Art of a Jewish Woman (26 page)

When Felice’s first child was born with a difficult caesarian delivery, Edward told Felice that one child would be enough, that a second delivery would be dangerous. But she told him, “No! We must have two. What if one dies? Then I will have nothing.”

The Quest

Jean Piaget is known for his descriptions of how reasoning develops in children. However in 1916 and 1917, when he was 19 years old, before beginning his adult research, Jean Piaget wrote a slightly fictionalized account of his life to that time,
Recherche
(The Quest). It was published in France in 1917
³²
, and Felice’s task was to translate that novel into English. In her translation from the French, Piaget says of his youthful protagonist, Sebastian, “At the time when the war [World War I] was creating the greatest intellectual confusion from which thought has ever suffered, Sebastian gathered unto himself the pains of a world in travail. War had unveiled brutal reality, and in the vicissitudes of combat this reality had remained naked. Intelligence had faith in its power to guide humanity, but it saw itself reduced to serve passions. And above this morass, where hatred and killing continued to soil the most noble of efforts, a few puny shrubs came into being, incapable of life and growth.”
³³

Felice had come upon Piaget, like so much in her life, by serendipity. In the late 1960s her friend, James Anthony, the director of the child guidance clinic at Washington University, St. Louis, at that time, found a French copy of
Recherche
and passed it to Felice to translate. It was the story of Piaget’s youthful internal conflicts in the year following his graduation from secondary school—his identity crisis and struggle for a way to believe and think that would resolve the crisis. His graduation dissertation had been a precocious scientific treatise on the life cycle of mollusks, but he needed time off before graduate studies to escape the horrors of the European war and to reflect. Since he was a citizen of neutral Switzerland, he could retreat to the mountains for a year and write his novel on the meaning of life and the path that his character Sebastian would follow.

Felice herself had never had this opportunity to pause her life and reflect in her youth. Fourteen years younger than Piaget, her sole memory of the World War I conflict from 1914 to 1918 was an image of troops marching past the home of her grandparents in Kolno. Then as a youngster and adolescent she was little Fegele, the bird in flight, whom the registrar at the university in Nancy renamed Felice in France. As a young woman refugee from the Nazis and then an immigrant, she didn’t have time to think. The hungry, empty hole in her stomach constantly impelled her forward. Finally, by immersing herself with Piaget, as with Lorca a few years earlier, she could stop and reflect about these two men and by consequence herself. She identified with Piaget. In her foreword to her translation of the novel she wrote:

Through my own emotion I understood his feelings and thoughts.
Recherche
no longer was a thing unrelated to myself…The protagonist, conscious of his spirit as an innovator that would in time permit him to construct his own system, a universal psychology to fulfill a divine mission of allaying evil and of uniting science and faith to the service of mankind, takes upon himself, like one of the elect, the suffering of humanity.
³⁴

In working on
The Quest
, Felice was not having a delayed adolescent crisis or re-experiencing an earlier one. In her 50s she was too mature, too fully formed for that. She saw in Piaget’s struggle much that she had personally experienced but had scarcely been able to feel because of the press of circumstance in her youth. Like Piaget she had an awareness that she had been chosen by her family, especially her father, for a mission that involved saving people (her family). Like him she had a singular talent—hers languages—that set her apart. And like Piaget she attempted to create order from the trauma of war—by creating beauty.

In
Recherche
, the young Sebastian decides that nationalism (devotion to the interests of one country) creates imbalances that lead to war and destruction, as does the existence of wealth in some countries and poverty in others. Sebastian sees that capitalism creates greed and imbalances, and state socialism can warp into nationalism. He makes a plea for a world order based on principles of international socialism in which the well-being of humane society takes precedence over competition. This too reverberated with Felice’s own beliefs.

She sent her translation to her friend, the art historian Dora Janson, who had left St. Louis for New York City, and Dora wrote back in June of 1970, “I wager you know almost better than the young author what he was groping for. Nobody ever gets around the evil part of human nature unless he be blind and foolish. If people were not tempted to be greedy, to lust for power over others, how good should we all be? So I think it would be rather nice for a change if somebody would promulgate the idea that, instead of being true to the best that is in us, we try being untrue to the worst.”

Felice’s desire to see her work published, alas, was frustrated. James Anthony reported back to her that the Piaget family was withholding permission to publish the translation because Jean Piaget regretted having originally published a work that he came to feel was immature. “He or they, I don’t know who, said I would have to omit the part about his emotional and spiritual crisis,” Felice said later. “It sounded too much like a nervous breakdown. Of course I couldn’t omit that part of the story. Then the book would have no meaning.”

Felice’s Women

Felice was a man’s woman. Her father made her, as she often said, and by consequence she was very much identified with him, with his
chutzpa
, enterprise, and assertiveness. She was in many ways male-identified, although her feminine beauty and seductiveness obscured it. The grownup, age-mate visitors she had in St. Louis were almost all men. The companions she was most relaxed with in Paris and New York were men—Andre Germain, Donald Grossman, and Barnett Newman. There was always an undercurrent of tension with their wives. When Andre died prematurely, Felice dropped Violette.

However, there wasn’t tension with young women—girls in their teens and women in their youth. They adored her, and she basked in their attention. They were introduced to Felice by mutual adult friends and relatives; sometimes they met her when she was lecturing at the university or art museum. Once they made her acquaintance, they were drawn by her personality, her
joi de vivre
, and her ringing voice. They were attracted by her accomplishments and her beautiful home, unlike anything they had known.

She talked to them directly and seriously. In an insightful, incisive way she interpreted without mincing words the personal conflicts and indecisions they revealed to her. And of course there was always the art. Coming to Felice’s was like coming to a gracious, private museum. Lunch was always served, and for the young women the time in the house felt like communing with the
avant-garde,
which implied new horizons, risk and adventure in thought if not in future action.

Felice mentored a score of women, counseling them about what to read, what to study, where to travel, what museums and exhibitions to visit, what profession to pursue, and how to dress in order to have an impact. She did not hesitate to advise them about whom they should sleep with, marry, or break off with. On at least one occasion she supported a young friend emotionally and financially through the termination of a pregnancy.

A recurring theme among the young women, my mother explained, was that their mothers were too conventional, too limited in their education, too meek, or too self-involved to be good role models for their daughters. She, by contrast, gave them intelligent advice distilled with psychoanalytically framed interpretations of their psychological problems—how to overcome a block in writing a dissertation, how to break an addiction to an unsuitable lover.

Since her mentees were comely, I kept an eye on them if I was home. Felice often shared her thoughts about the young women with me, which fueled my fantasies about them because she was revealing that they were not just passing guests in the house but sexually active beings. As I grew older in high school I imagined scenarios in which one or the other of them seduced me down by the swimming pool or off in the trees. The girls my own age that I met in high school seemed incredibly pedestrian compared to the young women I glimpsed visiting my mother.

Another recurring theme in the lives of Felice’s women was that each had a special talent or significance. There was a “talented” writer, a “marvelous” ballet dancer, a “gifted” linguist, a “dynamic” teacher, an “insightful” social worker, a “beautiful” cellist, and girls who were “special” because they were her sisters’ daughters or other visitors from Israel. My mother held them up to me throughout my adolescence and youth as examples of girls that I should be interested in for myself.

All told, I never got to know any of my mother’s mentees in any depth because in those years of my life I was trying to meet someone who looked, talked and thought like Felice. In my naïve mind nobody was meeting that standard, a view that my mother subtly promoted by pointing out a flaw or two in each of her women.

Most of the young women who visited Felice stayed friends with her from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when they first met, into the new millennium, when Felice was in her 90s. They visited intermittently and telephoned periodically. If I happened to be in the house when a call came in, I heard my mother sing out, “Where are you, dear? You must come over immediately. Oh. Where are you calling from? What is it?” rising a notch or two with excitement. Then she’d say, “We must not talk too long, it is so expensive. Call me back collect this second; I will pay for it, you don’t have the money. You must tell me all about it.” They’d call back a moment later—from places like New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, Israel, France, Germany—and the conversation would go on for an hour.

They also wrote long letters with details of their own lives, marriages, and children. To answer, my mother would spend hours at her writing table in the master bedroom with its wall-length windows looking out on the rolling side lawn and her portrait over the bed. She’d fill sheaves of crinkly onionskin writing paper—embossed with her initials FOM—with her rapid, strong cursive script. Or she would use pre-stamped aerograms, which never had enough space, so she’d cram final words into all the available space around the perimeter of the paper.

Occasionally I’d cross paths with one of Felice’s women friends, and they’d say a few words of admiration to me. For example, Nava, Felice’s sister Miriam’s daughter, said, “Felice is so important to me. I owe everything to her.” Nava was born with only a trace of hearing and my mother traveled to Israel shortly after it was discovered to interview prospective doctors and therapists for Nava. Felice paid for Nava’s hearing aids, surgeries, and speech instruction. Nava added, “During her visits in Israel she always had the patience and charisma to teach me how to read and write and speak in English.” Nava became fully proficient in lip reading Hebrew and English and completely verbal in both languages, a remarkable achievement for somebody born deaf. She designs the posters, brochures, and book jackets for Tel Aviv University.

Felice’s cousin Rosita from Mexico City said, “My brother wasn’t paying me enough working in our store and I needed a change. I had never been out of Mexico, and hardly ever met anybody outside of the Jewish community. We all still talked Yiddish, and Spanish of course. Felice was so great for me. I admired her independence, her interest in books; she was so unlike the women I knew in Mexico. She made it possible for me to come to St. Louis; I lived with you for awhile and then she helped me find my first apartment with two other students on Delmar.

“I met Jules at a dance at a synagogue. It was so strange to see a blond, blue-eyed boy there. That’s how I first noticed him. In fact, I think he noticed me because I was the only blond girl there. He was single, from Brooklyn and worked for McDonnell aircraft. Your mother insisted on meeting him. She said it was her responsibility to see if he was right for me.”

Jules Tragarz was a flight test engineer working on the autopilot system for the Banshee jet fighter airplane. He was from a military tradition. His father, from Warsaw, had fought in the Polish army in World War I against the Germans; his brother, a career army medic, had been on the first American troop ship to arrive in Japan after Hiroshima; and Jules himself had fought in the Burma Theater during World War II.

Felice didn’t like the military associations. Her opinion of him changed, however, when she visited his apartment and saw his makeshift shelves filled with paperback books on every wall of the apartment. Jules said, “She really warmed up to me then. Books were our relationship, discussing Nietzsche, Dewey, philosophical value systems. She bordered on being opinionated but had an ability to accept with grace opinions that were opposite hers. We could disagree and be friends.

“Felice came from an old-world order where her father’s word was the last say, and authorities had all the power. She was a good girl who had escaped from the Nazis by the skin of her teeth. She needed to feel secure. She had material needs, a hunger from an earlier time of scarcity in her life. She exerted a sense of discipline and required discipline from the people around her. But she could do this without abusing them, insulting them or putting them down.

“We agreed about social values; she firmly believed in economic sharing even though she liked to live well. Sharing is deeply rooted in
Tikkun Olam
, the Jewish concept of repairing the world and getting rid of evil. She could be fierce when she talked about ideas, more forceful than me because of the magnitude of her opinions and alienation. God gave her something to rail against. Her feelings were brought on by injustice, which I had never experienced.”