The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (14 page)

Ever adaptable, I begin to relax, and even to luxuriate. Park Avenue is not having any Holocausts. The world, moreover, is loosening up in thrilling ways. Jews are increasingly acceptable, marriageable. The love-goddess, Marilyn, falls for the smart guy, Miller, with the glasses. Bushy-haired, big-nosed Bob Dylan steps onto the scene, and he’s cool! He is followed by Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman, who with those names and faces win big-screen love and Academy Awards. My friends and I chat about television shows, joking about the Judeo-quotient of favorites like
Bonanza
and
Mission Impossible,
Agent Maxwell Smart and his Agent 99, mod Peggy Lipton and Linda McCartney, nee Eastman.

When I turn thirteen, there is no official Bat Mitzvah rite of passage; girls do not “go up to the Torah” in Orthodox circles, however modern or sophisticated. This silencing does not faze me, however. The outside world, to which I become more and more attuned, opens up in generous sync with my own adolescent blossoming. All is changing, we can see, morphing like the liquid in our lava lamps, turning old vendettas into an era of generous freedom. Being a woman, like being a Jew, becomes cool. In hip San Francisco, it’s the Summer of Love; in England a waif called Twiggy evokes the dawn of the ambisexual; and in New York we caper around in miniskirts and hopeful white go-go boots. Half hysterical with excitement, I run to my friends’ houses and dance to the hurdy-gurdy, higgledy-piggledy Beatles of
Sgt. Pepper’s.
Rock and roll pounds the drumbeat of new and better times. I begin to understand my brother’s newfound joie de vivre.

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

A
T 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 always 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.