Art of a Jewish Woman (25 page)

He said, “They ask you because you know what you are talking about.”

Felice was not a writer; she made notes and lectured from them and projected color slides of the art. People often asked her to write down her lectures and stories about her life, but she never got around to it. She didn’t think that what she talked about would interest people. She wondered if she should have written, but she preferred to spend the time that writing would have required reading instead.

Preparing for a lecture on Newman, she made outlines and wrote key phrases and snippets of ideas. Referring to Newman’s
Profile of Light
, a ten foot by six foot oil with two broad vertical bands of dark blue separated by raw canvas, she wrote, “His works are a progression in time and space … It is the perfect equilibrium of the ideal towards which man must forever tend, because of the fact that he is a creature who is forever poised … It has a sublime quality that is beyond thought. It inspires a sense of awe and veneration, implicit in the scale and color, producing a sense of grandeur. There is moral grandeur and moral absolute … I shall call it
the infallible iconography
… a brilliant example of an image poem…Monumental.”

I heard my mother lecture a few times and crossed paths with some of the art visits to our house. They came perhaps two times a year from the late 1950s on. A van would pull up, and as many as twelve or so students or women, mostly, would disembark—groups from local colleges, the St. Louis Art Museum, or from Midwestern and southern cities such as Cleveland, Kansas City, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Louisville, and Houston. On these occasions, Felice spoke extemporaneously on contemporary art and architecture, gesticulating broadly like a conductor at the paintings as if they were her musicians.

The audience in our living room seemed lost or awed amid the tall potted plants, large New Guinea and African geometric carvings, and rounded Jean Arp bronzes that were part of the mature collection. The space seemed to stretch beyond the glass doors to the distant trees. She talked as the spirit moved her on any given day, mixing history and anecdotes with the personal excitement each piece gave her. I learned the vocabulary of abstract expressionist art as I caught bits and pieces of her lectures over many years.

Sometime later she would proudly show me thank-you notes she received from her visitors. One in 1969 went, “You have a rare gift as a speaker and teacher…If our young people could be taught as we were taught in those minutes with you, there would be no more student riots.” Well taught by my mother, I happened to be one of the young people demonstrating that year in anti-Vietnam War protests in Berkeley, California and New York City.

When Felice lectured at the university or the art museum, she was more formal and erudite with references, but still her style of speaking was like the art she was exalting. It was full of dialectic, enthusiasm, elevating the moment into an exciting interaction of her thoughts, the paintings, and the audience response. It was a giddy, brinkmanship style of lecturing. Sometimes when I heard her, I felt she could fall off the stage at any moment if she didn’t keep improvising. That might describe how she had lived in the formative years of her life.

Barnet Newman’s ideas and style of speaking and working dovetailed with Felice’s. In a 1962 interview for
Art in America
, he said, “I am an intuitive painter, a direct painter. I have never worked from sketches, never planned a painting… I work only out of high passion.”

Asked to clarify the meaning of his work in relation to society, Newman answered, “I feel that one of its implications is assertion of freedom, its denial of dogmatic principles, its repudiation of all dogmatic life…[if] others could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.”
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My mother and I continued to talk about art until her death, even though the new movements, in her opinion, didn’t hold a candle to the period she loved. When she was ninety-four she told me, “Abstract expressionism is a valid pictorial representation of reality. You abstract from something in order to create a precise, concise consolidation of an overall reality. Your abstract thinking allows you to be expressive—unlike math, which is concrete. Five times five equals twenty-five. There is nothing else it can be.”

I asked, “Was The Movement in some way connected with World War II?”

She said, “No! It was a purely cultural, intellectual, artistic creation and invention. It was not connected with the war or any specific historical event. You have to look at a painting and make it part of your life. It’s not about what you know or how much you know. It is about looking and feeling. Looking and feeling is the opposite of dominating.”

Frederico Garcia Lorca and Jean Piaget

Beauty was not enough, Felice found. Beauty is pleasure, it may be a saving grace, but it is usually only skin deep, it is a surface quality which brings a sense of peace that is transient. Felice needed to find a way to live that also involved looking inward. Her mode of introspection was through thought rather than faith or meditation, so from the ages of forty-nine to fifty-nine she undertook two major intellectual projects. The first was learning to speak Spanish and studying Spanish literature at Washington University. This culminated with her master’s thesis, “Primary Motivations in the Rural Trilogy of Frederico Garcia Lorca.” The latter was translating the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s 1917 philosophic novel
Recherche
(The Quest) from French to English and adding a preface.

With these two projects, Felice didn’t expressly set out toward self-reflection, for as she liked to say, “I made myself up as I went.” She lived far too extemporaneously for that. Her initial intention in learning Spanish was to meet her Mexican-born cousins Bernardo, Reuben, and Rosita Gres, and their father, her uncle Solomon Grezemkovsky, who lived in Mexico City. She wanted to be able to speak with them. Solomon, her mother’s brother, had emigrated from Kolno as a young man before Felice’s birth.

The Holocaust was never far out of Felice’s consciousness. With her family either dead in the war or gone from Poland, she needed to connect with the Mexican branch of her family. She explained, “There were so few left of my family that I needed to see the Spanish speaking ones and be able to talk with them. And I needed to understand how the Spanish civilization that could create such great men as El Greco, Velasquez, Goya, Cervantes, and Unamuno could also create the Inquisition that tortured and killed Jews.”

The first step, the actual learning to read and speak Spanish, went swiftly. Within a year she spoke virtually like a native speaker. As soon as she was fluent in Spanish, she made her first trip to Mexico and met her family.

Uncle Solomon had been wounded in World War I fighting in the Russian Army against the Germans, and when he recovered, he and his young wife migrated to Mexico. At first he peddled wares out of a suitcase in market places in the state of Morelia where Rosa and Bernardo were born. After two years Solomon moved the family to Mexico City and opened a dry goods and home supplies store similar to those his parents in Kolno and his brother in New Haven had owned. It flourished and the children grew up comfortably. Reuben has a beautiful, conservatory trained voice and is a highly regarded cantor who travels the world to sing in Jewish congregations. Bernardo became an impresario of a
plaza de toros
on the outskirts of Mexico City and later leveraged the bullfighting ring into real estate development. Rosita married a young man Felice introduced her to on a visit to St. Louis, and they now live in Los Angeles, where she works as a translator.

In spite of the younger generation changing their name to Gres, and Bernardo’s embrace of Mexican culture, Felice noted that one thing hadn’t changed with the Grezemkovskys: They remained true to the orthodox religious practices and beliefs of Felice’s grandparents’ generation in Kolno. They were the family who complained that Felice’s parents were too assimilationist and that Felice should be speaking Yiddish instead of Polish when she was with them during middle school.

Although Felice became respectful friends with Reuben and Bernardo and mentored Rosa, she remained uncomfortable with their orthodoxy. When Bernardo’s son asked his girlfriend to convert to Judaism so they could marry, Felice protested with the words she’d spoken to Rabbi Isserman, “Converting religions is like trading one lie for another.”

Lorca’s Rural Tragedies

I asked my mother, “How does the Inquisition connect with Frederico Garcia Lorca?”

“Don’t be so impatient,” she said, “I will get there. Lorca was one of the great poets of the 20th century, perhaps the greatest. His work and life distilled the contradictions in a culture that could shed so much blood yet also create with great artistry. To get to Lorca, you had to understand how Spain had demonized the Jews in the 15th and 16th centuries. They drove them out or forced them to convert or killed them. They couldn’t tolerate that they had their own ways or were doing well. The monarchy did this for the sake of its own power just like Hitler did. The Jews became scapegoats for the royalty’s own weaknesses and self-hatred.”

“And Lorca?” I persisted, restless at times with my mother’s digressions, which could circle far and wide before returning to the main theme.

“I am getting there. When there were no more Jews and Muslims to persecute, the Church turned its attention to morality, telling Catholics how to believe and repressing their sexuality. The Church made sex bad. Women’s sexuality became a threat, so they were subjugated, and men were forced to observe a rigid code of honor, so the men were equally repressed. This is what Lorca was writing about in the 1930s. He was trying to liberate Spain from its backwardness. That is how I got to Lorca. The history of Spain and Lorca’s hope for a modern society was my family’s story, Hitler and McCarthy. One story. And of course I understood Lorca’s women, their need to have a child. It was how I felt.”

Felice paused for a moment, then resumed. “Men telling women what to do, this was my story too with my father,” she said.

“In what way?”

“My father made me submit to what he wanted for me. But I rebelled also; I had to in order to become the kind of person I wanted to be. I didn’t have a plan; it’s not that I knew what I wanted to be beforehand. When I landed on Lorca’s work, I made it the subject of my dissertation because what he wrote echoed with things in my own mind.”

Felice focused on his three elegiac, lyrical and symbolic tragedies—
Blood Wedding, Yerma,
and
The House of Bernarda Alba
. They are set in a rural Spain where farmers struggle to force crops from parched earth and where parents hoping that daughters will marry men with land shield their virginity behind the pale walls of villages that rise on rocky outcroppings. Lorca’s greatest themes were honor, repression, freedom, rebellion, blind force, fertility, and death.

Blood Wedding
, the most schematic of the plays, tells the story of a young woman unable to marry the man she loves because her dowry is insufficient and the deaths that ensue;
Yerma
dramatizes how a couple’s inability to conceive a child ravages them; and
The House of Bernarda Alba
describes the effects of a tyrannical mother’s suppression of her daughter’s sexuality. All three plays revolve around the essential “conflict between freedom and discipline on the one hand, between poetry and reality on the other … It is the conflict which the Spanish soul felt like none other, and which Federico, to the measure which the conflict permitted, resolved after the Spanish fashion: by setting his roots in reality the better to make it poetic,” Lorca’s brother Francisco has written.
²⁹

Lorca wrote his plays in the mid-1930s, and Felice was also mindful of the political context. “He was giving a voice to the students and to the workers, trying to create a collective will, a voice for the anonymous individual against the Fascists,” Felice said. Lorca directed a student theatrical troupe,
La Barraca,
whose purpose was to raise the consciousness of urban workers and peasant farmers to struggle against the axis between the Church and the Nationalists—supported by Germany—that was pushing the country toward fascism. He was too great a threat to the fascists and in 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, nationalist agents assassinated Lorca.

Felice completed her dissertation, “Primary Motivations in the Rural Trilogy of Frederico Garcia Lorca,” in 1962. She wrote in her introduction, “His characters are marked indelibly by fate … life tragically opposed by fate and death.”
³⁰
She was also thinking of her village of Szczuczyn and perhaps of her life with Samy that never really came to be because he became ill and killed himself.

The character Yerma (which literally means barren) especially interested Felice for their mutual drive from girlhood to have children, and the sense that without a child they would not be complete. In the play Yerma is unable to have children with her husband, and refuses to adopt a child or raise a cousin’s child in need of a mother even though her husband urges her to.

Felice wrote, “Yerma symbolizes the philosophical and spiritual quest for meaning in life and its importance to an individual’s survival…the eternal dualism of the spiritual and earthy, the conflict between mind and body, the intellectual quest for knowledge and rebellion against ignorance…Ultimately, the main character is the personification of Catholic Spain. Yerma is beautiful of body but insufficient and barren, pure and innocent of soul but of violent tragedy; passionate but ascetic; dutiful but without compassion. She thirsts for enlightenment but is ignorant and superstitious; proud but weighed down by an oppressive sense of inferiority. She resolves her intrapsychic problems not through love and reason but through hatred and violent obsession.”
³¹