Jewish Mothers Never Die Read online

  “Albert Cohen never got over your death. In Book of My Mother, he begs to see you again, and he does, in his dreams, long after you’re gone. Even when you’re hiding in a tiny village under a false identity, he feels as close to you as when the two of you lived together. He reproaches you for your selfishness in leaving him; he accuses you of not loving him anymore. And if my calculations are correct, Cohen was forty-four years old when you died. He was an adult and already famous! If he was unable to deal with his grief, imagine what a child like Nathan must be feeling!”

  Minnie leaned close to Rebecca:

  “Well, try thinking about our feelings! It was just as difficult for us to leave our children behind, to let go, and to realize their lives would go on fine without us. The others will tell you the same thing.”

  “The others?”

  “Oh, you’ll see; we aren’t the only ones here. There are plenty of mothers: Marcel Proust’s, Sigmund Freud’s, Romain Gary’s . . .”

  Rebecca let out a relieved burst of laughter. She was a mother, and she was Jewish. Did that automatically make her the Jewish mother of jokes and stories? Was her presence here among so many famous women proof that her son would be famous someday too?

  “Are there only Jewish mothers in this place?”

  “Not all Jewish mothers are Jewish,” opined Minnie. “Or mothers, either. My husband was a Jewish mother, just like you and me and everyone here. It’s an expression, that’s all: a synonym for being loving, devoted, heroic, possessive, demanding, paranoid, anxious, unbearable, nosy, and always obsessed with one’s children, from their food to their safety.”

  “So, you’re all Jewish too?”

  “That’s the way it is, don’t blame us,” said Louise.

  Minnie Marx was explaining that the concept of the “Jewish mother” was fairly recent. Starting in the early twentieth century, Jewish mothers were thought to be maternal, protective and loving. That was before American novelists like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth transformed them into “Yiddish mamas” better known for their stifling, even pathological fixation on their children.

  “Woody Allen helped on that score, too,” Rebecca added.

  “Jewish mothers didn’t only live in New York City, you know,” said Louise Cohen. “Albert wrote Book of My Mother in 1954, in France.”

  Minnie addressed Louise in the gentlest voice she could manage so as not to offend her:

  “Jewish mothers have always existed, it’s true: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Jochebed, the mother of Moses . . . As a concept, however, it’s an American invention that first became famous in 1964 with Dan Greenberg’s book: How to Be a Jewish Mother. That changed everything.”

  “Is Woody Allen’s mother here?” asked Rebecca.

  “No,” replied Louise.

  “You’ve never seen her anywhere?” she insisted.

  “Yes, but she didn’t stay with us for very long.”

  “Why? I’m a fan of Woody Allen.”

  “So am I,” agreed Minnie, but she said nothing more on the subject of this missing mother.

  Rebecca made a mental note to pursue the conversation later, at least to get some answers. Their explanations were not especially helpful. For the first time, her mind turned to her funeral. How many times had she wondered what it would be like? She could picture her best friend in tears, her colleagues speaking in hushed tones. The movie of her memorial service passed before her eyes. There were people crying, others who just came to sign the register, too rushed or too harried to take an hour out of their schedules. Family and friends surrounded her son. And even if, when she thought about that moment, she always imagined Nathan’s father, Anthony, racked with grief, she suspected that in reality he wouldn’t come at all. He had left her soon after Nathan’s birth and had never become close to his son. Still, she loved the idea of him in mourning because whenever his name came up, her hands shook, her chin trembled, her voice cracked, her heart raced and her thoughts became a jumbled mess. Eighteen years after they had met, she still had the same romantic feelings for him. She lost herself in thought again, imagining her son standing before the congregation at the synagogue to say a few heartfelt and reassuring words about grief and loss.

  She was drawn back to her surroundings by Louise.

  “Do you have any photos with you?” she wanted to know.

  Rebecca reached automatically for her handbag. Her handbag! She had forgotten its very existence until that moment but, seeing it next to her, she realized that tired leather purse had become more valuable to her than her closest friend. Going through its familiar contents made her feel a little less disoriented. The school photos of Nathan were still there: so many Nathans, from kindergarten to senior year. If boys tend to look alike in school photos, Nathan was no exception: neatly parted hair when he was five, shaggy bangs designed to hide the glasses he hated when he was ten and a tangle of hair and braces when he was fifteen.

  “He’s so handsome!” Louise exclaimed when she had looked at them all. “You must have loved him terribly.”

  “I adored him! He looks like a Persian miniature with his brown curls and his almond-shaped eyes.”

  “With such a blonde mother, he must take after his father,” Louise remarked.

  In fact, Nathan resembled Anthony so much that she had often had difficulty disassociating him from her feelings for his father and treating him as his own person. Seeing him always filled her with a mix of happiness and heartache, sending her flying from the most genuine admiration to the sharpest fear that he would never amount to anything.

  “Nathan loses his keys all the time, he forgets appointments, he throws his money away—he would never do a thing if I didn’t nag him! His bedroom is such a mess that it’s impossible for him to find anything, even if he wanted to. He’s lost without me. When he was little and he struggled to put on his coat, I did it for him, and I tied his laces too, to spare him the trouble. I even did his homework instead of explaining it to him.”

  “You were impatient,” suggested Louise. “You didn’t want to waste time.”

  “It’s true. I could never bear delays of any kind. I wanted him to be perfect, but I didn’t bother to show him how. Now I’m afraid I raised a good-for-nothing. How will he ever manage without my help?”

  “That’s what every Jewish mother asks herself,” Louise Cohen reassured her.

  2

  Spoiled Rotten

  I was always a child of four to her.

  Marcel Proust

  And with her hands uplifted and spread out like sunbeams she would bestow on me a priest-like blessing. Then she would give me an almost animal look, vigilant as a lioness, to see if I was still in good health.

  Albert Cohen

  Louise Cohen was in a mood to chat, so Rebecca decided to indulge her. She wanted some reassurance that she had done a good job raising Nathan and she was curious to find out how the mother of Albert Cohen had made such a talented man of her only son. How had Louise Ferro, the daughter of an Italian lawyer, born in Corfu in 1870, who spoke a Venetian dialect at home, managed to raise a major figure of French literature? Besides the love she clearly bore him, she had no obvious other advantage as far as Rebecca could tell.

  “Were you a demanding mother?” Rebecca questioned her. “Did you instill in him a sense of responsibility from a young age?”

  “Quite the opposite. I did everything for him. I buttered his toast until he was a teenager. Every single breakfast was an act of love. He was only five when we arrived in Marseille, and I had to leave for work very early in the morning, so I prepared his coffee in a thermos and wrote him a note to button up his coat when it was cold, to wash well, especially behind the ears—it’s so easy to forget—to look both ways before crossing the street. I always did my best to sound cheerful because I thought it must be terribly sad to wake up alone in a silent apartment. Sometimes, I even left a photograph of myself on the table: a mere paper companion, but it was something. He must hold the memory dear
since he describes our morning ritual in Book of My Mother.”

  “What kind of work did you do?”

  “I helped my husband Marco at his shop, 18 rue des Minimes. We lived next door at number 20. I would seize any chance to go see Albert, but it wasn’t easy. I never sat down all day; we sold eggs wholesale, and it was backbreaking work. I had to sort them first by weight, then by the date they were laid, which I had to double check by holding each egg up to the light. Then I packed them in straw-lined crates by the dozen, neatly lined up. Then the crates had to be carried out and sent to the clients. It was exhausting.”

  Minnie Marx tripped over her long skirt and nearly fell on all fours in the middle of the crammed sitting room. There were rugs piled on top of each other, chairs, tables covered with curios and boxes, candlesticks and lamps. Had each of these women brought along her most prized possessions?

  “Are you alright? Did you hurt yourself?” Rebecca jumped up.

  “Minnie tripped on purpose,” observed Louise.

  “Why would she do that?”

  “To interrupt me, of course.”

  Rebecca went to help Minnie, who was cursing under her breath:

  “That Louise can be so rude! She thinks she’s the only person who ever had a hard life, and with only one son. You’ve seen for yourself now how selfish she is; she doesn’t even care if I’ve twisted my ankle or broken my wrist.”

  Louise Cohen simply ignored her, steering Rebecca away to tell her all about Albert’s childhood.

  “Oh, pay me no attention! Really, I’m fine,” called a frustrated Minnie after them.

  Rebecca had noticed that each of these women seemed to expect her full attention and she felt like a new toy they were fighting over and would eventually discard when the game no longer amused them. She didn’t know whom to favor. Louise, for her part, seemed determined to choose for her, and continued her story.

  “My boy was smart and serious beyond his years. He made me want to cry. He refused to come home to an empty apartment so he would wait for me on the staircase, in the dark. He knew I’d finally come home to make supper. He made up stories while he waited. That’s how he convinced himself that everything he saw around him existed in miniature in his head. If he was at the seashore, he was sure that the Mediterranean was rolling its waves over tiny rocks, with tiny fish and a tiny sun, right in his own head. He created characters for his stories, too. He was always a writer, from his earliest days. Even when we lived in Corfu and he was so small, he saw everything there was to see on that island, that’s why he chose it as the setting for his novels.”

  Whenever she spoke of her son, Louise Cohen’s face lit up. Her motherly pride softened her rude and sometimes austere demeanor. Rebecca was fascinated by Corfu and how the family had arrived in Marseille. Besides, she loved nothing better than how childhood stories revealed who a person would become.

  Minnie didn’t hesitate to interrupt. She’d heard it all a hundred times before.

  “Shall I tell you about Dornum?”

  “That obscure German village where you were born is of no interest, Minnie. Corfu, on the other hand, is an island bathed in sunlight and honey. Albert named it Cephalonia for his trilogy about the ‘Valiant,’ where he describes the most beautiful island in the world, fragrant with citrus trees and olive trees. And the sea: ‘like an immense crystal that hardly a wave disturbs.’ He remembers the perfume of jasmine infused with the saltwater smell. His whole universe is pure poetry.”

  Louise had Corfu in her blood as she and Albert had lived in harmony with its seasons. They had walked on its beaches, along its fortifications and in its busy streets, “crisscrossed by lines of laundry set to dry in the sun, blue, red, yellow, green . . .” They were inseparable on their island.

  “That’s enough; I’m leaving you. This bucolic scene is getting on my nerves,” announced Minnie, getting to her feet.

  “Where will she go?” Rebecca asked Louise.

  “She’ll be back for dinner, don’t worry.”

  Louise Cohen stretched out full length on the couch as her girlhood memories of Corfu came back to her.

  “I never dreamed I was living the happiest years of my life. The Mediterranean climate rocked me, bathed me. I didn’t worry about the future. I was just happy having nothing else to do but be a mother. I was so proud of my son: From the day he was born, I was his adoring servant; years later, I would still sometimes get up in the middle of the night to make him marzipan in case he woke up hungry. Albert knew it, too. Didn’t he write: ‘My mother had no me: she had a son?’ I was right to go to such lengths to make him happy because he put all those memories—watching me make quince jam or the days he spent home from school sick—into Book of My Mother. He cherished every moment we spent together.”

  It had never occurred to Rebecca that raising a child could be so simple. She could still remember how she worried incessantly over her baby: was he warm enough? Was he breathing normally? Was he bored? Could such an exceptional baby as hers be satisfied with merely eating and sleeping? She couldn’t stop obsessing over this child who had never asked to be born. She hardly slept. Like Louise, she would go frequently into his room at night—not to admire him but to reassure herself. She would even wake him to make sure he was alright. He became the center of her universe and he would make her pay for it later.

  Nathan must have been twelve years old the night he refused to let her go out on a date. She had put on a pretty dress and was ready to leave, but just as she was closing the door behind her, she heard screaming. Was he making a scene or was he truly frightened? She tried reasoning with him; he cried until he nearly choked. She told him she had the right to live her own life, too, sometimes. He replied in all seriousness that she had sacrificed that right when he was born. She laughed, and she stayed home.

  A beautiful, tall woman entered noiselessly.

  “Jeanne Proust,” Louise murmured. “Just so you know, she’s quite a snob.”

  Marcel Proust’s mother was as handsome in person as in her portrait by Anaïs Beauvais: At once forbidding and sensual, with a high forehead, a round face, dark eyes, and a steely gaze that was softened somewhat by a generous chest that a muslin collar only partly concealed. Her gentle voice seemed at odds with the cool elegance she emanated.

  “I’ve come to welcome you. I believe you also have a son who is quite dependent on his mother. Nathan, if I’m not mistaken?”

  Rebecca blushed like an adolescent. How could she know that? Seeing the younger woman’s embarrassment, Jeanne Proust began to laugh:

  “Rest assured; just because we are dead doesn’t mean we can read other people’s thoughts. I was just outside. I overheard your conversation.”

  Rebecca felt like a foreigner in a strange land. Intimidated, she wondered if she should shake hands, greet her with a kiss on the cheek, on both cheeks, merely say hello, start a conversation, wait for a verbal cue? She had become accustomed to Louise Cohen and Minnie Marx, so cozily maternal, both of them. Jeanne Proust, on the other hand, was clearly a grande dame. Louise broke the uncomfortable silence:

  “Jeanne was always worried about Marcel. Much too worried. It made him nervous, the poor child.”

  “It was his fragile health, ever since he was born,” retorted Jeanne, exasperated. “That’s why I was on pins and needles every time he became ill: he was such a sickly child. He caught every illness going.”

  “You were uneasy long before he was born,” Louise reminded her.

  “Why shouldn’t I have been? There was plenty to be anxious about: the war against Prussia, the Commune, the terrible battles, the noise of the bombs and the ruins they left, not to mention the daily hardships we had to endure. I felt frightened and abandoned, far from my parents, despite my frequent visits to them.”

  “They lived in Auteuil, am I right?” Rebecca asked. “Like you, wasn’t Marcel very attached to that house?”

  Jeanne’s face lit up as she realized Rebecca was a cultivated woman
like herself. She would be able to share her most intimate literary moments with her, as well as her boundless admiration for her son’s work.

  “Marcel spent many weekends there and came often on vacations,” she was delighted to confirm for her. “He remembered in particular the long, satin curtains in his bedroom that were an empire blue. Also the little sitting room whose shutters were always kept closed to ward off the day’s heat. He wrote about the smell of soap and the ‘garishly bourgeois’ dining room. Marcel loved that house even though he thought it completely tasteless. We had to get rid of it when my uncle died. That was in February, 1897: such a terribly bitter winter that year the great lawn was entirely frozen.”

  “It was described in rather more prosaic terms for the purposes of its sale: ‘vast house, 1500 square meters with greenhouses and outbuildings, 121 avenue Mozart, with separate entrance 96 rue La Fontaine,’” recited Rebecca. She was rather proud of herself to have remembered the citation.

  If there had been a selection process to remain in Jeanne Proust’s company, Rebecca would have passed with flying colors. So much so that Louise Cohen felt excluded from the conversation and shared her displeasure with the others:

  “Apparently you find Marcel Proust much more interesting than Albert Cohen.”

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re a terrible liar. I’m going to go find Minnie.”

  “No! Wait! You were telling me what a mother hen you were to Albert when he was little,” she reminded Louise, hoping to lure her back.

  “Oh! That was nothing compared to the bond I had with Marcel,” Jeanne interrupted. “I never dreamed I would be so moved by his birth. We couldn’t have been closer.”

  Rebecca turned to Louise to encourage her to join in, but she was already long gone.

  “Leave her be,” Jeanne advised. “We’ll see her again later.”

  Leading her new friend out of the room, Jeanne Proust wanted to know exactly how familiar Rebecca was with Marcel’s work. Rebecca hesitated before answering, afraid her knowledge would seem insignificant next to Jeanne’s and that she would be asked to leave this strange paradise.