Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (14 page)

“Louise, why do you want to let Proust win?” Minnie Marx wanted to know. “You never take my side . . . You don’t play fair!”

“Fine, you win this time.”

“But, why?” Jeanne burst out. “I don’t agree. Didn’t Proust write the longest novel ever?”

Mina was enraged:

“If it’s weight that matters, Gary wrote thirty-two books: Almost ten thousand pages.”

“That’s an absurd criterion!” Louise Cohen countered. “Think about it: Albert wrote relatively little: eight books, some of which were versions of each other, since
The Book of the Dead
became
Book of My Mother
and
Belle du Seigneur
was written in 1938 and then rewritten in 1968. That said, it was a best-seller, translated into fifteen languages, even at 845 pages. It still tops the charts for Gallimard’s ‘White’ collection. The number of bookshelves they can fill shouldn’t be taken into consideration.”

“Of course not,” Minnie Marx said, upping the ante. “It’s not the number of books that matters but the number of films!”

That was the final straw. They jumped to their feet, insulting each other, purple-faced and disheveled. For a moment, stunned by the turn of events, Rebecca had the impression she was watching a film with the sound off. She thought of Bonemine, the wife of the village chief in the Asterix comic books, who is always wielding a shield, a fish, a rolling pin or whatever she can find, to beat her opponents silly.

Deciding she ought to head things off before the women came to blows, Rebecca began to tell them the story of Astérix, whom they obviously had never heard of. They were soon mesmerized by the adventures of the tiny Gallic village that held out against the Roman Empire. However, when she explained to them that the story was a comic strip, they protested, disappointed, that “engraved literature” was of an inferior sort.

“What does this Bonemine look like?” Minnie asked in the hope of appearing interested.

“Small and pudgy but in a haughty way; she’s proud to be the chief’s wife. She’s also domineering and knows how to get her way. She may be a housewife but underneath, she’s a general.”

“Just like me,” Minnie observed.

“Does she have a son?” Mina interrupted.

“No, not that I remember, but I’m not an expert.”

“So why do you even mention her?” Jeanne scoffed. “Go and find the mothers of Woody Allen and Albert Einstein since you want to meet them so much!”

Jeanne’s remark was like a slap in the face to Rebecca. She lashed out, incensed:

“Why did you drive your sons so hard? For your own egos or your own pleasure? Romain is being completely honest when he writes in
Promise at Dawn
: ‘I attached no importance whatsoever to my past or present; all that mattered was that I knew myself destined to reach those dizzying heights so clearly visible to my mother’s eyes; nothing on earth could prevent me from reaching them for her sake. I had always known that my mission on earth was one of retribution; that I existed, as it were, only by proxy.’ Retribution! That’s what your sons were for you: pay-back! They only existed to avenge your miserable lives! They weren’t autonomous beings; they were incapable of imagining their lives without you. At best, they were your clones.”

Total silence fell over the room.

Feeling themselves under attack, they filed out of the room one after the other. Why did no one answer her? Was it because Nathan wasn’t famous? But who could say that he wouldn’t be, one day?

She returned to the library, chose a book, opened it at random and inhaled its odor of glue, dust and old paper. This smell always soothed her. Feeling better, she decided to find out what she could about the sons of her new companions; she really only knew them through their literature, but now that she had started to get better acquainted with them through their mothers, she wanted to form her own opinions. She started with Romain Gary, who had written in
Promise at Dawn
that he only existed by and for his mother, whose repressed artistic ambitions he had been groomed to fulfill: “I was determined to do all I could do to make her, by proxy . . . a famous and acclaimed artist.” Gary had played the game. He wanted to prove to his mother that
her
life had not been in vain, that
she
had succeeded. He pushed aside his “me” in favor of an “us” that enclosed the two of them in a protective bubble. He adored his mother and was convinced he lived in osmosis with her. As he was leaving for England to join General de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, he had an image of himself getting on the plane, but it wasn’t him, rather “a fierce old lady, dressed in grey, stick in hand, and a Gauloise between her lips.” It was his mother who was leaving, who had decided to fight and win the war, who was going to fly a plane. “I truly believe that it was my mother’s voice which was talking through me.” Who was he, then? Himself, his mother, or a combination of the two? He returns to the question later in the same book, when he finds himself walking in the medina in Meknes. He realizes that Mina has taken over his life as surely as if she had stolen from him and that there is no room left for himself.

Rebecca wondered if she had been reading out loud: an angry Mina had come running into the library to tear
Promise at Dawn
from her hands. Taken aback, Rebecca let the worn paperback edition she had been reading fall to the ground, where it nearly broke into pieces, its spine ruined by hours of reading.

“Why did you do that?”

Mina mumbled an excuse, something about how she didn’t need to read it anymore since she knew the text by heart.

Rebecca tried to please her and quoted a passage:

“Your son wrote this about you: ‘Nothing could happen to me because I was her happy ending.’”

Mina smiled:

“It’s true that my love for him saved his life. I had him paged as he was getting on a plane. I wanted to kiss him one last time. I’m sure my handsome Romain pretended to his friends that it was a lover who was calling him away. Delightful as ever, he missed his flight. But the plane he was supposed to be on crashed, leaving no survivors. My call saved his life.”

“We’re all narcissistic and egomaniacal,” Rebecca observed.

Her remark lightened the mood.

Mina went on about her hero, all the while rearranging the curios that were piled on the fireplace mantel. The room was furnished to suit her: a bit too kitschy, loaded with colorful throw cushions, gaudy flowers and ornate furniture.

“He did better than I ever imagined he would. He wasn’t content to come home a war hero, no! He managed to find time in the middle of a war to begin his first novel,
A European Education
. To think I wasn’t there to congratulate him—I died in 1943 before the war ended—just makes me ill.”

“I understand completely how terrible that is,” remarked Jeanne, from a chair across the room where she had taken a seat. “I died before Marcel ever became famous, too. I hope you feel better after your little decorating spree but don’t worry too much. Though I’ve done my best to teach you what good taste is, you’ll never learn.”

She was about to hold forth on the fine arts but Minnie interrupted her, crashing into the sitting room singing
I’ll Say She Is
at the top of her lungs.

“Did I ever tell you about my boys’ first Broadway hit? This was the hit song from their movie.”

She arranged everyone in a line and, gesticulating as if she was an orchestra conductor, directed them to sing in unison. She was as full of life as she had ever been.

“Were you at the premiere?” Rebecca asked.

“You can’t imagine how nervous I was,” Minnie began. “It was the greatest moment of my life. I had dreamed so often of that day and then to think it had finally arrived! Performing on Broadway was a feat in and of itself, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to hear the public laugh, the critics applaud, bows and ovations—a triumph! I was in such a state of anticipation that, to ward off any disasters, I began reciting to my husband all the things that could go wrong. It drove him so crazy he left the house, shouting “Break a leg!” That’s how actors wish each other good luck, you know, but he didn’t realize how right he was because when I stood on a stool to get a look at myself in the high-up mirror in my husband’s workshop, I fell and broke my ankle. Nothing could have kept me away from the premiere though, so, at the hospital, I convinced the nurse to have me driven to Shubert’s Casino. They carried me all the way across the theater in a gurney, and everyone laughed, I can assure you. That was May 19, 1924, and it was our first big success.”

She began singing again and everyone joined in.

Rebecca interrupted:

“I remember that in Groucho’s
Memoirs of a Mangy Lover
, he wrote that the Marx Brothers never would have existed if not for you, but I have the impression that you weren’t looking for fame for yourself but for your sons. Which would make you different from everyone else here.”

“Not at all! I was thrilled when a Broadway musical about me opened in 1970.
Minnie’s Boys
, it was called, and it told the story of our early years. If I had allowed Groucho to become a doctor, I never would have been the star of a Broadway show!”

“I’m not criticizing you . . .”

“I know,” Minnie stopped her. “You don’t realize we didn’t have a choice. In our day, women obeyed their fathers and then their husbands. The only thing left for us was our sons, so we did what we had to for them to succeed: advice, encouragement, training, just like for an Olympic athlete. It was the only way for us to taste. Nowadays, women work outside the home. They don’t need to be mothers to exist.”

“They’re so lucky!” Jeanne sighed. “I would have loved to have a literary career, become a critic or a journalist . . . I was born in the wrong century.”

Rebecca wondered what kind of a mother she had been. Not as pushy or ambitious as these women who had preceded her. All she had wanted was for Nathan to share her values, as if through a kind of osmosis he would be the person she had wanted to be herself.

“Women may have greater freedom today, but mothers are always the same everywhere,” Minnie opined. “They still tell their sons, ‘Put on a sweater; I’m cold!’”

“Do you really believe there isn’t a single child who wasn’t conceived to conform to a parent’s wishes, who is capable of being the person he wants to be without a thought for his parents’ ambitions for him?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes, orphans,” Jeanne answered in all seriousness.

8

Jewishness Is Generational

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.

Woody Allen

God exists but is so inconspicuous that I feel ashamed on His account.

Albert Cohen

What I am really interested in is knowing whether God could have created the world in a different way.

Albert Einstein

“How did you instill a sense of Jewishness in your sons?” Rebecca wanted to know.

“In those days, unfortunately, being Jewish was determined primarily by the anti-Semitism that we had to live with daily,” Amalia answered. “In Vienna, we had to vote for Karl Lueger, who was elected mayor in 1895, even though he accused Jews of ‘unprecedented terrorism.’ Many Jews settled in Vienna after the Emancipation Edict came into effect in 1867. Lueger said: ‘We refuse Christian oppression and will not allow Austria’s ancient Christian kingdom to be replaced by a new Palestine.’ I can remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. He didn’t like the fact that thirty percent of students were Jewish, almost half of the lawyers, doctors and bankers, as well as many artists. Whether they were baptized or assimilated changed nothing in his eyes: ‘It’s their race that’s obscene,’ he used to say. He was reelected.”

Amalia was still stunned by the mix of superficiality and lurking anxiety that had been the norm in Vienna. Like many Viennese, she was passionate about the arts. People were ready to come to blows over who was the more talented between Arnold Schoenberg or Gustav Mahler, and they traded the latest books by Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal and discussed them endlessly.

“Nevertheless, the political atmosphere was oppressive; you always felt you didn’t belong,” she continued. “Sigmund had to wait seventeen years to become a tenured professor, even though he had published numerous scientific articles and a half-dozen books. By that time, he had already laid out the proof for his theory of male hysteria, he had invented the ‘free association’ method, developed his theory of seduction, which he would later abandon, described the Oedipus Complex and discovered the importance of dreams. Despite all that, he remained a lecturer at the university, which was a bitter pill for him to swallow.”

“Was anti-Semitism the cause or were his theories on sexuality too shocking?”

“Both, but you have to realize that, when he started at the university, he hadn’t done anything to be named professor because he thought it would come naturally. He finally had to contact some influential friends and still he had to wait sixty-four years to receive the official title, the same year he stopped teaching.”

Mina appeared, wearing a particularly flattering light pink suit. She looked younger somehow. She suggested they all go out for a while; she couldn’t stand sitting all day and she needed some exercise.

“Go out? Where?” Rebecca asked, surprised by the idea.

“Do you like the forest?”

Rebecca followed her into a dense wood of oak and beech trees. She was so happy to be walking in nature that she had a hard time concentrating on what Mina was saying.

“I don’t mean to wrongfully compare my Romain to Sigmund,” she was explaining. “But my son was also the victim of latent anti-Semitism because he was the only one in his graduating class at the military academy who did not make sub-lieutenant. They said he hadn’t been French long enough after his naturalization. He could never bring himself to admit it to me, for fear I would be hurt; I still held such an idealized vision of France. He spared me that.”

“What did he tell you? That he had failed his exams?”