JC2 The Raiders (30 page)

The student then asked if it was lawful to allow a gentile servant to
turn lights on and off during the Shabbat. The rabbi pondered for a
moment and ruled that it was.

Golda learned to speak and read Hebrew and Yiddish. That was a
necessity for her brothers but not for her, and that she took the
trouble to learn earned her a measure of respect not earned by her
sisters. She learned many things besides: to speak quietly and carry
herself modestly, to light the Shabbat candles at the proper hour, to
make the proper responses as her father led the family prayers, to
keep the meat dishware separate from the milk dishware, not even to
wash them at the same time.

She always knew — she couldn't remember when she had not been
aware of it — that she and her family were very much like most
of their neighbors and very different from other neighbors. The men
who came to see her father dressed exactly as he did. They wore
beards as he did and kept their heads covered, if not by hats then by
yarmulkes. The women, too, dressed much alike, very modestly, and
covered their heads before they left their houses. They shopped only
in selected stores, where things suitable for their use were sold.
They shared a body of special knowledge, and they shared customs and
traditions that seemed foreordained and inescapable.

Yet, she knew from an early age that not everyone
lived as her family did. She learned, too, very soon, that some
people hated her people. Her brother Elihu came home one day from
school when he was nine, bloody and bruised. He had been set upon by
other boys and beaten. "
Irländers
," her father
had grumbled. "
Italianers. Katholisch. Sturmabteilungers
."
It never happened again, but Golda heard them yell sometimes —
"Jew-boy! Kikey!"

She understood why those boys hated her brother.
They were jealous of him because he was far brighter than they were
and had a much better future ahead. He might become a rabbi like her
father or a diamond merchant like her Uncle Isaac, while
they
were headed for toil on assembly lines in factories or greasy labor
in automobile repair shops.

If they could get even such jobs. The Great Depression, which touched
her family little, reduced many of their families to penury. Envy was
the source of their hatred. Those whom G-d did not favor hated those
whom He did. Throughout history, it had always been so, her father
explained.

When she was seven her family took her to a street
fair, and there for the first time she saw people dancing.
Dancing!
They moved their bodies, especially their legs, in rhythm to music
and laughed and shouted in happy exuberance. The men danced first,
then the women. Golda was ecstatic. She tried to do the steps. Her
mother had to restrain her from trying to mimic the men's dancing,
which would have been unseemly; but when the women danced she allowed
the little girl to try the steps.

Golda could dance. Before her first experience with it was over she
discovered something even more exhilarating than the dancing itself:
that it made her the focus of attention. People close to her turned
away from the women's dance to watch the little girl. That very first
time she responded to them by mugging — grinning and rolling
her eyes — and discovered they liked that, too.

Dancing was not a transgression. It should be done decorously, with
appropriate modesty, but to enjoy it, even conspicuously enjoy it,
did not offend. Nothing in the law, her father said, forbade people
from enjoying themselves. Indeed, he had no objection to her mother
enrolling her in a dance class, where she studied ballet. Her only
problem with that was that her father judged tutus immodest and
insisted she must dance in a knee-length skirt. But he never came to
the dancing classes. He only supposed she would wear a tutu. He never
dreamed that what she really wore was tights — leotards.

In this little friction over what she would wear in her dancing
classes, Golda for the first time felt a tinge of resentment about
separateness. She was the only girl in her classes asked by her
family not to wear what the others wore; and if she had done it, it
would have embarrassed her, not to say humiliated her. She didn't
want to be different. She didn't want to be identified as someone
unusual, peculiar.

She wondered then why her father dressed eccentrically, why she was
supposed to keep her head covered outside the house, why they were
obsessed about keeping the meat and milk apart, why their family and
nearby friendly families were so different from all the other people
she saw as she rode the bus to her dancing classes. She ventured to
ask her mother, not her father, and was told that they obeyed the law
and followed tradition, which was what G-d wanted them to do.

G-d wants us to do, G-d tells us to do. (They never broke the law
that forbade them spelling out the name of the Deity, and in Golda's
mind, God was G-d.) What G-d wanted seemed to justify everything.

She rode to and from her dancing classes with a girl who said she
believed in God but believed very differently.

"Why is it," she asked this girl on the bus one day, "that
God tells you to do one thing and tells us to do something else?"

The girl shrugged. " 'The Lord moves in mysterious ways His
wonders to perform,'" she said. "We are God's children.
Blessed be the name of the Lord."

By the time she was fourteen, Golda Graustein was very secretly, but
very definitely, a skeptic.

When she was fifteen she was introduced to the young man Rabbi
Graustein had tentatively decided would be her husband. His name was
Nathan. He was a student at the yeshiva, preparing himself for the
rabbinate. He was eighteen years old.

Nathan was a slight young man, timid in the presence of the lordly
Rabbi Mordecai Graustein, and respectful toward the rabbi's daughter.
He was only an inch or so taller than Golda and probably weighed less
than twenty pounds more. She disliked the redness of his full lips.
She disliked the straggly patches of whiskers that grew here and
there on his cheeks and jaw — which he might have shaved, she
thought, until he could grow a manly beard. She disliked his totally
practical little round silver-rimmed eyeglasses. He wore a
calf-length black coat, wore his white shirt buttoned up and without
a necktie, and wore his black hat set precisely square on his head —
all like her father, only on Nathan these things did not lend
dignity. Above all, she disliked his bland sincerity.

He had been in their house four times before he spoke a word to her.
Then he said, quietly, bluntly, "Our fathers have chosen us for
each other."

"Perhaps," she said noncommittally. "But that's a long
time from now."

"Yes," he said. "I must continue to study."

Neither of her parents saw her first dance recital. For six months
she had been working with Mrs. Shapiro, her dance teacher, to develop
a routine. Her mother didn't know and probably would not have told
Rabbi Graustein if she had.

The recital was given in the recreation hall of a temple in
Hempstead, Long Island. When Golda mentioned that it was being
presented in a Jewish temple, her father frowned but did not ask what
kind of house G-d had that included a recreation hall. To the
Graustein family, Hempstead sounded like a distant place, certainly
one they could not reach conveniently, and they accepted the
assurance that the young dance students would be transported there on
a bus and returned by nine o'clock in the evening. In fact, that was
the only negative reaction they had to the recital — that the
bus had returned at 9:46.

They did not see their daughter perform. She was sixteen. She had
ripened into a leggy, busty young woman. Some of the dancers in the
recital were tap dancers, some essayed ballet. Golda Graustein came
on the stage in bright-red hip-high leotards glittering with
spangles, wearing a red spangled top hat and net stockings, and
carrying a stick. She did a solo piece. She danced, and she sang, and
twice she dropped in a one-liner — her own, not authorized by
Mrs. Shapiro. She mugged. She rolled her eyes. Her enthusiasm was
infectious. The audience stood to applaud and called her back three
times.

"I will be a dancer. I will be an entertainer," she told
her mother in the quiet of her bedroom that night.

"Your father has chosen a husband for you."

Golda's answer was simple. "No."

It was the first time he called her a shiksa.

He would no longer pay Mrs. Shapiro to teach her. Mrs. Shapiro taught
her anyway. He wouldn't give her bus fare to go to her classes. She
walked, until Mrs. Shapiro found out and gave her bus fare.

Naomi Shapiro had danced on Broadway in the 1920s and early '30s,
without much success; and when her figure began to thicken they had
discontinued hiring her.

"They will break your heart, darling," she told Golda. "You
must think. You must think — "

Golda was eighteen. "I must think of the alternative," she
said. "Marriage to a pale, pimply ... unmanly — "

"I can arrange an audition. You see what you will have to
compete with, then you will know."

Before this audition, Golda lost her virginity. More accurately said,
she did not lose it; she got rid of it, something she had ceased to
prize. She gave it away in a darkened rehearsal room at Mrs.
Shapiro's studio, to a dancer two years older than she was: a
muscular, handsome, manly youth, everything Nathan was not.

Doing this, she made her first great mistake about love. Innocent,
she did not understand that a man could do to her what that young
dancer did — unless he loved her. Oh, maybe not loved her in
the great romantic way they heard sung about on records and radio,
but cared for her at least. How could he have struggled with her
through the ritual of passion without caring for her?

But he had. He was a nice Jewish boy, too. He thrust his big fat
organ into her and caused her pain and pleasure and afterward treated
her as a nuisance he didn't want to tolerate anymore.

A week later Mrs. Shapiro accompanied her to her first audition. It
was, of course, a revelation. Golda discovered that she was only one
of thousands — tens of thousands? — of girls who were
dedicated to dancing and yearned for a place in the chorus lines of
Broadway shows. She was seen at all only because someone felt he owed
a favor to Naomi Shapiro.

She did not make the first cut.

As they stood on the street outside the theater in the rain looking
for a cab to take them to the subway station — Golda depressed,
wearing a scarf over her head, a too-short raincoat, saddle oxfords,
and bobby sox, everything unstylish — a man walked up to them.

"Hi, Naomi," he said. "Disappointed?"

"I'm not," said Mrs. Shapiro. "I warned her. I suppose
Golda is. Golda Graustein, meet Ernie Levin."

Golda looked at this man. He was maybe fifty years old. He wore a
pork-pie rain hat and a black raincoat. He was not as tall as she
was. His face looked squashed down, as if the jaws of a vise had been
tightened on his skull and jaw, but an irrepressible smile shaped his
eyes and mouth.

"Nice to meet ya, Miss Graustein. The first thing to do is
change that name. The next thing — What are you, Hassidic? The
next thing is to toss away the scarf, get your eyebrows plucked, get
your hair cut, and learn to wear makeup."

"Ernie is an agent," said Mrs. Shapiro without enthusiasm.

"I was back there," said Ernie Levin. "I saw the
audition. I can get ya work, kid. I can place her in the Catskills
this summer, Naomi. Next fall, off Broad-way maybe. Forget the chorus
line, Golda. You got a shtick. That's why you'll never make it in the
chorus line. You'd pull too much attention. What they want is
uniformity. It's grunt work anyway. How old are ya?"

The family schism followed.

"You will do no such thing. You will marry Nathan before the
summer is over and settle down to a proper and honorable life."

"No, Papa. I will not marry Nathan. I do not want to marry him.
I don't love him."

"He is a good young man. He will be a rabbi. You will be the
wife of a rabbi. Every girl wants to be the wife of a rabbi. You will
share in the respect and honor that will be accorded him. The matter
is settled, Golda. I have promised you to him. I will hear nothing to
the contrary."

"I know a little of the law myself, Papa. You can't force me to
marry Nathan. What is more, I am seventeen years old and will soon be
eighteen. I can leave your home."

"
SHIKSA
!"

She worked that summer — the last summer when the world was at
peace — at two borscht-belt hotels. To her disgust and shame,
she discovered that she was expected to wait tables at lunch as well
as to perform on the stage, two shows each evening. Ernie Levin told
her not to worry, that was the way you broke in. He told her she was
getting experience. He pointed out to her that she was allowed to
work solo, to dance and sing, to crack jokes, and most of all to
learn her trade.

A comedian was the star of each show, and she worked behind five of
them that summer. There were other singers and other dancers, but
what Levin told her was true, that she had a small lead role in each
show and was allowed to polish her shtick.

She wore leotards and net stockings, sometimes a top hat, and
sometimes she used a cane. Levin urged her to study her audiences, to
see how they reacted to what she did. It was essential, he insisted,
that she develop a rapport with audiences. She must not just offer a
prepared shtick, like merchandise on the counter of a store: take it
or leave it. She must learn to respond to the audience's reaction,
changing not just tomorrow night but right now if she saw she was not
carrying the audience with her. The worst mistake of all, he told
her, was to resent an audience that did not seem to like her, and to
defy it. The customer is always right, he said.