One day Mr. Goldberg brought home gefilte fish in a jar. “You crazy,” Ettie said, “gefilte fish already made! In a jar. With a label. From Brooklyn!”
Let me tell you something, God. The world is going to hell.
DESPITE HER OPINION about eating out, every once in a while Ettie would have an urge for a good sour pickle from Gus’s on Essex Street, so she’d take Tootsie or me with her to the Lower East Side.
We’d taxi downtown. Ettie didn’t ride on the subway. “When I’m dead, kineahora, they can put me underground. Before that, I’m not going.” Ettie didn’t take buses either. “They make so many stops, by the time I get where I’m going, I forgot why I’m going.”
Sometimes we’d go for a pastrami sandwich at Katz’s on Houston Street. Sometimes we’d get a potato or a kasha knish at Yona Schimmel’s. We’d always bring home rugelach from Gertel’s Kosher Bakery for Mr. Goldberg.
Our excursion lasted only until one of us needed a bathroom. Then we’d run for a taxi and ask the driver to drive fast.
LIVING WITH ETTIE and Mr. Goldberg meant living in a kosher house. I was always constipated.
“But why can’t I mix meat and milk?” I asked Ettie a million times. “The cow does.”
Monte
Ettie was always trying to fatten me up. All I ever wanted was a grilled cheese sandwich and a cherry Coke at Liggett’s Drug Store on 65th and Madison, made by the boy behind the counter who looked like Montgomery Clift, if Montgomery Clift had acne.
ETTIE TRIED TO ADAPT to me and to modern times. She used paper plates.
“Thank you, God, for making such a miracle. Okay, so paper plates may not be as big a deal as penicillin, but can I use penicillin to put food on that’s not kosher? And for my grandchildren, I do things you wouldn’t do. My youngest granddaughter is too thin, so whatever she wants to eat, I’m very happy. And if she brings into my kitchen a baloney sandwich from someplace I don’t know, I put it on a paper plate. Should she want a little butter on a piece of pumpernickel, and if I should be so lucky, she also wants to taste my breaded veal cutlet, out come the paper plates. But I promise you, God, only for a grandchild who’s too thin, would I mix milchig and fleishig, and only on a paper plate.”
Once in a while, I’d make brownies from scratch following the recipe on the box of Baker’s unsweetened chocolate. But after melting, mixing, spilling, and licking, and after the brownies were baked, there’d only be enough for one brownie each for me, Tootsie, Ettie, and Mr. Goldberg.
Let me tell you something, don’t believe what recipes say about how many portions or how many cookies. Recipes aren’t written for Jews. If you’re Jewish, whatever they say will feed half that number.
ETTIE NEVER WROTE DOWN any recipes, so once for Mother’s Day I gave her a recipe box with index cards.
“Thank you very much but what am I supposed to do with this?” she asked.
“Ettie, you should write down how you make chicken soup, latkes, kugel, in case you get amnesia and can’t remember.”
“If I thought there were things I wouldn’t remember, I’d get amnesia in a hurry,” she said.
A few weeks later, I looked in the recipe box to see if she had written anything. Only one index card had writing. At the top of the card was written: Make sure never to make Ida Bernstein’s mock kishke recipe again.
Below that was the recipe for Ida Bernstein’s Mock Kishkes.
Whatever Ettie cooked, Mr. Goldberg ate as long as there was a bottle of Heinz ketchup on the table. He never worried about his big soup belly until one morning when Dr. Lewin, chief specialist of everything at Mount Sinai Hospital and a regular customer in the store, offered some free advice.
“Mr. Goldberg,” Dr. Lewin began, “it’s none of my business, but I think it would be wise for you to consider losing some weight.”
Dr. Lewin was a brave man. Nobody else ever told Mr. Goldberg what to do.
When Mr. Goldberg told Ettie what the doctor had said, she said, “So I’ll give you some free advice how to lose weight. Don’t eat so much. Don’t sit at the table and eat like it was your last meal. After a little of this and a little of that, say to yourself, ‘Thank you very much, but I’ve had enough.’ Also, have a little strawberry Jell-O or a little fruit cocktail for dessert instead of dessert. And it doesn’t hurt to take a walk once in a while.”
So Mr. Goldberg walked across the street to Duvanoy’s, bought a Linzer tart, and then went upstairs for his afternoon nap.
Fruit Salad is good enough for Carmen Miranda!
Not Ettie
GRANDCHILDREN
ETTIE WASN’T LIKE ANY of my friends’ grandmothers. She didn’t bake cookies with Tootsie and me. She didn’t knit us sweaters. She didn’t sing us lullabies or songs from Broadway shows. Her arms weren’t waiting for our hugs or to give us hugs. But Tootsie and I knew that she loved us.
Actually, I was sure that Ettie loved my sister best. Everybody loves the first child best. Even if the second child is adorable.
I wonder how different my life would have been if I had been the first child or first grandchild.
Tootsie had Veronica Lake wavy blonde hair with a dip over her left eye, eyes like light blue marbles, and long red fingernails that always matched her Revlon lipstick.
She had a voluptuous figure. Deliverymen whistled at her in the street and yelled out, “Hubba, hubba.”
But her nose had a teeny, tiny bump she obsessed over, so she never felt pretty. Ettie was always telling her, “Don’t worry about the size of your nose. The bigger it is, the better you can smell a flower.”
Everybody else in the world thought Tootsie was just gorgeous.
A nose is a nose is a nose. Gertrude Stein said that and she was Jewish.
Besides the teeny, tiny bump in her nose, Tootsie had another problem. Me. Firstborn children seem to have that problem with the second child. “Why are you here?” they wonder. It never occurred to me at the time that being a first child came with its own set of problems. I had my own problems.
The five-year difference in our ages could have been a generation. Tootsie didn’t have to buy dresses with Peter Pan collars and puffed sleeves.
Tootsie got whatever she wanted from Ettie, even a black dress with a sweetheart neckline.
Tootsie could go to the movies with a friend and didn’t have to sit in the children’s section.
Tootsie knew things I wanted to know. She knew how to raise one eyebrow, and she had kissed a boy.
Tootsie was old enough to work in the store in the summer. I wasn’t. Ettie didn’t know what to do with me. One customer suggested a summer camp in Smithfield, Maine, where I could take horseback riding lessons. Only three hundred dollars a week.
Great idea, Ettie said, and sent me to Cejwin Camp in Port Jervis, New York. Cejwin stood for Central Jewish Institute. It was kosher and cost three hundred dollars for the whole summer. Ettie sent me there every summer. “Thank you, God,” she said, “for the big lake between the boys side and the girls side so I don’t have to worry.”
The first summer I was away, Ettie wrote me a letter I found many years later. It was stuck in the back of an old leather photo album.
Every time I compared myself to Tootsie, which was just about every day, I felt awful.
Every morning before school I complained to Ettie about the way I looked. My hair wasn’t right, a pimple was starting, my nose and ears were growing, and worse.
“There is nothing wrong with how you look,” she would say. “Even Rita Hayworth doesn’t look so good in the morning.
“If you spent as much time thinking about what was going on on your insides instead of your outsides,” Ettie would say, “you’d be a lot better off. Look at Emma Lazarus. She’s no beauty and they made a big statue of her right in front of New York. Now that’s a woman. She’s Jewish, you know.”
Dear God, maybe you know somebody who could make a movie about Emma Lazarus so everybody should know she’s Jewish because even my g
randdaughter doesn’t know.
To Ettie, not only did the Statue of Liberty have a poem on it by Emma Lazarus but it was of Emma Lazarus.
“You don’t have to work so hard to get beautiful,” Ettie said. “How many men would pay even a nickel to sit under a hot hair dryer for an hour every week just to get their hair like Tyrone Power?
“You think you can start out with a ten-cent ring from Woolworth’s, pay somebody to shine it up at a beauty parlor, and people will think it’s from Tiffany’s?
“Only that guy with the big glasses can go into a telephone booth and come out looking like Superman.”
Not even Mr.Goldberg . . .
That same week, I found out I needed eyeglasses because I was nearsighted and braces on my teeth because they were buck.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Ettie told me. “There’s already been a Jewish Miss America. Now we need a Jewish woman President—so go do your homework!”
Bess Meyerson, 1945
I was particularly jealous of Tootsie’s bosom, but again Ettie told me not to worry. “Be grateful if your bosom looks like an ironing board. You’ll always know that a man who falls in love with you loves you for your mind and not just because you have big titties. Who needs to schlep around an extra ten pounds anyway?”
To Tootsie she said, “Be proud of your big bosom. A man doesn’t want a woman whose front looks like her back.”
Nobody knows the color of her eyes.
While I worried about my bosom, Ettie worried about my bas mitzvah. She wanted Tootsie and me to have a Jewish education.
Everyone needs to believe in something. I have always been able to count on my faith in the power of Vaseline, chicken soup, and the Talmud.
Works good all over
AN EDUCATION
TOOTSIE WAS SEVENTEEN, past the conventional age to be bas mitzvahed. To me was going the honor.
Temple Emanu-El, the fanciest temple in New York, was on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, a block away from the store.
Every day Rabbi Perilman, the head rabbi at Temple Emanuel, came into the store to buy the Wall Street Journal. Even though he was a Reform rabbi, he made a good impression on Mr. Goldberg. He always paid for the paper, unlike certain other customers who thought they were too important to pay the five cents.
Mr. Goldberg, however, would never step foot in Temple Emanu-El because the men didn’t wear yarmulkes and the organ and choir made him feel like he was in a church. Mr. Goldberg went to Congregation Zichron Ephraim, the Orthodox temple on 67th Street between Lexington and Third avenues. He only went on the High Holidays. “Thank God that’s over,” he always said after the service.
Temple Emanu-El
A Reform temple is better than nothing.
Ettie always reminded Rabbi Perilman when the next Jewish holiday was, just in case.
One day Ettie whispered to Rabbi Perilman about her granddaughter, me, whose mother had died and whose father was no good and had disappeared, and that’s how I became a scholarship student at Temple Emanu-El.
Sunday school at Temple Emanu-El meant I had to sit where Mrs. Burstein, the teacher, made me—between Rachel Kaplan and Sheri Rubinstein, who were best friends. Rachel’s parents took her to Broadway shows and they sat in the sixth row, center. Sheri had a charm bracelet with charms that moved. You can imagine how I felt about Sundays.
To be bas mitzvahed from Temple Emanu-El, you had to be fourteen and they called it being confirmed. Ettie was planning a confirmation lunch for me at the Alrae Hotel on 64th Street. The manager of the restaurant in the hotel was a customer and, after Ettie talked to him about my situation, he said he would give her a good price if everybody came for an early lunch before his regulars.
Twenty people came and said mazel tov. My sister said my slip was showing. Ettie and Mr. Goldberg stood and didn’t eat. The Alrae Hotel was treif. A waiter walked around with pigs in a blanket.
I should eat a pig? If I was starving, I’d stay starving.
Ettie bought me a Jewish star necklace as a confirmation present. Two weeks later the clasp broke and I lost the necklace.
When I told Ettie I had lost the necklace, I started crying. “Maideleh,” she said, “don’t cry about such a thing. It’s not your fault. Nothing is your fault. Save your tears. There’ll be time for tears when you’re older.”
If I wanted something from Ettie, the best way to get it was to let her think it had something to do with being Jewish. That’s how I had my ears pierced. May 14, 1948, the day that Israel became a state, gave me a perfect opportunity.
Me: Ettie, I’m so happy Israel has become a state. So can you take me to get my ears pierced?
Ettie: So one thing has to do with the other, tell me? And who do you think you are anyway, a gypsy?
Me: Please?
Ettie: People will think you’re Italian.
Me: Please, Please?
Ettie: People will think you just got off the boat.
Me: Ettie, please, all my friends are doing it.
Ettie: So all your friends are jumping in the lake, you’re going to?
Me: Please!!!!!!
Ettie: You want a hole in your ear? Mr. Goldberg will say you have a hole in your head.
Me: Please, please, please, please! P L E A S E !!!!!!!!
Ettie: Putting holes in your ears will make you happy?
Me: Oh, yes, Ettie. For Israel. I’ll never ask for another thing.
Ettie: Bist mesliugeh. Okay. For Israel. Something to celebrate! Okay, we’ll call the doctor. But don’t let Mr. Goldberg ever know.
One time I had to write a paper in a high school English class about who I saw when I looked in the mirror. I asked Ettie, “So who do you see when you look in the mirror?”
“Who do you think I see,” she said, “Lana Turner? I see a worried Jewish woman.”
Being Jewish was not the first thing I thought about when I looked in the mirror. What I saw was a teenage girl with glasses, braces on her teeth, Tangee on her lips, wearing her first bra, pink, 32AA.
I was growing older and changing. Ettie was growing old, but she couldn’t change.
LOVE
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, I fell madly in love with Mario, the delivery boy for Jesse’s Kosher Butcher on Third Avenue. He had his own bicycle. He delivered chickens to Ettie every Friday morning.
But my romance never had a chance. I knew that if Ettie ever found out I was madly in love with the butcher’s delivery boy who wore a cross around his neck, she’d give up chicken and then kill herself.
Ettie’s worst fear was that Tootsie or I would become pregnant—by an Italian. Her third cousin Ida’s daughter Rachel eloped with an Italian boy named Tony and Ida never heard from her daughter again.
Ettie once caught me kissing a date behind the stacks of Sunday newspapers that were stored in the downstairs hallway.
She told my date that he should say good-bye and go home to his mother. She told me: “Keep going the way you’re going, young lady, and you’re going to get in big trouble and ruin your life and have to leave the country like Ingrid Bergman. Even worse, I’ll tell Mr. Goldberg! I know about these things. First comes holding hands, then the kiss, then a lot of kisses and the touching, and before you know it, off come the clothes. Then things happen you don’t want to know.”
Big Scandal: Movie star Ingrid Bergman, married and a mother, has affair with Italian director Rossellini, gets pregnant, is denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and leaves country in shame.
“Oh, Ettie, weren’t you ever young? Weren’t you ever in love?” I asked her.
“What do you think,” she answered. “I was always an old lady by the cash register? Just a while ago, I had a dream. Gregory Peck, a big movie star, calls me up. He wants I should go out with him Friday night.”
“On Shabbat?” I say.
“But it’s Gregory Peck and I always admire tall, dark, and handsome men like Robert Taylor, so I say yes.
“
Friday night, he brings me a corsage and we go dancing. Then he asks me to go steady so I don’t tell him about Mr. Goldberg.
“Then I woke up because I could smell the soup burning.”
So God, you made us dream so we’d have something else to laugh and cry about?
The only boy Tootsie ever dated was that boy from Westchester, even after they had each found out the other one had no money.
One day I got home from school early and surprised Tootsie and the boy on the couch. I saw her pulling down her shirt. But I could still tell her bra wasn’t hooked.
The boy gave me a look. He didn’t like me either.
Sex played no part in Ettie’s life. She had three grown children. That was enough with under the covers. What she and Mr. Goldberg did in bed now was he snored and she worried.
But one night as I passed her bedroom door, I overheard her: “Oy, oy, oy. It hurts. I can’t breathe. Oy, oy, oy. I’ll have to wash and iron the sheets again.”
Mr. Goldberg, put your clothes on. Where do you think you are?
After she graduated from high school, Tootsie found a job as a gofer in the garment district. The job lasted only three days. Mr. Levy, the owner, had made a pass at her. She ran crying into the bathroom and stayed there until five o’clock.
She told Ettie what happened and that she was worried about what Mr. Levy would think. “Never worry what anybody thinks. Only worry what God thinks,” Ettie told her.
The Smartest Woman I Know Page 2