Art of a Jewish Woman (30 page)

By contrast, France elected the Jewish socialist leader Leon Blum president in 1936. He enacted the enduring reform of the 40-hour week, and codified paid vacations for workers. However the course of his government’s management of the French economy was rocky because of factional fighting within his coalition. Moreover, conservatives feared state regulation of industries and withdrew capital funds that could have made expansion of jobs possible. Nonetheless France was anticipating Hitler’s invasion and constructed the Maginot Line of fortresses along the border with Germany, but when the time came they would prove totally inadequate to stop the onslaught.

Britain, France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia made a treaty to defend each other should Germany invade. Had they honored the treaty they may have nipped Hitler’s maniacally grandiose dream of domination over all of Europe and Russia in the bud and prevented World War II. Instead, on March 30, 1939, the British foreign minister Chamberlain announced that he had negotiated an agreement in Munich to let Germany occupy Czechoslovakia unopposed in return for Hitler’s promise not to attack Britain. It would “bring peace in our time,” Chamberlain said. A few days later Nazi troops crossed into Czechoslovakia.

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, which, like Czechoslovakia, was greatly overmatched, and the German army quickly reached the Russian border. A month earlier in August, Russia and Germany had concluded a secret agreement to divide Poland, the western part going to Germany and the eastern part to Russia. Consequently on September 17, 1939, the Russian army crossed the border into Poland and the Nazi troops pulled back without a battle. There was a public announcement of a non-aggression pact between the two powers, but this was simply a maneuver to give both the German and Russian armies more time to prepare for Germany’s attack on Russia.

On May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded France. In June 1941, he began an air assault on Britain. On June 22, 1941, he bombarded the Russian troops in eastern Poland. A few days later on June 28 his troops entered Felice’s village and began their march toward Moscow. In 1942, the death camps began liquidating their prisoners. Once again the capacity for hatred in the heart of humankind and the will for violence had overwhelmed the capacity for love and the will for kindness.

St. Louis, Missouri

Missouri lies at the geographic heart of the contiguous United States, as Poland is in the center of Europe. St. Louis is Missouri’s largest city, sitting on bluffs on the western bank of a broad bend of the Mississippi River, ten miles south of where the Missouri River flows into it. The first people there were bands of Sioux Indians, of which one group, the Missouri, gave the state its name. The first Europeans were Spanish explorers and French voyageurs, and a French New Orleans company established the first settlement there as a fur trading outpost in 1764.

They named their outpost after King Louis IX of France, who ruled from 1226 to 1270 and was known for his piety, kindness toward the poor, fairness among European kingdoms, support for the arts, and establishment of the French parliament. He also led two crusades, the first to Palestine during which he occupied Jaffa and held the Muslims at bay, and the second to Tunis, where he died. He financed his first crusade by expelling all Jewish money lenders from France, confiscating their property, and usurping money due them to his coffers. Further, he ordered that some 12,000 manuscript copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books be burned in Paris, for fear that they might weaken the Christian social order. Louis IX was canonized a saint in 1297.

It was King Louis’ reputation for benevolence and extending the reach of Catholic France that the first settlers had in mind in bestowing his name on their village. In the years that followed St. Louis grew into a largely peaceful city by incorporating diverse traditions and streams of immigrants. By the time Felice arrived in 1938--fleeing modern violence in the very Jaffa that King Louis had occupied and European anti-Semitism that he had once fomented--St. Louis was a heterogeneous, dense, polyglot, thriving, multifaceted city of about 800,000 people of whom approximately 60,000 were Jews. This was the largest Jewish community of any city in the interior of the United States. In this it resembled Felice’s beloved Wilno, where she lived during her adolescent boarding school years. Wilno had a like number of Jews, though there they were a quarter of the population.

As in Wilno every ethnic St. Louis community had its own newspapers in English and in the native language of its residents. As in Wilno and Palestine, Felice could read local and international news in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. The Jewish newspapers were reporting the Holocaust victims’ desperation as their lives were being extinguished. They had the story long before the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the mainstream American press wrote it, in spite of the fact that the Post Dispatch was one of America’s most in-depth newspapers. The very family that owned the Post Dispatch had created the Pulitzer Prize to reward excellence in writing, and America’s first school of journalism, founded to advance reporting, was nearby at the University of Missouri. Still, the mainstream press remained largely silent about what was happening to Jews in Germany and Poland.

Like her Jerusalem of the North, Wilno, St. Louis was intellectually rich. St. Louis University had been chartered in 1832 by Jesuits. Its educational principles were closely linked with those if its early faculty member Father Pierre Jean de Smet, a missionary among the western Indians, who brought his concern for educating and supporting communities in need to the university. The Indians had trusted Father de Smet as their mediator in negotiations with white settlers and the American government, but the treaties he helped broker were broken by the white people. They removed the Indians from their land, made them paupers, and de Smet died disillusioned.

The other university, Washington University, was founded in 1853 by William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister, as a non-denominational school. It was growing into a major research institution with a campus modeled on Oxford’s. When Felice arrived at Washington University in 1938, one faculty member had already won a Nobel Prize for physics, and there would be twenty-one future winners. Four of the future Nobel laureates were at work in the medical school’s laboratories at that moment. In addition to the two universities, smaller colleges, religious seminaries, Bible schools, and trade schools abounded in the city.

There were a score of orthodox Jewish synagogues and conservative and reform temples in neighborhoods with concentrations of Jews--downtown, the Central West End, and University City on the city’s western border, where the street car lines had their turnarounds; and Washington University was growing. The Jewish community was such a presence that for some, St. Louis came to be known as Zion in the Valley, a variation on Lion in the Valley (the Mississippi River valley) favored by the chamber of commerce.

The city had Forest Park--large like Central Park in New York, the Pepiniere in Nancy, France, and the Kalny in Wilno--gracing the city’s western limits. The city’s art museum, originally the Greco-Roman temple-styled main pavilion at the 1904 World’s Fair, sat on the park’s highest hill. In winter, sledders and skiers swooped down from the top of Art Hill to the frozen lagoon below, where ice skaters glided. Park keepers kept a large warming fire stoked with logs. In the summer there was an outdoor municipal opera with seats for thousands. Canoes and pedal boats plied the park’s waterways. At the brow of Art Hill stood a larger than life bronze casting of St. Louis. He was astride his prancing stallion, facing the lagoon and holding his crusader sword by the blade so that the hilt in the shape of a cross appeared to be blessing the city below.

Music was vibrant. The St. Louis symphony orchestra founded in 1880 was the first west of the Mississippi and filled its hall for every performance. The Jazz and Rock and Roll pioneers, Miles Davis and Chuck Berry, both born in 1926, were growing up in black neighborhoods in the city. Berry’s mother was a school principal, his father a contractor. Davis’s family was also comfortably off, and as children both boys had access to excellent music teachers. Their music left indelible stamps on the 20
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Century. Chuck Berry more than anybody else created Rock and Roll. He passed rhythm and blues through country music, added a big beat, gave his guitar a crystal clear sound, and wrote songs about love and cars that remain more popular than contemporary hits. Berry said, “I stressed my diction so that it was harder and whiter. My intention was to hold my black and white audience by voicing different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.”
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He was one of the first performers in the country to play to racially mixed audiences, in his very own nightclub. Miles Davis, the jazz trumpeter, was also known for his musical diction, a signature tone without vibrato. He said, “I prefer a sound with no attitude in it. I like a round voice with not too much tremolo, nor too much baseline. Just right in the middle.”
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Some said the word jazz came from St. Louis, from the music played on the riverboat JS, moored on the levee downtown. The boat’s entire main inside deck was a dance floor long and broad enough for hundreds, presided over by a big bandstand. People said, “Lets go listen to the JS.” Earlier at the turn of the century, Scott Joplin had written most of his best known rags while living in St. Louis.

The city also spawned literature. For example T.S. Eliot, the Nobel Prize winning poet and grandson of Washington University’s founder, grew up in St. Louis in the first part of the century, as did Tennessee Williams, the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. They both lived for a time on Westminster Place in the Central West End, the same street on which Felice would live for a number of years. Thomas Wolfe spent part of his childhood in the city.

Reminiscing from London, where he later made his home trying to escape the moral strictures of his family, T.S. Eliot (born Thomas) said, “My urban imagery was that of St. Louis upon which that of Paris and London have been super-imposed…[and] the Mississippi, as it passes between St. Louis and East St. Louis in Illinois: the Mississippi was the most powerful feature of Nature in that environment.”
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In the poem “Dry Salvages,” he wrote of the river, “I think that the river/Is a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable…His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom/In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard/In the smell of grapes on the autumn table…”
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Tom (later Tennessee) Williams, one year younger than Felice, came to St. Louis as a seven-year-old from Mississippi when his traveling salesman father took a job with the International Shoe Company. They lived on a poorer block of Westminster Place lined with red brick apartment houses, in one of thousands of such apartment houses in the city. He described his home, a model for the one in his play The Glass Menagerie: “A perpetually dim little apartment in a wilderness of identical brick and concrete structures with no grass and no trees nearer than the park…If we walked far enough west we came into a region of residences set in beautiful lawns. But where we lived, to which we must always return, were ugly rows of apartment buildings, the color of dried blood.”
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St. Louis gave Williams his external palette; his parents’ cold marriage and sister’s mental illness gave him his inner claustrophobia.

Thomas Wolfe’s mother brought him to St. Louis as a four-year-old in 1904, in time for the World’s Fair. She was trying to make a living for herself and her children after leaving their alcoholic stonecutter father in North Carolina. She leased a house, called it The North Carolina, and took in boarders. In his 1935 novella, “Lost Boy”, Wolfe, a memoirist of the nostalgia that comes from a migrating life, described going back to the old home: “[It was] as I had known it would be. A gray stone front, three storied, with a slant slate roof, the side red brick and windowed, still with the old arched entrance in the center…except that I did not smell the tar, the hot and caulky dryness of the old cracked ties, the boards of the backyard fences and coarse and sultry grass.”
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The city also gave women their voice, just as it would give Felice her stage. Kate Chopin, born Kate O’Flaherty, came to be known as America’s first romance novelist. In Felice’s time, Erma Rombauer, the daughter of a 19
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Century German immigrant surgeon and a mother who loved to cook, published the first edition of The Joy of Cooking. Mixing kitchen banter with classic and cosmopolitan recipes, Rombauer was as revolutionary to cookbook writing as Eliot was to poetry and Wolfe to memoir. Fannie Hurst, the daughter of 19
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Century German-Jewish immigrants, became one of America’s most successful short story writers in the first half of the 20
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Century.

In the first half of the 20
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Century, the city’s success, peacefulness, bourgeois traditionalism, and stability gave people the ease with which to flex their creative muscles; its mixture of religions, races and nationalities gave people the juice to get them started. For a 1955 newspaper article, Hurst wrote, “The St. Louis of today, with its accrued wealth of solid industries, gargantuan department stores, factories, major league baseball teams; its avenues, boulevards, residential streets with stone gates that are locked at night; its meatpacking, shoe, fur, chemical and heavy industries; its staggering brewing interest, its mercantile and manufacturing importance, its family mansions; all this staid conservatism of contemporary St. Louis has a background of trappers, of voyageurs, such as the Chouteaus; of Louisiana Purchase pathfinders; of Lewis and Clark, who blazed a trail into the fur monopolies upon which so much of St. Louis history rests.”
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