by Seth Lerer
One day, on a street full of saris, it occurred to Mom to join the Yiddish theater. What was left of the old legacy of Second Avenue was now ensconced in an Episcopalian church basement deep in midtown. The Folksbiene—the people’s stage—had been revived, and Mom auditioned for a role in Shop, a bit of twenties agitprop that was selected as the troupe’s seasonal opener.
When Mom got the part, and when the show was set, we agreed to see her. I drove in from Princeton with my wife, who found all this as much an anthropological venture as a family obligation, as if Margaret Mead had actually married one of those Samoans and was every now and then compelled to show up at some ritual of mutual humiliation. When we arrived, we found ourselves the only people in the audience under seventy, and we took our seats—under our own power—waiting for the play to begin. There was Mom, the young shop worker, speaking a stage Yiddish far removed from 1930s Brooklyn. The stage was filled with sewing machines nearly as old as the actors themselves, though I suspect the cast had more metal parts, not to mention plastic and batteries, than did the manual machines.
During the intermission, as my wife and I wandered around what had been conjured into a theater lobby, someone came up to us and asked, in Yiddish, what we were doing there. I noted that my mother was in the play.
Which one was she, he asked, and I said something to the effect of, Oh, the one on the right in the big chorus scene.
“Oh,” he replied in English. “The ingénue.”
She always was, whether performing or painting. Her art was as much a part of her as acting, and I grew up with her portraits and her still lifes. She painted brilliant circles on my bedroom walls, and one day after kindergarten she taught me to paint. Colors ran goopily from my brush, until she taught me how to hold it, how to get the watercolor on just right, and how, if you put a little bit of paint on one edge of the brush and turned it in a circle on the paper, you would get a little circle, shaded on one side and light on the other. I dipped the brush into the purple paint just as she showed me, and we painted grapes. They clustered on the shiny paper as they clustered in the backyard of our Brooklyn neighbors—an Italian family who actually had a grape vine and a fig tree (which they ritually bound in canvas every fall).
Mom learned to paint her canvas fruits at the Brooklyn Museum Art School under William Kienbusch, an abstract expressionist and scion of a wealthy Princetonian family. He was always “Mr. Kienbusch” in my mother’s stories: elegant, well traveled, impeccably turned out. I Googled him and found his photograph from 1956: T-shirt, paintbrush, dark eyes, and a lower lip to die for. He seems to have spent a good deal of his time, when not teaching (according to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website), traveling through Europe. Three volumes of his journals lie in the Smithsonian. They are in the form of letters to his mother, telling her of Spain and Greece, the Prado and the Parthenon. “He gives his impressions of Athens in long passages,” notes the website, “and describes eating lunch with the Greek King and Queen and other guests at the exclusive Propeller Club.”
Mom’s only travels in those days were to the Brooklyn and Metropolitan museums, and the only royalty she dined with was the carpet king of Flatbush, who commissioned her to paint a circus mural in his house using his own face for the ringmaster. One day, she put my father in the circus. In a portrait she painted in the early 1950s, he is making up as a clown before an act. He’s looking in the mirror, applying eyeliner, his face already whitened. The face is stretched out, as if to take the makeup more evenly, but I think that it’s more a look of surprise than of preparation. The eyebrows raised, the mouth wide open. It’s a look of fear, of fascination. How different from the serene Mr. Kienbusch, staring out from my computer screen, meeting my gaze, uncostumed, the paint confined to his canvas. What did my mother see in him? What did she see when she looked in the mirror of her wedding picture? What did my father see as he made up before a show?
As a child, I saw mirrors everywhere: windows at night, the backs of spoons that made each dinner a fun-house, my reflection in Mom’s eyes.
The TV sat in the den like a black mirror of my soul, until my father came home. Then we would spend the early evening watching game shows. “Zu sugen, dem emes!” he would shout in Yiddish, complete with a flourish of a hand, as if it were a magic spell. To Tell the Truth. That was his favorite, but they all were there: I’ve Got a Secret, What’s My Line? The game shows of the fifties and sixties were all about finding out, all about exposing impostures of the everyday. Find the real violinist, the man who married a princess, the woman who can recite the Bible by heart.
But the truth was, these were game shows about us. The TV of the 1950s broadcast secrets. The Army-McCarthy hearings filled the screen in the year before I was born, and I grew up overhearing all my parents’ arguments about the guilt or innocence of others. Are you now or have you ever been . . . ? Before McCarthy, there was Rapp-Coudert, a state legislative committee that held hearings on the “subversive attitudes” of New York public school and college teachers (this was in the early 1940s, but it was as fresh as Friday in my house). Inquests of this kind went on for a decade. My mother’s favorite professor at Brooklyn College, Harry Slochower, had spent her whole undergraduate life under investigation for his “sympathies,” and he was eventually dismissed in 1952.
We sat there in the den, watching domesticated versions of the trials my parents feared. The game shows deflected social terror. They channeled the anger and the fascination of a nation reared on loyalty oaths and security investigations, HUAC and “Red Channels.” The urge to expose was still there, only now, under the benign and bow-tied aegis of Bud Collyer or Garry Moore, the stakes were simple.
I’ve got a secret. And the biggest secret was the sex behind it all. Just think about those black-and-white interrogators. Instead of Kefauver or Murrow, there was Robert Q. Lewis, Bennett Cerf, Peggy Cass, Dorothy Kilgallen—as sexually ambiguous a panel as you would find. Woody Allen lays all this out in one of his movie skits, where a rabbi comes on a game show and reveals his secret wish: to be tied up and beaten by a shiksa while his wife sits at his feet and eats pork. I’ve got a secret. What’s my line? To tell the truth, it was always about desire: how could we transgress, and would they ever find out?
And then there was Beat the Clock.
We lived in the theater of interrogation, and my parents shaped their sympathies to fit their fears. There’s an old joke my mother’s cousin used to tell about the 1970s, when vans of young Orthodox men trolled the streets looking for lapsed Jews to enfold. “Are you Jewish?” they would ask strangers on the street. Those who weren’t said, “No.” Those who were said, “Who wants to know?”
We all wanted to know, and for my family Judaism was as much a play as anything else. There were the costumes of the faithful, the rites and rituals, the shows of Sabbath and Seder. For Reform Jews of my mother’s generation, the great fear was not the gentile but the deeply observant. Her bitterness reserved itself for the believers of her own kind, and the New York of my childhood filled itself with bearded men and covered women I was taught to loathe. On day, Mom’s mother went into the hospital. It was around the corner from the old Lubovicher seminary in Brooklyn. Mom and Dad left me with my younger brother in the car. Now, I could not imagine leaving a pet in an unattended vehicle, let alone two boys, eight and four. But if I did, what would I say to them? Don’t touch the dashboard, leave the wheel alone, keep the doors locked. No. From my mother it was, Don’t look the Lubovich in the eye. We had these superstitions about them—that they wouldn’t let you take their picture, that they wouldn’t count off in gym class, that if they met your gaze you would turn into a goat. But I think what my parents really feared was that if they looked you in the eye they’d turn you back into a Jew. Assimilation, passing, whatever you called it, could be wiped away before what Mom feared was their terrifying gaze. They were the real spirits of my nightmares, and my earliest memory is of a dream in which my bed is surrounded by
dancing flames, each with a leering, bearded face.
Maybe what terrified Mom most was that her children would be stolen. Abducted into orthodoxy, we would have denied her the salvation of her social soul. My son the doctor, my son the lawyer, my son who passes. I had a friend in high school who became a Chasid, much to the derision of my family. These were my father’s fears as well. We’d have to do the passing for him, as, later in his life, we would show up at public events just to prove that he had children.
For us, it was always a costumed life, and from the wardrobe of my Judaism I’d put on one more. My brother was Bar Mitzvahed in suburban Pittsburgh in June 1972. By then, my parents were living so far beyond their means—a seven-bedroom stone house, a gardener, and a Mercedes—that one great fling would hardly dent their debts. Dad had a way of hearing about “the best” of everything. Friends, lovers, coworkers—somebody always told him about the best restaurant, or the best movie, or the best lawn service. Invariably, they turned out to be fly-by-night, or someone’s brother, or a front for illegal operations (once, we turned up at a Polish restaurant in Pittsburgh where, it was immediately apparent, no one had eaten in years, there were no menus, and we had to be out by eight o’clock). As my brother’s Bar Mitzvah rolled around, Dad came home with news of the best caterer in Pittsburgh. Sight unseen, food untasted, he retained them. We would have the ceremony at the temple in the morning, then come home and they would be set up, the party in the garden, everything in order. And so, when we turned the corner at one-thirty, we saw the big “Wilson’s Catering” truck, and, emerging from it, a family of African Americans, in livery, toting great platters of ribs, ribeyes, roasts, and greens. A white-toqued server carved, and women in the kinds of maids’ uniforms you see now only in pornography took drink orders. It was high theater all right, and for years all Pittsburgh talked about the Lerers’ soul food Bar Mitzvah with the same blend of awe and horror as the court of Louis XIV must have talked about the king inviting Molière to sit in his presence.
All of which brings me back to Mom the ingénue, singing about a sweatshop on a borrowed stage. Shop was a play about the worker’s plight, about illicit love among the sewing machines. But it was also a play about the theater itself: about the magic of material, about how immigrants cut the patterns of their lives out of the bolts, about how dress and drama always go together. Little wonder that its playwright, the pseudonymous H. Leivick, was also the author of The Golem—perhaps the most famous play in all the Yiddish repertory, a story of a monster conjured out of clay, a haunted creature, a miscreant. We all have ghosts and golems in our lives (could you imagine Blithe Spirit in Yiddish—A Freyliche Geyst?), and all that we can do is dress up in disguise or paint away the winter.
Years after Mom had given up the people’s stage, she took to her apartment’s walls in Queens and painted birds and branches. The wooden wardrobe, too, took on her colors, as a twig arched over the armoire and met its mate against the wall. My wife thought it looked so natural, but I knew that this was a stage set. Mom had painted herself in, transformed her flat apartment into a one-bedroom theater. “For God’s sake,” says the ghostly Elvira in the final act, “not another séance.” But the door is open and the table set.
FIVE
Vaseline University
I finished my performance, and the bookstore owner turned to look out the window. Night had fallen. He had made no sales that day. He got up without speaking, opened the door and held it for me, his unkempt hair soon covered with the evening’s misty spittle.
“Keep the book.”
I hadn’t eaten all day, and I walked up Fillmore Street toward his apartment, stomach growling. I passed the Tully’s and the bank. I looked into the window of the Jackson Fillmore Restaurant and saw his empty seat. I walked in, told the waiter, my Dad used to eat here all the time, loved to sit in the window right there. Mind if I take the table? I’ll be out in an hour.
I sat down facing his old seat, ordered the veal chop, and turned to his absence.
The spring of my senior year in high school, you disappeared for weeks. There were the business trips to New York and San Francisco, and whenever you would leave, I’d have to drive you to the airport just to keep the car. We’d get up at five so you could get the first plane out, as if you couldn’t wait to leave, and I’d be back home by 6:30, barely knowing what to do until first period. One morning, I was so sleepy, you drove us both out (I would take the car back), and as you pulled up to the terminal, you stuck your hand out to adjust the side-view mirror and it fell out of its frame and shattered on the ground. The noise jarred me, and you shot me a glance, just to make sure I was awake, and threw yourself out of the car, not even closing the door, and then, turning in the terminal doorway, shouted out, “What do I care about a mirror? I make fifty-five thousand dollars a year,” and spun on your loafer through the automatic door, as if “To Be Continued” were flashed across the screen.
You weren’t there, that spring, when the thin envelopes arrived. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst—all of them wait-lists or rejections. My only package came from Wesleyan, to which I had applied late and listlessly, because you had a friend whose son had gone there in the 1960s and described it as a “fine school.” No one in Pittsburgh in the early 1970s had heard of Wesleyan. There was Ohio Wesleyan, but that was not it. There was Wellesley, and every now and then someone would taunt me in my final weeks of high school: Wesleyan—isn’t that a girls’ school? And then there was your father, whom we visited that summer on the way to check out the campus. We stopped for an afternoon at the apartment in Brooklyn, the apartment in which your parents had lived since the 1940s, and Grandma Tillie boiled a steak with noodles and we sat around the tired kitchen while Grandpa Norman found his teeth, and then, when he asked where I was “attending college,” he repeated the school’s name over and over in his accent. “Vaseline? You’re going to Vaseline?”
In the fall of 1973 I entered Vaseline University, armed with a box of opera LPs and a stereo, an electric typewriter purchased just for the occasion, and a handful of books. We all had private rooms in the dorm, and I dumped my stuff and found an open door. Unpacking there was a tall, brown-haired boy from Manhasset, who, as I entered, was hanging something up that looked to me like a bathrobe.
Cool robe.
“It’s not a robe, it’s my gi. For karate. You got any dope?”
Thirty-six hours later, we had heard that, dressed in his gi, this guy had jumped through a classroom window, screaming something that sounded like Japanese, and his room had been cleared out and vacuumed clean. I ran into the RA that afternoon, and jerked my thumb over to the guy’s room.
“One down,” was all he said.
After two days, another guy moved in—Phil, twenty-six, returning after, as he put it, “some time on my own,” with an Irish wolfhound named Lucille that lived in the room and, rumor had it, had borne his child.
I’d signed up for a great books sequence, a yearlong course whose syllabus integrated history, philosophy, and literature, from Greek antiquity to high modernism, all to be taught by a team of faculty. The philosophy professor had hair down his back, wore a white turtleneck with a large medallion on a chain, and insisted that we take our shoes off and sit in a circle on the floor because “that’s how the Greeks did it.” The literature professor had just arrived, having received his PhD at twenty-four, and he liked to have us over to his apartment to listen to the Pachelbel Canon and talk about the books. We’d sit on his Goodwill furniture and drink white wine, and one time, when I wanted to impress him with my understanding of Greek theater, I got up and looked around and found him in the kitchen talking to one of the girls about his father’s having been a Hungarian ambassador, and as she bent down I quietly turned and left and could never listen to Pachelbel again.
And as the snow fell in Connecticut, I would repeat the chorus of Aristophanes’s Frogs, brik-kik-kik-kax, koax, koax, louder and louder just to see if I could get the image of that
kitchen out of my mind. One morning I stepped out of the communal bathroom in the dorm to see a young man standing there, stark naked in the hallway, his blond hair falling over his eyes, his right hand brushing it up in a movement so natural and fluid that I thought, does he actually know he’s naked. He caught my eye and stuck his hand out and said, half with a shrug and half with a toss of his head like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, “I’m Billy. I came here to act.”
I didn’t even know there was a theater department.
“There isn’t.”
In his room, wearing a silk robe and holding a burning cigarette (which he never brought to his lips), he laid out his plan to stage The Importance of Being Earnest. Billy would be Algernon, and he’d pull the cast together. He had the costumes already, of course, and the biggest challenge would be getting people here to memorize their lines, but he had worked with worse. I’d done some acting, I began, but he brushed me off with a bit of cigarette ash that arced its way into my lap.
“No, no, no. You have to understand. I’m looking for talent.”
For the next three weeks, Billy would leave the dorm, crunching across the rimy lawns in a straw boater and a candy-striped jacket, twitching his hand like he was conducting an orchestra of frogs, reciting all the parts from The Importance of Being Earnest to himself. I never saw him go to class, but by the end of term he had cast the play and got the space—the library and lounge of one of the departments. He’d found a boy, even more handsome than himself, for Jack Worthing; a quiet, overweight girl for Lady Bracknell; two women who, to this day, I’m assuming were paid escorts as Gwendolen and Cecily; a lecturer with a British accent to play Chasuble; and as Miss Prism, a tall, dark-haired sophomore with a face out of a Lewis Carroll photograph, whose name was Merle Kummer.
