Art of a Jewish Woman (20 page)

She said, “Please explain to me why I should.”

They met regularly in his office, she the atheistic secular Jew and he the handsome, imposing man in his forties who was also one of the editors of
The Modern View.
He became well known locally and nationally for trying to bridge the conflict-ridden gap between the well-integrated and secure German-Jewish community that by-and-large had arrived in America in the 19th century and the newly arrived poor from Russia and Poland who were far more devout and self-protective. Rabbi Isserman was in the forefront of Christian and Jewish religious ecumenicalism as well as attempts to bridge the huge racial divide between St. Louis’ black and white communities.

In addition Isserman had a world view like Felice’s father, which also drew her to his study to talk with him. During that time Isserman preached, “God did not create white man first nor Jews first, nor America first, but man! One god created one man and one world. That is why you find in the Book the words, ‘Beat swords into plowshares.’ We are not doing this today. We are beating ploughshares into swords, more dangerous swords than the world has ever known. Swords that with one stroke can kill millions and devastate large territories. The dream of world peace cannot be silenced in our hearts by the noise of exploding bombs.”

Felice agreed, then asked, “Why should this make me a believer? Judaism is my connection to my home that is now gone and to my people who are now gone, but what does this have to do with God?”

“God gives us faith that there is a meaning to the present and that the future will be better.”

Felice said sternly, “Did God have in mind creating human beings with a capacity to inflict pain on others that has no limits? Human beings who rationalize their lust for blood by saying it is according to God’s moral code? That they are doing God’s work and that makes killing just?”

“We must work together, Felice, against this dark side in man.”

“How can you when people act without self-knowledge?”

“God’s love can bring love into the hearts of men and drive out hatred; we are all part of a common humanity.”

“What good is God if men still kill after 3,000 years?”

“It is because they don’t believe.”

“Why does it have to be God’s love; why not just love?”

“Felice, you can talk circles around me.” Isserman tried with his intellect and his vision of global brotherhood to give her faith; in the end he couldn’t.

As a talking point he once asked her, “What would you have done if you had married a Catholic and he asked you to convert? Would you have? And what would you have done if Edward had been Christian? Would you have asked him to convert to Judaism?”

“Never!” she said. “It would be like trading one lie for another!”

“Don’t we need religion to civilize, to support the social compact that makes it possible for us to live interdependently in a moral community?” He asked.

“What is religion but a cloak for scoundrels?” Felice retorted.

However, Isserman did have enough influence over her to convince her to send her sons to Sunday school at Temple Israel. I went through the motions. I liked the large classic building with pillars that made great props for games of tag or hide-and-seek. I liked the dark sanctuary, the stained-glass windows illuminated by the Sunday morning sun, the organ and choir music. Yet prayer felt foreign, an act. Other than learning the biblical stories, I went through the motions of religious instruction, skeptical of the testament miracles, feeling little or nothing. This certainly was largely because my parents only attended services once a year on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and memory for those no longer with us. Each Sunday after religious classes, my classmates joined their parents for the service while my brother and I sat on a pew alone. My father was busy doing morning rounds at the hospital, and my mother substituted for her absence with her discussions with Rabbi Isserman during the week. She explained to us, “I can’t believe in a god who could be so evil as to allow the Germans to do what they did, to send my mother to the gas chamber and kill Berci and six million others. But we feel that it is important for you boys to have a chance to make up your own minds.” My brother Barry became a practicing Jew; I followed my mother, but also my father in my belief in scientific rationalism.

Nonetheless Sunday mornings with Isserman did rub off on me. I remembered his admonition to my Reform confirmation class, Temple Israel’s 70th, when we graduated in May of 1956, and retrieved my copy of his sermon. It was tucked into the Old Testament with my name embossed on it that he had given me on confirmation day. He had said to us thirteen-year-olds, “Our Bible also calls for good race relations, and yet you live in a world where apartheid is in the air, and clamorous voices demand segregation, daily humiliation for men, women, and children, in schools and public conveyances, and places of amusement. Maybe that is why the Bible taught us, ‘Remember that ye were slaves in the land of Egypt.’ The memory of the tragic experience of our fathers must make us sympathetic with the humiliation and degradation of other peoples.

“The humble man despised on four continents of the world was welcomed in America. The despised people of other civilizations have created a magnificent era here, thus proving the truth of the Bible that all men are made in God’s image. People have said that there must be war forever. The German and French must hate eternally. Yet St. Louis was founded by French pioneers, and among its early settlers were Germans, and here they combined to build this queen city in the Louisiana Territory. So we have Cote Brilliant and Chouteau Avenues, Bremen and Eichelberger Streets.

“Just read the roster of the St. Louis Cardinals, of our athletes, Stan Musial, Polish, Red Schoendist, German, a mayor of English descent, a congressman of German background. So it goes throughout our land--a mixture of races, nations and faiths. So here is the proof that good doctrine of the Bible can be lived. Remember the Torah lesson: ‘Thou shalt not cherish grudges. Though shalt not hate. Though shalt love thy neighbor and the stranger’.”

What about women? There were none in Isserman’s list of notables yet half of our confirmation class was girls. Isserman apparently had blinders about the role and feelings of girls, like Felice’s father Moses had blinders. He hadn’t wanted Felice to become a doctor because women needed to be modest about men’s bodies; he didn’t want her to be an actress and promenade her body. Ironically Felice owed her job in Palestine to restrictions like this--Arab women were not supposed to lift their veils for a male dentist.

When I was thirteen Isserman’s words helped me open my eyes. I saw that my city was almost totally segregated--separate, unequal schools, drinking fountains, swimming pools, and the hospital wards I saw on my rounds with my father. The beds on the Negro wards were made of cheap tubular metal with the paint chipping off, in rows close together, with no curtains to pull for privacy during examinations. The beds on the white wards were sleek and new with curtains that could be drawn. I didn’t learn about segregation from my parents because my father accepted the status quo, and my mother was more preoccupied with McCarthyism’s threat to left-wing intellectuals like her, which felt like Fascism, than the civil rights movement.

In 1963 I returned to St. Louis after college on the East Coast to attend medical school at Washington University, and I became active in the local civil rights movement. I edited the school newspaper in which I repeatedly bemoaned the absence of black medical students and clamored for national health insurance that excluded no one. Further my mother had taught me about her personal activism in Wilno, and I helped plan demonstrations and carried picket signs in front of the Jefferson National Bank and other companies that wouldn’t give blacks white collar positions even in their branches located in black neighborhoods. But unlike my mother, who had been arrested during a Wilno demonstration, I melted away into the crowd when the police arrived with batons and buses to transport picketers they arrested.

It would have been too hard to pass my examinations if I were sitting in jail. Further, I didn’t want to become an object of gossip among my father’s conservative colleagues and friends and make life difficult for him. My father was a well-loved professor who admired his university, and felt at home and fond of St. Louis as it was. I didn’t want to threaten his feelings. He worked hard, he was very good at what he did, and he was kind. He didn’t deserve to have his personal world shaken too much. Within our family he and I discussed politics only a little, but one day in the heat of the 1960s turmoil he said to me affectionately, “Your thinking has gone further than mine.”

In the early 1950s Felice finally found a spiritual path to ease the pain of losing her mother, brother, and village in the Holocaust, a path which also provided a beacon for her family and others. She found it in beauty and aesthetics. She liked to quote Dostoevsky’s statement, “Beauty will save the world.” She was moved by the lines from Keat’s
Ode on a Grecian Urn,
“ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’--that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” She especially enjoyed echoing the philosopher George Santayana, “Beauty is pleasure taken as the quality of the thing,” letting the words roll ringingly from her lips as if the very saying of them filled her with delight.

When we talked years later about how she had turned her attention to art and architecture, where her interest had come from, she couldn’t pinpoint it, but said, “One of the saving graces in the world is beauty. The human faculty embraces beauty, embraces the sublime. To do this is the purpose of being.”

As she said that, I thought of the photograph she had brought with her to America, taken of her by Emil Bocktor on the Parthenon in Greece during her trip from Marseilles to Beirut. In it, she was gesturing excitedly toward the graceful, tapering, fluted white columns rising into a cloudless sky, in a light dress fluttering in the breeze, a group of travelers seated at her feet, no doubt admiring her as much as the ancient temple.

Felice added, “I don’t necessarily mean beautiful objects or women, but the goodness we do, and the human faculty is a thing of beauty. The opposite of beauty is disorder, ugliness, killing.”

My mother, who not only liked to dress well but to think of feminine beauty, said, “If I had girls I would have raised them to have feminine interests and femininity. It is important for a girl to make herself as attractive as possible. Girls are created, are genetically endowed to look pretty, and a normal girl should be raised to make herself as attractive as is possible with her endowment. Beauty is its own essence and very agreeable in life. It is the pleasure of living. It is necessary to cultivate beauty, not just of the body but of the mind.”

About raising her boys, she said, “You raise sons to be masculine, to be stronger in their attitudes, to be not so reticent about sex because a boy can’t get pregnant. By thirteen a boy is assuming a responsibility for his masculinity, a responsibility to use it well. He has a duty to grow into a man who will be an individual, a human being with a sense of responsibility for being a citizen in the country in which he lives and to play a role in society with dignity.”

Beauty began to obsess Felice. If she could promote its appearance, it would be like an antidote to the horror of the ugliness of killing, it could erase or purify the horrors of the past. When I talked with her in the last decade of her life about the Holocaust, she repeated her plaint that was a mantra of self-abnegation, “I survived the Holocaust in luxury.” By the 1950s beauty and aesthetics became her intellectual interest and outward preoccupation, which eased her guilt for having survived the war.

She was able to turn her attention to these questions because her sons were increasingly independent, self-directed students, and her husband was earning well. In 1951 Edward published his first book,
Clinical Electrocardiography,
which became a medical classic; two more followed. He was also creating the Heart Station at Barnes and nearby Jewish hospitals, which matured into the new Division of Cardiology as the Washington University School of Medicine grew and grew. Private patients were also seeking him out from all over the region.

With his success, Felice had money to realize her aesthetic passions, which began with building a home. She met a young Japanese-American architect named Robert Elkington in 1950, and they charmed each other. He had lived in Japan, studied with Frank Lloyd Wright, and grasped how to meld his Japanese design heritage’s love of simple lines and nature, open Midwestern space, and the developing ranch house design movement.

Felice and Edward toured St. Louis County looking for a homesite beyond the city limits and found six acres of undeveloped land on Litzsinger Road in the then largely rural community of Ladue. Our neck of the woods—literally woods and fields—was a small enclave of Washington University professors: Barry Wood, the head of the Department of Medicine and former All-American football player from Harvard, lived across a gulley. He built a sports field complete with a baseball backstop and football goalposts for the neighborhood kids. Joe Kennedy, a physicist who had done significant wartime research with plutonium, used the money from a government award for his work to build a house on the other side of a copse of trees. His work had also given him a fatal dose of radiation, and he died not too long after. Then Oliver Lowry, a pioneering biochemist, married his widow, Adrienne, and he moved in. The Laschs lived at the beginning of the lane to our house. The father was the editor of the editorial section of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch,
and his son, Christopher, with whom I waited for the school bus, later wrote
The Culture of Narcissism
, about America’s drift into self-gratification and self-entitlement in the 1970s.

We had three acres at the top of a rise for our new home and three acres of Deer Creek bottom land below. The bottom land, about ten acres in all, including our neighbors’, was planted in corn. A line of cottonwoods on the bank of the stream marked the edge of the fields. From the top of the rise Felice surveyed the cornfields and a stand of second-growth hardwood forest behind. The trees, the gentle, rolling hills, the crops made her feel more at home there than anywhere else she had lived since leaving Poland.