Inventing Memory (32 page)

14

Dancing to America

2006

What are the Jews after all? A people that can't sleep
and let nobody else sleep.

—ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

F
reud believed that the impulse to destroy was greater than the impulse to create. Her mother's self-destructiveness made Sara agree with him about that. And the archive bore him out. For all the beautiful dead women in "waists" who died of nothing more violent than childbirth, there were hundreds, even thousands, of children who had died in
pogroms
, at the hands of Nazis and related thugs. The last century had been an Armageddon for a people with no shortage of Armageddons. Whenever it seemed that things could not possibly get worse for the Jews, they
did
. In this context, what was a heroine? One who raised the most children? One who killed her own children? One who took it upon herself to
chronicle
all these horrors while at the same time raising children?

And what comfort was history? None. On the last day of Passover, 1389, a bloody
pogrom
was visited upon the Prague ghetto. (The old familiar accusation was that Jews had desecrated the Host.) At least three thousand people were killed, and their blood was left on the walls as a memorial.

The famous Rabbi Avigdor Kar composed an elegy to commemorate the massacre and called it "All the Hardships That Befell Us":

More than one father killed his own son, and more than one mother slew the
very child she carried in her womb…. Too many fell to be named: young men
and women, old men and babes in arms…. So much torment has engulfed us,
yet we have not forgotten the name of God…. The days of hope must come! Injustice and desolation must be driven out! Let us return together from Exile
and let the prophecy of Isaiah, our constant comfort, come to pass: For my salvation is near to come and my favor to be revealed.

Sara had read enough of this sort of thing to know that she—and even her daughter, Dove—was born in a peaceful parenthesis in Jewish history, an unaccustomed time of bloodlessness when her people seemed safe in America. But were they
really
safe—any more than they were safe in Prague in 1389 or safe in Spain in 1492 or safe in Germany in the 1930s? Storm clouds and storm troopers might be gathering everywhere. In Christian America, you could never tell when it might be un-American to be Jewish. The conversion mania might well start again. Fringe hate groups were plentiful enough. The Aryan Nation and the Christian Coalition were joining forces with the Southern Baptists to
convert
the Jews. Portents were ubiquitous if you cared to look. Militia groups and Christian fundamentalists might very well ally themselves with Farrakhan's forces to kill the Jews. Such madness had happened before.
Many
times before.

If the Council on Jewish History had a significant exhibition, should it be called "All the Hardships That Befell Us" or "Dancing to America"? Pessimism or optimism? Give the people what they wanted, or tell them the truth? Sara knew that Lisette was going to ask for her ideas about this, and the fact was that Sara was still debating with herself. Who wasn't
sick
of Jewish pessimism? She was sick of it herself! The days of hope must come! And just when you decided to live by that optimistic faith, someone showed you a picture of a mountain of eyeglasses or wedding rings or human hair—and hope was proved illusory again. The Holocaust had put a curse on Jewish history, obscuring all the joy, all the creativity, all the laughter of this ancient people with images of victimization and death. If the Jews were to be seen hereafter only as victims, then hadn't Hitler really
won
? Was
his
to be the final definition of this six-thousand-year-old people? Sara hoped not.

What kind of God had the Jews chosen to be chosen by? A God with the conscience of a jackal, the obduracy of granite, and the sense of humor of a Nazi? The God of Job was hardly a God who refused to play dice with the universe. How could you possibly fault people who turned away from all that pain? Who became Jewnitarians or Ethical Culturists or even Bill W.-cultists like her mother? Other tribes worshiped gods who gave rain or coconuts or manna. Other tribes had soft praline gods who forgave everything with honey tongues. But the Jews delighted secretly in the harshness of their God the way the English used to think they were more virtuous for having no central heating. The God of the Jews was a sadist who required his people to be masochists. Or so it sometimes seemed.

Who was it who said pain leaves deeper traces than pleasure? The God of the Jews was indelible and eternal because of all that pain. Soft gods had come and gone. Forgiving gods had come and gone. And the God of the Old Testament remained—with his thundering voice, his impossible tests put to Job, Abraham, Isaac, even Jesus himself, until there were holes in their hands and dust in their hearts. This God was no wuss. This was a macho God. No wonder the Jews were so proud to have been chosen to suffer by such a butch God, Yahweh of the
cojones.

"Heresy!" she could just hear old Sarah Sophia saying. The whole point of the story of Job is that God does not want to be worshiped only in the
good
times.
This
is the wisdom of Yahweh. We cannot fathom the will of God any more than we can create what God creates. Any weak, pusillanimous people can worship a God who gives goodies. It takes an iron-willed tribe to cleave to God even when God sends boils, death, destruction.
This
is the true surrender to God's power. And surrender is the
only
wisdom. "How do you think I survived," Sarah Sophia seems to say, "but through surrender?" This is the paradox: surrender is the greatest strength.

So went the ancient argument in Sara's head as she prepared her notes for the meeting Lisette de Hirsch had called. Lisette wanted to discuss the future of the Council, the best way to raise membership and donations, the major exhibition she had in mind.

The meeting took place in the room sunken into the bedrock of the city. Sara remembered the first time she had come here with Lisette, and she felt like a different person now. The room no longer scared her, nor did the big-cheese donors with their names like banks, who sat at the round conference table with their pristine legal pads and their twinkly expensive pens. Guys like this all looked alike to Sara. She was sure that was unfair to them, but they all seemed homogeneous.

Lisette began by saying that the Council needed to celebrate itself, show the world its work, its value.

"We have been doing all this excellent work in private, and now it's time to let the world see what we're up to. I'm looking for a theme for our exhibition, which will also become the theme for the illustrated book that goes with the exhibition…. I have some ideas myself."

Now came the moment everybody dreaded: the moment when one's idea would be ridiculed or it would be seen that one
had
no ideas. The three board members—three kings, as it were—were brilliant at nondisclosure. They had arrived where they needed to be by saying as little as possible. Silence is always brilliant—surely old Sarah's mother would have had a proverb for it.

"I would defer to Mrs. de Hirsch," said the first board member, a hunched-up man who had made billions in Wall Street.

"I would love to hear what you both have in mind," said the second, a silver-haired lawyer who protected himself and his wealth by contributing equal amounts to both major political parties.

"My expertise is elsewhere," said the third, a banker who advised popes and presidents and loved calling his clients from the Lincoln Bedroom—whoever was president.

"Sara, what do you think?" asked Lisette.

"I've been reading and thinking to prepare for this, and I keep coming back to the same thought: Can we let Hitler define Jewish history for us, or should we define it ourselves?"

Lisette looked alarmed. "Explain what you mean," she said testily.

"It's not easy to explain," Sara went on, "but let me try. We have this glorious history, which has now been eclipsed by the Holocaust. There are Holocaust museums, Holocaust studies…It's as if we spend all our time arguing with Hitler. It's a trap, I think. It's letting the anti-Semites say what Jews are and aren't."

"But you wouldn't
deny
the Holocaust?" Lisette asked.

"Of course not," said Sara, "but I don't believe that the greatness of our people is demonstrated only by the hands raised against us. I would rather stress the days of hope than the days of despair. Maybe we've been chosen because of our abundant life force, our refusal to surrender—and maybe we should celebrate
that
. The more I think of the history of the Jews in America, the more struck I am by the fact that we are all descendants of survivors, not victims. Rather than defeat ourselves with pessimism, why don't we show our ancestors dancing to America?"

"What a clever title for an exhibition!" said Lisette.

"
What
title?" asked Sara. "I wasn't aware I had proposed a title…."

"'Dancing to America,'" said Lisette. "That's the title of our exhibition. So optimistic and upbeat, so positive. People are tired of negativity, I think…."

"And then we take the story of a family and show its odyssey over a hundred years…."

"I love it!" said Lisette.

Suddenly the board members began vying with each other to regale Sara with heartwarming family stories about impoverished ancestors. One started with a pushcart, one with a tailor's shears, one with nothing but a shovel. The pushcart peddler became a department store king, the tailor became a garmento whose sons built a Hollywood studio, and the man with the shovel founded a real estate empire.

"But if it's to be
real
, it can't only glorify the family. It has to show them—warts and all," said Sara.

"Of course," said Lisette. "No whitewashing."

"You say that now," Sara said, "but what if you learned that there were black sheep in the family…?"

"
All
families have black sheep—even mine," said Lisette with a laugh. "My great-great-great-grandfather was a horse thief…."

"And mine," said Mr. Goldman—or was it Mr. Lazard?

"We think it's a great idea," said Lisette. "We're a thousand percent for it."

And that was how Sara talked herself into taking on the most difficult project of her life,
Dancing to America.

The research was compelling. Sara found herself increasingly seeing the world through the eyes of her ancestors. Sarah Sophia seemed to take over her thoughts, her way of looking at the world. And as she entered into the consciousness of this woman who had to be so much braver than she, Sara became more and more courageous herself, almost as though she were clothing herself in another soul, as if some transmigration had occurred.

Every biographer knows that any soul may be yours if you follow its contours and learn them by heart. This is what Sara did. She felt that she was being led through a deep fog and that as the fog cleared, she was beginning to suspect who she was.

Of course, Lisette de Hirsch vetoed most of the texts and exhibits she proposed. Did old Sarah
have
to have an affair with a
goy
? Why couldn't she marry nice Levitsky right off the bat? And did Levitsky
have
to be impotent? And a forger's fence to boot? Surely there were Jewish art dealers who
weren't
crooks? And what about Salome's affair with Henry Miller? Couldn't she have an affair with Chagall or Pascin, for example, or some other
Jewish
artist? Even Modigliani. Wasn't Miller an antiSemite? And wasn't Salome a bit too wild, never knowing whether her only son, Lorenzo, belonged to Robin or Marco? And why was Lorenzo such a failure, such a no-good? And would he sue if the Council included him—or a character based on him—in the exhibition? And Sally's alcoholism? Was addiction really such a problem for Jewish girls? Lisette didn't want to censor—far from it—but was that
realistic
? Realism was the key here.

Lisette was already writing fund-raising letters and drafting press releases trumpeting the exhibition: "Exhibition to Chronicle One Hundred Years of Jewish Immigration."

Let Lisette sanitize the exhibition in any way she wanted, but in the family story Sara was now writing (in lieu of her dissertation), not a line, not a comma, would be changed. Nor would Lloyd or David distract her. Once the family chronicle took over her life, she had little desire to be interrupted by either of them. David was too good to be true—how could anyone persist in loving someone who offered so little in return?—and Lloyd might just be a charming psychopath. There would always be men—but unless she captured the story of Sarah Sophia, Sa lome, and Sally, it was likely to be lost forever. Now was the time for her to get their stories down on paper. She had to complete their tales to begin her own.

Each one of these women had left some unfinished business. Sarah Sophia at first stopped painting under her own name and became a ghost painter. Even when she achieved fame in her own right as a Hollywood portraitist, she put her husband's gallery ahead of her work. She became rich, but she let her own work come behind the gallery. Salome had also allowed herself to be derailed. She kept endless notebooks when she was young, but she really gave up writing seriously after the disappointment of
Dancing to America
. At that time, nobody wanted to publish a book that honestly showed a woman's point of view. (Even Anaïs Nin's unexpurgated journals appeared only in the eighties and nineties. The first versions—in the seventies—were totally sanitized by Nin herself! No wonder they seemed so nebulous in places. All the real stuff was cut out! The affair with Henry Miller, the truth about her marriage, her incestuous father—everything!) And Sally deliberately destroyed her talent—with men, with drink, with bitterness, with lethargy. She even pulled her greatest album. How self-destructive can you get?