Art of a Jewish Woman (27 page)

In a few years Rosa and Jules left St. Louis for Los Angeles so Rosa could be closer to her family. She became a bilingual translator in the court system and Jules worked for the United States government as a systems analyst. Rosa always felt that Felice’s forcefulness had liberated her from beneath her brothers’ cloistering thumbs to become a woman with a family and career.

Another young woman who admired Felice and looked to her as a role model was Marvin Bank’s daughter Diana. She said, “She had so much humor. She offered knowledge, but above all the image of a woman unlike any other—that short hair, those clothes. She could be so sober or so colorful. She was so alive, so forceful. I think my father liked the challenge of Felice. She wouldn’t bend to him. Her mind was too independent.”

Her sister Laurie commented, “She was the quintessential perfect modern woman, ultra-educated. She made me feel so special, always asking about my travel and studies. She was so sophisticated. That short hair, lovely petite body, her big brown eyes.”

Felice’s best friend Isa from university in France survived the Nazis and settled in Israel. She sent her daughter to St. Louis to study, and Felice took Ilana under her wing. Ilana responded, “She looked at life with utmost honesty, accuracy, and, of course, wisdom. I was so fortunate to have her stand by me.”

There Are Changes

One day when she was 95 years old and I was seated by my mother on my regular Sunday, she was having trouble following our talk. She was losing the thread of our conversation. We were discussing a friend who had visited a little earlier in the day, and Felice was repeating herself. I said, “Mom, you just told me that.”

She looked confused and said, “How can that be? I haven’t seen Sylvia for ages.”

“Sylvia was just here.” Sylvia was one of her women friends, a mentee thirty years younger.

My mother riveted me with her eyes and said, “There are changes. I know. You have to be honest and confront them. One must be rational. You can’t fool yourself.”

She was talking about her mind. Her short-term memory was going. She was in her bed in her dressing gown, the head electrically raised to a comfortable reading level, books and magazines strewn on a table to her left and her coffee on a table to her right. But she couldn’t work her way through the books and articles anymore because she couldn’t remember what she had just read a few moments before and would get stuck on the same page. I looked at her, then up at her portrait hanging on the wall just over the bed, then down to her again and at her hair, still black like that of the 29-year-old Felice, marveling at the amazing journey her life had been.

She continued, angrily, “Why am I here? Why did I chose to live what’s left of my life in this strange place that means nothing to me? Do you know that just before your father died, he said to me, ‘Go join the boys in California. They will take care of you.’? Do you know your father was the finest man I ever knew?”

Edward had died in 1990 at seventy-nine after succumbing to a fatal illness over the course of a year. The final months were almost too difficult for Felice to face. She became irritated with him and his caretakers as he failed, as if he or they could do something about it. It frightened her so much to see him losing strength because he had been an integral part of her strength for fifty years. She turned to beauty again for a solution. She distracted herself, and attempted to cheer Edward by focusing on redecorating his room at home and later in a hospice, and was constantly adding finishing touches. Beauty would give him pleasure and drive away misery, she hoped.

Maybe it worked, because Edward never complained. In his final year he found new doctors for all of his patients so they would be well taken care of and methodically closed his office. With respect to his own illness, he monitored all of his laboratory tests and talked with his doctors as if he were a member of the medical team treating him. On the day before he died he said to me dreamily, “It’s been a long trail.” There was a sense of satisfaction, wonder and fatigue in his words, as if he had just completed a long hike in the Colorado Rocky Mountains of his youth and it was time for a rest.

A few days before he died he said to Felice, “Go join the boys in California.”

Felice was eighty then and had lived in St. Louis, a Midwesterner for just over half a century. It had become her home, its quadrants firmer in her mind than anywhere else; the city had given her the opportunity to raise a family, become an intellectual and scholar, art collector, and benefactor to many. But her friends had either passed away or were soon to go. She no longer had passion for collecting art because she felt that
her period,
Abstract Expressionism, was the apogee of American art and what followed was inferior. Continuing her role in art in St. Louis didn’t interest her, though her accomplishments in the world of art gave her enduring gratification.

She pondered moving to Israel to be with her sisters and their families, but after a few months she felt the inner pull of her very own family. We had been the main purpose of her life and she decided to do what Edward suggested--move to California to be close to her sons.

She sold her beautiful home and in 1990 and purchased a three-room condominium in a senior citizen community near San Francisco. Barry was a professor at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco and chief of cardiology at the Veterans Administration Hospital, and I was practicing psychiatry across the bay in Berkeley. Felice sold some of her art collection to galleries, auctioned several paintings at Christies in New York, gave a few pieces to museums, and kept just enough art to decorate thewalls of her small apartment. With the proceeds of the sales she created a philanthropic charity.

She directed donations to the St. Louis Scholarship Foundation, which had helped her in 1938, and each year she received letters from students who were attending St. Louis University, Washington University, and the University of Missouri, expressing their thanks for the scholarships that were making their higher education possible. Similarly because of her belief in education, she endowed a visiting professorship in Romance Languages and Literature at Washington University. She also favored groups committed to world peace and social justice with her philanthropy, and supported many projects devoted tocoexistence between Palestinians and Israelis, and to civil rights for Arab citizens of Israel. Teddy Kollek, then the progressive mayor Jerusalem who shared her feelings, became her friend during this period of her life. They especially took joy in an Arab and Jewish children’s symphony orchestra and art school in Jerusalem, which she supported.

She moved west, but San Francisco didn’t feel right. She looked out of her tenth story windows and to the east saw the commercial and industrial flatlands leading to the Bay and to the west hills with redwood trees rising to the horizon. “I don’t feel like I belong here. Where are my fields? Should I have stayed in St. Louis?” She asked. “The university was my home.” She felt alienated, restless, ill at ease, lonely.

Ironically, Czeslaw Milosz, her age-mate, Lithuanian-Polish countryman had made his way too to the San Francisco Bay Area. After defecting from Communist Poland he tired of the internecine left-wing political squabbles in France and accepted a teaching position at the University of California in Berkeley. He wrote, “I was enchanted with the journey to San Francisco, but it was like going to another planet…Had I chosen Indiana [which offered him a position] perhaps I would have found it easier to feel at one with nature.”
³⁵

Milosz and Felice were feeling the dyspepsia of the émigré, the sadness of old age. They were struggling to make a home in a strange landscape without the familiar forests and gently rolling fields of a Missouri (or an Indiana) that were like the spaces of their childhoods, without the faces and voices that had been with them a lifetime. When the communist world collapsed Milosz bought a home in Kracow, Poland to which he escaped for interludes from Berkeley until he became too frail to travel and passed away in Krakow in 2004 at ninety-three. Felice couldn’t go back to Poland because it was a Jewish wasteland but she periodically found her lost community during visits to Israel.

“Maybe I should have stayed in St. Louis.”

“Mom, your friends in St. Louis are all dead.”

“I should be in Israel. I could be with Hanka and her children. Dafna would take me for walks in the Old City, or I could walk along the beach with Dalia. Miriam’s gone, but I could be with Raphael [her husband]. They are my people.” Felice had basically stopped walking by this time. She used a walker to get about her apartment but had felt too unsteady to go down to the dining room for the past year. Her aide would have gladly pushed her about in a wheelchair, but my mother had too much pride to be pushed around.

“If you were in Israel, you wouldn’t be able to see your grandchildren.”

“Of course, my grandchildren. When is Kate coming to visit? I see myself in her. I can feel it, she is the most like me.”

“Later today.”

“Do you know how I wake up each morning? I keep my mind fit by reciting Latin poetry. Can you believe that? I still remember it from Wilno. Ovid:
Aurea prima sat est aetas.”

“What does it mean?”

“
In the golden first state of being, the first stages of life, a state that nothing can vanquish.”
Felice’s voice rang strong and resonant.

I was taking notes. My mother asked, “Why are you writing?”

“We are working on your story.”

“Of course, my story. Do you have any more questions for me today?”

“We have covered a lot.”

“Maybe I should have written my story when I was younger. People always asked me to write about it, but then I would ask myself, what is there to write? I was just an ordinary woman from a small village.” Her face turned wistful. Suddenly she grinned, “I had so many adventures.” Then she turned her head to the right and pointed at her brother Berci’s picture and started crying, “They killed him.” The mercurial shifts of mood that had bedeviled me from the time I was born were still there.

Sometimes Kate would come back from a visit with Felice and report, “Grandma was really sad today. She said she couldn’t sleep at night because she was having her nightmares. She didn’t want to get out of bed because she said she was too tired from crying. She said her body had betrayed her. And this was no way to live.” Her body was in fact vanquishing the golden first state of being in spite of the Latin lines she was reciting; in spite of the portrait over her bed, beauty could no longer see her through.

Out of frustration with her failing body, she would pick on her aide. I would defend her loyal caretaker and ask my mother to be nicer to her. Felice would flare at me with a searing rebuke. Just like in the old days, she hated criticism, and she still had the intellectual power to attack the excuses I made for the caretaker. Just like the old days, if she thought my hair was too unkempt when I arrived, she would reach for her hairbrush. When I leaned to kiss her she would attack my hair with strong strokes that seemed way beyond the power of her frail arms.

In April 2007, Felice’s great-granddaughter was born, and my daughter named her Felice. She was the second child named after my mother. The first had been her aunt and uncle’s baby in Kolno; they had to obtain a rabbinical dispensation to name their daughter Felice because Orthodox Judaism posits newborns should not be given the name of someone who is still living. Sometimes we all visited together—four generations in the same bedroom—and little Felice would crawl on my mother’s bed. They would stare and smile quizzically at each other, and my mother would radiate pride.

Once she asked, “What color is her skin? She looks Indian or something else. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“She is a global baby,” I explained. “Eastern European Jewish, Irish American, Korean, and African American.”

“Oh, I see.” My mother nodded wisely, grinned at my daughter and squeezed her hand tightly.

In November, Felice asked me as she regularly did, “What is the situation in Israel?”

I answered, “They are fighting.”

“The Arabs and Jews?”

She knew the answer but wanted me to say more. “They are always fighting. It’s the human condition,” I said.

“What are they fighting about?”

“Land.” I was reminded that this was the same land as the Palestine of her youth, the same land that had been fought over for millennia. Now at the end of my mother’s life the same battle went on.

“Shameful, disgraceful,” she angrily accused the human race. “People haven’t evolved.” She continued, “People can be capable of so much more. There are people of good will on both sides who want peace. Can’t they do more?”

“The men and women of good will are mostly silent.”

“I know why,” she said. “It’s the men with guns. It is always men with guns who destroy everything. I spit on them.” Spittle sailed into the space beside her bed.

In the first week of December 2007, my mother started having trouble breathing, but still she could put on a good show if a friend came to visit. I arrived on Sunday to find her with her makeup on, talking animatedly with Sylvia in Spanish. Sylvia, my age, was en route from Mexico City to Chicago to speak at a Montessori educators’ conference. I joined them for the last few minutes of their conversation. They were talking about Sylvia’s children and grandchildren, and Felice knew all of their names.

As I walked Sylvia to the door, we paused out of Felice’s hearing. Sylvia said, “I know she is going to leave us soon, but it is so difficult. I met your mother around thirty-five years ago when she went to Mexico City to visit Bernardo. I was still a student, and she guided me through my insecurities. She taught me how to confront my weaknesses, and because this wise lady accepted me I started to trust myself. The difference in our ages didn’t seem important, for the moment we met there was an immediate attraction. We talked so much about books, authors, art, and many other things that she barely paid attention to the pyramids. Every time we were together, we talked for hours. We were like the two women in the same cell in captivity for forty years who, when they were set free, told their keepers that they could not leave as they had not finished talking.”