The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir

by Sonia Taitz

  Enough with the worldwide conflicts and killings. We, the youth, boys with long hair and girls in pixie cuts, would make a new world. We were “the young generation,” as the Monkees sang. The past was gone, for the first time, in our time. It was dead and daisied over. It was time to emerge from the bomb shelters, time for blossoms to poke out of gun barrels, .22 or otherwise.

  This made sense to me, if not to my parents, who were wary of utopian fantasies. As a newly omniscient teen, I realized how sadly “blind” my parents were to my new world. All the “bad things,” after all, had happened in Europe, that bloody old world of petty clanship. That is why everyone from there (except for the rockers) wore sour expressions and tweedy old suits and stockings and clunky high heels, while we could wear sandals and chain-belts and let our hair blow in the wind.

  I remember my first makeup, all Brand X and yet more precious to me than Coty or Helena Rubinstein. Manny is thriving at his competitive high school; he is fencing and dating and busier than ever. But on a rare day when he has time, he takes me on an expedition to Woolworth’s, within which I change my life. With his encouragement and support, I pick up a lipstick at this magical “five-and-ten-cent store.” Its barrel is shiny gold; the color, Frosted Cocoa-Mocha, a crazy, mod bronze-beige. It smells of peppermint and feminine possibility. Then, the “blush on”—a cheap, plastic box with a clear rectangle revealing peachy powder, and a luxurious brush that turns the crumbling talc into a febrile glow on my cheeks. Later, in the bathroom, I rim my eyes with a black “kohl” pencil, imagining myself to be Nefertiti (if she’d worn peachy blush and frosted lipstick). Instantly, I am transformed from twit into temptress; if I could have looked at my face in the mirror all day (with some sort of gizmo attached to my head), I would have.

  I throw my dumb stretchy hair bands away and learn to flip my hair by throwing it all forward and then letting it fall back in splendid leonine volume. Nature herself seems to be loving me, and I celebrate by wearing an assortment of boldly colored fishnet stockings to go with my go-go boots.

  My parents scarcely notice these changes; during my teens they begin to enjoy a boom in their business and are now working harder than ever. In any case, I know enough to wipe off my makeup before entering the house. My father had commented, here and there, about the “paint” with which most American women were “shmeared”: “In Europe, only prostitutes painted themselves like that; Feh!”

  Now when I ask him, as I often have before, if I am beautiful, he does not tell me that beauty does not matter. He does not tell me that there are many other values in the world that go deeper and last longer. He looks at me, smiles, and says, with tremendous reverence:

  “And now God has given you even that.”

  He makes me feel that my looks are a gift, but also a part of my arsenal, to be used when a life-or-death matter occurs, as it did to Scheherazade. Should my brains and stories not be enough, there can be my beauty. And vice versa. And should both fail, there is always the piano playing or recitation of Hebrew psalms in the original.

  My mother, who wore only her bright swipe of Revlon Cherries in the Snow lipstick (with a pat of powder and clear nail polish on special occasions), seems unsure of what to say to her budding daughter in temptress regalia. The part of her that prefers Doris to Elizabeth might favor a less sultry look for her child, and yet she is gracious as I begin to transform.

  “You have a classic beauty and a delicious chen,” she says, using the Yiddish word for charisma. “The boys are going to love you,” she continues, with the first trace of respect she has ever given me. It is a woman-to-woman comment, and it does me good. When one of my high school crushes comes running up the hill to Overlook Terrace, passing my mother walking down to the subway, she reports:

  “You should have seen him run. Why did he run? Why do men run? I don’t know. Maybe they run up the hill for you.”

  I was proud of this power. Love was always good, but in that era it seemed—as I’d always dreamed—to have revolutionary, matrix-altering potential. One was free to love anyone, be loved by anyone. Sexuality began to come out of hiding, and boundaries blurred. Nations blended, Afros were in, as were my friend Sarah’s tight curls and my own shiny ultra-black hair. My heart swelled with hope. If there’s only one life, let me live it as a sultry Schwarzkopf. Let me live, and not be pushed into the death-line because I might look a little “ethnic.” Let me be saved, and hugged, and even loved.

  Then came Israel’s Six-Day War. Despite all this Haight-Ashbury, Electric Circus consciousness, I did not question Israel’s lightning-swift use of its forces to protect itself. Even in my dolly bird incarnation, a part of me was still that no-nonsense Camp Betar cadet and a war hero’s daughter. When it came to my people, when it came to a threat of annihilation, I wanted a fighting chance.

  Golda Meir, Israel’s national grandma, said it well: “I can forgive my enemies for killing our sons, but I cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill theirs.” I found her smart, strong, and oddly familiar, with the kind of orthopedic shoes my Bubbe wore. I felt safe with a prime minister like Golda at Israel’s helm. Israel’s face was female, with a corona of frizzy gray hair. Its founder, David Ben-Gurion, had his own Einsteinian coiffure. I loved this iconic grandpa for his casualness—he wore no ties; he was ready to push up his sleeves and plant a baby pine tree in the desert. Both he and Golda had new, Israeli, last names. “Meir” means “illuminating”; “Gurion” means “lion cub.”

  After six days, endlessly compared at my school to the miracle days of creation in Genesis, the Western Wall was ours to visit again, site of all those pilgrimages and millennial prayers. Although it was not even part of the Temple itself, just a wall outside it, photos showed soldiers, heads leaning against this powerful wall, helmets off, crying. Some became believers for the first time in their lives. All our learning had been a preface, like a prophecy from Isaiah—God will punish his people, but then God will redeem them.

  “Ahavtich”—I have always loved you, the word I had learned in my old yeshiva. These were the forgiving times, the transcendent rapprochement I’d awaited all my life. I was glad my parents had lived to see not only Israel born, but its very heart restored, like an old pocket watch set ticking again.

  Here was an answer to the awful documentary footage Jewish schools showed each year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, piles of bodies scooped onto flatbed trucks or dropped into ditches. Each time the camera closed up on a face it looked like mine, or like the faces of my classmates, or their families, or mine. And some of them must have been their families, and mine.

  We all want and need a happy ending, the comfort of, if nothing else, a wall of stone. Stone to mark that we had existed, the kind that Jews lay on graves to show they have been there, that a life and a soul is acknowledged. Every Jew on earth was not only a patriot that year, but a believer in miracles on this earth, in our time.

  The Making of a Courtesan

  AT FOURTEEN, a great miracle happened there, as we say on Chanukah. Not, in this case, in the city of Modi’in, where Maccabee warriors battled Hellenized Syrians, but in my own developing body. Somehow, finally, I made the full transition from studious girl with coke-bottle glasses and braces to a sultry, Semitic Lolita with contacts, straight teeth, and killer curves à la Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren.

  Still a child inside the modest Orthodox world, I did not know the true meaning of what I radiated for several more years. The first sign of this transformation was my English teacher, Mr. Levin, who suddenly said:

  “And what is your opinion of this play, Sonia—you, you COURTESAN?”

  This shouted, untoward word froze in the air. The moment passed. I suppose that none of us had the vaguest idea what a courtesan was, and Mr. Levin, always a bit fanciful, did have a tendency to shout out various wacky epithets. (I remember that he called one classmate “an ugly bowling ball.” What did that mean?) When I hear the word now, I am almost flattered—for wasn’t that what I had al
ways dreamed about being—a modern Scheherezade-Esther? Yes, a courtesan—one who can make powerful men weak and susceptible.

  Something beside my own subconscious intentions had brought out this reaction. One of the meaner boys had started sneezing every time I walked by, saying “Ah-choo! I’m allergic to foam rubber!” This was hilarious to him; “falsies” were apparently made out of foam rubber, and my breasts were big enough to seem improbable.

  It was also of considerable advantage to me that my formerly despised, dangerous black hair was now considered sexy. I wore it straight, long, and glossy, an effect achieved by “wrapping” the hair around an empty coffee can. My looks were a political statement. Jews could be sexy, as were Italians and Puerto Ricans. I was an Indian Princess, or maybe even a Jewish American one. Nothing to be ashamed of. Ali McGraw played one in Goodbye Columbus, and the Holocaust wasn’t mentioned even once. Finally, Jewish daughters could be spoiled, like Kitten in Father Knows Best. And when they grew up, these kittens could wrap men around their little fingers.

  So this was how Helen of Troy addled Paris, how Cleopatra made Antony irrational. These clever women were blessed with brains, but to that were added more mysterious powers. The powers of the courtesan, the seductress, the femme fatale. My first perfume, after a brief false start with a girlish lily-of-the-valley, was called Tigress. It was musky, and the top of the bottle was covered in fake tiger fur. You can’t get sexier than that, can you?

  In my idiotic solipsism, in my vanity and adolescent fancy, I thought I had figured out some great abiding truth of the universe. Something that would solve all ethnic hatred, solve it in the simple union of man and woman whose love was so powerful that swords would be bent into wedding rings. The trouble with the Jewish people, over the years, and all the persecutions? That was simply because no sexy woman with a great big brain (and working knowledge of Rashi) had tried to patiently explain all the issues and unfairnesses. She had not yet had proper access to the right, all-powerful leader, the Billy Alpha Male, and no gentile man, busy riding horses bareback and generally being Nietzchean, had ever dreamed how wonderful love could really be.

  If Hitler had met me, I thought, I could have had a few words with him, tossed my Tigress-scented hair, and averted all this nonsense. Okay, I would have dyed my Tigress-scented hair blonde. I wasn’t stupid. I was, after all, a courtesan. Mata Hari must take many disguises. It is part of her dangerous yet thrilling mission to alter history. She does what she was born to do. Like Hannah Senesh, she dons her parachute and jumps, deliberately, into hostile land.

  Despite my nascent female powers, I did not embark on a blissful ride on the highway of love. At first, it seemed easy. In my seventeenth summer, I met an appropriate male counterpart, a cute Jewish boyfriend. Yeshiva-bred like me, he was on the same summer tour of Europe for modern-Orthodox high school graduates. Jacob, like the other boys, wore a small woven yarmulka, and one day, as he and I were walking in Paris hand in hand, an old man had followed us. We wondered if he was one of the legendary European anti-Semites we had always heard about, and thought he would make some ugly comment about Jacob’s religious headgear, or maybe mock our innocent young romance. As we walked more quickly, he pleaded, “S’il vous plait, mes enfants.”

  We stopped and turned around. The man was white-haired, tall and thin. He looked into our faces, tears in his warm brown eyes, and said, “Yiddishe Kinderlach . . .” Jewish children. “Yiddishe”—my maternal grandfather’s word as the Nazis had taunted him. I patted the old man on the shoulder, and Jacob shook his hand. We were happy to be “Yiddishe Kinder” together, in Paris, representing the young, strong incarnation of our people.

  In the fall, Jacob and I were both headed toward the same place—Columbia University in Morningside Heights—he to Columbia College, and I to Barnard, its female counterpart. We took turns sitting on Alma Mater’s great, capacious, stone lap; we were thrilled to be received by the daunting, stern-hearted Ivy League. Tall and handsome, with shaggy brown hair and blue-green eyes, Jacob took care of me for nearly four years, waiting for me after classes, bringing me Drake’s coffee cakes in the mornings, cooking small steaks for me on his little dorm toaster-grill.

  Trust was there, and love followed over the next years. Jacob was my first partner, and I his. I loved being in his tiny room in John Jay Hall, entwined with this sweet man, laughing. We were compatible; we were like twins. In every picture taken of us we look young, beautiful, satisfied.

  After all this, I pushed him away. Why? Because it was easy, and obvious, and there the story would end. No trauma. No chosenness. No selection. My tale would pale next to that of my parents, who had looked into the heart of darkness and lived, my mother banging pots and eating apples, my father fixing timepieces and chanting at the altar. My mother, it is true, was thrilled with Jacob—but the one I was trying to impress, all my life, was my father. He was my own private Selection Committee. Marriage at twenty-one, to a guy from a big house in the boroughs (with a country house in Connecticut)?

  This, I think, was my mental reckoning:

  Should I stay with, and soon marry, this wonderful guy, who wants to go to law school (that, or medicine, being the only choices then for a smart Jewish boy), comes from a nice Jewish family, understands me and my world, went to a yeshiva like mine, and will almost certainly be good to me for the rest of my life?

  Nah.

  Of course, I had loved being with Jacob and his parents, who instead of serving exhausted pasta with ketchup at dinner took me out to “fish restaurants” where you could get a “nice piece of sole” and a baked potato in foil, followed by a rich hunk of cheesecake. Other than the delis for hot dogs and a greps after our Doris Day ritual, my family had never “gone out” to restaurants, and on the very rare occasion that we went to a coffee shop, my mother would invariably help the busboy wipe the table. Jacob’s mother, hair frosted in three shades of metallic blonde, would light up a post-fish Newport, exhaling like a movie star. His silver-haired, silver-moustachioed father (who actually looked like Mr. Lodge, Veronica’s father) would unwrap a cigar with a great sense of quiet entitlement. And then we’d all get into the “champagne” colored Cadillac Eldorado and drive, soundlessly ensconced, to their sprawling Tudor-style “private house” in Forest Hills, Queens.

  Jacob had a large backyard, with flagstone paving and a basketball hoop. He had a basement “rec room” with cork on the walls, lavender carpeting in the powder rooms (with matching monogrammed guest towels and mini soaps), a dining room as well as a citrus-colored “kitchenette,” and a wood-paneled trophy room for all the father’s philanthropic contributions to the Jewish world.

  Sometimes the contrast between Jacob’s upbringing and mine pained me. I once overheard his parents refer to my own tiny apartment as a “shoebox.” My parents had invited them over to Washington Heights. Jacob’s parents walked through the apartment (that would take about thirty seconds) and clucked about the two bedrooms, the one tiny baby blue bathroom with a sink that stood on skinny metal sticks, and the small kitchen. We had no dining room; we ate in the kitchen, at a small round table covered with a flowery oilcloth, its centerpiece a vase of plastic flowers. If you listened carefully, as you sat there, you could hear loud salsa playing out of someone’s car radio. Dominicans and Colombians were joining the Puerto Ricans in my neighborhood, and now there were serious drug sales, there was frequent shooting.

  Perhaps worst of all, Jacob’s parents had bluntly asked that horror question: “So where does your brother sleep?”

  “It’s sort of a slum,” they informed me, as we drove away in the Caddy, as though I could do something about it. Oh, is it? I’ll move away at once! Thanks for letting me know! I’ll move into something larger and more luxurious, in an expensive stylish neighborhood now!

  I was both mortified and angry at them for belittling my parents. After all, we lived in Manhattan, even if it was the tip of the island, above uptown, above Harlem, at the end of the end of Elling
ton’s “A” train. At least we didn’t live in Queens! Slum-dwellers or not, we lived in THE CITY But I had always wanted a quiet, gracious life, a childhood like Jacob had had, a garage with bikes and wooden sleds inside it.

  I could have married this boy and had my own gracious home with wall-to-wall carpeting, an ecstasy of toilets, diamonds in my ears and circling my neck, not to mention a rock to weigh down my small-boned hand. I could have gone all Riverdale, and had pool parties and bridge nights like my mother’s old friends. I could have gone to Junior’s and had the maitre d’ know how I liked my fish and my cheesecake.

  Is this in the great tradition of the operatic movie magazines, which my mother and I both adored? Is it to defy my mother—who warned, like Cassandra: “A goy will hurt you. Watch out!” Am I trying to be heroic, jump into the subway tracks, join the Lithuanian army, like my father? Or is it simply the case that troubled people who have had a taste of hell are most familiar to me? The ambivalent, the torn, the wounded—these are my true fellow travelers, even as I get my A’s at school. I like the minor keys, the complex atonalities.

  I eventually find it impossible to stay with Jacob, the good boy, the Likable Kid who is close to his parents. Who has a vintage collection of baseball cards, including Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford. Who will end up as a leading litigator in a prominent Jewish law firm—which is to say, a top firm in New York. Who offers me an amazing Tiffany solitaire at the Rainbow Room. He is gorgeous in a tux, and I wear the diamond for a short while, pondering normalcy, safety. My mother draws the relieved conclusion from this that her willful daughter’s life is settled; she is ecstatic and starts buying me pots and pans that I, too, can clatter in the morning.