His rages and invectives proved to be too much for Sylvia Kirschner. She was relieved of our case, no doubt voluntarily. My father blamed her personally for Suzette’s rebellion. Dad was sure our family would be disgraced, that news his unmarried daughter had left home would spread among the ragtag group of refugees. Honor, reputation, social standing—that is what really mattered to him, far more than money.
Our new social worker, Shulamit Halkin, also cast a cold eye on Dad’s old-world concerns and what she, too, saw as his patriarchal tendencies. But she didn’t seem quite as beguiled by my sister as her predecessor had been. Suzette, bored with her clerical work at the First National City Bank, had confided to Mrs. Halkin her desire to become a doctor and save the starving children of India, and for that matter of the whole world.
“She could not quite explain to me what motivated her interest in all the children of the world and what she hoped to do for them,” Mrs. Halkin noted wryly in the case files. It was hard for her to see why my sister worried about the sufferings of distant peoples in Asia when her family was barely making ends meet in Brooklyn.
There were times my father couldn’t even afford the $95 rent, and Basil Cohen had to look the other way. The tie business wasn’t as lucrative as he’d hoped. He wasn’t making nearly enough to pay the rent, and if Suzette left and stopped chipping in, our financial situation would go from precarious to dire.
Newly enrolled at the local elementary school, I was shielded from most financial worries, as was my brother Isaac, who attended junior high.
César was carrying all five of us on his frail eighteen-year-old shoulders. That first year, he went from one menial job to another, never staying more than a couple of weeks or a couple of months: salesman in a Syrian-owned record store, clerk at a French bank, until finally settling down in an entry-level post at an American conglomerate named Continental Grain that was blessed with a cosmopolitan, amiable culture.
I shared a bedroom with Suzette, and assumed we were ideal roommates. I didn’t realize that I was a seven-year-old nuisance who cramped her twenty-year-old’s style in a thousand different ways. While she yearned to flee, to come to terms with her emerging womanhood, I wanted to hunker down and reclaim the childhood I had lost. While she kept sparring with my dad, I felt closer to him than ever in his alienation and distress. While she thought of our house as impossibly confining and wanted only to run away, I loved its simplicity, the fact that we were no longer on the run.
My formula for achieving permanency and stability? I would decorate our room on Sixty-sixth Street with white voile curtains. I had glimpsed them fluttering about the display windows of home furnishing stores up and down Eighteenth Avenue, our shopping mecca, and they became my version of the all-American fantasy of the white picket fence.
“What about the white curtains?” I asked the night before she left home for good. I was watching her fold clothes into her new suitcase, not one of the twenty-six. I couldn’t quite manage a light tone. I felt wounded and every bit as betrayed as my dad by her departure.
She shrugged. I would have my white curtains one day, she assured me. “But maybe not in this room on Sixty-sixth Street,” she added. That was how I knew that she was really leaving, how I grasped it before my parents, who still thought this was all a big bluff by their contrarian, wayward daughter.
My father wasn’t about to use my brand of gentle suasion.
“Mogrema”—Criminal—he shouted as Suzette left.
The door slammed, and there was silence. A few minutes later, I heard my father’s halting steps down the stairs, and the door closed again.
I LIKED TO STARE out the curtainless window of the room I now had all to myself. Up and down the street and in the adjoining blocks were other families like mine, new arrivals from Cairo and Alexandria. In the mornings, I’d watch my father walking to attend the first service of the day at the Congregation of Love and Friendship. His step seemed painfully labored.
Sometimes, we wouldn’t see him the rest of the day. He’d stay for the second set of prayers, intended to draw those laggards who couldn’t make it by 6:00 a.m. Afterward, he’d linger, most likely because he had nowhere else to go, but also perhaps because he didn’t want to come home. Deeply upset about Suzette’s departure, powerless to stop her—or persuade Mrs. Kirschner to stop her—he withdrew to the little shul down the street.
He sat by himself, somewhat removed from the other men, though he enjoyed amicable relations with all of them. They’d banter, laugh, trade rumors, discuss how their lives were going in this confounding new land. The men relished exchanging the latest gossip every bit as much as their wives and daughters, who came only on Saturdays and sat crammed together behind a tall concrete wall, chatting nonstop in the makeshift women’s section.
My father, on the other hand, sat there silently, and spoke up only when a reader, or even the rabbi, had made a mistake—and then it was to call out the proper wording or intonation. He had such a prodigious knowledge of the liturgy, he could recite by heart almost every single prayer. He was meticulous and so strict he didn’t tolerate the slightest error or deviation in the reading of a sacred text.
He was a biblical security guard—a policeman of the holy word—challenging anyone who dared to change what was perfect and deathless and immutable. When it came to questions of God and religion, my father was once again the Captain, a figure of authority. Some of the older congregants were annoyed by his interruptions. But Dad was unyielding, and forced them to reread the offending word or phrase.
Oddly, the younger boys didn’t mind; they deferred to him on all religious matters, and dubbed my father the tzaddik—the saint, the holy man.
When the synagogue emptied out, as the men left to go to work or home to their wives, my dad would linger. Sometimes, Rabbi Halfon would join him. The ancient little rabbi, who had reigned over the original Congregation of Love and Friendship, hadn’t seen my father since Egypt. Their reunion on Sixty-sixth Street had been one of the unexpected joys of moving to America. The two liked to sit together at the same table, reading. They didn’t exchange a single social pleasantry, yet they were the closest of friends, joined together by their shared passion for the holy texts.
Even after the rabbi went home, Dad stayed. If the door was open, I’d catch a glimpse of him as I walked to school, a lonely, solitary figure bent over a large book. His lips moved silently, and he didn’t even see me when I’d wave. His injured leg stretched out, his cane perched on the side of the table, he fidgeted and shuffled from side to side to alleviate the pain. But then he’d usually settle into a position he could tolerate, sit back, and resume reading.
He would peruse the weekly portion of the Bible, review sayings of the prophets, study obscure codes of Jewish law. His favorite readings were the Psalms, the heartfelt pleas to God authored by King David. It was customary to recite them in a group, typically on the anniversary of the passing of a loved one, but my father liked to read them by himself every day. He’d go through the psalms one by one, and read the entire book from beginning to end.
He sat in the same spot from the late morning through the afternoon and early evening, without a break, helping himself to little snacks left on the table by the caretaker—colossal black olives and pita bread. The bread and olives were his lunch and dinner. He’d look up in the late afternoon and see a crowd of men entering. It was time for the evening services, and he hadn’t returned home, and he hadn’t sold any ties, and he hadn’t made any money.
Elie Mosseri, twenty-two and newly married, liked to sit near him when he could. He was from our old Cairo neighborhood, and he and his family had lived, like us, in a building on Malaka Nazli. He had vivid childhood memories of Leon in Egypt, a tall, commanding figure who always sat by the synagogue’s altar, and didn’t hesitate to speak up when a word in a prayer was misspoken.
He was shocked at the change he saw in him in America. Elie plunked himself into a chair next to my father and began to
read from the large frayed Hebrew books that came from the library of the abandoned Congregation of Love and Friendship in Cairo.
Elie could tell Dad was struggling, that he didn’t have a job or very much to do. Why else would a man stay nine, ten hours in synagogue?
The congregation was booming. New immigrants descended on it day and night. They prayed in the exact way they had in Egypt, determined to allow nothing to change, despite the fact that they now lived thousands of miles from Cairo.
AN ENTERPRISING PAIR OF brothers began baking pita bread and delivering it to homes up and down Bensonhurst. Morris and Joshua Setton discovered there was an eager clientele willing to spend what little they had to avoid eating white bread. They later opened a grocery store of their own that stocked only Middle Eastern delicacies, realizing early on that merely eating the hot round loaves of pita was a crucial step in retrieving our lost life.
That was the goal now: even more than forging ahead in America, we wanted to replicate what we had left behind in Egypt.
Grown children were encouraged to marry other Levantine Jews—not Americans, not even other American Jews. Mothers taught their daughters their favorite recipes so they would be preserved and passed on, and their children and grandchildren would dine on the same foods generations of families had enjoyed, a cuisine that mingled the best of Syrian and Egyptian traditions, the sweet fruity passion of Aleppo and the garlicky oniony zest of Cairo—stuffed grape leaves, stewed okra in lemon and tomato, pockets of lamb filled with rice and pistachios, meatballs in sour cherries.
Assimilation?
It wasn’t a word we knew or cared to learn, and my father, finally reunited with his own people, was enjoying a modicum of peace and contentment. That was also why he stayed longer and longer at the Congregation of Love and Friendship, not deigning to come home.
It was also, of course, why my sister left. She now lived in a tower high up in the sky in Queens, a part of New York I’d never visited and that sounded distant and foreign. Her rebellion was nearly complete. She had moved out before getting married and against my father’s wishes, and she had even sidestepped the unspoken rule about living in a ground-floor apartment, as had always been the tradition in our family starting with Malaka Nazli.
How foolish—and hopeless—to try to reproduce a vanished world, Suzette thought. It depressed her, this effort to build a Cairo-on-the-Hudson. There was nothing in common, she felt, between those humdrum streets of one- and two-family homes and itty-bitty shuls of Brooklyn and the energy and joy and magnetism and life that could be found in even the shabbiest Cairo alleyway. It was altogether pathetic, this attempt to recapture the past through groceries and synagogues.
Suzette remembered an exuberant culture where religion mattered, but so did going out at night and reveling in all the Levant offered. Our father, who now all but lived at shul, was the prime example of this dual existence, where faith and ritual had in no way hindered his ability to lead a rich and pleasure-filled life. In Egypt, it was easy to be religious and worldly at the same time, but that seemed an impossibility here in America.
It was as if you arrived and were ordered to choose one door or the other, not both.
The biggest missing ingredient was glamour. It had been the defining quality of Farouk’s Cairo in the 1930s and ’40s—the elegant British officers, their beautiful mistresses, the passion for dancing, the insistence on going out all night every night. Even after the revolution, there was still an allure to life that couldn’t be obliterated by even the most heavy-handed and ruthless military rule. Restaurants continued to stay open late, and people still didn’t dine till midnight, and then they went out dancing or merely sat back to watch the belly dancers.
New York, supposedly the greatest city on earth, seemed to be limited to ten or twenty blocks that were drab, functional, and utterly devoid of style.
The moment we arrived, Suzette had sought out a dear friend from Egypt, Marcelle, who was also in Brooklyn. Marcelle had been a wild child, very brainy, very chic, the archetypal party girl. But somewhere on the way to New York, she had undergone a transformation. Shortly after settling here, Marcelle became engaged to a very devout man, and affected the habits and garb of religious American women. She changed her clothes and even her name; instead of Marcelle, she called herself “Adeena.” On the eve of the wedding, she was preparing to cut her hair and don a wig.
Suzette was stunned when she saw her irrepressible girlfriend wearing a long, modest dress and behaving deferentially toward her fiancé.
For Marcelle’s wedding, my sister wore a sleeveless sheath. The moment she entered the synagogue, a group of women rushed over in a panic to drape her shoulders with a sweater or shawl. Under no circumstances, they said, could her arms be bare. That was when she’d sworn to herself that she would leave, and have nothing to do anymore with this community of expatriates who called themselves Egyptians but bore no resemblance whatsoever to the people she had known back in Egypt.
A couple of weeks after my sister moved out of my room on Sixty-sixth Street, my mother moved in. She took over the narrow steel cot left vacant by Suzette.
I didn’t even question our sleeping arrangements. I took it for granted that my parents no longer shared a room; they hadn’t even on Malaka Nazli. At first, it seemed necessary—we simply had no space. But as one by one my siblings left, and they continued to sleep apart, I realized that their refusal to occupy the same bedroom was part of a deeper mystery I could never hope to grasp as a little girl.
EACH MORNING, I LEFT hand in hand with my mom for PS 205, the small public school around the corner. She refused to let me go alone, despite the short distance, and I cringed because we attracted attention. Only when I had pushed the door open would she relinquish my hand and kiss me good-bye.
I was intensely aware of the differences between me and the other children. It wasn’t simply my broken and heavily accented English. There was also the way I looked and dressed—like a Parisian lycéene who had landed in working-class Brooklyn.
My mom loved to dress me like the idealized Parisian schoolgirl of her imagination, sending me to school in navy blue sweaters and matching plaid pleated skirts, though of course, back in Paris, confronted with real French schoolgirls, I dressed like an Egyptian.
I marched out of the house looking as if I were on my way to some swank school in the sixteenth arrondissement. Alas, my wardrobe only set me apart once again from my classmates, the little girls who came in colorful dresses with wide flare skirts—clothes hand-sewn by their mothers, elaborate and showy, and lined with ribbons and bits of velvet trim.
“They are so fellahi,” my mom exclaimed when I expressed a longing to look like my schoolmates. To compare someone to an Arab peasant was her most searing put-down. To Mom, these families of seamstresses and housepainters and sanitation men were merely fellahin, although I noticed when I went to their homes that they lived far more comfortably than we did.
Loulou as a young schoolgirl in Brooklyn.
I wasn’t sure how we were superior to them. We were the ones who were poor and struggling desperately; wouldn’t that make us fellahin?
Lunch was also an ordeal. I noticed that most of the children carried lunchboxes—small, sturdy, efficient affairs, made of metal. Inside, there’d be a sandwich consisting of two slices of white bread filled with tuna or bologna or ham or cheese. My fare came in a brown paper bag, typically a fresh roll purchased at dawn by Mom from the Italian bakery around the corner and stuffed with a Hershey bar.
My classmates peered at my lunch and then at me. “Is that a chocolate sandwich?” they asked, their eyes widening.
I nodded yes and took a big bite. I found it absolutely delicious—that is, until I realized they found it awfully strange, this pain au chocolat lunch of mine. Self-conscious, I asked her not to make them anymore.
Loulou’s American class.
I wandered around my new school, shy as could be in my pleated skirt and sweater set
s. Classes, at least, were simple. I was more than prepared for the rudimentary arithmetic, reading, and science that constituted an American elementary school education. My problem was gym. I had never played sports in Cairo or Paris, so the sudden emphasis on physical fitness took me completely aback. I wandered through gym classes in a fog, volunteering for nothing.
Without explaining why, Mom instructed me never to reveal I came from Egypt. I told anyone who asked that I was from Paris. To my teachers, this made me a charming novelty, “that little French girl,” and even my closest friends didn’t know the truth. Yet I often felt I was living a lie, burdened with a dark secret that was bound to surface: that I wasn’t French at all, that I was born in Cairo.
AFTER SUZETTE LEFT HOME, I noticed that my brothers also seemed to drift away. César, our sole means of support since my sister had moved out, worked during the day and then went off to school and after that to his mysterious nightlife, so that I was asleep by the time he came home. Isaac spoke of joining the U.S. Air Force. I was secretly pleased at the prospect of his leaving. He and I were always clashing, and unlike my oldest brother, who tended to be protective, I found Isaac, six years my senior, caustic and combative.
While César was more docile, and closer to my dad, even he seemed increasingly removed from the religious practices that had been so central to our life. My father’s worst fears about America were coming to pass. He’d order my brothers to pray. They’d merely shrug and go their own way.
Even my mother was rebelling: outfitted with a new pair of dentures, Sylvia Kirschner’s last legacy, she kept hinting that she wanted to go out and find a job. Her first declaration of independence came when she decided to abandon the Congregation of Love and Friendship. She’d tried valiantly to fit in, but the area where women sat, a cramped space behind a wall, was so dismal, and it was often impossible to find an empty seat or follow the service. Even worse were the busybodies who kept grilling Mom on Suzette’s whereabouts. “Is she married yet?” they’d ask, while the less kindly among them posed the same question with more edge: “She isn’t married yet?”
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Page 24
