One American Dream

by Bernard Beck

  I instinctively knew that it would be a mistake to smile in victory, so I just nodded yes, and stood up, and for the next four years the head librarian and I traded books. I would return the book I had read, and the librarian handed me the next book on the list. We never discussed the books, although I’m sure the librarian labored long and hard over the preparation of the ongoing list.

  In 1920, when I entered high school, the US was still adjusting to the sudden drop in economic activity following the end of the war. Over two-million soldiers had returned from Europe, and they wanted their old jobs back, but there were new workers in those positions, and they didn’t want to quit. Chaos took over much of the country. There had been major strikes in the meatpacking and steel industries, and large-scale race riots in Chicago and other cities. Anarchist attacks on Wall Street produced fears of radicals and terrorists. By the end of the year, two years after the end of the war, the economy had started to grow, though it still had not completely shifted from wartime to peacetime footing.

  The election that year was the first in which women had the right to vote in all forty-eight states. There was new and revolutionary thinking in almost every sphere of human activity. The national feeling of relief that had swept the country at the end of the Great War had dipped but was now about to evolve into unbridled optimism. The stock market was poised to soar, and despite the strife, there was a growing sense of confidence in the country. The restraints of Victorian morality that had dominated the country for the previous century had been relaxed, and as women entered the workforce and earned the right to vote, fashion trends became more accessible, masculine, and practical.

  Many women believed that since they were now the political equals of men, they now had the right to pursue more personal freedoms. They began engaging publicly in typical “male” activities like smoking and drinking (which was still ostensibly prohibited). They worked toward attaining sexual freedom by trying to combat the historic double-standard, which treated men who had taken many lovers as healthy, but women who had many as evil or flawed.

  Skirt hemlines rose and were less constraining of women’s movements. For the first time in centuries, a woman’s natural body shape was now exposed as dresses became more fitted and revealing, and the constrictive corset, which had been an essential undergarment to make the waist thinner and the breasts and hips more pronounced, became a thing of the past. A more masculine look became popular—including shirtwaist dresses, short hairstyles, flat breasts, and natural hips. “Bobbed” hair and exposed legs became the new symbol of freedom.

  Although society matrons of a certain age continued to wear conservative dresses, the most impressive social trend of the “Roaring Twenties” was undoubtedly “the flapper.” Flappers were a “new breed” of young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, smoking, driving automobiles, treating sex in a casual manner, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.

  This new freedom spilled over into the world of art and home décor, where surrealism and art deco forced a transition from the lush, curvilinear abstractions of Victoriana and art nouveau decoration to more mechanized, smooth, and geometric forms.

  Jazz became the most popular music in America, and orchestras led by Fletcher Henderson, Paul Whiteman, and Duke Ellington, among others, played in the most fashionable cafes and concert halls.

  To me, it was as if sex had just been invented. There was a freedom in the air that boasted new colors, new styles, new music, and new literature, and as an adventurous, post-pubescent girl, I was not about to miss any of it. My friends from the neighborhood were too timid, so I sought out new, more adventurous friends, but my parents were cautiously restrictive about whom I spent my free time with. I was bright and breezed through my schoolwork. I read constantly, insatiably, and I was bored . . . all the time.

  Sundays were especially painful for me. My parents tried to schedule appropriate outings for the family, but they were always too juvenile or too old-fashioned. They were reluctant to leave me alone at home, but when they dragged me along, I hated it. So they encouraged me to take along a book to read, which was what I enjoyed most. And so, at nearly every outing, while the rest of the group would participate in an activity, I would sit by myself and read. In all fairness, my mother did try to find activities that would interest me, but, as a rule, whatever we did as a family, I hated.

  I thought of myself as a “liberated” woman. I yearned to live a liberated, bohemian life, and I felt trapped in the stifling Jewish “upper” (as my mother frequently reminded me) class. I wanted to go to jazz concerts, art openings, “meet-the-authors” cocktail parties, and poetry readings. But I was only permitted the vicarious experience of reading about them in the gossip pages. I longed to sit in some exotic, little-known downtown coffee shop or café and absorb the atmosphere, but my parents kept reminding me that I was just a child—and a Jewish child at that—and that proper Jewish children did not hang around in cafes.

  I hated being a proper Jewish child, but what could I do?

  Consequently, my bohemian experiences were all secondhand. I read about them in the gossip columns of the newspapers and magazines, but I was not permitted to go to any of them, and I bitterly fought the restrictions. I devoured the art section of the newspaper, studied every literary magazine, and read every avant-garde book as soon as I could get my hands on it. I yearned to be an adult and free of restrictions, but all I ever heard from my parents was a long list of things that proper Jewish girls didn’t do. I didn’t want to be a proper Jewish girl, but I had no choice.

  In those years, at the start of the Roaring Twenties, New York City was alive with stimulation and a pretty, young girl could get anything she wanted—I was a pretty, young girl, and I wanted to breathe and taste and hear and experience everything. I hated my parents’ Victorian house with its formal rooms and its dark furniture and drapes. I wanted to live.

  As if it was a source of life giving oxygen, I read. In fact, all of my experiences, social, intellectual, sexual, and emotional came through my reading. I was a fast and insatiable reader, and I read an eclectic variety of material ranging from the literary masterpieces that I got from the library, to the pulp magazines which I bought on a daily basis on my way home from school.

  I had one reliable ally in the family: my grandfather, Ben-Zion. And we had one common enemy: my father. In the same way that I felt restricted by my situation, my grandfather resented everything about his state of affairs. He was, he felt, an underappreciated scholar—underappreciated both in the community and at home. He, too, hated the opulence of my mother’s home; he felt confined and denigrated, and he felt helpless in the face of my parents’ juggernaut of social achievement. We recognized in each other a kindred spirit: we were both stifled by my parents’ social ambition.

  As a result, my grandfather and I spent a disproportionate amount time together. He was my favorite teacher, and I was his best student. I got all of my Jewish education from him. He taught me to read Hebrew and Yiddish, and I read the Torah and the Prophets with him in the original Hebrew. His method of teaching was to tell me stories about how the great Rabbis of the Talmud and the Diaspora debated the laws, and he practiced debating with me. I learned Jewish history and philosophy and religion in the form of stories. And through the stories that my grandfather taught me, I absorbed, rather than merely understood, the rationale and beauty of Judaism and the history and logic of its rules and customs.

  Slowly, timidly at first, but with the enthusiastic encouragement of my grandfather, I began to make up my own stories. I enjoyed this very much, and I discovered that I was quite good at channeling my imagination into literary creativity. Eventually, under my grandfather’s urging, I started to write these stories down. I told my stories to my grandfather in Yiddish
, but I wrote them in English. Eventually, in addition to the Jewish subjects that my grandfather had encouraged me to write about, I began to write stories that were similar to the stories that I read in the pulp magazines that I avidly devoured. I had a fertile imagination and a rich fantasy life, and I wrote freely and well. My stories were always about some sort of threat to a young girl and about heroes arriving just in time to save the “damsel in distress.” There was a lot of implied sex, a lot of fainting, and a lot of intrigue. My stories weren’t very creative, but I had a certain amount of skill and a large amount of pent up sexual energy. Although he was not aware of the content, my grandfather encouraged my creativity. Perhaps he recognized my abilities, or perhaps he derived perverse pleasure from encouraging my father’s “perfect” daughter to do something that was outside the accepted norm—something that he suspected my father would not approve of.

  I loved writing. It was my fantasy world. The stories poured out of me like water from the tap. There were dozens of them—each one a little better than its predecessor—and my grandfather encouraged me tirelessly.

  The stories came easily to me, and I was proud of them. Writing them was, in my mind, my first real accomplishment, my first really independent activity, my first rebellion. In the privacy of my room and in my discussions with my grandfather, I thought of myself as a bohemian—a free thinker. My grandfather told me that I could be like Alma Mahler who wrote her own music and was married to the great Jewish composer Gustav Mahler, or Fanny Mendelssohn, who was a great female Jewish composer and pianist and was the sister of Felix Mendelssohn. I, however, dreamed of being like the society author, Zelda Fitzgerald, who was the darling of all the gossip magazines. In my fantasies, I was a famous author with a secret identity. Someday, the world would discover my treasured talent. Someday—who knows?

  “What’s the point of writing stories if no one reads them?” my grandfather asked me one day. “You don’t even read them to me!”

  “They’re not the sort of stories you would like. Besides, who could I show them to?”

  “How about those magazines that you’re always reading? The ones you hide when I come into your room? See if there is a way to submit stories to them.”

  Blushing and embarrassed, I took one of the magazines out of my desk drawer and looked through it to see if there was an address for inexperienced writers to send stories. And there it was, on the back page just inside the cover: “Have a good story to tell?” it read. “Send it to our editors, and if it is published we’ll send you five dollars!” There was an address to send the stories and a special form to fill out. So I sent what I thought were the best of my stories to the magazine. They published one! And they sent me five dollars!

  And then I sent more stories to different magazines, and they, too, published some. And suddenly, I, Ruthie Rubin, was an author. Wisely, I had submitted all my stories under the pen name Zelda Mahler and no one ever suspected that I might be the actual author.

  My stories became my life, my escape. Every day after school, I would sit at my typewriter writing and editing and rewriting and pretending and dreaming that I was a great writer.

  When I wrote I was Ruthie Rubin, but I dreamed I was Zelda Mahler. In my mind I was sophisticated, suave, and urbane. I was Zelda Mahler, the famous writer wearing her cloche hat with her long cigarette holder, and her slinky dress. Zelda Mahler. People stopped at her table in the Algonquin Club just to be seen with her. Zelda Mahler, daring, risqué, and so sophisticated.

  I told my grandfather that I had sold some stories, but I never showed any of them to him. They were just not appropriate.

  By the time I was fifteen years old, and a high school sophomore, I, or rather Zelda Mahler, had sold seven stories. And, in return for an exclusivity agreement and with the encouragement of my grandfather, I was listed on one magazine’s masthead as a contributing editor. I was now getting paid ten dollars for every story!

  Of course, my parents had no idea what I was doing. It was a deep, dark secret between my grandfather and me, but I was too young and naïve, and my grandfather was too sheltered and traditional, to have anticipated the consequences.

  Chapter 7

  The maid tapped lightly on the library door. “There’s a Mr. Jacobson on the phone for you, Mr. Rubin,” she said through the closed door.

  I opened the door a crack. “I don’t know any Jacobson,” I said. “Did he say what he wants?”

  “He asked to speak to Miss Ruthie, but I told him that she was in school, so he asked to speak to you.”

  “Did he say what it was about?”

  “No, sir.”

  I slid the door closed and went to my desk and picked up the phone.

  “This is Jack Rubin,” I said in my most officious tone into the phone. “How can I help you?”

  “My name is Jacobson. Herman Jacobson,” the man answered. “I am the publisher of a number of magazines. Among them is a magazine called The Love Book.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I interrupted irritably.

  “I’m sorry, I thought you would know.”

  “Know what?” I asked, suddenly worried.

  “Mr. Rubin, is Ruth Rubin your daughter?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Did something happen to her?”

  “No, sir, at least nothing bad,” he said quickly. “Please hear me out, and then I’m sure you’ll understand the purpose of my call. As I was saying, I publish a magazine called The Love Book. You probably are not familiar with it, so I will tell you that it is a book of short stories that appeal to young women. One of our most popular authors is a woman named Zelda Mahler, and she lives at your address.”

  “There’s no one here by that name,” I snapped.

  “Yes, I realize that. Please let me go on. Zelda Mahler has been writing stories for us for about a year. We send her a check for each story that we publish. Because she is so popular, we would like to offer her a long term contract. I realized that Zelda Mahler is a pen name, and so I looked at the way she endorsed her checks, and I saw the name Ruth Rubin. I believe that Ruth Rubin must be your daughter.”

  I sat for a moment, shocked. “Yes,” I finally managed to say. “Ruth Rubin is my daughter, but she is not a writer, she is a fifteen-year-old high school girl.”

  “That surprises me,” Mr. Jacobson said. “Her stories are well-written and quite sophisticated. I thought that she was at least in her twenties. But it doesn’t matter. I still would like to offer her a contract. Would you please ask her to call me when she gets home from school? I would like to speak with her.”

  I ended the conversation and stared at the phone, amazed. Ruthie, a writer, stories? And didn’t he say that the name of the magazine was The Love Book? What kind of magazine could that be? I didn’t doubt that what Mr. Jacobson said was true, what I felt bad about was that I didn’t know that Ruthie had been writing stories. Wouldn’t she have told me about them; especially if they had been published and she was getting paid for them? It was true that I wasn’t especially close with Ruthie, but still, I was her father, and I should have been aware of what she was doing.

  She spent so much time by herself in her room and so much time with Ben-Zion. “He probably had something to do with it,” I said aloud. Then I thought, It was an English language magazine, and Ben-Zion doesn’t read anything in English. Maybe she did it in school or in the library—she spends a lot of time in the library. Mr. Jacobson said that she had written many stories. When could she have done that? At least he said that they were good stories.

  I had not paid attention when Mr. Jacobson said the name of the magazine and now I wasn’t sure that I had gotten the name right. What kind of a name could that be for a magazine? I must have misheard. Maybe, I thought, it had something to do with a school project. But then I thought that it couldn’t have been because Ruthie would have shown it to me if it was for school. She always b
oasted about how well she was doing in school. I read a lot of books, but I didn’t waste my time on magazines. Magazines were too light and full of nonsense. I kept wondering what sort of a magazine Mr. Jacobson was talking about. Maybe it was some sort of news magazine. Even though Rose subscribed to a whole bunch of news magazines, I never read them because I believed that they were just for lazy people who don’t read the newspaper. If you want to get the news you read the newspaper. That’s why it’s called the newspaper. If you want to learn stuff, you read books. Period. Magazines are for people who don’t know how to think.

  But, I thought to myself, he said that she had written many stories and that he had paid her by check. I knew that she had her own savings account at the bank, but I didn’t think that she ever went there. And besides, I always went with her to the bank. But obviously, she must have been going there by herself, without me. Why didn’t they say something at the bank? She was only a teenager. Why didn’t they tell me that my daughter was depositing checks at the bank?

  Why would they?

  I could feel anger and frustration building inside me. I took out a cigar and bit off the end and spat it into the waste can. I leaned back in my chair and carefully lit the cigar and puffed deeply on it. It didn’t make me feel any better.

  I sat there exploring my options, but I felt bewildered, unsure of what to do. At first I thought that I should talk to Rose about this but that would be avoiding responsibility. This was my problem, plain and simple. I decided that I would have a talk with Ruthie, ask her about it, look at what she wrote, and compliment her on it. But why, I wondered, had she hidden it from me? There was something wrong. Very wrong.