The Wine Lover's Daughter Read online

  I am every bit as much the milkshake lover’s daughter as I am the wine lover’s daughter. My mother provided many things my father couldn’t: comparative youth (she was twelve years his junior); an easy rapport with my middle-school friends (if there had been a MotherDaughter Picnic, I would have brought her); an appreciation for all-American pleasures like root beer and the Academy Awards (from her days on the MGM lot, she knew lots of gossip about the older actors); a matter-of-fact attitude toward sex and bodily functions (on a European trip with our father while Kim and I were at summer camp, she mailed us variously textured samples of toilet paper, one from each city, for our amusement and cultural edification); a love of nature (on Florida vacations, she organized midnight expeditions to stinky mudflats where, flashlights in hand, we patrolled the sand for king’s crown conchs while our father lay in bed, reading Book-of-the-Month Club galleys). When he was out of town, she took us to Shakey’s, where we listened to honky-tonk piano and ate pizza, a food he reviled, both because it was eaten with the hands (vulgar and unsanitary) and because it contained garlic (vulgar and foul-tasting). She was less worried about money. She didn’t put herself down.

  But when I addressed my letters from Paris to The Clifton Fadimans, I may have been onto more than I knew. Marriage and children effaced my mother’s former self, or at least the part that had thumbed its nose at conventional gender roles. She missed the career she had given up—by her own choice, in the sneakily cruel manner of those prefeminist times, which arranged things so that there was no one to blame but yourself, though you ended up blaming your husband anyway. In the early years of their marriage, she spent a lot of time giving dinner parties for my father’s friends and typing the scripts for the shows he hosted, first on radio, then on television. (Her days in the MGM steno pool had left her with crackerjack secretarial skills.) Although my father participated with greater enthusiasm than most men of his era in the more congenial aspects of parenthood, such as making up stories about bibliophilic worms, she was the one who drove us to school, buckled our galoshes, and coaxed foul-tasting medicines down our throats when we had earaches. Interviewers—invariably his, though she had once had plenty of her own—referred to her, if they mentioned her work at all, as “a newshen,” “an authoress,” and “as pretty a gal correspondent as ever strummed a portable.” Even when she was in her seventies, a reporter remarked that she was “cute as a bug’s navel.”

  Within my parents’ imperfect but interesting marriage, wine was always an area of accord. Having wooed her with rum cocktails (or milkshakes), my father successfully introduced her to wine, which she enjoyed in a cheerful, unassuming, nothing-to-prove way. They shared at least a half bottle, and for many years a full one, every night with dinner. My mother was no connoisseur, but it is true that she once told him, after they drank a La Tâche ’49 as guests of his old college friend Mortimer Adler—who had become, as my father approvingly put it, “the only practicing philosopher in history able to make money in respectable quantities”—that it was the best wine she had ever tasted. In fact, at my brother’s twenty-first birthday party, it is entirely possible that my father and John Laird were not the only ones who could appreciate the La Tâche ’47, not to mention the Romanée-Conti ’34, the Latour ’45, the Sherry Royal Vintage 1862, and the Port 1840 (sans nom).

  13

  Jew

  Earlier in these pages, I enumerated the reasons why my father loved wine. Here is one more: Wine wasn’t Jewish.

  I have rarely mentioned to a Jew that I was writing about my father and wine without being told, “Of course, Jews don’t drink!”—an observation often tendered as said Jew raises his or her glass of wine in mock-toast. One friend told me that whenever a relative drinks too much champagne at a wedding, her family calls him Joe Goy. Another, a klezmer musician, said, “Right! Shiker iz der goy.”

  “What?”

  “‘Shiker Iz der Goy.’ It’s a famous Yiddish folk song. It means ‘The Gentile Is Drunk.’”

  I found it later in a book called Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants, a title my father would never have wanted on his shelves. Here is a translation of the first two verses:

  The gentile goes into the tavern.

  He drinks a glass of wine there.

  Oy, the gentile is drunk.

  He’s drunk, he has to drink,

  Because he’s a gentile.

  The Jew goes into the house of study.

  He looks into a book there.

  Oy, the Jew is sober.

  He’s sober, he has to study,

  Because he’s a Jew.

  In other words, if you drink a glass of wine, you can’t be Jewish. Q.E.D.

  To my father, it didn’t matter whether this was true, just whether it was perceived as true. And the perception was that Jews knew nothing about wine. If they drank at all, they drank Manischewitz. The only wine he ever unequivocally dissed in print was “a certain beverage that advertises itself on the car cards and subway posters of New York City as ‘the wine you can cut with a knife.’” He called it “bottled syrup.” He did not name the syrup, but why was I not surprised to find out that it was Schapiro’s Kosher Wine, pressed from sweet Concord grapes in the basement of a tenement on the Lower East Side?

  When I was growing up, the whole idea of Jewishness was deeply mysterious. I was brought up in a household so nonreligious (not antireligious, since religion was never criticized, merely absent) that I resembled a child who has been raised in an excessively antiseptic environment—Lysol on the counters, Phisohex on the hands—and has therefore developed no immunities. My mother was of Scots Presbyterian stock with more recent ancestral detours into Mormonism, but the operative fact was that, like my father, she was an agnostic. (They weren’t atheists. That would have betrayed their shared commitment to rationality, since how could you know for sure?) My father once wrote that he was so devoid of religious feeling that “it is as though the Great Monosyllable were a nonsense word, like xbyabt.” The only vaguely pious term he ever used was “Blessings,” the last word he said whenever he bade farewell to a family member. But it was always clear that he was the one doing the blessing.

  If xbyabt was not immanent in our home, neither was much sense of identification with our father’s branch of the family. Our mother could talk for hours about her ancestors, chief among them the great-grandfather who traveled to Utah in a wagon train, maintained three wives in three separate households, and at one point had thirteen children under the age of fourteen. She could have drawn a verdant family tree. Our father told us amusing stories about growing up in Brooklyn; his humble beginnings were an important part of his self-deprecatory arsenal. Like James Thurber’s winsomely baroque family of flakes and screwballs, the relatives who were part of his childhood were comic fodder: the cousin who could read at age three and had a nervous breakdown at twenty-five; the uncle who was 4′7″ (though my father once admitted, “I think I was being malicious when I told you that—he was four eight easy”). But on the rare occasions when his more distant family history came up, he knew few details and, as far as I could see, had little desire to learn more. He once mentioned that three of his aunts had been killed by Cossacks in a pogrom, but he didn’t know their names. He didn’t even know the names of his grandparents. How could anyone not know that?

  His parents had been freethinkers, mildly socialist and strongly secular. I asked him once if his family had celebrated Hanukkah, and he looked at me as if I had asked whether they had eaten raccoons. Jewish parents who name their sons Edwin, Clifton, and William are conveying a pretty clear message.

  My maternal grandmother—a retired librarian whose uncle had been the mayor of Salt Lake City—lived near us and was my favorite babysitter, but my paternal grandparents hovered on the remotest periphery of my consciousness. Bettemi, who had taken the goyish name Grace after her marriage, died before I was born. Isadore lived until I was ten, but I met him only once. I’m sure my father was a
shamed of his father’s accent, his lack of education, his proletarian manners, his palpable Jewishness. And where had he learned shame? From his father. Whenever Grace spoke Yiddish, Isadore had winced; he considered it inferior to Russian, which he spoke well and she spoke poorly. The Fadimans had fashioned a little daisy chain of shame: The father was ashamed of the wife and the son was ashamed of the father, though the only one who was ashamed of the son was himself.

  I don’t remember hearing the phrase “bat mitzvah” until I was well beyond bat mitzvah age. At school, my class of sixty had 1.5 Jews; the .5 was not chummy with the 1. When I was invited to a Shabbat dinner by a girl I had met through my YMCA group—it had attempted to foster ecumenical sisterhood by introducing the Christians (us) to some teenagers from a local synagogue (them)—the noodle kugel seemed far more exotic than the Rumaki Puu Puu served at the Islander, a “Polynesian” restaurant on La Cienega, disdained by our father but beloved by the rest of the family, that featured fake thunderstorms every hour. When Kim and I were told we were going to have a new tennis instructor, I had no idea that it was because the old one, doubtless chosen by our mother, worked at a Jewish country club, and the new one, doubtless chosen by our father, worked at a gentile club. In the larger world, I could never tell who was Jewish. Aside from names—names were easy, they were words—I couldn’t even begin to guess what kinds of cues other people’s radar picked up. When I read Hamlet in twelfth grade, I remember asking myself: What about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? They sound Jewish, but they can’t be! Or can they? Is there such a thing as a Jewish Dane? Are they wicked and foolish because Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, and if so, does everybody know that but me?

  A cousin of mine once hired a researcher in Minsk to look into the Fadiman genealogy and learned that for three generations in what is now Belarus, our ancestors were named either Fadiman or Fodiman, which seem to have been used interchangeably. (I was disappointed. I had hoped that my real name had at least five syllables, something along the lines of Feydimanovsky.) My father was undoubtedly grateful that his last name was ethnically ambiguous. He didn’t have to anglicize or shorten it, unlike some of his friends and their families. George Novack was once Yasef Mendel Novograbelsky; Felix Morrow was once Felix Mayrowitz. Diana Trilling tells the story of the Columbia philosophy professor who made a pointed comment about Morrow’s distinguished last name. “I wouldn’t know about that,” Morrow replied pleasantly. “I’m the first in my family to bear it.”

  In the early 1970s, the writer David Wallace, the son of my father’s friend Irving Wallace, went in the other direction and changed his name to David Wallechinsky, his family’s original name. My father thought this was lunatic. Roots were for cutting off, not for reattaching. Who in his right mind would choose to be named Wallechinsky? At the time I thought his sputterings were hilarious, but I now see that they had a sharp edge. He was angry at David for thumbing his nose at the pain his father’s generation—my father’s generation—had suffered.

  Much has been written about the anti-Semitism of gentiles in the first half of the twentieth century, but not so much about the self-alienation of Jews—not all, not even the majority, but a large number of secular intellectuals that included my father and many of his friends. It led to such farcical moments as my father telling Diana Trilling, when they were reminiscing about a literary magazine to which both he and Lionel had contributed, “I don’t think we thought of it as a Jewish journal.” They were talking about The Menorah Journal. This was like saying they didn’t think of Canoe & Kayak as a magazine about boats. Lionel once declared in the Contemporary Jewish Record, “I know of no writer in English who has added a micromillimeter to his stature by ‘realizing his Jewishness.’” Today this sounds like denial bordering on paranoia, but whenever I have the urge to go back in time and tell them to knock it off, I remind myself that I don’t have a clue what they were up against and never will.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, fewer than 10 percent of Columbia’s students were Jews. By the time my father arrived at Columbia in 1920, the figure had risen to 40 percent. I learned this only recently, and it surprised me: I had always assumed his circle was a small, beleaguered minority. I was wrong about the small part. Columbia had more Jews than any other Ivy League school because it was in New York City, into which, starting in the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants had poured. This was a problem, because Jews—especially Eastern European Jews, my father’s strain, as compared with German Jews, who were considered more cultivated—were viewed as uncouth strivers with iffy personal hygiene and the potential, as Columbia’s dean put it, of making the university “socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement.” (The dean was careful to add that after a generation or two in adequate social surroundings, Jews could become “entirely satisfactory companions.”)

  A fraternity song from the 1910s went like this:

  Oh, Harvard’s run by millionaires

  And Yale is run by booze

  Cornell is run by farmers’ sons

  Columbia’s run by Jews.

  A later verse contained the lines “And when the little sheenies die / Their souls will go to hell.”

  The challenge was where they went before they died—specifically, when they were around eighteen years old. How could they be discreetly steered away from Morningside Heights, to which the subway so conveniently led from the Lower East Side and Brooklyn? Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, had a few ideas. Starting in 1919, he required applicants to state their religious affiliation, specify their father’s birthplace, and submit a photograph. He introduced non-academic criteria—including “straightforwardness,” “clean-mindedness,” “public spirit,” and “geographical range,” along with a psychological examination designed to winnow out swots whose ambition exceeded their “native intelligence”—that allowed the university more wiggle room in its admissions decisions. His new dean wrote, “We have honestly attempted to eliminate the lowest grade of applicant and it turns out that a good many of the low grade men are New York City Jews.” Two years after my father arrived, the proportion of Jews in the incoming class had been successfully reduced to 22 percent. If he had been two years younger, would he have been admitted? Or would he have ended up at City College (more than 80 percent Jewish)?

  No matter how brilliant they were, my father and his circle could not shrug off the label. When he was in his seventies, he sent me a 1927 essay by Mark Van Doren called “Jewish Students I Have Known.” It was a series of sketches of seven undergraduates, referred to by letters, whom Van Doren had recently taught at Columbia. In an accompanying note, my father provided a key:

  A = Henry Rosenthal

  B = Clifton Fadiman

  C = Meyer Schapiro

  D = John Gassner

  E = Herbert Solow

  F = Lionel Trilling

  G = Charles Prager

  C was erudite and loquacious, F fastidious and melancholy. B was worldly and amusing, a gifted mimic with a mischievous tongue and the air of having read everything ever written. “His tongue did not wait to strike; it was always playing,” wrote Van Doren. “B could adjust himself to any condition. He could pick up any extra money he needed; he could impress any superior; he could write on any subject.” (In his note, my father observed, “The portrait of me is inaccurate in many respects. Mark did not see that I was scared, impractical, sentimental. Which, of course, I still am.”) There is not a single negative word in Van Doren’s essay, but reading it is an odd experience. It’s like a field guide to an exotic but unappreciated bird species compiled by an ornithologist who is highly pleased with himself for noticing identifying features (iridescent plumage! forked tail! curved beak!) that others have overlooked.

  When Van Doren’s birds were at Columbia, there were four Jewish faculty members. Jews were viewed as clever and industrious, but their brand of diligence (a trait one Harvard observer called “underliving and overworking”) was not wha
t Ivy League humanities departments were looking for. How could an uncultured person transmit culture? In New Haven, an aspiring English professor was informed, “Mr. Cohen, you are a very competent young man, but it is hard for me to imagine a Hebrew teaching the Protestant tradition to young men at Yale.” (Elliot Cohen managed to dust himself off and become the founding editor of Commentary.) It was said that another Mr. Cohen—a philosopher named Morris who ended up at City College—was turned down for a Yale position because he did not know how to wear a dinner jacket.

  My father, who had overworked but not underlived and, by the time he finished college, probably knew how to wear a dinner jacket, started graduate school at Columbia with the hope of being appointed to the English faculty, which (in the words of Alfred Kazin, a City College man) was “as crowded with three-barreled Anglican names as the House of Bishops”: Harry Morgan Ayres, Jefferson Butler Fletcher, George Philip Knapp, William Witherle Lawrence, George Dinsmore Odell, William Peterfield Trent. Joining them would allow my father to spend the rest of his life studying literature, the only thing he loved as much as wine. It would also constitute the ultimate proof that he had crossed the river.

  One day the head of the department informed him, “We have room for only one Jew, and we have chosen Mr. Trilling.”

  My father never got over that moment. Many years later, he wrote that he had always dreamed of being “a scholar, perhaps even a college professor” but had instead ended up in “activities that have resulted in my becoming a kind of hemi-demi-semi-professor, or perhaps only a hemi-demi-semi-quasi-professor.” Because he made more money and became more famous than any professor, his readers doubtless assumed that this was just another volley of false self-deprecation. It wasn’t. He said he lacked the brains, but the real reason he didn’t get the job was that he lacked the pedigree.