Art of a Jewish Woman (28 page)

Two weeks before her death, Felice’s breathing became even more precarious, and she spent most of the days asleep or half awake, but she still roused herself for my visit. “I’m not afraid to die,” she said to me. “It’s my time. I just don’t want to feel pain.” She was no longer eating.

A hospice nurse was visiting her apartment twice a week, leaving a medicine the aide could give that dissolved beneath her tongue. It took away the panic and the arduous physical labor of straining her whole body to overcome her shortness of breath. And it also made her sleep more deeply. The night of December 30, 2007, she passed away at ninety-seven.

Afterword

Felice had asked to be cremated. In life, when she thought about death, she literally shivered at the thought of lying alone in a cold, dark place. A few days after she died, a letter came from Reuben Grezemkovsky, her cantor cousin in Mexico City. He begged my brother and me not cremate Felice. “It is not the Jewish way,” he said. Quoting a rabbinical ruling about cremating a Jewish body, he wrote, “Men and women were created in God’s image by God himself. Therefore the body is attached to a soul that is sacred. As a body needs a soul to survive, also a soul needs a body to sustain itself. When a body leaves this earth, his soul remains attached to him for seven more days. Therefore it is forbidden in Jewish law to cremate a human body under any circumstances. Henry and Barry, please do not follow the ways of paganism by cremating Felice’s body the way Nazism cremated six million Jewish bodies and souls.”

My brother wavered briefly. I recalled how Felice had told me that her mother’s relatives in Kolno were upset because Felice’s parents were raising their little girl with Polish as her first language rather than Yiddish. Now the same family—two generations later and moved to the New World—was upset with her way of death. Further, I could not follow the rabbinical reasoning. If a body leaves the earth, as Reuben had quoted the rabbi, how could a soul remain attached to it?

Two generations removed from their orthodox Jewish grandparents in Kolno, Poland, a continent and ocean away in Mexico, almost a century later, Felice’s cousins were still following the traditional religious teachings. By contrast, my brother and I were continuing the path of assimilation that Felice’s father had set her on, a path that views the peoples of the world as one humanity rather than many tribes, religions and nations warring over boundaries and hegemony.

We followed my mother’s request and placed her ashes with Edward’s in a niche, one like hundreds of similar niches for cremated remains in a mausoleum of a Jewish cemetery in Oakland, California. The Mexican cousins did not attend Felice’s memorial gathering at our home, but Miriam’s daughter Nava came from Israel and took some of the ashes back and scattered them there.

After the memorial gathering I began to write my mother’s story. I needed the distance of her passing because of the intensity with which she experienced life, the intensity of the emotional energy she poured into me. I needed the void created by her death to be able to think about her life rather than just be enveloped by it and react to it.

Writing made me rethink the powerful impact my mother had on me and grasp pieces of her influence that I had never understood before. Certainly I had become a psychiatrist because of the penetrating way she spoke of people, the help she offered them, and her interest in Freud and the unconscious. And of course my father was my role model in becoming a doctor. But my mother’s influence went far deeper than this, pieces remaining out of my awareness until the past year.

For example, I also trained to be a child psychiatrist, which I always thought was largely an intellectual decision. I had finished my adult psychiatry training in New York City and wasn’t ready to leave so I decided to study child psychiatry to learn more about the formative years of people’s lives. During that time the family of an autistic youngster I was treating gave me their homemade family films of their little girl’s first two years. I began studying the interplay of the baby’s and mother’s facial expressions, eye gaze, touches, holding or grasping, and vocalizations. I did this obsessively over and over in slow motion, back and forth, and frame by frame. This led to a large research project with many films from many families of the infancies of children who later became autistic. Studying them made it possible for me to describe the first signs of autism in the first year of life in a large number of children.

This research method—studying mother-infant interaction, film-frame-by-film-frame, for what it could predict of the child’s later emotional development—became the core of all of my subsequent research. Only when I was rethinking my life with my mother while writing this book did I fully realize that all the professional time I have spent in the laboratory has been a continuation of my childhood attempts to decipher Felice’s mercurial shifts of mood and expression from gaiety to tragic tearfulness and back again to laughter.

As a child I had no idea where the sadness came from. It could replace her smile in the twinkling of an eye. She didn’t tell me why she was sad back then. It was the mystery of my childhood, and I wondered if I was causing her sadness. I asked her if I was a good boy and she would nod yes but wouldn’t explain why she was crying.

Likewise there were her other moods, in which she leapt from melodiously measured, reasonable conversation into a searing intellectual diatribe if I mildly rebuked her over something. For instance, if I said a few words against her criticism of a friend or her impatience with a hotel’s service, she would angrily pathologize me, her friend
in absentia
, and anyone she could implicate as defective. This too mystified me and left me feeling helpless, even though at the same time I marveled at the
tour de force
of the logic she used in her assaults. I
knew
her moods as a child but I finally
understood
them by retracing her life to tell about it.

I also realized in the writing that my mother’s story is not simply about her life but also about how a parent passes emotional trauma she has suffered (in Felice’s life, the Holocaust in particular) on to a child in ways that strongly influence a child even though it may not be readily apparent to himself or others. This was another important reason to tell her story.

In spite of my mother’s strength, her skin was thin. It had been stretched thin by too many traumas, beginning with her birth and continuing into her youth until they finally slacked off when she met Edward and when the World War II postwar years wound down. The bad experiences and tragic events had wound her up tight inside, so much so that even when she was a young mother languidly sunning by her swimming pool or engrossed in a book, the picture of relaxation, she could snap and sting like a rubber band. The accumulation of hurts, the peregrinations of a refugee that began with her exile from her mother at birth, then exile from her surrogate mother the wet nurse, had taken its toll. She never felt rooted or that she quite belonged wherever she was.

There was a big split between the world of outer events over which she had achieved control by her years in St. Louis and her emotional life. She was fragile, resilient, imperious, vulnerable, self-absorbed, vitally present, rejecting, and loving. Any of these states could alter if she encountered something that made her feel affectionately regarded, on the one hand, or ignored, on the other.

At her core, Felice was lonely. She was never convinced that her mother loved her. Perhaps she was projecting onto Bela her own ambivalence, her own anger at Bela for taking her away from the woman who mothered her first. Perhaps when Bela told her daughter the story some years later about how Felice’s arrival in the world made her so sick that she lost some of her beauty and couldn’t care for her at first, Bela’s eyes twinkled at her daughter with affection, making it a story of hardship overcome. Perhaps Felice didn’t catch that twinkle in her mother’s eyes, if it was there. She felt that her mothered blamed her for making her less beautiful. I asked Hanka, Felice’s sister, about Felice’s feeling that their mother was cold. Hanka replied that she too felt that Bela had a certain vanity and self-centeredness. It had made Hanka uncomfortable also, and she couldn’t remember their mother hugging or kissing them.

My mother needed to feel loved. I’ve sometimes felt that the reason she kept the portrait of herself at her most beautiful permanently over her bed was that it helped her feel never alone or far from her youth, untouched by time, always ready to be courted. My father had commissioned it so
he
would never feel alone in case he lost Felice. Once when I was in my thirties my mother said to me, “You know, I have never spoken to you about my relationship with your father. There was something missing between us. There were ways in which he didn’t really satisfy me.”

I nodded. I knew this. She didn’t have to tell me. I could have used the standard psychiatrist’s line, “Tell me more,” but I didn’t want to hear more. I didn’t want to be my mother’s psychiatrist, and what she might have said if I had let her go on could have been very painful for how it reflected on my father. My mother was waiting for me to encourage her to go on, but I changed the subject.

I’ve often wondered if Felice had affairs. Although she and Edward were well-matched, they were also mismatched. He was reticent and unprepossessing; she was effusive, flirtatious, worldly, and beautiful. His life was medicine, and hers was politics, people, literature, and art. She would have had ample opportunity for affairs because of her many male friends and her long visits to New York, yet in a way I didn’t care, nor do I care now. I know my parents cared deeply about each other and supported each other, in spite of their differences, and they would not have done anything intentional to hurt the other person.

Given the strong presence my mother cut, how was I going to work out my own romantic feelings toward girls and women? It was a question I asked myself often from the time I was a teenager in the course of fitful relationships that came and went. A clue to the answer is that my first wife was the opposite in appearance from my mother. She was tall, fair, and a bit awkward in a formal New England way. Since I was my father’s son, not just my mother’s, I was working too many hours and too many days a week in my studies and beginning my career during my first marriage. I didn’t know how to play well enough, and after a number of years Linda left to study gamelan music in Indonesia. She was, however, like my mother in that she was the smartest, the best educated young woman I had met up to then.

I met Bridget, a petite redhead, shortly afterward. She was a professor at Berkeley who had returned not long before from studying Arabic poetry in North Africa. She was working on her first book,
Arab Epic and Identity
. As my father had said of Felice, “She is the most intelligent woman in St. Louis,” Bridget is the smartest woman I ever met in Berkeley.

I had the unusual experience for a boy growing up in those days of being intellectually mentored by my mother. She was the best teacher I ever had, and I wanted to continue being taught by the women I met later. I learned more from Felice than any formal teacher in spite of the fact that she was also a thorny rose bush.

When she hugged me she would smile joyfully and squeeze the breath out of me. Then she would pull back from the embrace, cast an appraising eye over me, reach for her hairbrush, and exclaim, “Can’t you do something about your hair?” Always there was the enigma of her beauty, the strain to tolerate it, being drawn into it, wondering what was inside of it, and then wondering why she had to break the spell.

Felice Video

Youtube Video Trailer Link:
http://bit.ly/wMfJ2z

Dedicated to my granddaughter, little Felice.

Acknowledgements

Bridget Connelly, my wife, knew that Felice’s story had to be told long before I did, and long before I was ready to face parts of it. She began the research and plotted our visits to the places my mother had lived--Szczuczyn, Kolno, Vilnius, Nancy, France, Palestine, and St. Louis. Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, and specialist in Oral Tradition, Bridget for a long time was the guide behind this biography and composed the first draft of several chapters. Bridget’s years of living in Egypt and Tunisia brought an understanding of the Arab experience to the section on Palestine that would have been impossible without her.

In addition, Bridget’s grandmother left Connemara, Ireland during the Second Potato Famine and arrived in America in the late 19
^th
Century. Bridget understood how one group--in her family’s past the English landowners--could create starvation for political purposes to drive another group--the Irish--from their land and turn them into migrants. It is a story Bridget Connelly grappled with in her book
Forgetting Ireland,
which also helps inform the Nazi genocide.

Aside from our travels, archival research, and interviews with others, the biography for the most part is Felice’s own story in her own words. I kept a diary of my conversations with my mother on our regular Sunday visits over the last four years of her life. Sometimes Bridget fed me questions to ask my mother in order to fill in gaps in her life. Sometimes Bridget asked Felice directly the kinds of questions that a son would have difficulty thinking of, let alone talking about with his mother.

Sometimes our daughter Kate pitched in, taking notes of her conversations with her grandmother, eager to compare her youth with that of Felice’s. Most importantly, Kate insisted that this be a story rather than an academic treatise. Cheryl Colopy’s skillful editing and suggestions kept the focus on moving the tale along. Richard Harris’s careful editing smoothed the roughness in the manuscript.

In Israel, Raphael Shenkman, Nava Shenkman, Hanka Mazor, Dalia Mazor, Dafna Furst, Isa Pallman and Ilana Bialecki spent long hours with us sharing their memories. Without them, there would be no book. In the Americas, Rosa and Jules Tragarz, Sylvia Dubovoy and Diana and Laurie Bank have been kind and generous with their thoughts. Rachel Kostanian, the assistant director of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, was our guide in Lithuania, grappling with her personal losses as a child surviving the war while indefatigably leading us through the streets of Vilnius in search of Felice’s Wilno. Bebe Leventhal, who grew up in Vilnius before the War, answered many questions from her home in Los Angeles.