A political poem in political times

What To Do

Read Mary Oliver over and over. Read Jane Eyre, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nancy Drew, the book by Louise Nevelson where she says I think that there is such a thing as energy, creation overflowing. Make apple cake with raisins and spices. Change the towels. Change the sheets. Change the locks. Go to Duke Gardens and see if the water lilies are still in bloom, if the Japanese bridge is still painted red. Call Coach and complain about the bag where the zipper placket tore. Repot the houseplants. Eat salted cashews, yogurt with stewed blueberries, dark chocolate. Say a rosary. Sweep the floor. Find the prayer card of Saint Lucy. Purge shoes and earrings and scarves. Look at the photographs of one grandmother a widow, the other in a housedress, neither of them smiling. Listen to Barbra Streisand sing I’d Rather be Blue in Funny Girl. Listen to Fanny Brice singing it first in 1928. Go to see Gaspard & Dancers with Jane. Walk with Lynn. Walk with Sally. Walk with April. Keep walking. Look at Georgia O’Keeffe’s White Flower, blowing up in your face. Remember when Betty Friedan debated Phyllis Schlafly, how Betty lunged forward and rose up from her chair. Remember hearing Adrienne Rich, Tillie Olsen, Gloria Steinem, Nikki Giovanni. Remember Ethel Merman belting out the revival of Annie Get Your Gun. Remember how Annie missed the shot to get her man. Remember being told don’t let the boys hear you say that and it’s so nice when that first one is a boy. Remember pushing out children into the world. Remember the truth you are telling all the time. Remember how much you had hoped things would change. Remember it, remember it all, and rage on, rage on, rage on, rage on, rage on.

Goodbye, Philip Roth

As a reader, a writer, a woman, and a feminist, I can't seem to pass up this opportunity to weigh in on Philip Roth, who died this week at the age of 85. Not that I am a Rothian scholar -- I read only a modest fraction of his considerable oeuvre: Goodbye Columbus (maybe just the title story), Portnoy, per my reading list The Prague Orgy back in 1985 (no memory of that book whatsoever), and more memorably his two slim volumes of memoir, Patrimony and The Facts.  I also devoured the post-divorce tell-all by his second wife Claire Bloom, Leaving a Doll's House, where to quote the New York Times review and to put it mildly, she paints him as a "self-centered misogynist." But plenty of ink has already been spilled on the subject of Philip Roth and women, particularly Jewish women (see, for example, Philip Roth Hated Jewish Women) so I don't feel much need to add my voice to that chorus. And anyway, how can anyone possibly compete with Vivian Gornick's observation "If in Bellow misogyny was like seeping bile, in Roth it was lava pouring forth from a volcano"??? Not even gonna try.

But I did want to say that in a world where the voices of men still are the voices that are listened to, where the perspective of men still predominates, I remain more interested in the voices of women (not disinterested in the voices of men, just more interested in the voices of women). So maybe it is not exactly surprising that not long before Roth's death I was going through my overstuffed folder of reviews and clippings of books I might want to read someday and came upon a "bibliography of books by and about jewish women" -- hipster lack of capitalization theirs -- that I tore from a 1983 issue of the "radical feminist periodical" (you nailed it Wiki) Off Our Backs.

I've read a number of books from that list over the years, but on that day I was drawn to Jewish Grandmothers, edited by Sydelle Kramer and Jenny Masur, and published by Boston's Beacon Press in 1976. According to OOB the book contains "Ten autobiographical accounts of Jewish women who came to America early in the twentieth century" with "each chapter a refutation of the stereotype."

My hunch that that no local library would have a copy of this little-known book turned out to be correct, so I ordered a used copy online, which I was in the process of reading when my phone sent me a push with the news of Roth's death. What irony -- in fact, the inside flap of the dust jacket actually refers to Alexander Portnoy himself:

These ten women, immigrants from Eastern Europe who came to America between the turn of the century and the 1920s, now give a public so long accustomed to Portnoy's complaint a chance to hear the whole story.

  Back cover of Jewish Grandmothers

So thank you Fannie Shapiro, Sarah Rothman, Rose Soskin, Pearl Moscowitz, Katya Govsky, Anuta Sharrow, Mollie Linker, Beatrice Pollock, Ida Richter, and Ruth Katz for raising your voices and sharing your stories. As Rothman puts it in her very first sentence: "I was thinking, if I could only write a book, I would have so much to tell."

And while I'm at it, thank you, too, Kveller, for your article this week Ten Writers Not Named Philip Roth Capturing the Female American Jewish Experience.

So many women's voices, so much to tell.

A Salad Bowl and Things in my Mother's House

Throughout my childhood the salad at any special occasion was served in a bowl shaped like a giant lettuce leaf, stamped "Made in Portugal" on the bottom.

And now that my mother has moved into an apartment at a retirement community and the children (there are four of us but it is mostly my sister and me) are taking things left behind in the house, the salad bowl is now in my own home, sitting atop the low bookcase Dan built in our little home office, visible to me every day. 

Unimaginable really that it should be in my house at all, so completely do I connect it with my parents, with their life together. It should be on the dining room table at 342 North Columbus Avenue in Mount Vernon, the room with the flocked velvet red and gold wallpaper, with my Aunt Rosie or Aunt Frances sitting in those ornate carved chairs my mother loved so well, chairs that none of us, we must confess, wanted, and are now in the hands of a consignor, waiting to be sold. Italian-Americans usually served the salad after the meal, right on the same plate from which they just eaten their macaroni or lasagna, the oil and red wine vinegar mixing with the gravy, which is what we always called tomato sauce until everyone got more Americanized. And that is how salad was served from this bowl, right onto the dinner plate, before coffee and dessert.

I told my mother I had taken the bowl. "Oh good," she said. (She is unfailingly pleased whenever we take something from her house. In her perfect world, every last chair, lamp, cup, napkin, tablecloth and plate would go to her children and grandchildren.) "Didn't you say you got it as an engagement or wedding gift?" I encourage her to remember. "Yes," she said, adding ruefully, "but I can't remember which." I press on. "And who gave it to you? " Not an Italian, right? It looks so Anglo," Anglo being an all-purpose term for anything un-Italian-American. No, my mother quickly agrees, not an Italian. "Didn't you tell me that Sherman Lichtman and his wife gave it to you and dad?" Dr. Lichtman was a Jewish dentist my Aunt Marie worked for as a dental hygienist, back when a hygienist was simply a young woman with a high school degree who learned on the job. But my mother is not sure, and the certain identity of the occasion and the giver, more than 60 years in the past, have in fact slipped away forever. 

My mother took good care of the bowl. Ceramics are notoriously vulnerable to chipping, yet the bowl has only a single tiny chip barely visible on its rim. I have not used it yet, can't bring myself to, not sure I will. So there it sits in my house, on top of the bookcase, between two glass vases and a stack of CDs, where it should, and and at the same time shouldn't, be.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: From the postcard collection

There is a pinhole at the top of my postcard of the young Edna St. Vincent Millay, framed by a magnolia, her head in profile, in a dress that must be linen because of its wonderful wrinkling, square mother-of-pearl buttons down the front. 

The pinhole. I think I tacked the card onto a bulletin board in my first-year dorm room when I was in college. And before college and the postcard and the pinhole, one summer in high school, in Vermont, I read through the entire Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, straight through, one after another, all 800-something pages. I loved the fact she was from Maine, that she first achieved fame at the tender age of 19 with her poem Renascence, which won a prize and was published in 1912. Of course it rhymed, all 200 lines worth, somewhat purple-prosy, but I loved it then and I love it now; I can still recite a fair bit of the beginning, in my head, in places like the dentist's chair:

     All I can see from where I stood
     Was three long mountains and a wood;
     I turned and looked the other way,
     And saw three islands in a bay. . .

and I am 15 again, holding that teal-green volume from the town library in my hands, sitting outside, reading reading, longing to write myself, longing to express the things I'm starting to feel about the world, longing to grow up.



I'm grown up now, and I've learned, been told, that Millay was not a great American poet but merely a good one, a popular poet, very, in her time. I know from that big fat absorbing biography of her that I read, Savage Beauty, published in 2002, that later in life she had a terrible drug addiction (she kept careful records of what she took so we know exactly how terrible), that she died after falling downstairs at Steepletop, her home in rural New York, at the age of 58, alone, the year after her husband died. But her lyric verse still charms me, still transports me back to my girlhood, and I still love the magnolia-framed photograph of her, a moment captured in time, how pretty she was with her hair swept back in a loose bun, some of the magnolia blossoms not quite yet open.