BLVR: What did your grandmother say about the old country?
MS: She told me about how the Jew-haters would come
into her little grocery store and she would push her children down into
the cellar. They had a door that closed and they ransacked the whole
store. That was pre-Nazi. That was the Cossacks. She came from a little
Polish town. My love of Poland is very bleak to this day. I can hear her
stories in my head. It was very hard for her. Her husband died when he
was forty, which drove my mother crazy. She blamed his death on my
grandmother, which is why my grandmother sent her to America—shut up,
get outta here. So she came to America. A sixteen-year-old girl, alone.
She was told that there would be a pushcart dealer and his wife who
would rent her a room and she would have someone to talk to. But shortly
after she arrived, he was killed in an automobile accident. I don’t
know how she survived. I mean, of course she went nuts. They were all
nuts. I knew they were crazy when they came to the house. Crazy faces
and wild eyes.
BLVR: Did you have a sense of being American-plus?
MS: Yes. I was very happy to be an American. I loved
being here. I loved not being dead when I was a kid. And whenever a kid
died, when I was a kid, it was a very big thing; it reflected back on
the fact that my being here was arbitrary. My father coming here was
arbitrary. He didn’t have to come here. He came because he was chasing a
girl who had committed herself to every living human male in the
village. And he was the rabbi’s son! He had prestige and was extremely
handsome and devil-may-care. He came here and became a drudge. His
family was sitting shiva for him back in the old country because he had
done this terrible thing: chasing a girl, when your father is a rabbi,
and schlepping all the way to New York.
I remember reading that Anne Frank had a friend in America, in Idaho
or somewhere, and they exchanged letters. The girl wanted to know why
Anne couldn’t come and visit her. The idea that it would have taken only
a simple plane trip to save Anne’s life… and the little girl from Idaho
didn’t understand that. Why should she? It was very touching to me that
it was the plane trip that was the answer to everything. Anne’s death
was very hard. All the little-girl playmates that I had in Brooklyn
became little Anne Frank girls. And one of them actually became sick and
died. I was very confused. I saw that you could die, even in America.
That was hard.
So the childhoods of me and my brother and sister were complex. We
didn’t know who we were, and whatever we chose to be was seemingly in
opposition to what our parents wanted us to be. They wanted us to be
wealthy Americans. A doctor, a professor. My sister could be a rich
wife. Not much was expected from her, except that she marry well. My
sister was so intelligent, and she wanted so much to go to college, but
my mother and father said no, she was only a woman, it was a waste of
money. I hated the idea of college, and my father was furious because I
was the youngest and he could actually pay for me. I was in total
revolt. I hated school. I hated forcibly learning something. I had a few
understanding teachers who didn’t see me as an evil creature.
BLVR: So where did your curiosity and imagination manifest?
MS: My brother, who was five years my senior. A
wonderful, wonderful brother. And my sister. They stood guard over me.
They were like the parents I wanted, and behind them, the parents I
really had. I mistreated my parents because I didn’t understand their
troubles, and then it gets too late.
BLVR: Were they very anxious around you?
MS: Yes. Too anxious. Everything was hard,
everything was a problem, everything was a scolding. Everything was
you-did-something-wrong. You went around the block, you did something
wrong. You spoke to a strange person, you did something wrong. My mother
calling me to dinner, “You didn’t go to your brother today, and he’s
reading by himself in his room, what kind of brother are you?” He was my
savior. He was gentle and wonderful. We wrote stories and I illustrated
them on shirt cardboard. And when my relatives—these goofballs—came, he
would read the stories and I would hold up the pictures. He wrote a
wonderful story called “We Are Inseparable.” About a brother who falls
in love with his sister, which my brother did—Freud didn’t know from
Brooklyn, he never flew over Brooklyn—and they’re going to get married.
My parents didn’t think anything of it.
I remember that story, and I hated drawing the scene where they had
to kiss, because I couldn’t fit their faces together. And then at the
end—because in the back of his mind he knew something was wrong—the boy
is in an accident, with bandages like a mummy, and lying in a hospital
bed, and the parents are blocking the bed because she’s a banshee and is
going to come, and she rushes in and pushes them aside and jumps on
him, and they both hurl themselves out of the forty-second-floor window
of the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital screaming, “We are inseparable.” Ha! I
had such a good time drawing the bodies falling and smashing. Total
wreckage. It was his masterpiece.
BLVR: Did your family know they were crazy?
MS: No. But they led desperate lives. I remember
when my brother was dying, he looked at me, and his eyes were all teary.
And he said, “Why were we so unkind to Mama?” And I said, “Don’t do
that. We were kids, we didn’t understand. We didn’t know she was crazy.”
When I asked my best friend, Martin, to have lunch at my house, and my
mother walked through the room furiously—she was always furious—he said,
“Who’s that?” And I said, “We had to hire somebody.” I would not admit
it was my mother. And that shame has lasted all my life. That I didn’t
have the nerve to say, “That’s my mother; that’s how she is.”
No comments:
Post a Comment