Wendy and the Lost Boys (2 page)

Part One

GROWING UP

1950-71

THE BROOKLYN YEARS:
LOLA, GEORGETTE, BRUCE, AND WENDY.

One

THE FAMILY WASSERSTEIN

Let other, weaker families dwell
on their sorrows. That was the unspoken philosophy in the Wasserstein household.

Wendy would joke that when family members died, it was said, “They went to Europe.” More intricate heartaches were ignored.

Secrecy pervaded the household, though the family would deny that anything was hidden. “It’s not that there were secrets. Things were just not talked about, never mentioned,” said Bruce Wasserstein, Wendy’s brother. “It was what my parents wished.”

The family produced überachievers. Wendy became the first woman playwright to win a Tony award
and
the Pulitzer Prize while also achieving commercial success on Broadway. Sandra Wasserstein Meyer, the eldest, became a high-ranking corporate executive at a time when the best job available to most women in Fortune 500 companies was boss’s secretary. Their brother Bruce became a billionaire superstar of the investment banking world.

Even Georgette Wasserstein Levis, the middle daughter who checked out of the race early—married young, had babies, moved to Vermont—ultimately became the successful owner of a large country inn, the Wilburton.

The Wasserstein children held Morris, their sweet father, in special regard as the source of comfort, quiet wisdom, and unconditional love. Morris and Lola were said to be the perfect couple, though it was also said their marital bliss was helped by the fact that Morris was practically deaf, his hearing damaged by illness when he was a boy. When he needed peace and quiet, he just turned down his hearing aid.

A decent, hardworking man, Morris Wasserstein had brains, foresight, and ambition, but not the fierce personality that produces titans or playwrights.

For the mythmaking ingredient, look to Lola.

She was of minuscule size but a powerhouse contender among legendary heavyweights, Jewish-mother division. Lola was the lightning rod, credited or blamed for her children’s drive, their idiosyncrasies, their outsize successes and peculiar flaws.

Lola stories were legion. Perhaps most emblematic were those told after Wendy won the Pulitzer Prize. Lola was said to have responded in at least two ways:

“I’d be just as happy if she’d marry a lawyer.”

“Did you hear? Wendy won the Nobel Prize?”

Either way, the clear message was that the Pulitzer wasn’t quite good enough.

On the other hand, anything her children did was de facto the best. Lola decorated the walls of her apartment with lacquered collages of Wendy’s press clippings and
Playbills
, as well as articles about her other children. Their framed diplomas, school photos, and prizes were on display. Lola said her chest was so puffed out from pride that she needed a bigger bra.

That particular paradox—of being better than everyone else but not good enough—would become a recurrent theme in Wendy’s life and in her work. In
The Heidi Chronicles
, the superior-inferior concurrence emerges when Heidi Holland, the heroine, is invited to speak at the all-girl prep school she’d attended. Heidi—by then a well-known art historian—has a meltdown as she enumerates the ways she feels that women of her generation have failed one another.

Discussing all the women she meets in her gym’s locker room, she erupts into a fantasy about what she’d like to say to them. “I’m sorry I don’t want you to find out I’m worthless,” she says. “And superior.”

The problem may have been that Lola never explained what would happen to the child who couldn’t produce achievements that could be quantified and displayed. Would he—would she—still be worthy of love?

O
n January 4, 1993,
New York
magazine ran a lengthy article by Phoebe Hoban called “The Family Wasserstein” in conjunction with the opening of
The Sisters Rosensweig,
Wendy’s homage to her two older sisters, Georgette and Sandra. Hoban interviewed Lola and Morris, Wendy’s parents, at a hotel restaurant.

Lola offered the journalist her philosophy of life. “I’ve always taught my children that they have to be a person in their own right. I have this expression, ‘I am.’ This is to have the confidence in yourself, that what you are, nobody can take away. No matter what you do, just feel confident.”

Their daughter Sandra reinforced the family’s inflated version of its history.

“That Polish resort town in
The Sisters Rosensweig
is really where my grandparents had their villa with tennis courts and their own pastry chef,” Sandra said. “They were very sophisticated and had a lot of money.”

Sandra was fifty-five years old at the time, a senior officer for corporate affairs at Citibank. More than her younger siblings, she had always known that some truths were woven into her mother’s confabulations and that others were hidden in stories that weren’t told. In the spring of 1993, a few months after the
New York
magazine article was published, Citibank sponsored a concert tour of the New York Philharmonic. One of the stops was Warsaw. Sandra invited Wendy, then forty-two, to join her for what Wendy would call “a sisterly tour of our mother’s Polish girlhood.”

They set out to debunk the myths Lola had bequeathed them. Wendy recorded their findings. “Growing up, I always loved the stories about my mother’s childhood,” she wrote. “Lola’s Poland was different from anybody else’s mother’s Poland. My schoolmates had grandfathers who were peddlers in Lodz, but my mother’s family had a summer villa in a spa resort called Ciechocinek. My mother’s family was the intelligentsia. At least according to my mother.”

“Frankly, I always placed the truth of the summer villa right alongside my mother’s sworn testimony to me in eighth grade that grown women would pay thousands of dollars for hair like mine, especially when it divided into thousands of damaged, frizzy split ends,” Wendy wrote. “It might have been more than a slight exaggeration, but it was certainly comforting.”

For their trip, Wendy and Sandra hired a driver in Warsaw to take them north along the Vistula River to Wloclawek, where Lola Schleifer was born on March 28, 1918. At least that’s the date recorded on her New York State driver’s license. Her contemporaries weren’t convinced. “No one knows when she was born,” said her first cousin, Jack Schleifer. Her marriage certificate to Morris says 1917. At family functions Morris quietly approached Lola’s relatives and asked them, “Do you know how old Lola is?” He never got a definitive answer, because no one knew for sure. Lola enjoyed the game. At Georgette’s sixtieth-birthday party, Lola asked a guest, “How can my daughter be sixty when I’m only thirty-eight?”

As it happens, her name wasn’t even Lola. She was born Liska, a variation of Elizabeth, which is how she is listed on U.S. Census records from 1930—a fifteen-year-old girl, indicating that she was born in 1915 or 1916.

“Lola” came later, another invention.

In Wloclawek, Wendy and Sandra found a grim and polluted city of 120,000 people, an industrial center known for its hand-painted pottery. Their driver took them to Piekarska Street, where the Schleifers had lived, two blocks from a lovely park surrounding a fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral. For the Wasserstein sisters, the scene was alien but familiar. They recognized the white lace curtains hanging from Polish windows; they were the same kind of curtains that hung in their mother’s bedroom back in New York. When their driver told them, “Poland is a country of churches,” they smiled and nodded without response, struck silent by ancient fears. When he said, “Your mother must have been very well-to-do. Only the very well-to-do lived in corner houses,” they smiled again. “My sister is a formidable banker, and I am a playwright,” Wendy wrote. “But today we are two Jewish girls in Poland. It’s not exactly comfortable to speak.”

Wloclawek doesn’t occupy much space in history texts. In the twelfth century, it was an outpost for the Roman Catholic Church, as the seat of the local provincial bishop. In the fifteenth century, Copernicus, the legendary Polish astronomer, studied there for a couple of years, giving the city a kind of “Lincoln slept here” academic cachet. In 1815 the kingdom of Poland came under Russian czarist rule, where it would remain until after World War I (which is how Lola managed to be born in Russia but raised in Poland without budging from Wloclawek). Eventually Wloclawek became the Akron of north-central Poland, a sturdy manufacturing center, home of the country’s first paper mill and cellulose plant. The huge kilns that fired its signature pottery were built in the nineteenth century.

The population expanded accordingly. Simon and Helen Schleifer contributed four children to the growing community, which had reached 35,000 by 1909. Theirs was a relatively small brood; Simon had been one of ten children. Though Jews were prohibited from settling in Wloclawek until the eighteenth century, by the time Lola was born, one-fifth of the population was Jewish. In the city’s all-Jewish enclave, Yiddish was far more likely to be spoken than Polish. Even modern Jews like the Schleifers obeyed the dietary laws, read Yiddish newspapers, and were educated in yeshivas. They lived with a lurking fear of anti-Semitism, a wariness that existed in memories of pogroms and the daily reality of restrictions on where they could work or go to school. They understood they were regarded as interlopers, temporary citizens—no matter how many generations back they could trace their ancestry in Poland. In turn they looked down on “Polacks,” even as they trembled before them. A sign of Jewish prosperity was a Polish maid.

Superior-inferior.

F
or Wendy, Lola’s declarative “I am” became an ongoing question: “Who am I?” Nurture versus nature, the connection between past and future; so many ephemeral unknowns determine a human being’s sense of self: How was she to calibrate the significance of DNA, geographical displacement, societal pressure, birth order, gender, ethnicity, religion, the weight of history? Could Wendy extricate herself from the stories she’d never heard from the grandparents she’d never known?

Her grandfather Simon Hirsch Schleifer came of age in the late nineteenth century. Simon—Shimon, as he was known then—was an intellectual, a
yeshiva bocher
and raconteur. He became a teacher in the yeshiva, not because he was religious but because there were few other options available to the Jewish intelligentsia, who were not permitted in the Polish civil service or, with few exceptions, to teach in public schools. (After Wendy won the Pulitzer Prize, “playwright” was added to Simon’s résumé, but none of Lola’s contemporaries remembered him writing plays.)

Wendy’s grandmother Helen Schleifer was more conventional: She cooked, sewed, and took care of her children. She wore blowsy dresses and spoke Yiddish with Simon’s mother, who didn’t understand Polish. She dealt with the loss of a son, who’d died in childhood from illness. Helen was a beloved mother but never a role model for Lola, their baby, the most pampered of their children. Lola acquired her father’s yearning, his desire for the larger world. Even as a young girl, she had style, a freckle-faced gamine dressed in knickers, aiming a provocative glance at a photographer. When her family summered at the resort town of Ciechocinek, she most likely bathed in the mineral-rich waters. She would have strolled through the manicured gardens in Zdrojowy Park and eaten ice cream at the Bristol Cafe and danced at the band shell, which was then almost new.

Did they own a villa with tennis courts, as Lola had told her children? Or was the villa rented, or did the Schleifer family stay in a hotel? Did it matter?

Lola remembered what she remembered, in warm and gauzy recollections.

“According to my mother, wherever she lived, wherever she danced, wherever she ate, was the best place to live, the best place to dance, and the best place to eat,” wrote Wendy.

No meek shtetl humbleness for Lola. “I am,” was already on her lips.

Nice bravado, but Lola and her fellow Jews were about to become part of the past tense—“they were”—footnotes in Polish history. Lola and her parents left the country more than a decade before the Nazi occupation in 1939. By the end of World War II, Poland’s Jewish population was decimated. Fewer than 70,000 of the 3.3 million who lived there before the war survived.

Wendy noted the absence with sadness. “Today in Ciechocinek there are still the parks and even the famous spa water, but no one looks like my sister or me,” she wrote after her 1993 trip with Sandy through the green Vistula River Valley. “No one even resembles the women from my mother’s faded photo album. Fifty years ago the ethnic cleansing of Ciechocinek was so successful that there is no variety here. Everyone looks pretty much the same.”

Most of Lola’s immediate family escaped, part of the Great Migration, the karmic explosion of awakened consciousness that drew millions of desperate dreamers to the United States in the thirty years leading up to the First World War. The pattern was for the men to go ahead, try to get established, and then send for their wives and children.