The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  It all seemed terribly daunting.

  Edith decided that we should pick up the pace of our private lessons. I had a glimpse into the formidable teacher who had been a star at L’École Cattaui and captured the heart of the pasha’s wife. Each day until the entrance exam, I would have to sit with her after school (and after Hebrew studies) and learn to conjugate a verb in several tenses, or be given a dictée straight out of the pages of the lycée’s frayed textbooks. These contained passages from great and obscure works of literature and became the basis of the spelling tests and pop quizzes Mom gave me every night. The book had an inscription from a long-ago teacher to their student. If I didn’t care about you, it said, I wouldn’t even bother, “mais je vous aime et je vous gronde beaucoup”—but I love you and I am constantly scolding and demanding more of you.

  It was the early spring of 1967, and I was now completely at ease with English. I was so pleased with myself and how I’d mastered the language that I lorded it over my siblings and parents. They all had pronounced accents they couldn’t shed.

  One morning, when a repairman came to the house, I airily called out, “I am the only one who speaks English.” I insisted that he deal only with me. My family—César in particular—found my display of arrogance galling and months later, they were still poking fun, mimicking me saying, “I am the only one who speaks English.”

  But even as my command of English grew, I was losing my fluency in French. Mom spotted the danger ahead—all around us were refugee families who’d arrived a year or two earlier than we did from Cairo or Tunisia or Morocco, and the children had become so thoroughly Americanized they didn’t speak a word of French anymore. She was determined this wouldn’t happen to me. French, not English, was my native language, she kept reminding me—French was my culture, my true heritage.

  We spoke only French at home now and instead of the radio, we’d listen to Charles Aznavour and Dalida on the small blue record player my brother had bought with one of his first paychecks. We owned a handful of records and they were all of French singers—Aznavour, our Sinatra, was my favorite; I adored his veiled, romantic voice. I could listen to him over and over singing “Donne Tes Seize Ans,” a song about a young girl who is about to have her sweet sixteen, and Aznavour tells her how splendid it will be to grow up, how the world will be hers for the taking. I couldn’t wait to turn sixteen, certain life would be like the Aznavour song.

  Then there was Dalida; for Mom, she was in a class by herself. My mother adored the former Miss Egypt whose throaty, sentimental ballads made her cry because they conjured up the life left behind—that world, now lost, where every one of us talked in the same intensely emotional way that Dalida sang. Dalida was the hometown girl who’d made good. She was the one who had left and never left. With her extraordinary beauty and talent, she had captivated all of Europe yet never forgot her roots in Shubra, the humble neighborhood where most of the Italians in Cairo were clustered. Even when she was the toast of Paris, Dalida still came back to perform at the swell old Cinema Rivoli and people would line up for days simply to buy a ticket. And later, after the exodus, there wasn’t a single Egyptian Jew in Brooklyn—or Paris or Geneva or Milan or Adelaide or Rio or Montreal—who didn’t continue to worship Dalida, who didn’t mourn the stacks of her albums they’d been forced to leave behind, who didn’t recall her magical performances at the Rivoli when she’d declared that she was a Cairene first, last, and always.

  Yet, despite Mom’s best efforts, four years after leaving Egypt, I wasn’t anywhere near as fluent as I’d been. I had fallen considerably behind my French peers. But I was still ahead of my classmates at PS 205.

  It seemed extraordinary to me that after all these years in America—from the tail end of second grade to fifth grade—I could still coast on the little bits of knowledge gleaned from my early education in Cairo and Paris. My mother had failed in her quest to have me skip a grade, so I’d had no choice but to make the best of my situation. My teachers knew they could count on me to liven up a class discussion, and they seemed to appreciate my enthusiasm, the fact that any time they asked a question or began a class discussion, my hand would shoot up to the sky as I begged them to please, please call on me.

  I felt far less of a bond with my classmates; my relations with them were cordial but not much more than that, and with a few it was decidedly cool. There had been a period when I was included in the round of birthday parties that took place over the course of the year, but the invitations were less frequent now.

  My class at PS 205 was an oddly diverse group. Most of the children were Irish and Italian Catholic, but there were also sizable numbers of Eastern European Jews as well as a couple of black students. These were recent arrivals, part of an effort to desegregate the public school system, and they seemed as lost and foreign and out of place at PS 205 as I had been the first couple of years.

  I was instinctively drawn to them, more than to the Jewish girls who struck me as overly confident and a bit spoiled. Some came to school wearing prominent gold chais, the Hebrew letter that signifies life, and seemed oblivious to the possibility of anti-Semitism, while I lived in fear of it. I could never quite understand this public display of religion, which had been my first impression of America. The Christmas after we arrived to New York, we’d paid a visit to some Brooklyn relatives and I was struck not simply by the ubiquitous wreaths and garlands and trees the Italian families showcased outside their homes, but by the electric menorahs in the windows of almost every Jewish house.

  Once we were settled on Sixty-Sixth Street, I’d tried to persuade my parents to buy an electric menorah. How I loved the soft orange light that illuminated even the darkest, wintriest New York nights. And having a public electric menorah was to my mind so American—a sign that we were full-fledged members of this strange new open society. But Edith and Leon steadfastly refused me—in their eyes religion was a low-key, intimate affair, to be observed discreetly behind closed doors, as it had been in Egypt.

  The Jewish girls at PS 205 were living proof my parents were wrong. They were every bit as affirmative about their faith as the Italian girls with their little gold crosses. By showing off their chais they had turned Judaism into a kind of status symbol. I had a gold pendant in the shape of a Jewish star, one of a few pieces of jewelry we had smuggled out of Egypt, but I rarely wore it and when I did, I’d tuck it under my blouse or sweater. Those rare times I had it in full view, I felt self-conscious and vulnerable.

  I had no real affinity with the girls of the golden chais; in spite of our shared background, I was a stranger among them. They exuded such a breezy self-confidence—in their laughs and giggles, in the way they discussed Jewish holidays or tossed about their long pampered hair.

  Wendy, for example, always managed to be color coordinated when she came to school every morning, even to the point of wearing diamond-patterned maroon tights that matched precisely the diamond pattern of her maroon turtleneck sweaters. Mom would buy me standard navy tights from Woolworth’s and insist they went perfectly well with whatever clothes I wore—that was the wonder of bleu marine she insisted. Wendy came from a family that seemed a bit more prosperous than the rest of us in our working-class neighborhood. As they flourished, parents showered their young daughters with wonderful clothes and jewelry, and I noticed how even in the course of one school year, some of my classmates were appearing in ever-more opulent wardrobes, at least by Bensonhurst standards.

  I was surprised the year before when Wendy invited me to her birthday party. Edith decided to go with me; she was fearful of letting me wander anywhere around the neighborhood by myself and wouldn’t even allow me to walk to school unaccompanied though PS 205 was literally around the corner. Wherever I went in New York, Mom came, too, usually holding my hand tightly as if she were afraid she’d lose me in this strange new world. We made our way to a simple but nicely furnished apartment and were promptly introduced to Wendy’s mom and older sister. They struck us as so gracious and
charming.

  The sister was studying French and struggling to master it at school. It seemed so natural: Would Edith agree to tutor her?

  My mother was delighted; having me as her lone student hadn’t quite made up for the loss of her career at Cattaui. Besides, she badly needed the money in a period when my family was literally scraping together pennies to get by. She assumed that the family, who lived comfortably and dressed their daughter in the nicest clothes of any girl at PS 205, would be able to pay her well.

  My mom never bothered to negotiate or even mention a price for the French lessons. She had always felt awkward about discussing money. That was business, a man’s realm, and the women of our refined culture steered clear of that. Besides, she simply assumed that she would be compensated fairly by this elegant, friendly family.

  There was a code of honor in the Levant that went hand in hand with the aggressive, cutthroat traditions of the souk. We believed in gentlemen’s agreements. We put our trust in unspoken understandings. And that is what my mother, Edith, thought she had with my friend’s family.

  On days when I was invited to Wendy’s house to play, my mother would sit in another room and dutifully go over French verbs and phrases with the older sister. Everyone seemed delighted with how the tutoring sessions were going—Wendy’s mother, her sister, and, of course, Mom. The family was extraordinarily hospitable; they showered us with love and attention.

  But after several of these lessons, my mother still hadn’t seen a dime, and she scrounged up the nerve to question them. They seemed genuinely astonished—paying for French lessons? Why, they’d assumed that Edith was doing it as a favor to the family, to help out their older daughter.

  We didn’t realize that the members of this American family were creatures of entitlement. They were entitled to have friends, good grades, wonderful clothes, and gratis French lessons. Since leaving Egypt my mother and I felt we were entitled to nothing.

  There was an unpleasant scene that left Edith feeling hurt and used. I gathered that Wendy’s parents stood their ground and hadn’t even offered some sort of token payment. While I didn’t witness the confrontation, I suffered the consequences.

  Never again was I invited to Wendy’s house or her birthday parties, and she barely spoke to me at school. I felt oddly guilty, as if I were in the wrong to believe Mom should be paid for teaching French grammar and vocabulary to a privileged teenager.

  The episode only underscored my vague, inchoate distrust of American girls. They seemed to me to lack the candor of the Levantine girls who sat with me behind the divider at the Shield of Young David every Saturday.

  This is how Mom and I prepped for the Lycée Français exam.

  Every Saturday afternoon after services, we’d set out hand in hand for “The City.” Our destination was Donnell, the quirky branch of the New York Public Library that had become a kind of second home to my family. With its massive collection of foreign-language books and even a children’s room with a special French corner, it was a natural haven for us. Besides, my mother felt it offered me a far better education than I was receiving at PS 205. My mother was passionate about libraries—it gave her such pleasure to step into those quiet rooms filled with books. Our two local libraries—the spacious Mapleton branch near Eighteenth Avenue and another far smaller storefront library near Kings Highway that was a room or two—were among the only places she let me walk to alone as I grew older. She trusted libraries implicitly—they were sacred to her, holy sites.

  And Donnell was the Holy of Holies.

  As we journeyed to Manhattan, far from the pressures of life on Sixty-Sixth Street, I had Mom’s undivided attention.

  We both relished these weekly outings that took us to a corner of New York we found exotic and elegant, though parts of it were neither really. After getting out of the Forty-Ninth Street subway station, we’d walk along Seventh Avenue, passing a cluster of “adult” theaters that featured images of curvaceous women and neon signs that flashed Girls, Girls, Girls. I knew instinctively not to look too closely, and besides, the doors to these establishments were usually closed, I noticed, as Mom and I hurried past them.

  I was curious but couldn’t understand the fuss. I am a girl, I thought—what is the big deal?

  In a ritual we both enjoyed, we strolled up Seventh Avenue past the stately white Americana Hotel. We both loved the Americana, which was outclassed in our eyes only by the Hilton down the street. Once in a while, I’d dart into the Hilton, drawn by the carpeted interior and the chic people milling about the lobby and browsing through the expensive shops. It was hard to remember that I had once felt entirely at ease and not like an outsider at all in a Hilton every bit as swank and sleek as this one: the Nile Hilton, where Dad and I would retreat nearly every afternoon to the dark bar.

  Those chic, quiet blocks that led up to Donnell were a window into a gilded world we could only dream of entering. We’d walk past charming old brownstones and designer ateliers with dresses in the window that looked nothing like what I saw at Mays or Korvette’s. My brother Isaac had piqued my interest in those designer workshops—he told me they could make me a dress no other woman in the world would have. That is what I wanted—an outfit that would be mine and mine alone. An outfit like the ones Emma Peel wore, that would be the envy of the women’s section at the Shield of Young David and make Maurice finally fall in love with me.

  Our pilgrimage always included a stop at MoMA—the gleaming Museum of Modern Art across the street from Donnell. The entrance fee was so steep we couldn’t afford it any more than the Hilton or the Americana, but that didn’t stop us from going into the gift shop, which was free of charge. We loved looking at the little postcard replicas of all the famous artworks upstairs that were denied us. The museum was exhibiting the photographs of Diane Arbus, and some of her haunting images were available in the gift shop. I’d stare at the black-and-white photographs of impossibly forlorn people and even at ten I felt an absolute kinship with them. They were quintessentially American, yet they looked as alienated and lost as I felt.

  Once Edith had treated me to a postcard or two, we proceeded to Donnell. Mom waited as I browsed and picked out my reading for the coming week—all in French, of course. I favored a novel by Jules Verne, Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), or a volume of Tintin, the comic series about a young investigative reporter and amateur detective who battles bad guys and solves case after case as he travels the world with his faithful dog Milou. I owned exactly one Tintin, Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (The Jewels of Lady Castafiore), a gift from a family friend I relished and kept reading and rereading till I knew it by heart.

  Donnell didn’t stock many Tintins but when one surfaced, I’d grab it—The Cigars of the Pharaoh, We’ve Walked on the Moon, The Secrets of the Unicorn. I also loved La Comtesse de Ségur, a nineteenth-century children’s author unknown in America, whose books featured little girls beset by misfortune, who somehow manage to find redemption and renewed purpose through the tragedies that befall them. Those Saturdays at Donnell, I was getting a taste of a literature that was drastically different from what I was being exposed to at PS 205, where nothing we read in class captured my imagination as much as The Adventures of Tintin.

  Occasionally, I liked to tiptoe into the young adults section on the mezzanine level. It was forbidden territory—I faced a stern librarian who peered suspiciously at me when I wandered in, and often shooed me back to the children’s room. Every once in a while, I snuck past and leafed through those teen romance novels I adored—books about lovelorn young girls who wore “formals,” received “corsages,” and danced the night away at proms with boys.

  What is a formal? I wondered. Would I ever go to a prom and dance with a boy? Will he send me a corsage? In the same way that Donnell’s children’s section kept me connected with my French past, its young adult library was shaping my future, teaching me about becoming an American teenager.

  Then it was Mom�
��s turn. Together we headed to the adult foreign-language collection—Donnell’s pride and joy, with shelf after shelf of French novels. As if in a spell, Edith would let go of my hand and drift off on her own. I’d see her fingering Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma or L’Immoraliste (The Immoralist) by Gide.

  She visited the Proust section as if it were a shrine. Proust occupied the highest perch in her literary pantheon, and only Flaubert stood a chance of edging him out. She would pick up a copy of Salammbô and read out loud the opening line and say, as she had a thousand times before, “Loulou, did you know that Flaubert worked seven years on that one single sentence?” Then, in a worshipful tone, she would recite it: “C’était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d’Hamilcar…”—“It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar…”

  I had heard her quote the line so often I knew it by heart, though I never understood why it had taken Flaubert seven years.

  Mom’s tastes were eclectic, and I could never predict what she would choose nor could I advise her. I was anxious to help. Was she in the mood for Zola? The Goncourt brothers? Perhaps some literary criticism by André Maurois? I’d wander around the adult collection pulling out whichever volume caught my eye or whose author sounded familiar because she’d mentioned them or had read me excerpts of their work for a dictee. She’d glance at it absentmindedly, then return it to the shelf shaking her head no.

  We’d leave with a stash of books in our arms and walk through the same streets that filled us with such wonder, pausing once again at the Hilton and the Americana as if they were our personal stations of the cross, until we’d arrive at the seedier enclaves by West Forty-Ninth Street and we knew we had to hurry home to Brooklyn.

  As I crammed for the lycée exam, PS 205 decided to offer my class a tour of the junior high school we’d be attending come fall. Seth Low was located on the edge of Bay Parkway, a considerable walk from my house. I went by bus with my classmates and joined hundreds of other fifth-graders filing into a large auditorium to hear a command performance by the Seth Low Junior High School band. The school was large, impersonal, and intensely forbidding. It wasn’t at all like PS 205, which for all its problems was still intimate and manageable.