Many years ago, as a single woman living in NYC, I would spend an occasional Saturday afternoon with my mother. A little shopping, a little eating, a little walking. On one visit, we sat at the dining table that dominated my two-room studio on the Upper West Side and, with absolute nonchalance, she removed a diamond pendant from her neck and placed it on mine.
“I want to see you wear this while I’m still alive,” she said. A hard-working woman, she coveted diamonds for reasons far beyond their beauty and preciousness. A diamond ring or a pendant was something, yes, to adorn herself with on a night out; but something less tangible more than tripled its monetary worth, namely the recognition that valuable jewels would be passed on to her daughter and son, who would then pass them on to their own children.
On this particular day there was a subtext, unspoken. I’d been suffering, in the aftermath of an oral surgeon’s incompetence. In one fell swoop, she turned the diamond into a talisman, hopefully with the power to protect me.
This past weekend the daughter of a cousin of mine became a Bat Mitzvah. She sparkled during the service, from her glittery shoes to her ballerina dress to a small pendant around her neck. And her words, echoing the wisdom of a thirteen-year old (whose tongue barely missed a trope in her chanting), sparkled as well.
It was a ceremony and celebration made all the more poignant by the presence of her grandmother (my aunt) in a wheelchair, a shadow of her usually imposing self. Cancer does that to a person. There was an added poignancy for me, the timing of it all one week before the Jewish New Year. These holidays always seem to be the true marker of a mother – the cooking, enough food for an army, nothing subtle about the nudging weeks ahead: you’ll be here – right? In families like mine, traditions diluted with each passing generation, observance would become an assumption, more cultural and sentimental than religious in nature. We do the best we can to keep traditions alive. To remember.
Which brings me to two books in which journeys and mothers play a central part.
Felice’s Worlds, recently published, is essentially Henry Massie’s homage to his mother, a Jewish woman born in Poland who, through circumstance and her father’s prodding, was one step ahead of where the Nazi regime would have placed her. The opening chapter finds Felice about to enter Palestine, 1935, a young woman in an arranged marriage, still in love with the man she is forced to leave behind along with the life they had planned (he a doctor, she an oral surgeon). She has a bit of leverage, too, beauty coupled with intelligence. As memoir, it gets off to a promising beginning but quickly falls into a chronologically driven framework with no real narrative voice to propel it along. The story of a Jewish woman who escapes the ravages of World War II and the Holocaust, only to find herself guilt-ridden about being a survivor – while amassing an extraordinary art collection – is a potentially compelling one that ends up being told in a less-than-compelling way.
Sometimes it has the feel of a son who wanted to make sure he got every bit of his mother’s extraordinary life chronicled. Sometimes it reads like the case notes of a psychiatrist (Massie’s profession). Once in a while Massie touches a nerve in his effort to understand things about his mother that he didn’t understand as a boy. And he certainly brings Felice to life via the spirit that really moves her to find her place in a new world, and, ultimately the world of art. Also, the questions Felice raises re: her own Judaism and assimilation vs. orthodoxy are important ones. And the way she comes to love and collect Abstract Expressionist art says a great deal about her: “There was no nostalgia in abstract expressionist art because it had never existed before. . . . It became my way of making myself at home in my new country without just assimilating myself into the comfortable existence that I saw around me.” It’s in the weaving of it all together that Massie falls short.
The heart and soul of David Grossman’s exquisitely poignant novel, To the End of the Land, is a mother who does what would seem counter-intuitive when her son, recently released from the Israeli army, voluntarily returns to the front for a major offensive. Rather than wait at home and risk that dreaded knock on the door from the “notifiers,” she embarks on a journey. It’s a simple premise, even if it takes a leap of logic and faith: bad news can only come if you’re home to receive it. She enlists a former lover to take this hike in the Galilee with her, pulling him from the life of a hermit he slipped into following his brutal torture as a POW years earlier. In the course of the journey, the son she is terrified of losing is kept alive via the stories she shares, ultimately rendering To the End of the Land a tale of revelation and reconciliation.
We are a ‘storying’ species — we live through stories, we pass them down to our children, we tell them in order to remember. Two stories, a novel rich and riddled with nuance, a memoir perhaps less than sparkling but no less profound in what it adds to the collective narrative told about mothers and the ways in which we glorify them, turn them into heroines, remember and reflect on them.
Photo © Abe Frajndlich
