Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Rhoda, Jules, and Dave Feiffer, 1940

  Mimi and Jules, 1932

  Rhoda Feiffer, 1938

  Cousin Harriet Davis, Mimi (top), Jules, and Alice, 1938

  Years before I lost my faith in God, my mother’s sister Celia and her husband, Eugene, became Christian Scientists, less a conversion than an evasion. They slid from Jewishness to not-Jewishness, a halfway station of the cross on their way to Protestantism. In my youth Christian Science seemed to recruit Jews with a little money or a lot of money who left the Bronx and Brooklyn behind in order to walk the walk and talk the talk of Riverdale and Westchester.

  The rest of us, without money, were left in the boroughs with our immigrant parents, who neither knew nor cared how they fit in. Their Jewishness made the Atlantic crossing, abandoning the old-time orthodoxy for an ad hoc mishmash of liberalism, socialism, Communism, and Trotskyism, all very secular except you went to shul on the High Holy Days. The Communists, Trotskyites, and Socialists worked very hard at not getting along with each other. The noise brought on in the neighborhood by the embattled factions of left-wing idealism could be deafening.

  My parents took no part in the debate. They steered clear of anything that smacked of grown-up argument. My mother restricted her confrontations to her children, only one of whom (Mimi) argued back, while my father remained above the fray, passive and dismissive.

  My block, Stratford, was, except for two or three Italian families, rigorously Jewish. A block over, Morrison, was Italian and Catholic. We got along by staying apart. Now and then there were block wars. Their kids invaded our block (or vice versa) and everyone threw stones, resulting occasionally in some kid getting a hole in the head, a term I’ve heard only in the Bronx, as in “Yussie got a hole in the head.” I never saw an actual hole in the head. I don’t know what it was, exactly. But it was epidemic in my childhood and not heard of again thereafter. Medical science must have done something about it when I wasn’t paying attention.

  Surrounded by Jews, I felt un-Jewish. In the company of my Christian Scientist relatives, I was so Jewish I hardly recognized myself. It took Gentiles or neo-Gentiles to make me a Jew; it took Jews to make me an anti-Semite. I defined myself by distancing myself. Others noticed it: “Do you always have to be different?”

  Choice had nothing to do with it. I would have given anything to be more like everyone else. But, no getting away from it, I was different. Another accusation that often came my way: “Who do you think you are, a privileged character?” Who, me? Not me, no, never—well, actually, yes.

  Underneath a formidable shyness and shoe-shuffling humility lived an arrogant, easily offended hanging judge. He and I regularly convened. We agreed that I was in the right and they were wrong, wrong, wrong. But power, for the time being, was in their hands. And the only way to pacify them was to pretend to share their thoughts and values. So I should act funny, sometimes servile, always nice.

  Now I’m not sure my sister Alice, four years my junior, would recognize this portrait. I doubt if she ever saw me servile—more likely the opposite. I can’t actually testify to how others might have described my behavior. But I recall clearly how I felt in those Bronx years. I felt helpless, scared, off-balance, and cowardly. My older sister, Mimi the Communist, dismissed me as an opportunist. If only. That would have been something to rise to.

  Fear was the principal emotion of my childhood. I was never not afraid. I sidestepped arguments, fled confrontations, pedaled away from fistfights. What Fred Astaire did with Ginger Rogers, I practiced with bullies in the Bronx. I tap-danced offstage so skillfully that it might not have occurred to them that I was running away. I danced backwards, kidding, making jokes, laughing it up, pretending we were buddies. I confused them with my cowardice. Abject fear mixed with fancy footwork got me out of the Bronx alive.

  Out of the Bronx was the main place I wanted to be. The Bronx symbolized my too apparent state of inadequacy. As I grew older, I grew smaller in my own eyes. Living my life with these people in these surroundings diminished me. And to speak of utter diminishment, now the time had come to prepare for my bar mitzvah. It was announced that I was to go to Hebrew school. I said I wasn’t going. My mother and father said, “What are you talking about? Of course you’re going.” I said, “Why did you wait till I was twelve and a half? What am I going to learn in six months, especially when I have to learn it in Hebrew? Especially when I haven’t been inside a shul in a year?” My mother said, “You’ll do the best you can.” My father left the room. “You don’t believe this stuff any more than I do,” I said. “You’re doing this for the neighbors. It’s all hypocrisy.”

  That was my best shot. My mother’s response was, “You’re being fresh, Sonny Boy. I don’t like to see you this way. Don’t break my heart.”

  I went to Hebrew school. Where I was to be groomed to become a man by a rabbi who barely knew my name, who was to guide me in learning a ritual that I didn’t believe in, presented in a language that made no sense to me.

  Rabbi Cohen looked at me as if he didn’t know I was a privileged character. He looked at me as if I weren’t there, as if nothing I did or would ever do could spark his interest. It took another seven years, until I was drafted into the army, for me to face an experience of equal anonymity.

  Previously I had avoided Young Israel on every possible occasion, and now I was there five afternoons a week, taking a crash course in a ceremony I wanted no part of, learning by rote how to say Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu, learning to apply as if a bandage the tallis and tefillin. Every minute of this six months’ episode, right down to its final moments, was an agony to me.

  I did not believe. And I did not believe that my parents believed. What did they believe? They believed—and this was the crux of it—that they should not be ashamed in front of the neighbors. None of whom were their friends. If they gave in to my wish to skip my bar mitzvah, they would owe an explanation to the Peterniks and the Moskowitzes. It would cause a fuss.

  My parents were against fuss. If they had a passion, that passion had to do with being against fuss. Fuss got them noticed, got them attention, the wrong kind. They’d be singled out, their parenting called into question. The fuss I was trying to stir up was going to get them into trouble.

  When their children got into trouble, my parents took the other side. They looked the other way, any which way that would save them from siding with Mimi, Jules, or Alice, whoever brought home a complaint that could be dealt with in only one way: by siding with the grown-up.

  It didn’t matter if we, their children, had a legitimate grievance—we had to apologize. Grown-ups could never be in the wrong in a dispute with their children. My mother, who was immovable and implacable in standing up to us, couldn’t stand up to grown-ups.

  I have no doubt that at least one part of my radical politics came out of those years when, time after time, I was herded by my mother down avenues and into positions that I thought were against my best interests. And I was forced to shut up about it. After a certain point I wasn’t allowed to argue against her judgment. She worked too hard to be upset by a stubborn, willful son. She had an upside-down stomach that made her ill, and what contributed to her upside-down stomach? Sons who ignored her condition and refused to cooperate.

  I lacked representation. Somebody should have been out there standing up for me and against the grown-ups. And no one was. I gave in and gave in some more. And gave in even more after that. And after giving in to a point where there was little left to surrender, even a coward like me dreamed of rebellion. If my mother had just once backed me up, I might have gone a little less extreme in my rage against injustice. I might have remained as indecisive as Mimi said I was. But thanks to my mother’s desertion, I was forced back onto my inner resources. I dug scarily deep and found radicalism.

  So it wasn’t solely the sway of Cold War America that shaped my political sensibility. It was the politics of Rhoda Feiffer, instilled in her by God knows what: memories of the shtetl,
the pogroms, the steerage, a frightened Jewish girl ridiculed by the goyim in grade school in Richmond, Virginia, a lifetime of humiliations that became so routine they lost the power to humiliate. All in the aggregate teaching her this lesson: you dare not stand up to them.

  So she didn’t. When push came to shove, she let her children be shoved. And the more shoved we became—Mimi, Jules, and Alice—the more the three of us realized that we were engaged in a high-wire act, youth, without a net.

  Mimi’s need for parenting led her to the Communist Party and the patriarch, Stalin. My need led to a more indigenous, romantic radicalism with shades of Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies and Clarence Darrow and Mabel Dodge. The issues of the day, the suppression of the Left, the blacklist, Pat McCarran, and Karl Mundt certainly raised my ire, but in the end it wasn’t the suppression of other Americans that fueled me, it was my own suppression. Civil liberties, schmivil liberties. If my mother had been there when I needed her, I might have stayed docile.

  But I was no schmuck. I kept my emerging radical response to my mother to myself. The extremes of my rebellion were not yet well established enough to stand up to her upside-down stomach.

  Mimi had no such problem. She cavalierly ignored my mother’s condition. Once more employing judo skills to turn a weakness into a strength, I disguised my fear of my mother as principle rather than abject surrender. In my eyes I became the staunch defender of my mother and her upside-down stomach against my badly behaved sister. I was the good son, standing tall, acting righteous, making a moral argument on my mother’s behalf. Mimi’s lack of control agitated my mother’s upside-down stomach. How unfair to a woman who sacrificed so much for me and my sisters! Better that I, her only son, back off from hurting her further. My conscience was too strong to add to her burden. I was blessed with a conscience that had a low threshold for confrontation and a high threshold for surrender.

  I couldn’t believe what my aunt Frances was telling me. She said that I couldn’t invite more than one friend to my bar mitzvah party. Frances had taken charge. She was my father’s older sister, beloved by everyone in the family—my sister Mimi liked her, for God’s sake!—and I couldn’t stand her. Frances was kind, I was told. A heart of gold, I was told, thought of everyone but herself, and so on. And I found her on her infrequent visits from Atlantic City, where she and her husband, Herman, owned a men’s shop on Steel Pier, to be a pushy, nosy, overbearing, boorish, self-righteous—have I made myself clear?

  She swooped down on 1235 Stratford like an avenging angel, her punishing benevolence welcomed by everyone in the family but me. She lay down the time for my party, the rules for my party, the number of guests at my party, which guests, and what they would eat and drink. And Rhoda, this mother who took no prisoners, smiled sweetly, acquiescently, and obeyed. To every request that Frances set forth, my mother said yes.

  My mother’s role in my bar mitzvah was to implement Frances’s decisions. My father’s role was to stay out of the way, something he was practiced at. My role was to be the excuse for a Feiffer family reunion. All the relatives and near relations who had made it in the Jewish migration to these shores were now to find out why they had come to America: to attend Frances’s party of the half century in honor of Dave’s son, whatzisface.

  Hundreds accepted. So many that I was told, days before the event, how many of my friends I could invite to the party. The list had been scaled back to none. We had run out of room. “My friends can’t come to my own bar mitzvah party?!”

  “Don’t be selfish,” was my mother’s response to my complaints. “This is a wonderful occasion, Sonny, don’t spoil it.”

  What she dared not say to Frances, who was well on her way to spoiling it, she had no trouble saying to me.

  Frances was, for reasons I still don’t understand, a towering presence in my parents’ lives. My mother’s own three sisters—Celia, Selma, and Ida—had little or no influence on us. Selma lived across the river in Paterson with her once-wealthy husband, Sam, and their two grown children, Herbert, a lout, and Frances, a nervous wreck. Sam went broke at the start of the Depression and sat on his front porch in benign retirement for the rest of his life, spouting monologues of dreary advice that no one listened to.

  My mother’s eldest sister was Ida, pretty at one time, soft-spoken, and Southern accented. Ida lived as a single mother in Washington, abandoned by another failure, another Sam, who went out of business, then out of sight.

  Celia, two years older than my mother (Rhoda was the youngest and cutest), was the one I knew best. She and her family lived in Riverdale, that part of the Bronx that liked to think of itself as Westchester, just as Celia and her husband, Eugene, thought of themselves as not Jews but Christian Scientists. Celia had early dreams of becoming an opera singer but her father said no, and Jewish girls obeyed their fathers in those days. So she gave up opera for attitude and from then on lived under the pretense that she was a Gentile and a society lady, demonstrating her superiority by speaking in an affected contralto, sounding as if her end of the conversation were sung as recitative.

  She did have her moment in the sun, however. It happened when I was thirty-two, and was marrying that day my longtime live-in girlfriend, Judy Sheftel. My strongest memory of the wedding party afterwards stars Celia. Among the party guests were Julie Andrews, at that time starring on Broadway in Camelot, and her then husband, the brilliant production designer Tony Walton. Celia was introduced and in the beginning managed to contain herself. But as the party bubbled on, I noticed that wherever Julie Andrews happened to be standing, there, a short distance away, stood Celia. Cordial and charismatic, Julie moved about the room, mixing and mingling, and Celia moved, not quite beside her but never more than two wedding guests away. Her shadowing act made me increasingly uncomfortable. Before Julie became aware of it, I moved in to shoo Celia. As I made my move, Celia made hers. She sidled up to Julie and, no more than an inch from her ear, crooned in a sotto voce contralto her famous solo from My Fair Lady: “I could have dahnced all night, I could have dahnced all night…” I wanted to kill her at the time. But almost fifty years later I look back on it as the one fond moment that my imperious aunt ever gave me.

  As highfalutin as Celia was, her husband, Eugene, was straightforward, a regular guy, the only relative I went to for advice, although I don’t think I ever took it. It didn’t matter, I trusted him. He was short and stolid, a man of few words, fewer when Celia was around.

  While I thought of my father as primarily gentle and not very significant in my life—or his own—I saw Eugene as made of sterner stuff, more a man to be reckoned with. I could talk to Eugene, discuss my ambitions, even go in for a touch of experimental grandiosity, knowing I wouldn’t be laughed at. I was flattered by his attention. In my late teens, working for the cartoonist Will Eisner, whose offices were down in the Financial District, I would make dates with my uncle. His business was close by, at 92 Liberty Street. He’d take me to lunch and listen, not unsympathetically, as I shot my mouth off. He’d respond with advice I found useless, like “Go to college, have a backup plan in case this cartooning thing doesn’t work out. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

  Eugene was conservative, a Republican, practiced Christian Science, and never once proselytized. He listened, disagreed with everything I said, and made no judgments. He was the kind of grown-up I needed more of but just had one of.

  On the other hand, my aunt Frances was an extreme example of what I had learned to expect from grown-ups. She didn’t listen, she only proselytized, and she knew right from wrong: right was what she said, wrong was what I said.

  I was used to it. I came from a family of Franceses, some less overbearing than others, some even benign, but every one of them, even my obliging father, judgmental and righteous when it came to discussions with children. And guilt-provoking. It was astonishing—something to marvel at, really—how adults of my parents’ generation could instill guilt and reject blame. Among them, my aunt Frances
was unrivaled.

  “Don’t spoil it,” my mother had said. “Frances has worked so hard on your party, you could try to appreciate it.” Of all the offenses leading up to my bar mitzvah, this was the most flagrant: that I couldn’t invite my friends because Frances said so, and my parents went along. It made official what I had known from the start: not any of this bar mitzvah caper had to do with me.

  When it became clear that I was no quick study in Hebrew (nor slow study), I begged Rabbi Cohen to let me perform part of the ceremony in English. Certainly not. When it came time to write a speech, I was informed that it was to go more or less like this: “I, bar mitzvah boy. humbly walk through the doorway of this rite of passage by offering displays of obsequious gratitude to all those who deny me the right to think for myself: my parents, my relatives, my teachers, my relatives’ relatives, and all those locked up in Hitler’s camps, whom I would betray if I spoke any words but the ones put in my mouth by the rabbi.”

  I did as I was told, based on a lifelong understanding that the one thing that worked with grown-ups was surrender. In any case, once I got over the initial shock, humiliation wasn’t all that much of a problem for me, just another one of the numbing miseries that it was my assignment to put up with until I was old enough to bust out of this joint.