Sandy never lost her grip on her siblings, but they didn’t share the same roof for long. The tough times for the Wasserstein family had drawn to a close just as Sandy was making her escape. Her education had been accelerated via the tracking system established in the 1920s by the New York public schools, to push children who were high achievers. The “Special Progress,” or SP, system remained in place throughout the 1960s, as a way to manage the huge influx of Baby Boom kids into the system. It was common for students to skip one grade; the truly ambitious like Sandra Wasserstein skipped two. She was graduated from James Madison High School in 1953—in Brooklyn—and left for the University of Michigan that summer, just before her sixteenth birthday.
Situated in her expansive house, having survived heartache on heartache, and not one to fuss over housekeeping, Lola sought new outlets for her vast reserves of energy. While the Wasserstein brothers toiled in the ribbon factory and expanded into textiles and then real estate, their wives turned similar drive into their products: the children.
The competition among the sisters-in-law was fierce. Top performers in this hotly contested race were Lola and Florence, Jerry’s wife. The goal was to see whose children provided the most bragging rights. No penalty for slight exaggerations. That was all part of the game.
Florence had the home-court advantage: She was native-born, raised in Manhattan’s Yorkville section, the Upper East Side’s predominantly German neighborhood, where Jewish families were rare. Like Lola, Florence had five children, but all of hers were home and accounted for.
Aunt Florence would provide marvelous material for the extended gag that Wendy would concoct from her Brooklyn childhood:
On quiet afternoons at my family’s house in Brooklyn, when my brother, Bruce, would be taking my sister [Georgette] for a mop ride and plotting openly to boil my blubber for oil like Moby Dick’s, Aunt Florence would casually ring up to say hello and to inform us that “guess what,” her son, our cousin Alan, had just finished reading and memorizing the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“That’s wonderful, Florence! Did he enjoy it?” My mother would always do her best to sound enthusiastic.
By this point my sister would have severed a few ligaments on the mop ride and I would be wailing that I didn’t want my blubber boiled. My mother would approach us with the unchained wrath of Medea. ‘You goddamned kids! Your cousin Alan just finished the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and what the hell are you doing?”
In a rare moment of sibling solidarity we would answer: “Mother, nobody reads the Encyclopaedia Britannica!”
So Aunt Florence loomed large as a standard-bearer for elementary education in the 1950s.
The madcap childhood Wendy wrote about wasn’t far from the truth, though her version was consistently more amusing than real life. Lola’s demands were relentless. Her children all remembered, one way or the other, bringing home a grade of 99 on a report card and being asked, “Where’s the other point?”
As adults they portrayed themselves as a bevy of little geniuses. Actually, they brought home the report cards of smart but not exceptional students, with as many B’s as A’s, and even some C’s.
They did have fun, as they created their New York Jewish version of the American dream. The children watched popular television shows like Zorro, The Wonderful World of Disney, Bachelor Father, and The Millionaire , a weekly drama that followed the consequences when a rich man gave a million dollars to a stranger. Morris and Lola joined a beach club, where the children swam. On weekends, when Wendy was small, Morris took Georgette and Bruce to the park to ice-skate, ride bikes, and have other adventures, while Lola stayed home with the baby. They learned to play tennis at camp. Lola enrolled the girls in dance class. Morris bought a movie camera, preserving a record, proof that his happy family existed.
They took drives into the country and cultural excursions into “the city,” as outer-borough residents referred to Manhattan. They ate out at Cookys, a famous Brooklyn delicatessen.
In homage to Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, other television programs they watched as children, they tried to have pets, an alien concept for Eastern European Jews. The experiment was unsuccessful. Wendy would write:
I don’t come from a long line of pet lovers. One of my earliest memories is of my mother, Lola, releasing our pet parakeet into a hurricane. She never explained how the bird flew out of her cage into the storm, but all we children knew it was involuntary. And then there was the time I came home from elementary school to find our newly acquired cocker spaniel on the roof. My mother swore that the dog had climbed up there for the view, but I certainly had never seen Lassie on the roof. The police arrived, and the dog survived and subsequently moved to live with relatives in the suburbs. The last straw was my father driving a cat from our house in Brooklyn over the bridge into Manhattan and dropping her off somewhere near Wall Street, apparently hoping that a generous stockbroker would take her in.
Morris avidly followed the news. He read the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and many business magazines. When he helped Georgette study for a seventh-grade history test about World War II, he seemed to know all the answers without looking in a book. When she asked him why, he answered, “For me that isn’t history, it was the news of the day.”
As the only son in residence, Bruce was anointed most brilliant by his parents, most obnoxious by his siblings. He was the know-it-all who beat everyone at chess, read history books for fun, and considered himself the supreme authority on everything—an attitude reinforced by Morris and Lola, who showered him with special attention. On Georgette’s birthday both she and Bruce received Schwinn bicycles, which struck her as terribly unfair. Bruce may or may not have been six years old, as legend would have it, when he began following the stock market and reading Business Week and Forbes. However, he was young when Morris talked business with him—and listened to what his son had to say; at an early age, Bruce became accustomed to having his opinions treated as worthy of extra consideration. He declared himself King of Bruceania, a make-believe empire he created on family trips to the Catskills, when he and Wendy would pretend to be explorers like Hernando de Soto or Lewis and Clark.
Lola made it clear to her children that they were not to be part of any crowd. Waiting in line was for ordinary folks, not the Wassersteins. Every year, on the family’s annual pilgrimage to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas show, Lola would bypass the long queue and explain to the head usher that the family was visiting from Kansas and had just one day to tour the city. (She chose Kansas because the family had just watched The Wizard of Oz on television the night before.) Much to her children’s chagrin, few people said no to Lola, despite her non-Midwestern, Polish accent.
She was a devout individualist. When other mothers teased their hair into bouffants, Lola chopped hers off into a severe helmet. While other prosperous 1950s housewives took care to keep their homes immaculate, Lola didn’t mind a mess.
She was ahead of the times with her attitudes toward diet and exercise. There would be no platters of Old World dumplings and stuffed cabbage for her children, and no New World canned foods either. Frozen french fries were allowed; they could be baked. As other mothers filled out, Lola got slimmer. She and Morris walked miles, hand in hand.
Weight was a constant topic of discussion. Georgette was praised for being svelte, living up to her nickname of Gorgeous. Bruce and Wendy managed to grow chubby despite the fresh vegetables their mother had delivered to the house in crates. Lola had many theories about nutrition; her children couldn’t bear to watch her eat—or rather, drink—breakfast, a mixture of soft-boiled eggs and orange juice. She insisted on feeding Bruce steak, as though he were a prizefighter being primed for the heavy-weight championships. She didn’t cook so much as roast and broil, chop and arrange, priding herself less on cuisine than on original presentation, like topping salads with kiwis and grapes. For Sunday brunch she served bagels, lox, and cream cheese, then criticized the children for be
ing plump.
Lola emphasized wholesome foods and slender physiques, but the family dined regularly at Lüchow’s, the German restaurant near Union Square known for its groaning platters of sauerbraten, Wiener schnitzel, and dumplings, accompanied by the music of an oompah band. Lola insisted on telling the musicians that it was one of her children’s birthdays, even when it wasn’t.
“I would have to sit there, head up, chest out, beaming with pride and confidence as they played ‘Happy Birthday’ on their accordions just for me,” Wendy remembered. “Is it any wonder that to this day I have a terminal fear of men wearing lederhosen and tiny feathered caps?” Her embarrassment led Lola to designate Wendy the shy child.
Unlike the headstrong Bruce, who constantly rebelled, Wendy was conciliatory. After Lola mortified the children by showing up at school wearing a hat with cherries hanging from it, they cut off the cherries. Wendy felt so guilty she convinced Bruce to confess. They told their mother, “We just want you to be normal.”
Perhaps in reaction to Lola’s lack of sensitivity, Wendy became hyper-empathetic, even to inanimate objects. Every night before going to sleep, she said good night to each of the cadre of dolls and stuffed animals that slept with her. She rotated their positions on the bed so none of them would feel excluded.
Watching her little sister tend her make-believe flock, Georgette predicted she would grow up to be a happy housewife with “bologna arms” and many children. She promised Wendy—whom she called “Sweetsiebud”—that she would be happy but warned her not to marry someone dull in the insurance business.
Lola pushed and prodded her brood. She heard Ethel Merman sing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in Annie Get Your Gun and changed the lyrics for home consumption. “There’s no children like my children,” she would say.
When it came to education, Aunt Florence might have set the standard, but Lola was not intimidated.
She didn’t know better—and had no choice—with Sandy, who was educated in the New York City public-school system. Sandy’s high school, James Madison, provided a solid education, but the Wassersteins had moved up in the world. They now lived in Midwood, the Brooklyn neighborhood on the affluent side of the Flatbush border. Lola owned a fur coat, and the family spent the Christmas vacation in Miami Beach. In keeping with their new status, they sent Georgette to private school.
She attended Brooklyn’s Ethical Culture School, an offspring of the Ethical Culture movement founded by Felix Adler, son of a rabbi who became a humanistic reformer, whose motto was “Act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby in thyself.” The school was a proponent of progressive education. The teachers there encouraged creativity and selfexpression, at a time when these were radical ideas. The students planted seeds and wrote poetry. Art was considered as important as arithmetic.
This soft touch was fine for their daughter Georgette, but Lola felt that a boy needed something more rigorous. She also wanted Bruce to have a Jewish education, in deference to her late father. Simon might have scoffed at religion, but he’d spent most of his adult life as a Hebrew-school educator. He avoided synagogues, except for holidays and special occasions, yet it wouldn’t have occurred to him to eat pork—or to have a grandson who wasn’t educated in Jewish teachings.
Morris and Lola enrolled Bruce at Yeshivah of Flatbush, even though Morris had unhappy memories of his religious education. His brothers had sent him to a Lower East Side yeshiva, but after a rabbi hit him, he switched to public school. Morris hadn’t had a bar mitzvah, the ceremony that inducts Jewish boys into the requirements of their religion. As an adult, with his own family, he saw no reason to join a synagogue, though the Wassersteins did celebrate Hanukkah with latkes and dreidl playing and trips to Ohrbach’s department store to buy gifts. They gathered for seders at Passover. Lola sent Georgette to Hebrew school at the East Midwood Jewish Center; Simon had taught Sandy to read Hebrew. Lola’s own religious education was questionable. At Bruce’s bar mitzvah, she held the Hebrew prayer book upside down.
Given the family’s ambivalent attitude toward religion, Yeshivah of Flatbush was not the obvious choice. The school had opened in 1927 in direct response to the immigration law enacted in 1924, which halted the huge influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. If Judaism were to survive in the United States, the founders reasoned, it could no longer rely on a constant supply of newcomers. The goal at Yeshivah of Flatbush was to produce Jews who would be proud Americans but also true to their faith. This purpose became more determined with the rise of Nazism through the 1930s and was strengthened by the Zionist movement.
The school was kosher and called itself Orthodox, but it was revolutionary in its day. Unlike traditional yeshivas, this one placed equal emphasis on Jewish and secular studies, and stressed Hebrew not Yiddish, considered the language of Jewish exile. Even more radical: girls studied next to boys. The only division came with Torah studies, which were conducted separately.
One aspect of Yeshivah of Flatbush resonated with Lola. Its graduates, male and female, were expected to be superior in every way: they would be as well grounded in their own traditions and history as any traditional yeshiva bocher, yet also be trained to compete in the larger world. They were expected to march out of the ghetto into the mainstream, then climb straight to the top.
Graduates became Nobel laureates (among them Baruch Blumberg, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, and Dr. Eric Kandel, the Columbia University professor who won the Nobel Prize for his work in the molecular biology of memory). They also became rabbis, physicians, bankers, lawyers, professors, editors, and at least one jazz impresario (Art D’Lugoff, founder of the legendary Village Gate).
From kindergarten on, students were tracked according to their performance. “By high school there were six classes,” said Gaya Aranoff, a Flatbush graduate who became a pediatric endocrinologist on the faculty at Columbia University Medical Center. “If someone was in the F class or E class, they were branded for life.”
Competition was embedded into the culture. “There was this post-Holocaust desire for the kids to excel,” Gaya said. “That was the message we got in school; that was the message we got at home. Expectations were very high.”
In the Wasserstein home, the family made fun of the vegetable cheeseburgers the kosher school served at lunch. But when it was Wendy’s turn to begin school, her parents sent her to Yeshivah of Flatbush with Bruce. The two of them walked to school together, Wendy trailing a few feet behind her big brother. He embarrassed her by knocking on the window of her first-grade classroom and sticking his tongue out at her. She adored him but also found him annoying—or “annoing,” as she would write in her diary. Wendy was a smart little girl and a passably good student, but she couldn’t spell and had difficulty reading. Later she said she was dyslexic.
“Words in books flew around the room when I tried to read them,” she wrote. “I was convinced that the ‘Fly to Europe’ advertisements on the subway were actually offering tours to Ethiopia.”
Lola took Wendy to reading specialists, and her comprehension improved. At the yeshiva, she made the A track, along with her classmate Gaya Aranoff, the future physician. “She was this plump, cherubic, curly-haired, sloppy kid who had a shy good nature,” Gaya said. Her strongest memory of Wendy took place outside school, on the occasion of Gaya’s ninth birthday. Wendy brought the most unusual gift to Gaya’s party.
“She brought me a denim skirt of hers I had complimented her on,” said Gaya. “After the party, when I was going through the gifts, my older sister said, ‘What kind of a weird present is that? Why would she give you her old skirt?’ I said, ‘But I loved that skirt, and she knew I loved that skirt.’ Wendy literally would give you the skirt off her back.”
Wendy had a very different recollection of the party. Her father—unprepossessing Morris—had indulged himself by buying a Jaguar. The Jaguar had been Bruce’s idea. At age twelve he advised his father to buy a car that would set the Wassersteins apart from t
he “Cadillac Jews” of Brooklyn. Morris refused to buy a Mercedes or any other German vehicle, so he chose a classy British car.
Unlike Lola and her brother, Wendy cringed at the thought of seeming flamboyant. She didn’t want her Flatbush yeshiva friends to think she was a spoiled rich kid. On the way to Gaya’s party, Wendy asked Morris to drop her off a few blocks from the Aranoff house, so no one would see her in the Jaguar.
Wendy’s good-natured exterior covered a complicated mixture of insecurity and self-doubt. Being the youngest child in a large, competitive family would have been enough to contend with. The pressure was compounded by Lola’s belief that survival lay in hiding the truth.
A playwriting teacher would tell Wendy, “There is order in art, not in life,” to which Wendy replied, “Life can imitate art if the artists change the accepted variables.”
Her ideas on this question were forming as early as second grade.
Wendy starred as Queen Esther in the Purim play at the yeshiva. Then she told Lola she was going to be in another play, costarring with a boy in her class named Eddie. For months Wendy talked about nothing else. She and Eddie had been cast as the romantic leads.
Lola bought Wendy a pink velvet dress and set her hair in ringlets the night before the opening. The next day Lola came to school and asked where the second-grade play was going to be performed.
“What play?” replied Wendy’s teacher.
Without missing a beat, Lola said, “I must have the wrong room. It must be one of my other children.” And she left.
Lola might have been demanding, but she was loyal. She could criticize her children, but just let an outsider dare. She waited until Wendy came home to yell at her for fibbing.
Recalling the incident in a letter to a friend, years later, Wendy wrote, “I remember feeling this total embarrassment and unwillingness to accept my own actions.” She said the memory brought back a disturbing sensation, “the sense of running away from myself.”
Wendy and the Lost Boys Page 4
