutably glamorous and grown-up about the very confinement of a girdle, demonstrating that you were no longer an indecorous girl but a woman, willing to suffer extreme discomfort in aid of—let’s strip to the bare truth of it—capturing and keeping the male gaze.