Art of a Jewish Woman (14 page)

Felice thought fast. She summoned her own father’s authoritarian voice and manner in German and said fiercely and firmly, “Mind your manners, child. We have work to do, or I will tell your parents.” She suppressed the impulse to add, “or I will slap you,” as her father might have said. She followed the German with French. “Don’t act silly. That is not how a well-educated child acts.” Angell was satisfied, impressed, even daunted.

Next he summoned his wife to the office to interview Felice. Katherine Cramer Woodman Angell was much younger than her 68-year-old husband, whose first wife had died in 1931. A son and daughter from that marriage were grown and independent. Cassie was Katherine’s daughter from a prior marriage. Mrs. Angell was something of a beautiful southern belle, a gifted hostess who made everybody feel comfortable. In his autobiography Angell would write, “Katherine made my life one of great happiness. Her warm and friendly interest in students and their problems has won her a position of remarkable influence and appreciation in the Yale community.”

After Professor Angell retired from the Yale presidency the following year, Katherine would start a small cooking school in New Haven and would later co-found the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York in 1946. In memory of her oldest son, who was killed in the final months of World War II, the school’s mission would be to give job training under the GI Bill to veterans returning from the war.
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In the initial interview, Mrs. Angell and Felice were respectful with each other, and the job was hers. Felice moved into the president’s mansion, the fourth on the staff of a maid, cook, chauffeur, and now a governess-tutor. The Angells gave her a self-teaching course in English on phonograph records, and she had her own room with a gorgeous view of the garden. The maid was assigned to take care of everything she needed. The president addressed her as Mademoiselle, and Mrs. Angell always called her Felice. Her job was to help Cassie get ready for school in the morning. Then she taught Madame Angell French for two hours every morning. Cassie came home from school at 3 p.m., and first they played ball and other games, then they worked on her French and Latin until dinner and continued after dinner with her languages and other homework.

Mrs. Angell also introduced Felice to the wives of other faculty members, and some of them became her French students also. Thursday was her day off, and they preferred for the chauffeur to take her around wherever she wanted to go. Perhaps they were afraid that she would get lost or didn’t want to be on her own for too long. Since she had gone to school in Nancy, not far from the Alps, when winter came they asked her if she could ski and could teach Cassie how to do it. Felice said yes, though she had only been skiing twice in Lebanon, and it had been a disaster.

Once Cassie was so bad, refusing to do her schoolwork, that Felice threatened to slap her. She never knew if Cassie told her parents, but what she said made her fear losing her job because she was still virtually penniless. Even though they paid her $50 a month on top of room and board, a lot in those days, she was sending everything she earned back to Poland. She asked President Angell if he could advance her first two months salary so her sister Miriam could leave Poland and go to Palestine and so her parents could eat. He did.

She lived on the extra she earned from giving French lessons to the wives of faculty members, and still had only the amount of clothes she could fit in her one suitcase--the beige suit, a green and white polka-dot work dress, and a black dress.

“It was my education that made the difference in my life. James Roland Angell respected it greatly and became like a father to me. I had a fantastic life. The Angells entertained often—dinners for faculty members, visiting professors, university trustees, wealthy business people—and they gave me a place of honor at the table: I sat on President Angell’s left, and Madame Angell on his right, and Cassie to her right.”

When there was no entertaining, in the evening, after Cassie went to sleep, as tired as he was, President Angell would invite her to his study and give her an hour English lesson. She learned English much faster than her students learned French.

Felice was living in one of the headiest intellectual settings in America, soaking it up and being treated as an intellectual equal by her employer. He was neither a self-important man nor a wealthy man, but a scholar from a line of teachers and academic administrators. He began to address Felice as “Doctor” and gave her access to his library. It provided her a stirring first model of American intellectual life.

Furthermore, he, Angell, had his own challenges to face. In his memoir he would write, “When I was four, I barely survived an attack of scarlet fever which caused me the loss of hearing in one ear … Some years later I suffered from recurrent attacks of malaria…a curse in the early history of southern Michigan where I grew up. As a result, I suspect, of these mishaps, I was not very robust and the effect upon a rather oversensitive nervous organization was to render me somewhat timid and unassertive.”
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These experiences allowed him to identify with Felice’s own struggles to make a place for herself, and they could both empathize with each other’s dangerous and severe childhood illnesses. Angell’s Congregationalist Christian upbringing had been pious, though not overly so, and because of his parents’ modesty, he treated the household staff with dignity. It struck a note of contrast with the disregard of servants and the disfavored that had angered Felice elsewhere.

President Angell had risen to his position gradually by dint of his important scholarship, experimental research in psychology, Socratic teaching that endeared his students to him, and even-handedness in administration. He had studied under the educator and philosopher John Dewey at the University of Michigan and the psychologist and philosopher William James at Harvard. He was greatly influenced by their pragmatic insistence on the need for empirical evidence in psychological theories. He followed their beliefs that thought, feeling, and willed action were linked as the three primary ways of being conscious. In the course of his work, Angell became one of the main exponents of the new school of functionalism in psychology in the early 20th century.

Professor Angell’s academic career had been largely at the University of Chicago, where he rose to dean and acting president before taking the presidency at Yale in 1921. His 1911 textbook
Chapters in Modern Psychology
was a standard that endured into the 1930s. Encountering Sigmund Freud’s work and the new field of psychoanalysis perplexed his rationalism. He said, “Despite my early and sincere interest in abnormal psychology, the Freudian movement … found me driven into an attitude of criticism and hostility, for, while I regarded certain of its contributions as sound and fundamentally significant, not a little appeared to be somewhat romantic and distinctly unscientific.”

Still, he acknowledged the importance of the psychoanalytic method: “Introspection in one form or another I held to be indispensable as the method from which inevitably derives our original apprehension of the whole field of study.”
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That was the kind of discourse Felice heard at dinner parties. It was what she read in the Angells’ library. She had never been in a great humanities library before, and she devoured books in her time off—in German, and by the end of the year in English too. She was discovering psychology and psychoanalysis, which she had never heard of before. President Angell had little good to say about psychoanalysis, but she was attracted by its idealism and romanticism. Freud’s dream of making conscious the violent id and moderating and channeling it with the ego attracted her. It reverberated with her own hopeful nature. Yet Felice was also logical, like her host at the head of the dinner table. It was how she was leading her life—step by step, suppressing fear, self-doubt, and regret in favor of practical necessity. For this reason she also appreciated the way psychoanalytic theory organized and compartmentalized the mind and described the operation of psychological defense mechanisms.

All of this came to an end too quickly. The year was James Rowland Angell’s final year as president, and when summer came they had to move. Cassie went to a girl’s camp, and the Angells went to their summer home in Maine. With three servants already there, they didn’t invite Felice to go with them. Felice’s job was over. Anyway, she’d had enough of Princess Cassie, who fancied herself part of the British Royal Family.

On May 31, 1938, Katherine Angell wrote her a letter of reference that read, “This is to say that Mademoiselle Felice Ozerovitch has been in my employ for the past year as French instructor for my eleven-year-old daughter. My daughter has done well in her work and likes her teacher. Felice is extremely intelligent and very anxious to please. She had not had a great deal of experience as a governess in the home, but she is eager to be helpful, and is a pleasant person to have in the family.”

It was a positive reference, but restrained, hardly glowing. Perhaps this was Katherine Angell’s style. Perhaps there were other reasons for its coolness. Felice may have spent too much time in the library and neglected Cassie. Or perhaps there were competitive feelings between Felice and Mrs. Angell. This was not unlikely, as Felice was used to being the apple of her father’s eye and Professor Angell had become an intellectual mentor to her.

From a house of culture and ease, Felice jumped into the New York immigrant community. She didn’t want to stay in New Haven with Uncle Herman’s family because their interest in accumulating money felt narrow to her, so she turned to another uncle, her father’s brother. He had emigrated twenty-five years earlier and had stayed in the Bronx, New York City, supporting his family with his hands.

He had two daughters about Felice’s age—Sylvia, who was born in the Pale, the broad swath of Yiddish Jewish settlement that straddled the Polish-Russian border, and Pearl, born in America. They all worked in factories in the garment district.

“My Bronx aunt and uncle were quite nice to me. I even remember my father’s brother placing his hand on my shoulder one day when I was trying to plan my next step and saying, ‘I am not worried about you. You will do well in America’.”

But Sylvia and Pearl were jealous of Felice’s education, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to stay there long. Through a placement agency, she got a job as live-in nanny with a wealthy Jewish family for their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter in Brooklyn. The arrangement was the same as with the Angells: room and board and $50 a month. But the families couldn’t have been more different. The husband and wife were card players and gamblers, away all night. Felice wondered if they were part of the Jewish mafia because there were many whispered phone calls. Parts of the house were locked and forbidden to her to enter. Felice considered that they were taking care of their guilt for whatever crimes they may be committing by sending their thirteen-year-old son to a Yeshiva school to learn to be a rabbi. They were so proud of him, as if it was an honored thing that would bring respect to the whole family. However Felice was so far from religion personally that to her the bargain they were making was frightful.

New York fascinated her. She’d take the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan where she loved to walk from one side of the city to another, downtown to uptown, east to west. And she loved to talk with people. Once she ran out of money on one of her walks and became so hungry that she went into a bakery and just asked for a small loaf of bread. They felt sorry for her and gave her one, and she told them, “I will pay you back when I get paid.”

Another time she was talking with a man in a park about how she needed to find a way to get her license to practice dentistry in America because in her mind she was still a dentist and she knew she could make a living with her skill. She knew by then that she needed a year or two more school in America to take the courses that were required here. He said that she should try the Leopold Shepp Foundation on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan because they had scholarships for immigrants who need to finish their education.

On her next day off she took the Lexington Avenue subway to the top of where Central Park begins and walked down the entire length of Fifth Avenue, looking at building signs and directories the entire way. Finally, near Greenwich Village, she saw “Leopold Shepp Foundation” lettered in gold on a window three stories up. She climbed the staircase. Because it was August, the only person there was the secretary, Miss Temple, who must have liked her after they talked because she said, “You are just the type of person the foundation is interested in supporting. The committee that makes the decisions will be back in three weeks. I will be in touch with you. I am sure you will succeed.”

They offered Felice a choice of three universities—the University of Chicago, McGill in Montreal, and Washington University in St. Louis. If she could leave in a week, she would be in time to register for the fall 1938 semester. It was her moment to gamble. She weighed her choices. The only thing she knew about Chicago was from the gangster movies she had seen. She didn’t think she would feel safe there. She was escaping from violence in Palestine and Europe, so why go someplace where there were more guns? As for McGill, she thought that if she had come this far to be in America, she wanted to stay there and not go to Canada. That left St. Louis, Missouri. She knew nothing about St. Louis or Missouri. She decided to go there.

Felice knew she should feel grateful to be in America and thankful for the opportunities that were being given to her, and she was. It was a new and exciting place. But something was missing. There was a void. She couldn’t put her finger on it. Was it culture that was lacking, her family that was missing? She kept thinking that she shouldn’t be in a place filled with cars and buildings so big that when she looked up they filled the sky. It was as if that was the culture—cars, concrete, construction, crowds of people—and it didn’t mean much to her. She should be with her family. But she knew that was an impossibility. She packed her bag once again.