Jewish Mothers Never Die: A Novel (15 page)

“No, he never could have made me believe such a thing. I was sure he was a genius. So, he made up a story about how he had seduced the lieutenant’s wife, who then refused to promote Romain out of jealousy. He knew I’d like a love story!”

Amalia slowed down as she tried to give them a better idea of the virulent anti-Semitism that reigned before the war, while avoiding the many clichés that had been tossed around.

“We lived with the constant threat of reprisals and a diffuse fear as more and more Jews fled the pogroms in Russia and arrived in Brody. We accepted them like storms and hail, with a kind of fatalism, like everyone in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, I suppose. Sigmund couldn’t tolerate it, though. His father had told him a story that had completely shaken him: ‘Once, when I was young, in the same city where you were born, I left the house one Saturday, in my good clothes and wearing a new fur hat. A Christian jumped out at me and knocked my hat off my head and into the mud, yelling: “Off the sidewalk, Jew!”’ ‘What did you do?’ Sigmund asked. ‘I stepped off the sidewalk and I picked up my hat,’ Jacob answered him calmly. His reaction horrified Sigmund, who never forgave his father for letting himself be treated that way.”

“That might explain why he identified later with Hannibal, who swore to avenge his father’s defeat by the Romans,” Rebecca said. “He wanted to repair the humiliation Jacob suffered.”

They were following a stream that meandered through the forest. It was a delightful walk, and Rebecca let herself be dazzled by the play of light through the leaves. It reminded her of the daydreams she indulged in while her students were taking an exam and she could gaze uninterrupted at the sun bouncing against the window of the lecture hall. She was seized by an irresistible urge to run off by herself and stretch out in the grass.

“And how would you define being Jewish today?” Mina asked.

“My Jewishness is no more than a facet of my identity,” Rebecca ventured. “I never taught Nathan a thing about religion or Jewish tradition. The best I did was give him a Jewish name: Nathan Rosenthal.”

“He never talked to you about what it meant for him to be Jewish?”

“Well, I know he had a very different experience of it than when I was his age. I used to feel that being Jewish gave me an aura that other people didn’t have. I identified with the ‘Imaginary Jew,’ a concept developed by Alain Finkielkraut, and I derived a sense of importance from our collective past and its famous figures, from the ‘Wandering Jew’ to the emaciated prisoners of the concentration camps and the victims of the Inquisition. I reveled in my inherited heroism. It’s not the same for Nathan, though. He doesn’t deny his ethnicity; it’s just not interesting to him. So he’s left to find his place between the anti-Semites he meets, the anti-Zionists who think Israel is a dirty word and his friends who reproach him for not being involved enough in the community.”

“That sounds like Romain,” Mina observed. “Whenever anyone asked him what his position was on Israel, he used to answer: ‘I like Italy a lot, too!’”

“I thought he was proud of his Jewish identity,” Rebecca countered. “Wasn’t he furious that he wasn’t included in the
Who
’
s Who in World Jewry
even though he had filled out the application? If I remember correctly, he also accused the editors of giving themselves the right to decide who ‘got sent to the gas chamber.’ It’s hard to imagine a more violent comment than that.”

Amalia wasn’t participating in the conversation. She seemed to be engrossed in the walk, striding firmly ahead and leaving Mina struggling to keep up. The group arrived in a clearing, ringed by a circle of benches where they all sat down to rest. Amalia caught her breath to speak.

“Sigi thought of himself as a Jewish nonbeliever, and he was astonished to find himself held up as a Jewish hero when his only merit was that he never denied his Jewishness.”

Mina felt she had to clarify: Romain Gary thought himself as Jewish only in reaction to anti-Semitism. He wrote that it was the Shoah that made most assimilated Jews realize that they were Jewish in the first place.

“Sartre said the same thing, didn’t he? Anti-Semitism is what defines a Jew,” Rebecca agreed.

Amalia interrupted:

“That may be, but Freud said it before Sartre: He was a German by language and culture but, faced with anti-Semitic bias, he preferred to call himself Jewish.”

“Was your Jewishness just a way of defining yourselves or did you believe your faith and practice it?” Rebecca asked.

“I was religious by habit as much as by tradition and I assumed my children would be also.”

“I did my best to convince Romain to convert to Catholicism,” Mina admitted.

“I’ve walked far enough,” Amalia announced. “You’ve worn me out. I can’t go a step farther. Let’s go find Louise Cohen; she knows everything about tradition.”

Louise was planting a rose bush when Mina, Amalia and Rebecca came upon her. She was wearing a flower-print apron and had her hair tied back. She looked softer than usual. Rebecca didn’t waste a moment to ask her what she knew about Jewish celebrations.

“I always loved
Pessa’h
,” Louise said. “The whole family came together, and we were always a big group, since, according to tradition, any passersby should be invited to share the meal.”

Louise motioned to them to sit in the shade of an arbor, next to which was a table laden with cakes, fruit, and every kind of drink, hot and cold. It was like a peaceful, timeless oasis. Louise wiped her hands and poured herself a glass of water before offering to serve the others.

“I remember the big house-cleaning that always preceded the celebration. The apartment was immaculate and fresh-smelling, like new. My father-in-law sat at the head of the table and read to us the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. It was a solemn moment for him. He spoke in a ceremonious drone, very conscious of the effect he had on everyone.”

“And what about your family?” Rebecca asked Amalia Freud.

“We observed Yom Kippur of course, but only occasionally Rosh Hashanah, and sometimes Christmas too. We weren’t as observant as the Cohens but it was enough apparently for Sigi to keep the illustrated Bible his father had given him for his whole life.”

“Maybe it was just a sentimental attachment.”

“Nothing was ever easy with my Sigi, I’m afraid. Jacob, his father, was the first to reject the traditional Jewish ways, as a reaction against his father, who was a very pious Orthodox Jew. So he fled the
shtetl
where he was born and raised, got rid of his caftan and fur hat, and adopted western clothing from then on. He assimilated, but he always felt guilty for what he had done. The Philippson Bible he gave Sigi was meant to anchor his son in a tradition that he himself had rejected.”

She asked Rebecca a question in turn:

“What about you? Do you believe in God?”

“I agree with Woody Allen: ‘If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.’”

Rebecca seized the opportunity to ask again if she could meet Woody Allen’s mother, sure that she would have some fascinating anecdotes about her son. Minnie Marx came into the garden just in time to intervene:

“There’s no need for Nettie to be here. It was my Groucho, after all, who was Woody’s inspiration: He stole all his ideas from him.”

“Whatever did she do to all of you?”

“I think she didn’t care for our company.”

Was Nettie paranoid or overly emotional? Minnie wouldn’t answer. She said that she would rather talk about Woody Allen than about his mother.

“For example, I love this quote from him: ‘If it turns out that there is a God, the worst you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.’”

“And Groucho, was he practicing?”

“‘My partner is:’ That’s what he once answered a journalist who asked him the same question.”

Rebecca tried one more time: would they please tell her what had happened with Nettie? Wasn’t she a Jewish mother like the rest of them?

“I’d love to ask her, for example, why Woody Allen has so much to say about religion.”

“I suppose you think his mother understands better than we do the meaning of some of his sayings: ‘How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?’”

“Not really. You all seem so obsessed with your sons; why wouldn’t she be too?”

“Because that’s the way it is.”

The mention of Nettie Königsberg always put Minnie Marx in a bad mood.

“To tell the truth, Albert was the only real Jew among our sons,” Louise Cohen remarked. “He even added an ‘h’ to Coen to ‘make it more Jewish.’ He took his Jewishness very seriously.”

“And Einstein?”

“Come on! So we’re not enough for you!” Minnie Marx protested.

Rebecca tried to defend herself, arguing that Einstein must have had plenty to say about religion; wasn’t he an atheist Jew who was raised Catholic?

“Everyone was Catholic, more or less, except the Marx family,” Minnie observed. “But that’s because we were American.”

“It’s true,” Mina confirmed. “I had Romain baptized so he could assimilate completely into French society. That’s just what people did back then. He called himself an unbelieving Catholic.”

“I even put Albert in a Catholic school when we arrived in Marseille,” Louise Cohen explained. “I really didn’t have a choice; it was the best school in town. The sisters taught him to say the ‘Our Father,’ but they always complained they couldn’t convert him; he was so adorable.”

Rebecca turned to Amalia:

“Surely Sigi wasn’t raised Catholic!”

“No although . . . He did go to mass with Monica Zajic; she was his governess and a fervent Catholic.”

“And you let him go?”

“I never knew anything about it.”

Rebecca was startled to hear someone calling her name: “Rebecca! Rebecca!!!” The voice was new to her but she followed it. It was coming from behind a door towards it. Finally, she opened it, and found herself in a darkly paneled, formal room with two art deco chairs placed on either side of an enormous fireplace. Where was she? She felt out of place. A grey-haired woman introduced herself: It was Pauline Einstein. Her deep blue eyes seemed to shower Rebecca with sincerity and goodness.

“I wanted to meet you. You seem to be interested in education and religion, and Albert Einstein is fascinating on both topics.”

Pauline Einstein looked exactly as she did in the photos Rebecca had seen of her: a square face, hair tied tightly back in a neat chignon and wearing a simple black dress that reached to her ankles.

“We didn’t observe our faith either. No ceremonies or Kosher food or synagogue,” Pauline Einstein explained. “Hermann, my husband, would have agreed with Jacob Freud: Religion was just a superstition. And like the others, Albert went to a Catholic school in Munich. We were very liberal. When he was ten, however, I brought in a relation of ours to teach him the precepts of Judaism so he would understand his ancestors’ faith. He became observant and refused to eat pork. He developed a passionate love of God, in the same way he loved music and nature. His faith was irrational yet very deep.”

She fell silent, thought for a moment, then began again:

“I think it was the only thing that made Albert happy. Something like the joy I feel when I play the piano.”

“You don’t miss it?”

“I still play here.”

Pauline smiled like a little girl who has just been caught stealing a piece of cake, her face covered with crumbs. She gestured across the room to an immense grand piano piled high with stacks of sheet music. Rebecca was surprised she hadn’t noticed it before. Had she been so captivated by this woman? Pauline intrigued her. She still exuded something of the adolescent: awkward, petulant and wistful.

“When did Albert become an atheist?”

“It must have been when he was around thirteen because he refused to make his bar mitzvah, which was quite a statement at the time. His study of mathematics convinced him that the Bible was not a scientific record. He said, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of the universe, not in a God who intervenes in human affairs.’ From that moment on, he was categorically opposed to religion. He never changed his mind either. He left firm instructions that he didn’t want a religious burial.”

“You should join the others,” Rebecca urged her. “They were just talking about you; they miss you.”

“I’ve been waiting all this time for Minnie to apologize and until then I can’t forgive her. I just can’t do it. I need more time; I have such violent outbursts at times. I feel like all my composure has turned to anger. It’s not like me at all.”

“Is it possible that you’re more like your true self in death than in life?”

“I’m not the woman I once was: wife, mother, housekeeper, cook, analyst, nurse, all at once, full of love, compassion, energy and never a hair out of place. It exhausted me but I knew how to manage. I miss the person that I was.”

Rebecca also felt entirely different in this strange paradise, but she liked her new self. Here, she was calm and relaxed. Oddly too, she didn’t miss a thing, whether friends or lovers. She wasn’t constantly losing her temper, or worrying about Nathan. Alive, she had thought it was up to her to make Nathan’s decisions for him, even though she possessed neither confidence nor kindness; the two essential traits of a good mother. Here, she was finally at peace with herself. And she hoped that, left to his own devices, Nathan would do fine, maybe even better than if she were still there to watch his every move.

Pauline Einstein took her by the hand.

“Come to the piano. I’m going to play you some of Bach’s
partitas
.”

Back in the garden, Louise Cohen was trimming the box trees and Amalia Freud was napping while Jeanne Proust, who had changed into a pleated summer dress, discoursed on the education their three sons had received: All of them the products of bi-cultural upbringings.

“Sigmund was Jewish and German, just like Albert, who was torn between his traditional Jewish roots and the westernized man he had become. Marcel was the same; he was the son of a provincial Catholic and a fundamentally Parisian Jew: Me. My children were baptized Catholic, but we never discussed religion at home. They hardly even knew they were Jewish.”