Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (7 page)

My mother, however, has everything to do with it.

•  •  •  •

My grandmother, a Russian immigrant, was a dumpling of a woman with a doleful face and long gray hair that she twisted into a bun. She always entered our house by the back door. Perhaps she was intimidated by her assimilated daughter’s glamorous Beverly Hills life. She didn’t hear very well, which must have increased her isolation. I remember saying, “Hi, Grandma, how are you?” and her replying, “Bacon and eggs, as usual.” She spent most of her time in the kitchen making chopped liver and the most delicious cinnamon cookies, although one of her best concoctions had a distinctly Gentile ring to it: spaghetti with a sauce of Campbell’s tomato soup (made with milk, not water). I’ve always suspected that, for immigrant Jews, Campbell’s symbolized America. More than religious freedom. More than Chinese food. Waiting to greet them after months of seasickness, tuberculosis, death in steerage, were the original five: the tomato, the vegetable, the chicken, the consommé, and the oxtail
(although I can’t believe my grandma was interested in the consommé or the oxtail). Lady Liberty, her arm raised, could have been carrying not a torch but a can of Campbell’s.

In any event, I digress, because the memory I was summoning is this: When I was about twelve, my parents bought a painting, and when my grandmother and I were checking it out, newly hung in the den, she asked me if the painter was Jewish. I thought that was so funny. It was such an irrelevant question.

The oppression of organized religion is a theme in the novel I have written, the novel that I am at the JBC tryouts to talk about, although I leave that out of the two-minute pitch. For one thing, one of my heroines is a Southern Baptist who leaves her preacher husband. So not Jewish. Not-Jewish does not seem the way to go here.

In fact, after the pitch session, when we were all mingling, a representative from one of the Jewish book festivals asked if I had any Jewish characters in my novel, and I was forced to confess, no.

Forced to confess, I say, because what trumps everything for an author is wanting to sell books. I knew I had just sold one less.

A month or so after the group pitch, I was notified that I had received several invitations and I began that
fall to travel to Jewish book festivals. As a result, I found myself not exactly deep in questions of Jewish identity, but peripherally circling them, sort of on the level of Woody Allen’s character in the film
Hannah and Her Sisters
: Having a nervous breakdown and investigating Christianity, he discovers mayonnaise.

What does Judaism mean to me? Did I have a Jewish upbringing? How religious am I? These questions came from people I met as well as from magazine or newspaper reporters interviewing me for publicity in advance of my arrival.

I was stumped, because I am an author who happens to be Jewish and hadn’t given it thought, but I understood that if a person attends a Jewish book festival, that person certainly had.

I consulted Jewish friends. “What does Judaism mean to you?” “Culture and pickles,” said one who was writing a biography about a Catholic saint. Someone else said that her family called themselves “comedy Jews,” which she added really meant that they were atheists. Another suggested that I sidestep the question by saying my family’s religion was show business. This was true—my dad told endless Hollywood stories. He was in love with being a screenwriter and the world of moviemaking. I tried that answer, but got a follow-up. “Are you a food
Jew?” the reporter asked. I considered. Not really. While we ate nova and bagels every Sunday, I didn’t taste a matzo ball until I was forty. “A book Jew,” I offered.

While in Indianapolis, I was picked up at the airport by a lovely woman and delivered to a talk. When we missed the exit and practically ended up in Chicago, we started discussing how much we loved the telephone directory, that Texas-sized stack of pages that got dropped on your doorstep every year until Google rendered it useless. Whenever she traveled, she said, she always looked up her last name in the local white pages. She wanted to see how many Jews with her last name—very distant relatives, she assumed—lived there and where. She didn’t phone them up. She was simply curious. She liked knowing they were there.

I have an affection for the phone book because, when my nephews were nine and ten and could barely see above the wheel, I took them to the huge veterans’ cemetery in West Los Angeles, sat them on top of the Los Angeles white pages, and let them drive my Honda.

The official white or yellow pages is also the best way to kill a bug.

I am terrified of bugs, especially roaches and their larger relatives, water bugs. Once I woke up from a nap and there was a water bug on my arm. I levitated off the
bed and crashed onto the floor. My head narrowly missed the wrought iron edge of a table, which seemed a miracle. That sort of miracle, surviving a water bug, is my kind of miracle—the kind I could entertain my parents with.

In any event, the most effective way to kill a bug without having to get near it is to drop or throw a white pages on it. In my thirties, when I was single, I got very good at this. My aim was unerring. (The only thing I do remotely as well is parallel park.) When the white pages stopped arriving, I switched to
The Gourmet Cookbook
, a huge two-volume tome my mother gave me.

The other way to kill a bug is to invite a Gentile over to do it. Which, when I was single, I also occasionally did.

As I began my talk at a festival in another Midwestern city, I immediately noticed a
farbissina
. This Yiddish word that my husband taught me means “bitter woman.” She was sitting smack-dab in front of me in the front row, an intimidating presence, with her arms crossed over her chest, her breasts hiked up over them. If you included her elbows, she took up three seats.

She was muttering a lot, although I didn’t quite hear her comments until I began speaking of my mother.

My mother believed in nonconformity. We, her
daughters, were expected to be nonconformists, too, which essentially meant we had to conform to everything she said. Still, it was fantastic because her rules called into question everything that was common wisdom at the time. Number one, you will have careers.

She was the only working mother we knew. The only one, and she was proud of it. “Your mother works, and you will, too.” Remember how Hillary Clinton was excoriated for saying she was no cookie-baking, stand-by-your-man Tammy Wynette, and she rushed to backtrack? My mother was unapologetically no cookie-baking Tammy Wynette.

“Don’t worship celebrities, they’re no better than you are,” she also told us. This was my favorite: “Just because you’re related to someone is no reason to like them.” Most mothers did not give their kids license to hate them. This rule captures my mother more than any—she was deeply unsentimental. And this is useful for writers—more than useful, necessary. It gave me permission to feel what I wanted, not to feel guilty, to accept and explore the truth in life or fiction. “Never buy on sale” was another.

When I said, “Never buy on sale,” the
farbissina
, who had been keeping up a running commentary, said quite loudly, “Anti-Semitic.”

I felt I had to address that heckle immediately. It
was provocative, rude, and it made me defensive. My mother wasn’t anti-Semitic, I said. She was proud to earn money, to have become successful, and delighted to find herself, through her own talent and hard work, living in a large house in Beverly Hills, basking in the Southern California sun. She was thrilled to have left poverty behind, ethnicity, and the small world of the Bronx Jewish ghetto. In leaving behind all that, she had also left behind buying on sale. Her daughters would be raised in the world of why-pay-less.

After the talk, I gave the heckle more consideration.

Was my mother simply assimilating, or was she an aspiring WASP? By marrying a WASP (my first marriage), was I furthering the process of assimilation that she started? Did she subconsciously want me to intermarry? Perhaps I gleaned it. Was that the subtext of “Never buy on sale”?

She also said, “Never eat leftovers.” She also said, “Pick one hairdo and stick to it.” She also said, “If a doctor practices out of town, you have to ask yourself why.” She also said, “You can read anything except the comics.” She abhorred censorship. I was the only kid I knew reading
Peyton Place
, a racy sex-filled novel, out in the open.

My mother’s rules were our commandments. She was Moses, and we were her followers. She left Bronx
Jewish behind and established her own religion: Ephron. A sect of writers (which all her daughters eventually became). Services were held nightly at the dinner table. Laughter was the point, not prayer, and the blessing “That’s a great line, write it down.”

After my divorce, I fell madly in love and married a man who suited me. We were the same religion, and I don’t mean Jewish, although Jerry was that. He was a writer, a fellow worshipper of the written word.

After my talk, I mentioned the
farbissina
to people at the Jewish community center where the festival was held. “She’s an Israeli,” they said, as if that explained everything.

They also said they were probably helpless to do anything about her, as she was a big donor. Obviously they needed her to continue to put bricks in their JCC.

A week later, on my way to a book festival in Atlanta, my friend Joy e-mailed me a link to an article in the
New York Times
. Joy’s only comment was “A
shonda
.” (Yiddish for something to be ashamed of.) The article was about the fact that the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta, host of the festival, had suddenly canceled the appearance of Peter Beinart, a journalist who advocates a liberal take on Zionism and criticizes the established American Jewish community because, to quote the
article, it “does not defend democratic values in the Jewish state.”

As soon as I arrived, I asked about banning Beinart. The woman driving me was vague. No one knew quite what happened, she told me, only that the head of the book festival was upset and had secured another location for him. The Jewish book festival, however, was not permitted to associate its name with his event. Not permitted? I asked. By whom? She didn’t know for sure, but people suspected the community center’s big donors. She also said that the book festival was worried that other authors would cancel their festival appearances in protest and solidarity with Mr. Beinart. So far, no one had.

Probably for this reason, I thought:
Those authors want to sell their books.

I was feeling guilty about being there and trying every which way to justify it. As in, I heard this news too late to cancel. As in, when it comes to Israel, some Jews are irrational, fanatical, or, at the least, not objective. You can’t even discuss Israel with them without getting into a BIG ARGUMENT. As in, the author, Peter Beinart, hadn’t canceled. He was happy to have another venue. Perhaps he wanted to sell his books, too. He might have even been thrilled because I was told that his new venue sold out immediately. Besides, if he writes about Zionism, he
must have an appetite for controversy. I can imagine the tweets and e-mails he gets. Twitter and the online posting of articles is license for anyone not only to comment but to dump rage. A writer can end up the target of a verbal firing squad. The threat of it can censor thoughts before they are written.

I wrote a long guilt-ridden e-mail to my editor, although there was nothing he could advise as I had already “performed” in Atlanta. Ultimately, as the question continued to trouble me, I concluded that I had betrayed my mother and the religion of Ephron, of which one of the commandments was “No censorship.”

•  •  •  •

My novel
The Lion Is In
—the one I was discussing/selling at Jewish books festivals—came from a dream.

Several years before, I had been upset, very upset about illness—my sister Nora and my husband were both sick—and I was thinking,
How in the world am I going to get through this time without heavy-duty drugs?
I went to sleep and had a dream.

There were two women in a bar—well, more a roadhouse than a bar—on a rural highway in North Carolina
(a state to which I had never been). Inside the bar, in addition to the women, was a lion. The women were on the lam. I didn’t know what they were running from, but I knew that the lion would change their lives.

When I woke up, I had a title,
The Lion Is In
, and I realized that I had dreamed the premise of a book. I began writing immediately, and writing it provided an alternate reality, a place where I was happy to live every day. A refuge. When I was awake I lived there. And writing exhausted me enough that at night I slept easily.

After I had finished a couple of drafts, my girlfriends insisted I had to go to North Carolina. How could I presume to write about a place where I had never been?

I had placed my roadhouse bar in Northampton County, about sixty miles north of a city called Rocky Mount. One of my best friends, who had been there, told me that it was primarily farming—tobacco and soybeans. There were pine forests. The county had been hard hit by the downturn in the economy, especially by the furniture business moving to Mexico. A place that time forgot. Put another way, a timeless place. That seemed right.

With the book largely finished, I visited. I stayed at a DoubleTree Inn in Rocky Mount, and every day I would pick a random destination, some obscure town, a dot on
a map in Northampton County, and instruct the GPS to “take back roads.”

In my novel, one of my heroines, Rita (the one who has left her preacher husband), wants Marcel the lion to have a tree. Marcel lives caged in the bar and has never had a tree before, although, with Rita’s help, he has begun to venture out. One day, when Rita is driving to a store, she passes an open field with a lone oak tree in it. The tree, bare of all foliage, appears to have been struck by lightning. What remains is only this: a trunk and naked limbs. “More a sculpture than a tree,” Rita calls it. She convinces some men to dig up the tree, carry it back to the bar where Marcel lives, and replant it near the parking lot.