The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  There were altogether eleven consecutive generations of chief rabbis in my family, more than any other rabbinical Halabi dynasty. One was even crowned king of Aleppo. They continued to lead the community. They resumed waiting for the Messiah.

  More than three hundred years later, I was still waiting. I was in my own way as intent and anxious for his arrival in Brooklyn in the winter of 1967 as Rev Shlomo Laniado had been in Aleppo back in 1665.

  My rabbis at Hebrew school had me all fired up with their stories about the Messiah. I was constantly learning about Moshiach and given ever-more wondrous accounts of all he would accomplish when he finally came. He would heal the sick among us. He would reunite lost family members. He would end war, hunger, and poverty. He would abolish all sad holidays and fast days, starting with the Fast of Lamentations. He would lead us all back to Jerusalem—the living as well as the dead.

  I viewed the Messiah’s coming in intensely personal terms. What mattered the most to me wasn’t the prospect of peace on earth but the possibility of seeing Alexandra, my maternal grandmother who had known me only briefly as an infant when she left Egypt and moved to Israel. She had died a few years later, lost and alone in a Promised Land devoid of any promise, without seeing any of us again. I wanted to be reunited with Baby Alexandra, my sister who had lived only eight days before succumbing to typhoid fever. I expected to be rid once and for all of cat scratch fever, whose return I always dreaded. And because the Great Temple in Jerusalem was to be rebuilt immediately, Mom would never again have to mourn its destruction by fasting. I believed all this and more would come to pass once the Messiah came.

  I didn’t think of myself as a gullible child. On the contrary, I’d question my rabbis closely, methodically, almost obsessively. How was the Messiah going to lead us to Jerusalem, I wanted to know—through what means of transportation? Boats? Planes? Would it happen overnight, or in the course of several days? How would Baby Alexandra return—as an eight-day-old infant, or as a child a couple of years older than me, the age she would have been had she lived, or as a grown woman?

  At least one scenario they offered—underground tunnels that would whisk us all, the living and the dead, to one spot in the Holy Land—was thrilling to me but also unsettling. My first Hebrew school teacher in America, Rabbi Baruch Ben Haim, a kindly, avuncular man I adored, had encouraged me to ask questions in class, and he always offered such vivid descriptions of the Messianic Era that I’d find myself thinking about the Messiah’s arrival instead of concentrating on my homework or studying for a math test.

  But since the start of the year, I was no longer with Rabbi Baruch. I had progressed to a more advanced class with older children and a brand-new teacher, Rabbi Saul Kassin—a disciplinarian who scared me half to death.

  Rabbi Kassin belonged to a hallowed rabbinical dynasty of his own. Indeed, back in Aleppo our two families had clashed over the centuries, each challenging the other’s supremacy on points of custom and Jewish law, and so perhaps it was natural that I would chafe at his air of absolute authority.

  Of course, the difference was that the Kassins still wielded enormous power here in America. Rabbi Kassin’s father was chief rabbi of the Syrian-Jewish community in Brooklyn, a position of honor and responsibility. The Kassin dynasty had endured while the Laniados’ rabbinical lineage was alive only in people’s memories, evidenced by the fact that eyes still widened at the mention of our name. I had found it useful, even in our vastly reduced circumstances, to say it loudly using the Arabic pronunciation—Leh-nee-ad-do—when I was introduced to any of the Syrian-Jewish grandees who lived in Bensonhurst or around Ocean Parkway. Though some had been in America more than half a century, they felt a deep connection to Old Aleppo and were duly impressed. We may have lost our fortune, but to this community of mine where name and family honor mattered above all, we were still the aristocrats.

  I veered between my dad’s Halabi arrogance and my mom’s crushing humility.

  Rabbi Kassin seemed oblivious to me and my pedigree, and in his classroom there would be none of the bantering, the exchange of pleasantries and rabbinical arguments that had made Hebrew school with Rabbi Baruch so thrilling and such fun.

  To begin with, boys occupied all the prime seats at the front of the classroom while girls were relegated to one row in the back. The boys were under pressure to prepare for their bar mitzvahs in a couple of years, whereas Hebrew studies for the girls were treated as an afterthought, a luxury.

  My heart sank as I took my place night after night at my little desk against the wall, squeezed in next to Lillian Mosseri, a sweet, even-tempered Egyptian girl who seemed not to care much about Hebrew school or Rabbi Kassin or even the Messiah. It was hard for me to contain my dismay at how much had changed.

  Rabbi Baruch had run a meritocracy where girls were the rising stars. In the course of a couple of months, the boys, so cocky and sure of themselves, seemed to fade in importance as my girlfriends and I dominated the class. We were leading a quiet revolution—our own miniature women’s movement on Sixty-Seventh Street—showing girls to be equal to boys in a realm always denied to us—the realm of religion, of God.

  I’d linger after class most nights, hoping to continue my exchanges with Rabbi Baruch. He loved to tell stories about the coming of the Messiah, elaborating on all the miraculous changes that would come about. I was so mesmerized I became persuaded that all of my family’s recent woes—our forced departure from Egypt, the rocky transition from Cairo to Paris to New York, my parents’ uncertain means—would all be behind us in a matter of weeks or months, once the Messiah came.

  A drama was unfolding at home that made it imperative for the Messiah to arrive.

  My brother Isaac had decided to follow Suzette’s example and leave home. He was in high school, and catalogs were arriving in the mail from faraway schools, colleges thousands of miles removed from Sixty-Sixth Street, including the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

  My parents were distraught. They had lost Suzette; they were about to lose Isaac.

  The family was breaking up piece by piece, member by member, and what could either of them do to stop it? That was America for you—a land where children went away and parents were left behind and family was no longer sacrosanct.

  I, too, felt anxious about Isaac leaving.

  “What if the Messiah comes while you are gone?” I asked him one day.

  He burst out laughing. “That is the best argument I’ve heard for me to stay,” he said.

  But he didn’t sound convinced.

  My brother wasn’t the only one plotting his escape. My sister, who had continued her wanderings from one Queens high-rise to another, now spoke of moving even farther away from us, to Miami. In 1967, the women’s movement was starting to kick into gear with an almost messianic fervor. Its leaders offered an idealized vision of a world where women would be freed from their lowly roles and inferior status. Instead of being prisoners of their homes, they’d go off each morning to work in shiny offices where they’d at last be on equal terms with men.

  Salvation would come through a woman’s work life, not her home life.

  Suzette had embraced the movement while it was still inchoate and took it several degrees beyond its most fervid leaders. Her views weren’t simply extreme—she tolerated no dissent. She was utterly contemptuous of marriage and family, and she repeatedly suggested I could do without both. I devoured her every word, the most rapt audience she would ever have.

  But I was also torn. The messages about women both resonated and conflicted—perhaps fundamentally—with what Mom had taught me about rebuilding the hearth. Edith spoke of home and family as sacred and was profoundly sad because it was clear that ours was unraveling.

  “Loulou, il faut reconstruire le foyer,” she would remind me again and again. You must rebuild the hearth. It was as if she believed I really could put back the broken pieces of our family in a way that she and Dad couldn’t. It was the recurrent nightmare of Americ
a, as my parents were experiencing it—a place where children left, and home, instead of being central, became meaningless.

  This was more true than ever with the women’s movement—it seemed to be mostly about abandoning home and hearth. No need for husbands or families; only realizing the self through work mattered.

  I applied the radicalizing ideas of “women’s lib” to the only universe I knew, to the twin worlds of my synagogue and my Hebrew school, to the divider I hadn’t been able to breach and to the classroom where the status of girls struck me as shockingly, woefully unequal.

  One evening after Hebrew school, I headed for Bay Parkway, whose lights and wide vistas and lively streetscapes I found bracing and hopeful. It was very different from cozy Eighteenth Avenue where little stores were packed together one next to the other. Bay Parkway was more stately, its storefronts larger and more imposing, and there were none of the cheap bargain stores that characterized La Eighteen as Mom called it.

  On the second floor of a storefront, a new school had opened, offering judo and karate lessons for adults as well as children. Spectators Welcome, the sign on the door said. I made my way inside. A class was starting, so I took a seat by the wall, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. A burly man was lecturing to a group of children on the principles of karate. I saw boys my age in splendid white uniforms with white belts. The instructor taught them to bow to each other, and then showed them how to properly tie their belts. The instructor wore a black belt and when he and a colleague did a demonstration for the children, the two men leaped high in the air and lunged at each other and fought ferociously. Up close, karate seemed more brutal than I’d imagined it watching Emma Peel. In her black leather catsuit, she managed to be tough but supremely graceful, delivering elegant blows that made short shrift of her enemies.

  Still, it was all thrilling to me. I noticed that when the two men were through, they bowed to each other and maintained a courtly demeanor.

  I was suddenly sure that was what Mrs. Peel would counsel—karate lessons, not Hebrew lessons. That is what I needed.

  I had tried to learn it on my own, marching off to the library for “how-to” manuals in martial arts. I took home a book with diagrams and step-by-step directions on how I could strengthen my hand, along with mesmerizing accounts of men who could smash a brick or thick pile of wood with a single chop of the hand. But when I attempted the karate exercises, none were as simple as they appeared—it hurt even to smash a thin piece of wood.

  The school on Bay Parkway was a much more promising venue. I stood there watching as the instructors demonstrated more martial arts moves.

  But I was afraid even to ask how much they charged for a lesson.

  One Sunday, I announced to my family I was quitting Hebrew school. I’d had enough.

  When Mom balked, I reminded her that I was going to be a secret agent when I grew up. I had no need for Hebrew classes or Bible instruction. Better she should send me to study judo and karate. My mother seemed taken aback by my vehemence. She didn’t have strong feelings about Hebrew school—she was much more intent on my mastering French grammar and culture to prepare for the lycée. Even so, she didn’t like my idea of quitting—it went against her core belief that the more I studied, the better. My father sat there impassive and removed, unable to grasp my anguish. He would happily have taught me more Hebrew, given me special lessons to make me a star again, as I had been in Rabbi Baruch’s class. But that wouldn’t have helped: In Rabbi Kassin’s classroom, it didn’t matter how much a girl knew or didn’t know.

  I had resolved to skip my Sunday morning class altogether and was refusing to leave the house.

  César was dispatched to talk some sense into me. Whenever there was a hopeless dispute, my oldest brother would mediate. It was a role he’d had since he was a little boy. Mom revered his judgment and she loved to say, “Il faut parler a César”; we should turn to César for counsel.

  I tried to make my case. I planned to become a world-class spy, I explained, and Hebrew school was a waste when I wasn’t even learning much anymore. What I needed was to acquire the skills that would help me as a secret agent—judo, karate, even target practice.

  My brother listened and nodded intently. He agreed that I was making a fine career choice and Emma Peel was an outstanding role model. But wouldn’t Hebrew help me as I roamed the world on my espionage missions? he argued. Wouldn’t I have an edge if I absorbed whatever Rabbi Kassin and the Shield of Young David Hebrew school still had to teach me, and then went to work as a secret agent?

  As for Mrs. Peel who was so intellectual and worldly, she would certainly appreciate my learning another language, César calmly pointed out.

  By the end of our chat, I had not only shelved my plan to drop out of Hebrew school but was vowing to work even harder there for the sake of my future as an international woman of intrigue.

  I put my coat on, raced over to Sixty-Seventh Street, took my seat, and tried to focus on what Rabbi Kassin was saying. In the days that followed, I told myself I had made my peace with staying put—at least for now—though I wasn’t entirely at ease.

  A question was gnawing at me. When we’d learn about the Messiah, it was always about what “he” was going to do once “he” arrived, how “he” was going to bring about global peace, how “he” would revive the dead and rebuild Jerusalem. But it was no longer clear to me that the Messiah had to be a man. All around me were tough, formidable women, capable of great feats—women like Mrs. Peel. Was there in fact a rabbinical prohibition against one of them becoming the Messiah?

  One evening as my Hebrew school class got under way, I raised my hand and waited for Rabbi Kassin to call on me. I was anxious: I knew what I was about to ask was seditious, and I had a feeling Rabbi Kassin wouldn’t like it one bit. But I was determined. He walked toward the back of the classroom and nodded in my direction.

  “Rabbi, why can’t the Messiah be a woman?” I asked.

  He looked at me ever so briefly before turning away. “Because he can’t,” he snapped, and that was that.

  It all happened so fast I don’t think my classmates noticed how crushed I was by the exchange.

  When I arrived home, I climbed into bed and pulled the covers over me. I felt as crumpled and deflated as on that Saturday I had tried to breach the divider and the boys had shooed me back into the women’s section. I couldn’t get Rabbi Kassin’s terse reply out of my mind—or the fact that he didn’t even think I was entitled to a thoughtful answer.

  I kept my promise to my brother and continued to attend Hebrew school. But it was as if I were on automatic pilot. I had no enthusiasm for it anymore, and I paid little attention in class. I didn’t raise my hand or participate in discussions. Mostly, I whispered and giggled with Lillian and the other girls in the back row. Girls were never expected to be serious students.

  I didn’t think much about the Messiah anymore. I no longer expected to meet up with Alexandra again. My faith was still there, of course, deep and abiding, but it wasn’t absolute anymore, it wasn’t all-consuming the way it had been.

  It was as if the rabbi’s shattering, dismissive answer to my question was propelling me in a very different direction than the rebuke had intended, making me a riper target for assimilation. I was now even more open to all those dubious modern values that Rabbi Saul Kassin and others in that compound on Sixty-Seventh Street—downstairs at the Hebrew school, upstairs in the women’s section—were trying so hard to vanquish.

  · 12 ·

  The Tragedy of the Navy Blue Blazer

  My mother’s quixotic campaign to get me into the Lycée Français de New York seemed to be finally paying off when we received word in the spring that I would be permitted to take the school’s entrance exam.

  Edith was overjoyed though she warned: “Il faudra beaucoup étudier”—I’d have to hit the books and study hard—really hard.

  At least I was being given a shot.

  That was all she wanted, and it
was all she received—no guarantee of a place for me in the fall; no invitation to come to East Seventy-Second for a grand tour of the magnificent mansion the lycée occupied or a meeting with Monsieur Galy, the school’s distinguished president; no hint of a scholarship.

  Yet my mother’s natural optimism and ebullience took over. The future suddenly seemed dazzling with promise—Loulou off to the lycée. Loulou attending a private school. It was as if by that alone the family’s lost honor would be restored and the hearth rebuilt. The Lycée Français de New York was almost as prestigious in her mind as our beloved Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk, with its vast campus and stylish pale gray uniform and Parisian teachers. Mom had conveniently blotted out what happened at the end, how Nasser had booted all these exquisite French institutrices out of the country and we were left with a mediocre Egyptian faculty whose command of even basic subjects was questionable.

  My mother was especially excited about the New York lycée’s uniform—the dress code mandated a navy blue blazer with gold buttons, which was to her mind the epitome of style. Edith had always been in love with navy blue. It wasn’t merely a color to her but an identity, an emblem of the lifestyle she so wanted me to have—elegant, refined, aristocratic, European rather than American, at least the America we knew. The lycée even had its own gold buttons with a big capital “L” in an elegant serif font that mothers were supposed to affix to the blazers, along with a crest. It was all such a dreamy prospect for Edith—the notion of sending me off to school in Manhattan every morning in a gray pleated skirt and white blouse with une jaquette bleu marine aux boutons dorés.

  I was by no means as excited by what lay ahead. The lycée had given us a syllabus outlining what children my age were supposed to master in various subjects. There were also detailed reading lists with books in English and French. And for good measure, an administrator sent over a couple of ancient secondhand grammar books to help me prepare.