“Albert always denied it but Solal was his double,” Louise began. “He’s in four of his novels, and my clever son even found a way to kill him off in Solal and then to bring him back in Belle du Seigneur! Their lives were so much alike: Solal struggled to integrate Geneva high society and to become a senior official at the League of Nations. You can see, by the way, how important it was for him to be on top,” she giggled.
After a moment, she began again:
“Solal is magnificent. He steals everything from his boss, Adrien Deume: His job and his wife. He’s torn between the West and the East; one is unfamiliar to him but he is the ‘Seigneur’ in that world; the other he loves, but mostly from afar. He is ambitious and confident, and at the same time full of self-loathing. He complains he ‘is what he isn’t and isn’t what he is.’ He adopts a false identity to find love and turns his back on society as soon as he has risen to its heights. He forces the beautiful Ariane to make anti-Semitic statements to resent her.”
“A true case of conflicted identity,” Jeanne Proust concluded.
“Just like Gilberte Swann, who becomes Gilberte S. de Forcheville! Swann is effaced by a simple initial, as if she wanted to hide her father’s Jewish heritage,” Rebecca said.
“Back then, a Jew either was proud of his identity and saw all doors close to him, or he denied it and he rose in society, like the Narrator’s spiritual father, Charles Swann, refined, elegant, worldly and loved by all the Guermantes,” Jeanne reminded her.
“But Swann changes. Why does the green-eyed, red-headed dandy come back to his Jewishness at the end of his life? Is it his terminal illness, the Dreyfus Affair or anti-Semitic propaganda?” Rebecca wondered.
Jeanne began walking up and down the aisles and answered in a sententious voice that suited their surroundings. In the house of worship in which they had gathered, it almost seemed as if she was preaching.
“Marcel makes Bloch the primary object of his anti-Semitic attack. He’s a mannerless second-rate writer who makes a mess of everything. In The Guermantes Way, he places his top hat on the floor next to him in Madame de Villeparisis’ drawing room and then warns everyone who enters to be careful not to tread on it. A few moments later, he manages to smash a vase of flowers, spilling water all over the rug. He quickly reassures his hostess: ‘It’s not of the slightest importance; I’m not wet.’ He is the stereotypical Eastern European Jew, gauche and eccentric, who speaks Yiddish but, far worse, never assimilates into proper French society. He’s ashamed of who he is.”
Minnie yawned and admitted that she never could read Proust.
“It’s not that I didn’t try,” she explained in her defense. “But nothing ever happens! Sorry, Jeanne.”
Jeanne didn’t trouble herself to answer but turned instead to Rebecca.
“Do you remember the scene on the beach at Balbec? The Narrator overhears a ‘torrent of imprecation against the swarm of Israelites’ who have overrun the seaside resort. ‘You can’t go a yard without meeting them . . . You hear nothing but, “I thay, Apraham, I’ve chust theen Chacop.” You would think you were in the Rue d’Aboukir.’ Turning around, the Narrator is astonished to discover none other than his old friend Albert Bloch, repeating the same injurious curses that others had used to slander him. He concludes that Bloch is an ‘ill-bred, neurotic snob.’ Since he belonged to a family that was held in scorn, he had to find the fastest way possible to rise in society. ‘To carve himself through to the open air by raising himself from Jewish family to Jewish family would have taken Bloch many thousands of years. It was better worth his while to seek an outlet in another direction.’ He found it with the Guermantes, precisely, where he manages at last to be admitted, under the name of Jacques du Rozier, the name of a perfect English gentleman. Swann’s route takes the opposite track entirely.
“No one ever called Proust an anti-Semite,” Rebecca observed.
“Oh yes, they did,” Jeanne corrected her, her cheeks flaming from the memory of the abominable, unjustified attacks on her son.
Louise Cohen, sitting down heavily at the back of the synagogue, launched into her own story about the unfair attacks on her son Albert.
“When his play Ezechiel was published, he was criticized for his depiction of two characters. There is Jérémie, a pathetic little schemer who, desperate for money, agrees to go to Ezechiel to inform him of his son’s death, although he doesn’t know how to go about it. There’s also Ezechiel, a rich banker from Cephalonia, the archetypal greedy Jewish moneylender. Albert first describes him deep in some complicated calculations about how to save on candles and he concludes that the seven-branched menorah is the ruin of the chosen people; a three-branched one would have done just as well. Well, you can’t imagine what people said! When the play was produced for the first time at the Comédie Française in 1933, it incurred universal wrath: not only the anti-Semitic organizations who saw this as thinly-veiled praise for Jewish values but many in the Jewish community were up in arms, too, because they thought the play was deriding those same Jewish values.”
“And when there was a new production of Ezechiel in the 1980s it was the object of more of the same outrage, directed again at its depiction of Jewishness,” Rebecca added. “It’s hard to say though what exactly everyone found so offensive; it seems to me that Cohen was more generally interested in the vulnerability of his ‘human brothers.’”
Lost in a Proustian flood of memories, Jeanne merrily continued her own stream of thought, explaining that Bloch’s uncle, Nissim Bernard, was comfortable in French society but not what you would call assimilated since he never stopped referring to himself as a Jew.
“Your Nissim Bernard is a perfect example of what was happening in America at the time,” Minnie interrupted her. “Christians and Jews hung out together but never married, yet they all considered themselves American. When I lived in New York, every community had its neighborhood: Little Italy, Chinatown, Yorkville.
“You’re becoming nostalgic,” Rebecca couldn’t resist noting.
“I can still remember an old man who only spoke Yiddish. He was moving, and I asked him how it was going, thinking he had just arrived. I couldn’t believe it when he told me he had already been in New York for ten years. ‘Why don’t you speak English?’ I asked him. You know what he answered?: ‘What for?’” And she laughed and laughed . . .
“Wasn’t every author who wrote about Jews accused of being anti-Semitic?” Jeanne asked.
Rebecca remembered how Isaac Bashevis Singer was criticized for caricaturing his own people as “Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes.” His reply was: “Shall I write about Spanish thieves and Spanish prostitutes? I write about the thieves and prostitutes that I know.” If the thief was Jewish, why should the reader infer that all Jews were thieves? It is absurd.
Minnie Marx got up suddenly, stamped loudly and shouted for silence.
“I’ve had enough of your books and all your complicated characters. Your sons might have written pages and pages about how Jewish they were but I’ll tell you one thing: It’s the food that makes a Jew, first and foremost.”
9
I Know What’s Best for You
Self-control, sobriety, sanctions – this is the key to a human life, saith all those endless dietary laws.
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Heaven’s kitchen looked so old fashioned that it was hard to imagine anyone could cook in it. A closer examination revealed, however, that even a professional chef would find it more than serviceable. In fact, it had everything! There were two huge stoves, several work counters, and copper pots of every size hanging on the wall from smallest to largest, as well as a full complement of every kind of cookware and utensil imaginable: frying pans, baking tins, peelers, slicers, graters, mincers . . . Minnie, Louise, Mina, Amalia and Jeanne had taken it over. And as usual when no one dared interrupt her, Minnie had monopolized the conversation.
“My mother was obsessed with what we ate,” she recalled. �
��It was only later that I understood why: She watched us to make sure we wouldn’t swallow anything that was forbidden to Jews. However, it was also a way of treating us like children. She decided when and what we ate and if we didn’t finish everything on our plates, we were punished. She made us feel so guilty! She would say that we didn’t love her enough if we didn’t eat up. Every meal was a scene because my brother, Al, refused to bend to her tyranny. He would spit into his napkin the bits that he couldn’t force down. Sometimes, my mother would grab his napkin before he’d had a chance to flush the evidence of his crime down the toilet. Then she would fly into a rage and make him sit at the table with all the lights out. Sometimes he would be served the same plate for breakfast. Me, I just shoveled it all down.”
“Was she the one who played the harp?” Rebecca asked.
“Oh yes, and she took it very seriously, I can assure you, just like food. It’s her fault I never learned how to cook: She wanted to control everything.”
The food neuroses Minnie had to face in her mother’s house put Louise in mind of a Philip Roth book she loved (she had become a big fan of his). In the beginning of Goodbye Columbus, Aunt Gladys tortures her nephew at dinner: Why doesn’t he want any bread? She brought it to the table just for him! He stuffs himself with bread to make her happy but she keeps at him. Isn’t the meat any good? He assures her it is. Then why does he only eat bread and potatoes? Is he trying to hurt her feelings? What a waste if she has to have to throw out all that good meat! Every uneaten carrot and pea is proof of his ill will. Neil Klugman has no choice but to clean his plate; she could have kept him there for hours.
Minnie didn’t know the book; in fact, she hardly ever read. She neither had the leisure nor the inclination. She was just too busy to live vicariously through other people. No sooner did she open a newspaper than she fell asleep; it didn’t matter where she was, at home or on a train. After missing her stop on more than one occasion, she vowed to never again bother: watching the scenery go by was much more edifying than some journalist’s opinion about things that didn’t matter. The only books of any use were cook books, which she collected for her husband.
Louise Cohen opened the cupboards one by one, hoping to find inspiration. What could she make? She no longer knew what she liked to eat; she had always cooked for Albert alone, treating him to the richest, most intricate dishes she could dream of. Since he was borderline anorexic, getting him to eat was a full-time job.
Rebecca observed that meals figured prominently in Cohen’s novels.
“There’s his famously bulimic character, Nailcruncher; his name alone says everything about the ogre he is: he refused to get out of his mother's womb. ‘I’m not one to leave a dining room by choice, you know. They had to pull me out of there with pliers,’” Louise quoted from memory. “That’s a good one, isn’t it?”
“Well, you can laugh all you want about your plate-pushing mothers,” Mina interrupted, exacerbated by the stereotype. “It’s easy when you’re not starving. Romain was touched by the sacrifices I made for him. He understood that every steak I served him was a victory over adversity. My day was never wasted if Romain ate his fill. Once, he walked in on me in the kitchen, licking the sauce right out of the pan where I’d sautéed his meat. I’d always pretended to be a vegetarian. He realized I’d been depriving myself for him. He ran out, ashamed, and he put the story in Promise at Dawn.”
Louise was lovingly preparing a batch of meatballs while Mina tackled a recipe of that most mythical of Jewish dishes: Gefilte fish. They were putting heart and soul into the job, obviously relieved by having something practical to do. They were the only ones who could find their way around a kitchen, although Jeanne Proust wanted them to know she was highly skilled at drawing up balanced menus. Rebecca, for her part, had always been afraid of food, which was synonymous in her mind with calories—and extra pounds.
“I was convinced I was fat,” Rebecca admitted.
“You?”
The other women burst out laughing; by the standards of their day, Rebecca was scrawny.
“Albert was forever telling me how fat I was,” Louise remarked, her hands deep in a bowl. “But knowing that I loved to eat, he encouraged me anyway; my unfulfilled desires would make me gain weight, too, he said. That was kind of cruel, don’t you think?”
“The subject never came up in our house,” Jeanne countered. “Hygiene alone mattered; it was a new concept, and Adrien’s speciality, after all. We had to wash our hands before and after every meal. If Robert put up a fight, he’d get a spanking.”
“My mother was convinced that what we ate had a direct influence on our health,” Amalia Freud told them. “We were a big family, and my brothers devoured everything they could get their hands on. That we had enough to eat was important to my mother but not the main thing: we had to eat healthy.”
“Kosher food is very good for you,” Louise reminded them.
Rebecca didn’t dare join in the conversation. She was fascinated by what they had to say about the rituals around food, which sounded much more complicated than putting ingredients together.
Mina suddenly let out a cry of indignation:
“Sugar! You can’t put sugar in that!”
She repeated her exclamation, wide-eyed, to the entire group:
“She can’t put sugar in the meatballs!”
Mina hadn’t let on but she had been carefully watching Louise at work: ground beef, chopped onions, raw eggs, salt and . . . sugar. She stopped her with a hand on her arm.
“Russians put pepper in, but never sugar! It’s heresy!”
“According to you! Everyone knows that Russian and Lithuanian Jews are uncivilized!” Louise retorted.
“You can keep your Sephardic meatballs to yourself!”
Jeanne jumped into the fray to stave off a fight:
“Some cooks even add powdered almonds. Why don’t you each make your own version and we’ll decide which is better?
“You’re a competitor, Jeanne, and you’re always looking for a match off,” Minnie answered her. “You know just as well as I do that taste is hardly objective. Everyone will vote for what they know because we prefer the familiar: We’re always looking for our childhood in what we eat. Do you know the joke about the new bride who’s driven nuts because everything she cooks her husband criticizes? She tries everything, looks all over town for the best ingredients, pores over every recipe she can find, but nothing helps. One day when she’s utterly exhausted by her efforts, she leaves the sauerkraut on the stove too long and burns the whole thing. ‘Finally! It’s exactly like my mother used to make!’ her husband exclaims.”
“Isn’t that the idea of Proust’s Madeleine?”
“Marcel was surprised how that little cake could bring back the memory of his Aunt Léonie and, by extension, his childhood at Illiers,” Jeanne agreed.
“Oh! Could you find the passage for me?” Rebecca asked her. “It’s been so long since I’ve read it.”
Jeanne handed Rebecca the precious volume that she always carried with her, and she read out loud: “‘But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still alone, more fragile but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.’”
“Isn’t that magnificently written?” she asked with tears in her eyes.
Everyone agreed, even Minnie, who had to admit that reading Proust out loud made it all. Remembrance of things past an easier pill to swallow.
“Marcel was a finicky eater and ate like a bird,” Rebecca recalled. “Céleste Albaret, his chambermaid, said that he never took more than a coffee and a croissant when he woke in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Oh, how
I tried to get him to eat correctly and have regular mealtimes!” Jeanne protested.
“What’s interesting is that, once you passed away, he sometimes bought a filet of sole or a sorbet to bring back the memory of taste he had loved in his childhood. Was it for his novel or for himself? I always wondered.”
“Both, perhaps.”
Rebecca was lost in thought. People’s relationship to food is never simple; it’s less about what we eat than what food means to us. The foundations are laid in childhood, beginning with our favorite tastes and our revulsions. It’s also a means of transgression or disobedience that can take on tyrannical proportions. Nothing breaks a mother’s heart more than when her child refuses to eat a meal she has lovingly prepared. Nathan was very fussy about never letting food touch on his plate: he found it disgusting. Meat and vegetables had to be kept separate, and he even went so far as to change plates while he was eating.
Louise Cohen was reminded of a scene in Portnoy’s Complaint:
“There’s the time where Alex is ready to break every Jewish law to escape from his controlling family: he devours a lobster while fantasizing about a shikse, a Gentile temptress. Neither one is the least bit kosher!”
When the meatballs were ready, it was time for the mothers to vote on which batch was better, but having devoured them both in two minutes flat, they were no closer to deciding. Minnie finally ventured that, if she absolutely had to choose—and who said she had to, anyway?—she preferred the salty version: in other words, Mina’s recipe.
Horribly offended, Louise Cohen jumped up and, without a word, locked herself in the bathroom.
Jeanne and Mina pounded on the door, begging her to come out. There was no response. Minnie tried clumsily to patch up the situation. Really, Louise’s recipe was every bit as good as Mina’s, and Albert would have been so proud of her.
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