Naked in the Promised Land
Lillian Faderman
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HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston New York 2003
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Copyright © 2003 by Lillian Faderman
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Faderman, Lillian.
Naked in the promised land / Lillian Faderman.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-618-12875-1
1. Faderman, Lillian. 2. Scholars—United States—Biography.
3. Lesbians—United States—Biography. 4. Jews—United
States—Biography. 1. Title.
CT3990.F33 A3 2003
305.48‘8924073‘092—dc21 [B] 2002032233
To ensure the privacy of certain persons who appear in this book,
some names and identifying characteristics have been changed.
Book design by Anne Chalmers
Typefaces: Janson Text, Copperplate
Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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FOR AVROM
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Acknowledgments
My deep gratitude goes to the many friends who read this book in its numerous versions, made helpful suggestions, and gave me encouragement: Rosie Pegueros, Ruth Schwartz, Linda Garber, Barbara Blinik, Ruth Blinik, Joyce Aiken, Rosalind Ravasio, Charlie Bolduc, Joyce Brotsky Virginia Hales, Sharon Young, and Olivia Sawyers. Special thanks to Frankie Hucklenbroich, Steve Yarbrough, and Beatrice Valenzuela.
It would have been impossible for me to finish the manuscript without the gift of time from my colleagues and the administration at California State University, Fresno. I’m especially grateful to Luis Costa and Michael Ortiz.
My editor, Elaine Pfefferblit, believed in this project from the start and has made me feel her support. Thank you. Sandy Dijkstra continues to be a great friend and a terrific agent.
I’m blessed in my family—Avrom Irwin Faderman and Phyllis Irwin. Thank you for your sweet nurturance.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
I LILLY
1 HOW I BECAME AN OVERACHIEVER 3
2 GOING CRAZY IN EAST L.A. 24
3 CRUSHED 44
4 MEN I 64
5 SHEDDING 87
II LIL
6 HOLLYWOOD 105
7 MY MOVIE-ACTRESS NOSE 130
8 THE OPEN DOOR 142
9 GETTING THE GIFT OF WISDOM 160
10 KICKED OUT 173
11 A JEWISH PRINCE 190
12 A MARRIED WOMAN 207
III LILLIAN
13 HIGHER EDUCATION 227
14 HOW I BECAME A BURLESQUE QUEEN 247
15 MEN II 267
16 PROFESSOR FADERMAN 286
17 HOW I BECAME A COLLEGE ADMINISTRATOR 306
18 SHEAVES OF OATS 331
19 EPILOGUE 351
LILLY
1. HOW I BECAME AN OVERACHIEVER
HOW COULD I NOT have spent years of my life lusting after the golden apple—the heft of it, the round, smooth feel of it, the curve of it in my small hand? When I was three months old and a war was raging across the ocean, my mother rocked me in her arms in a darkened theater. On the silver screen, here in America, in the Bronx, was Charles Boyer, a duke with a mansion in Paris, another in the Loire, another in Corsica. His sumptuous abodes were concocted by a lunatic confectioner: furniture, curtains, ceilings, walls—all of billowy whipped cream. If the movie had been in Technicolor, everything would surely have been ivory, heaven blue, sun gold. My mother—a shopgirl, an immigrant, no husband—stared with open mouth, rapt, all but drooling at Boyer and paradise. When she remembered, she dandled me a bit in her arms, praying I would be silent long enough to let her see—one more glimpse of the duke, of his mansion, of the story. This she told me.
I did not cooperate. From fitful sleep I awoke to bawl, to shriek with new lungs, with all my strength.
To the lobby and back with me. One more glimpse for her, and to the lobby again.
“See,” she softly crooned. “Look, see.” Standing in the back of the theater, she held me up to better see the screen. It was the handsome duke she wanted us to see, and the many mansions. For a moment my mouth was open too in rapt attention.
We went home together, I in her arms, in the late October cold sunset to our little rooms in the Bronx. She wrapped the blanket tighter around me and held me to her breast so that no cold could reach me. But her head was full of Duke Boyer with his bedroom eyes and kissy mouth and mansions.
For my first three months we’d been living on “relief,” as welfare was called in New York in 1940, and my mother didn’t have to work. We could go to movies together to our hearts’ content. But it couldn’t last.
“You have to sue the baby’s father,” the relief worker told my mother in the loud voice she used for people who didn’t speak English well. “The Bronx can’t be supporting you and her forever.” She printed the address of the public lawyer in big, careful letters and told my mother what subway to take.
“That’s not my baby,” my father swore on the stand, and the judge believed him. He didn’t have to pay my mother a cent.
The Bronx didn’t have to pay any more cents either, the relief worker said. That was when my aunt—the funny monkey, my mother called her—came to live with us and take care of me, and my mother went back to the garment factory where she’d been a draper before I was born. No more movies and outings in the cold for me.
My aunt kept me well bundled in the cramped and overheated apartment and crooned Yiddish lullabies to me all day long. Unter Lililehs viegeleh…Under little Lilly’s cradle stands a pure white goat. The little goat went to market, to buy you raisins and almonds. A foghorn voice came out of her short body. I stared up at her with huge love eyes. She held me to her heart and I crawled in forever, she said. A kush on dyneh shayneh bekelech, a kush on dyneh shayneh pupikel, a kiss on your pretty little cheeks, on your pretty little belly button. Smack, smack would go her lips in big goopy kisses on my briefly exposed skin, and I was beside myself with glee.
My mother called her Rae, and I’d never heard the word aunt, so when I began talking I called her My Rae. I became roly-poly because My Rae was always sticking into my mouth big spoonfuls of whatever she was cooking in our small kitchen—prune compote, potato and carrot tzimmes, boiled chicken with noodles, My-T-Fine Chocolate Pudding. “Open the moileleh, the little mouth,” she said and grinned ecstatically when I did. In went the compote, in went the tzimmes. “A michayeh, a pleasure,” she said. I learned to walk months later than most kids because when My Rae wasn’t cooking or making her sewing machine go whirr, whirr with the piecework she did for money, she never let me out of her arms.
They were the only two of their family who, in 1923, had made it to the safe shores of America, long before Hitler marched through Prael, their shtetl in Latvia, and wiped out everyone else—a crippled brother, two sisters, the sisters’ husbands, the sisters’ five children. It was not supposed to work out that way. “This is what you must do,” the grandmother I never saw told her eldest daughters, my mother (a sylph, an eighteen-year-old beauty) and my aunt (a bulldog, the chaperone). The poorest of the poor were going off to America and sending back dollars and pictures of themselves dressed like the nobility. Why should her two daughters be any less lucky? They were to marry rich men in Ame
rica and bring the rest of the family over.
They’d been in America for almost twenty years, their parents had died, and neither my mother nor my aunt had married, not even by the time I was born to my mother and her lover in 1940. She’d been with him for eight years. He’d told her from the beginning that he wasn’t the marrying kind, but she loved him, so she couldn’t help herself.
Then, not long after my mother lost the paternity suit against my father, Hitler invaded Latvia. When the silence from Prael continued, month after month and year after year, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, my mother blamed My Rae for all of it.
“You! It’s all because of you. I could have brought them, but you said no. ‘First we get married,’ you said with your big mouth. Lousy bitch, I’ll tear you to pieces like a herring. A fig on you,” and she thrust her thumb between her index and middle fingers, waving it in front of My Rae’s nose in a shtetl version of giving someone the finger. I sat on the bare floor and bawled. “And Moishe would have married me, but you had to butt your lousy two cents in.”
“The cholera should take me. I should die in their place.” My aunt wept for her multiple sins.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was getting dribbles of information during the war about the fate of those overseas. My aunt went to them and kept going back. Nothing. Then at the end, in 1945, came the tardy news that in the summer of 1941 the Jews of Prael had been made to dig their own graves and were murdered on the spot. No one survived.
My mother shrieked, tore her hair, fell to her knees. I fell on top of her, shook her to remind her, “You have me, Mommy. Mommy, don’t cry.” I didn’t know to weep for the relatives I’d never seen, but something terrible was happening to her. I wailed. Now we shrieked together, high keening sounds, and my scalding tears were fluid fire down my cheeks.
My aunt, wailing herself, still remembered me. She lifted me up and held me to her heaving breast.
My mother sat upright on the floor and stared. “Everything you took from me. Now you want to take my baby,” she screamed. “A mameh ohn a boich vaytik, a mother without a bellyache you want to be. You lousy bitch, you can’t!” She threw a shoe at my aunt’s head.
Maybe my aunt reasoned that since so many in the family had been killed, she had a moral responsibility to remain alive. She left us still keening and came back to the apartment a couple of hours later with a train ticket to California in her hand.
“I can’t no more. I’ll die,” she yelled at her sister as she threw things into a cardboard valise. She wet my face with kisses and more tears and left me alone with my mother. I was five.
I cried even louder and harder than my mother for a long time. And then My Rae’s image faded from my mind. As hard as I tried, I could only remember her foghorn voice and her long blue eyes.
My mother cursed the walls, naming both her sister and her lover, my faithless father, whom she hadn’t stopped loving. Then, despite the paternity suit, she and my father began again. Maybe they’d never stopped and I didn’t know about it because my aunt had kept me distracted with lullabies and tzimmes. Now we moved into a furnished room on Fox Street, “by a Missus,” my mother called it, who would take care of me while my mother worked and on Saturday nights and all day Sunday, when she was with her lover. Mrs. Kalt, the woman’s name was. She talked to me in Yinglish and patted my back with gruff, absent-minded strokes when I cried because my mother was gone, and sometimes she gave me three pennies so I could run to the dark, sweet-smelling candy store on the corner and buy myself a charlotte russe with a little mound of whipped cream that I could wrap my tongue around.
My mother and I slept in the same bed, and some nights I was startled awake by soft whimpers, like a forlorn child’s, but they were my mother’s. Was she crying for Moishe? For the lost relatives? I didn’t know, but I cried too, the same wretched little sobs. We held on to each other and whimpered together.
But we weren’t always miserable. Some Saturday mornings, to my ecstasy, she took me to Crotona Park. I struggled to reach her arm as we walked along the paths. “Mother and daughter,” she said. Our skirts blew in the gentle breeze, and I held on to her tightly.
Sometimes we’d stop to rest on a bench and she’d sing—her voice sliding up and down—songs from “Your Hit Parade” that she must have heard from the other women in the shop. It had to be you, wonderful you. It had to be you, wonderful you, she knew the lyrics imperfectly. “On this bench me and Moishe sat the first time I went out with him,” she confessed to me or the wind one morning.
Of course our moviegoing resumed: All This and Heaven Too, Together Again, Back Street—that was her favorite; I saw it at least four times. “What’s a backstreet, Mommy?” I asked. If she knew, she never told me.
Though I didn’t understand most of what I saw, I learned to speak English without a Yiddish accent through the movies. And it was there that I came to understand female gorgeousness: women with glossy waved coifs, spider-leg eyelashes, and bold lipstick, elaborate drapes and flounces over statuesque, well-corseted figures, shapely legs (but never as shapely as my mother’s) in seamed nylons and high heels; women who were sophisticated, glamorous. My mother tried to copy them on the Saturday nights she went out with my father.
I watch as she looks at her face in the speckled mirror. She burns a wooden match and the cooled tip becomes a brush that she draws across her lids once, twice, a third time. I hold my breath just as she does in her concentration. The smudges are uneven, and she rubs her fingers over them, smoothing them out. Now her eyelids look heavy over her eyes, which are luminous and large.
Next she takes her tube of lipstick and pokes her pinkie finger over the top of the worn-down stick, then dabs the color on each cheek. She rubs, rubs, rubs, rubs with her finger, and her cheeks become rosy. I know those cheeks well because I have kissed them with loud, smacking kisses and with soft, butterfly kisses. I don’t know if I like the new color, but I know from movie posters that glamorous women must have rosy cheeks.
Her lips are next. She applies the blood red stick directly. I see she has not followed their lovely outline. The blood red laps over and makes her lips larger, like Joan Crawford’s. For a moment I want their delicate pink back, the graceful shape I sometimes studied while she slept. But now they look like a movie star’s lips, and she nods at them with satisfaction.
“Hubba, hubba,” I say in my best Bud Abbott voice. She smiles, but I’m not sure whether she is smiling at me or something she sees in the mirror.
Next she combs her dark curls, then puts Pond’s cold cream on her already creamy shoulders and neck.
My eyes do not leave her for a second; but after she kisses my cheek and slips out, they well up with tears.
Him I never see.
I watched her so many times as she made up her face to look right with her makeshift cosmetics. Did she see in the old mirror the beautiful face that I saw? Did he tell her how beautiful she was?
Her lovely figure should have clothes like the movie stars’, I thought. But I knew, because she told me, that we were too poor for her to buy herself nice clothes. “Someday, I’ll wear the beautiful dresses,” I promised myself, trying to picture my grownup self in them and not remember the sound of the door closing behind her.
It was through the movies that I learned to think big: I would become a movie actress, since my mother admired them so much. Though she hardly read or wrote English, and she never lost her Yiddish accent, she knew the names and lives of all the actresses as though they were her sisters: Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Greer Garson, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck—those were her favorites. She remained in love with Charles Boyer. “He looks like Moishe,” her lover she meant, my father. I hated Boyer and his big lips.
Her eyes and mouth almost always looked sad when she didn’t make them up, but on Saturdays during the day and in the evenings during the week I had her to myself, and I was happy just being close to her. What else could I need? We had “kitchen privileges” w
ith our furnished room, but she didn’t like to cook, and we both loved to dine out, as she called it. Sometimes we went to the Automat, where you could put nickels in a slot and, like magic, the little window popped open so you could take out the wonderful goyishe dishes on display. Lemon meringue pie. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on squishy white bread. Mashed potatoes and gravy with ham steak—forbidden and for that reason delicious.
Or we went to a little restaurant on Southern Boulevard, with a menu in Yiddish and white tablecloths. Calves liver and fried onions. Gedempfte flaysh with apricots. Stuffed cabbage in a sweet and sour sauce. “What will madam have?” the waiter, who wore a little black bow tie, asked my mother, and me also. He wrote our order on a pad with the stub of a yellow pencil he pulled from behind his ear.
Or we took the subway all the way across the city, with me clinging to her skirt so I wouldn’t lose her, and we went to the Katz Deli on Delancey Street, with sawdust on the floor and great bowls of sour pickles on the table. Huge corned beef sandwiches, so big that she and I could split one. Lox and cream cheese on Russian rye bread. Scrumptiously greasy potato latkes.
I was almost always the only child in those restaurants, and I forgot I was a child. I took my ordering very seriously. I saw how the men at the other tables did it for themselves and their wives, and I did the same: “I believe I will have…” I said, in a voice I tried to deepen so I would not be mistaken for a child.
How many dresses she must have had to drape for such outings. I think whatever money she had after paying for the furnished room and the sitting services of the Missus she spent on our entertainment. Though we could afford nothing better than a furnished room, we lived lavishly on movies and dining out.
“Mother and daughter,” I said as we walked back home through the Bronx streets in 1946. Now I was six years old, and it wasn’t so hard to reach her arm.
I don’t know why we moved to an even smaller furnished room on Longwood Avenue, but it was then that my mother enrolled me in P.S. 62. I went to school until three o’clock and then to a day care center a block away—a nursery school, it was called—until my mother came to collect me after five.
Naked in the Promised Land Page 1