A pensive little girl who wasn’t exactly a daredevil, Marlene found herself joining her friends in a dangerous, potentially lethal game they played several stories above the ground. It was a far cry from her role of dutiful older sister, expected to shepherd her younger siblings to services each week. Now, though only a teenager, Marlene was like our elder statesman. She was among the few to enjoy the friendship of the rabbi’s wife, the trust of Sarah Menachem, and the affection and respect of rank-and-file members such as my mother. Despite her quietness, she was also opinionated, never shy about letting us know her views.
On the eve of the Zero Population Growth movement, when the notion of having small families began acquiring cachet, I promptly told everyone in the women’s section that we should all have at most one or two children. Marlene coldly, immediately disabused me of the idea. Jews had lost so many of their own in the Holocaust, why not “let others” pursue the noble goal of population control?
I couldn’t even think of a comeback.
As our performance drew near, Marlene emerged as a stern, formidable taskmaster, barking orders, requiring us to practice our parts again and again, and then critiquing our individual performance. Had we memorized our lines? Were we going over them at home? Had we organized our costumes?
I felt feverish those last few days. Even in school I found myself repeating my part over and over again, my mind drifting from whatever the teacher was saying: “Who is that dog of a dog WHO DARES NOT BOW DOWN TO ME?” At the Shield of Young David, any stray men who happened to be in the sanctuary praying or studying during our rehearsals knew to get out of our way.
It felt like a historic event—our synagogue putting on a play. Sunday afternoon, women and men filed into the main sanctuary together and took seats side by side. I had never seen that before.
And then we began.
I made my grand entrance, trying hard not to trip on my father’s long brocade robe while I balanced the silk turban on my head. I had been made up to look fierce and angry—one of the women had drawn a mustache in thick black ink and made my eyebrows dark and bushy.
“Who is that dog of a dog who dares not bow down to me?” I roared as I marched onto the stage. The audience burst out laughing and applauded and booed at the same time. “Who is that dog of a dog who dares not bow?” I repeated and pointed to Mordecai, the lone Jew who refused to yield to my command.
We had no curtains, no sets, no furniture onstage, yet our audience seemed enthralled. They all shared the illusion that we were back in biblical times. One by one we walked onto the stage. Gracie, splendid in the velvet outfit her father had stitched painstakingly by hand, looked every inch a king. I cowered when I was denounced as a madman and traitor, and tried in vain to protest when Gracie revoked my decree to execute all the Jews in the kingdom and ordered my hanging instead.
I was led away from the stage, my head bowed in shame.
Once the play was over, I tore off my robe and turban and rushed back to the sanctuary. Everyone seemed ecstatic, congratulating each other, hugging each other, and even Mrs. Menachem was beaming, the edge temporarily gone from her. “Loulou, tu était absolument magnifique,” Mom said—I had been magnificent.
I glimpsed Maurice in a corner and kept trying to catch his eye. I was a star. Surely, this of all days would be the day I would have earned his love, the day when he finally noticed and acknowledged me.
He didn’t, of course. He simply left and went home along with everyone else, and I wandered around the sanctuary searching for the sense of achievement that never really came, no matter how hard I worked for it, no matter how hard I tried to obtain it, the attention that I craved and that continued to elude me again and again.
· 8 ·
The Healing Powers of Iodine
Most everyone at the Shield of Young David vanished the moment school ended and summer began. My friend Diana left for the Jersey Shore with her mother and siblings, including Maurice. Other children fanned out to the Catskills or else to sleepaway camp. The aristocrats in our congregation traveled to Israel.
We were left to vacation in Bensonhurst.
But to do what?
Looking out onto the men’s world beyond the divider Saturday mornings wasn’t nearly as riveting with Maurice gone. At home, my mother seemed daunted by the prospect of keeping an energetic, high-maintenance child busy and entertained over an entire grimy New York summer.
It wasn’t like Cairo where the family packed up each year for Alexandria or what Mom dubbed our “grandes vacances.” There was no family left anymore, not really. My siblings increasingly were going off on their own. Suzette was ensconced in one of her ever-changing Queens high-rises. I’d receive letters from her with return addresses that sounded both distant and exotic: Lefrak City, Rego Park, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens. My brothers were still with us, but they had their friends, their own lives really, and were rarely at home.
This was all terribly painful for my mother, who felt she was watching the family disintegrate yet seemed helpless to stop it. What she did instead was to hold on to me even more tightly, to focus on me more intently.
She was still reeling from a year of tangling with my public school, the fact that teachers and administrators had balked at her demand to have me skip a grade, since she was convinced I was wasting my time at PS 205.
Edith was also upset that there was no prospect of grandes vacances. In the summer of 1966, only she and I and dad were left, and we certainly couldn’t afford to go to Alexandria’s American counterpart.
Not that we thought there was a counterpart, not that we believed Miami Beach or Bradley Beach (where the Syrian Jews were congregating) or any resort in this country could possibly compete with the yellow sand of Agami Beach, so fine it was like talcum powder to the touch, or the water at Mahmoura that was limpid and clear and you could look down and see the pebbles at your feet, or the lively Corniche along Stanley and Sporting beaches with its dozens of charming cafés serving pitchers of beer and mezze, deliciously cold appetizers that you could munch on while facing the sea.
Mom’s strategy was to have us go to the poor man’s Alexandria—Brighton Beach in Brooklyn.
The morning after school was done we boarded the Sea Beach Express, then changed for another train in Coney Island. Once we reached our stop, we clambered down the steps where we found dozens of fruit stands and kosher butchers and small bargain stores crowded together in the dark careworn spaces under the elevated tracks.
As we walked to the beach, we passed a private gated club known as the Brighton Beach Baths. I’d peer through the metal fence and see elegantly dressed men in white shorts playing tennis and women in bathing suits lolling about by large swimming pools or soaking up the sun on comfortable folding chairs. I had eyes only for the miniature golf course on the other side of the fence. It was so alluring, with its little windmills and minicastles—a make-believe kingdom sized for a child.
The prior summer we had stopped at the entrance to inquire about admission. Whether we asked about the summer rate or the monthly rate or the weekly rate or even the price of a one-day pass, the Baths were completely beyond our means and I had to content myself gleaning what I could from the holes in the fence, much as I followed the goings-on in the men’s section at the Shield of Young David through the apertures of the wooden divider.
On the other side of the road leading to the beach, even closer to the ocean, was a summer camp operated by a Y. I glimpsed groups of children my age laughing and frolicking in a large swimming pool. They all wore little yellow plastic caps and I found these caps as well as the notion of camp, of an organized system of games complete with playmates, both foreign and appealing.
My longing to attend the Y day-camp left Edith cold. Summer camp in Brooklyn? The notion of letting children swim in a chlorinated pool when the ocean was steps away struck my mother as absurd, a quintessentially American folly.
Every once in a while, my mom would wistfully describe how
she wished I were really spending my vacation. She’d invoke our Milanese cousin Salomone who sent his children every year to sleepaway camp in the Swiss Alps.
A camp in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Geneva: Now that was a worthwhile destination for pauvre Loulou.
Edith’s options for me were always so fanciful and out of reach. It was a miracle that she managed to scrape together the subway fare to get us both to the beach every day, let alone send me off to a fancy Swiss camp.
Her musings about an Alpine vacation for me reminded me of her equally hopeless quest to have me skip a grade. Her battles with my teacher, my principal and, finally, the bureaucrats at the Board of Education had dominated the better part of the last year. At one point, my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Simon, an attractive blonde with a dry wit, wrote to say that while I was a lively, engaged pupil, I “should not be pushed.” My mother was stung. Instead of graciously accepting the criticism, she fired back with a note of her own. “She is not being pushed. She wants to learn.”
The fact was that, for Edith, the idea of her daughter attending public school was simply anathema. Indeed, from the moment I had entered PS 205, she had made it clear she despised the place—the quality of the education was nothing like what I’d experienced at the Lycée Français in Cairo. My studies weren’t nearly intense enough nor were my teachers rigorous enough to satisfy her boundless ambition on my behalf.
During the year, to supplement what I was learning—or more likely not learning—she would give me private lessons. Every afternoon, we would sit down together and she’d try to teach me French grammar, or give me des dictées. Those were elaborate spelling tests, central to the Parisian educational model Mom revered. She’d read out loud a long and often difficult passage from literature—not simply individual words—and I had to write it down. Afterward, she’d carefully scour my dictee for spelling or grammatical errors.
The star teacher of L’École Cattaui, the disciple of the pasha’s wife, went over key episodes in French history, introduced me to the classics of French theater, and then, appalled at the rudimentary arithmetic I was learning at school, added math to our curriculum as she began teaching me advanced multiplication tables, long division, and percentages.
Then there were the pop quizzes—the questions that she’d ask me at any point in the day, even as we strolled to the beach. What century did Louis XIV reign? What was his nickname? When were the plays of Racine and Corneille performed? What year did Flaubert publish Madame Bovary?
If she was ever dismayed by my performance, she didn’t let on, even as I got answer after answer wrong, mixed up the masters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and couldn’t for the life of me distinguish between the great tragedies, so that I confused Corneille’s Medea with Racine’s Phaedra. I hadn’t the foggiest notion when Flaubert had published Madame Bovary, the book that Edith told me again and again, even when I could barely read, was the greatest work in the history of literature.
Edith was intensely patient with me, but she could never stop raging against PS 205. She was on a warpath—in meetings with the principal, she’d informed him that American schools were decidedly inferior to French lycées; I had to skip a grade, ideally two. I had to be with more advanced pupils.
Her appeals—that I was a child who needed to be stimulated—landed on deaf ears. In the rigid bureaucratic culture of New York City’s public schools, the liberating influence of the 1960s was being felt, though not necessarily for the better. The prevailing liberal ethos was that all children were equal and had to be with their peers. Age, not talent or knowledge or ability, was what mattered most.
I was to be educated with all the other nine-year-olds, we were told repeatedly.
Defeated by the system, humiliated by its army of bureaucrats, Edith was thrashing out a new strategy for my education as the summer of 1966 began: I was going to attend private school exactly as I had in Cairo.
But not simply any private school.
Edith fixed her sights on the Lycée Français de New York. A supremely tony institution on Manhattan’s East Side, it catered to an elite clientele—children with addresses that didn’t stray far beyond the contours of Fifth and Park and Madison. Tuition alone was steep, and it was fairly obvious that connections were needed to get in, not to mention wealth, social class, and a rigorous knowledge of French.
Yet Mom latched on to the dream of seeing me once again as une lycéene. To her mind, her children had always attended the lycée and while our circumstances had changed dramatically, she still felt that I belonged there.
She imagined me going off to school in the magnificent mansion on East Seventy-Second Street off Fifth Avenue, carrying my books in a neat leather satchel—not clasped together with a large rubber band as my uncouth public school classmates did—and wearing a uniform.
Among Mom’s many pet peeves, she loathed the fact that public schools allowed children to wear whatever they wanted to class. It was, of course, another one of those egalitarian American impulses—uniforms like private schools were so elitist, we’d be told again and again. But Edith had her doubts. She wasn’t sure America was that egalitarian. Uniforms were the true equalizer—rich or poor, all children were forced to dress the same. Besides, how else to outfit a child for school, without having to fuss every day or spend a lot of money for a wardrobe? The Lycée Français had a uniform, of course, an exquisite one, a navy blue blazer over a pleated skirt that she considered the ultimate in elegance and style.
Clearly, the only hope for me was to rejoin the company of des jeunes filles de société, the upper-class girls she felt were my peers and not those working-class kids, the children of seamstresses and sanitation workers and cabbies, who were my schoolmates now.
One of the few luxuries Mom allowed herself was a subscription to the France-Amerique, a French weekly newspaper. Only a few pages thick, its readership consisted of an upper-crust base of French expatriates, members of the diplomatic corps, and Francophiles. Any French cultural event in New York, any concert or play with a remotely French theme, any French artist was sure to be featured.
But what Mom treasured most of all were the ads for the lycée and the occasional news items about it. She scoured the paper for insights into the school, noting the powerful people connected with it, and formulated her plan of attack.
She would approach the lycée directly on my behalf, she decided. She would mount a full-fledged campaign by sending its president as well as a raft of other officials her exquisitely crafted letters, imploring them to admit me and to offer me a scholarship.
Her strategizing would start now, on these early July outings to Brighton Beach. She had decided to devote the summer to figuring out how to get a place for me in that most elite, desirable of schools.
But first we had to get our supply of iodine and build up our defenses for the battle ahead. Besides, the ocean beckoned—not like the sea at Sporting, perhaps, our favorite beach in Alexandria, but still so appealing, and as Mom reminded me, chock-full of iodine.
Edith with twelve-year-old Loulou at the beach, summer 1968.
My mother had a mystical belief in the healing elements of the sea, its powers to cure any malady. The operative ingredient was iodine—l’iode—the compound she believed was so potent that it transcended most medicines. Every summer, she’d advise me to immerse myself in the water and remain there as much as possible. Our trips to Brighton Beach weren’t merely supposed to be entertaining but therapeutic, a chance to wash away any incipient bug we could be harboring, alleviate a chronic condition, even treat a serious malignancy.
In despair over her unsightly varicose veins, Edith was convinced that after a good dip in the water, the bulging lines at the top and the back of her legs would magically recede or disappear. A believer in alternative medicine years before it became fashionable, she would inspect herself closely before each of our swimming expeditions. Then, after floating in the ocean for a while, she would turn
to me and ask me anxiously if her legs looked any better.
I would never think of questioning her faith in l’iode, nor did I have the heart to disappoint her. I’d peer closely at the spot where she was pointing and nod that yes, the veins were fading away, no question, and she was overjoyed.
In Egypt, when we had access to the Mediterranean only for a certain number of weeks, she and Leon were both so worried about getting their necessary doses of seawater that they would actually pour some in bottles at the end of August. The bottles would be sealed, packed away in our suitcases, and carted from Alexandria back to Cairo to help them weather the year. When his eyes bothered him, for example, my father would take out one of the bottles, pour some seawater on a cotton pad, and apply the soaked pad to his eyelids. Mom liked to wash her face with the seawater.
In Brooklyn, my parents’ worries about access to iodine abated—the beach was only a subway ride away, after all. And while each of them found this country was missing so much of what they had cherished about their lost life, they agreed that the Atlantic was every bit as rich and wonderful and dependable a source of iodine as their beloved Mediterranean.
When Dad joined us for a day at the beach, he would wear shorts or roll up his trousers to reveal his ulcerated left leg. It had been nearly a decade since he’d suffered that terrible fall that had shattered his leg and hip. The accident had taken place in Cairo shortly after I was born, and he had never quite recovered; on the contrary, he was always in discomfort and no prescription ointment or cream seemed to soothe his injured leg.
But then the iodine came to the rescue. Both were hopeful that the water—far more than the doctors’ salves—would at last heal Dad’s painful leg. Mom would take my little sand pail and go fill it with seawater that she’d pour over his affected leg in a move that struck me as supremely tender.
Because I was prone to so many maladies—the victim of summer colds, mysterious bugs, hacking coughs, fatigue, fevers—my mother would plead with me to scrub my face and my hair in the Atlantic and let the sea wash over my entire body. She usually went in with me, joyous in her old-fashioned one-piece blue stretch bathing suit that she had brought from Egypt and still insisted on wearing. She never spoke about the darker side of iodine or discussed that horrible incident at Villa Lalouche in Alexandria before I was born.
The Arrogant Years Page 12