The Smartest Woman I Know (5 page)

Every time I compared myself to Tootsie, which was just about every day, I felt awful.

Every morning before school I complained to Ettie about the way I looked. My hair wasn’t right, a pimple was starting, my nose and ears were growing, and worse.

“There is nothing wrong with how you look,” she would say. “Even Rita Hayworth doesn’t look so good in the morning.

“If you spent as much time thinking about what was going on on your insides instead of your outsides,” Ettie would say, “you’d be a lot better off. Look at Emma Lazarus. She’s no beauty and they made a big statue of her right in front of New York. Now that’s a woman. She’s Jewish, you know.”

To Ettie, not only did the Statue of Liberty have a poem on it by Emma Lazarus but it was of Emma Lazarus.

“You don’t have to work so hard to get beautiful,” Ettie said. “How many men would pay even a nickel to sit under a hot hair dryer for an hour every week just to get their hair like Tyrone Power?

“You think you can start out with a ten-cent ring from Woolworth’s, pay somebody to shine it up at a beauty parlor, and people will think it’s from Tiffany’s?

“Only that guy with the big glasses can go into a telephone booth and come out looking like Superman.”

That same week, I found out I needed eyeglasses because I was nearsighted and braces on my teeth because they were buck.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Ettie told me. “There’s already been a Jewish Miss America. Now we need a Jewish woman President—so go do your homework!”

Bess Meyerson, 1945

I was particularly jealous of Tootsie’s bosom, but again Ettie told me not to worry. “Be grateful if your bosom looks like an ironing board. You’ll always know that a man who falls in love with you loves you for your mind and not just because you have big titties. Who needs to schlep around an extra ten pounds anyway?”

To Tootsie she said, “Be proud of your big bosom. A man doesn’t want a woman whose front looks like her back.”

While I worried about my bosom, Ettie worried about my bas mitzvah. She wanted Tootsie and me to have a Jewish education.

Works good all over

T
OOTSIE WAS SEVENTEEN, past the conventional age to be bas mitzvahed. To me was going the honor.

Temple Emanu-El, the fanciest temple in New York, was on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, a block away from the store.

Every day Rabbi Perilman, the head rabbi at Temple Emanuel, came into the store to buy the
Wall Street Journal
. Even though he was a Reform rabbi, he made a good impression on Mr. Goldberg. He always paid for the paper, unlike certain other customers who thought they were too important to pay the five cents.

Mr. Goldberg, however, would never step foot in Temple Emanu-El because the men didn’t wear yarmulkes and the organ and choir made him feel like he was in a church. Mr. Goldberg went to Congregation Zichron Ephraim, the Orthodox temple on 67th Street between Lexington and Third avenues. He only went on the High Holidays. “Thank God that’s over,” he always said after the service.

Temple Emanu-El

Ettie always reminded Rabbi Perilman when the next Jewish holiday was, just in case.

One day Ettie whispered to Rabbi Perilman about her granddaughter, me, whose mother had died and whose father was no good and had disappeared, and that’s how I became a scholarship student at Temple Emanu-El.

Sunday school at Temple Emanu-El meant I had to sit where Mrs. Burstein, the teacher, made me—between Rachel Kaplan and Sheri Rubinstein, who were best friends. Rachel’s parents took her to Broadway shows and they sat in the sixth row, center. Sheri had a charm bracelet with charms that moved. You can imagine how I felt about Sundays.

To be bas mitzvahed from Temple Emanu-El, you had to be fourteen and they called it being confirmed. Ettie was planning a confirmation lunch for me at the Alrae Hotel on 64th Street. The manager of the restaurant in the hotel was a customer and, after Ettie talked to him about my situation, he said he would give her a good price if everybody came for an early lunch before his regulars.

Twenty people came and said
mazel tov
. My sister said my slip was showing. Ettie and Mr. Goldberg stood and didn’t eat. The Alrae Hotel was
treif
. A waiter walked around with pigs in a blanket.