Pauline Kael (2 page)

“I am the most grateful human being in the whole world for what Hollywood has given me,” Joan Crawford once said with straight-faced sincerity, in a late-career interview. “It’s given me my education—it’s given me everything that I’ve ever earned.” Pauline Kael, who dismissed Crawford as an actress, might easily have said something along those lines. Her love of the movies was nothing short of life-giving: It sustained her in ways that nothing and no one else in her life ever could, or ever did.

From the beginning of her career Pauline Kael seemed intensely proud of the fact that she came from the American west. There were elements of both careerism and reverse snobbery in this: She took great pains to paint herself as a western rebel, an independent, plain-speaking thinker who owed nothing to what she considered to be the hidebound thinking of the East Coast literary and critical establishment. While she often gave the impression of being a second- or third-generation Californian, her parents were actually only in the process of settling into their life on the West Coast at the time she was born.

For most of her life, Kael’s mother, Judith Yetta Friedman, projected the identity of the classic displaced person. She was born on December 21, 1884, in Pruszków, Poland, a town whose population hovered around 16,000 in the early years of the twentieth century. Kael later claimed that her mother’s father was a tax collector for Tsar Alexander II.

Judith prized a solid, first-rate education above most other things in life, but during her formative years, such a thing was mostly out of reach for even the brightest of young women. A proper education was a privilege reserved for men, and Judith never stopped resenting the way women were denied opportunities in the Old World. “Judith Kael resented her lot in life, which was to be a breeder,” said her grandson, Bret Wallach. Pauline Kael may well have had her mother in mind when she reviewed the 1983 film
Yentl
, directed by and starring one of her favorite performers, Barbra Streisand. Based on a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Yentl
tells the story of a young woman who, yearning to become a religious scholar, disguises herself as a boy and enrolls in a yeshiva. Though never an ardent feminist in the traditional sense, Kael, more than most critics at the time, liked
Yentl
and particularly responded to Streisand’s portrayal of the title character, “who runs her fingers over books as if they were magic objects.”

Judith eventually married Isaac Kael, born in Pruszków on August 18, 1883. Isaac’s family background was not nearly as elevated as Judith’s, which appears to have been a source of conflict between them for much of their married life, as Judith grew increasingly resentful of being consigned to the role of housewife and mother.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more than two million Jews, a great number of them from Russia and Poland, arrived on American shores. Isaac emigrated to the United States in 1903, with Judith following two years later; Isaac’s younger brother Philip (who married one of Judith’s sisters) would join them in 1907. They settled into the epicenter of New York’s Jewish ghetto—the grim, poverty- and disease-ridden slums of Hester Street, where Jewish peddlers shoved their pushcarts up and down the dirty streets, hawking fish, meat, household items, novelties. Isaac made a living by selling caps. Within a short time the couple started a family: Louis, born February 27, 1906, and Philip, born May 12, 1909. The chilly disposition that Judith showed later in life may have had its roots in the miserable experience of these difficult early years in New York. Soon the family sought out a healthier place to live, with greater opportunities. The Kaels did eventually manage to live for a brief time in the Catskills town of Mountain Dale, New York, where their third child, Annie, was born on September 23, 1912.

For some time Isaac and Judith had been aware of a thriving community of Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma, a picturesque town in Sonoma County, California. In 1904 a Lithuanian named Sam Melnick had settled there and gained a foothold as its first Jewish poultry farmer. Once word of Melnick’s success got around—thanks in large part to articles and advertisements in
The Jewish Daily Forward
, the most widely read Yiddish daily newspaper in America—many Jewish immigrants made the trek westward.

The decision of the Kaels to become part of this Jewish community had no particular religious motivation; both Isaac and Judith had been and would remain highly secular Jews. But in Petaluma they would have the chance to live among their own people in what sounded like a beautiful setting, with plenty of fresh air and room for the children to play. They also knew that in a farming community, poor people almost always have an easier time coming by food than they do in the city. So in 1912, along with Judith’s parents and Isaac’s brother Philip, the Kaels packed up their belongings and headed to California.

 

In 1912 Petaluma, which lies thirty-five miles north of San Francisco, was a tiny town—its population was around 7,500—surrounded by rolling hills and sprawling dairy farms with signs hawking farm-fresh eggs and milkshakes. With its dirt roads and hitching posts and frame houses, it seemed to belong to the Old West more than to the twentieth century.

In 1878, a Canadian named Lyman C. Byce had arrived in Petaluma, and soon began raising poultry there. In 1879, he and Isaac Dias invented the first egg incubator, which revolutionized the poultry industry. Farmers could produce a far greater number of chicks, and business began to boom. Ranches sprang up that eventually developed the capacity to produce anywhere from 100,000 to 1.8 million eggs annually. The Petaluma Valley became dotted with stock and poultry feed mills, egg-packing plants, and box factories. At the railroad station was a sign depicting an enormous hen sitting on a stack of eggs that trumpeted Petaluma’s sobriquet “The Egg Basket of the World.”

On their arrival the Kaels moved into a two-story house at 219 Fifth Street, until Isaac found a nine-acre farm five miles west of town, near Middle Two Rock Road. On the property was a large frame house, with a couple’s house and bunkhouse out back. The Kaels got their poultry business off the ground with a flock of white Leghorns. As was the case with most Jewish immigrants in the area, their lack of experience wasn’t much of an obstacle. Maintaining a chicken ranch wasn’t overly complicated and didn’t require a huge initial outlay of cash, but it was hard work; the eggs had to be gathered and sorted and cleaned by hand, then packed up to go to market. Year by year their business grew, and Isaac ultimately built up the ranch to the point where it could accommodate five thousand chickens. He and Judith also added to their family. On November 30, 1913, another daughter, Rose, arrived. And on June 19, 1919, their fifth and last child, Pauline, was born at Petaluma General Hospital. In a few short years the family’s life had improved to an almost unimaginable degree, and the future seemed to hold great promise.

At home, however, the atmosphere was far from harmonious. From the beginning, Judith—or Yetta, as she was often called—loathed life on the farm. A woman who, during her privileged youth in Poland, had scarcely had reason even to boil an egg was now harvesting and cleaning them for long hours each day. Then there was the kale that had to be grown, picked, and mixed into the chicken feed, on top of cooking for the ranch hands. Judith was angry and frustrated much of the time, and the harder she worked, the more distant she grew toward her children. Anne Kael Wallach’s son, Bret Wallach, who remembered visiting Judith in the late 1940s, described her as someone whose “affection radiated at about two degrees above absolute zero.” However frustrated she may have been, Judith did show a certain motherly concern for her three daughters, and as time went on, she grew determined that Anne, Rose, and Pauline would have the educational opportunities that had eluded her.

Judith’s unhappiness made a sharp contrast with Isaac Kael’s own good-natured gregariousness. He was a man who naturally expected good things to unfold before him and made no attempt to hide his delight when they did. He had great drive and energy and confidence, and his children adored him.

The Jews who settled in Petaluma generally fell into one of two groups—those who allied themselves with the Labor Zionist movement in Israel, and those who sought to improve social conditions for American Jews; outsiders were quick to tag the latter group as “radical,” even “Red.” To Kenneth Kann, author of
Comrades and Chicken Ranchers
, an oral history of farm life in Petaluma, the town was “a community of idealists, people who were not so concerned with making a lot of money, people who preferred the agricultural life over the sweatshops and the pushcarts of the city.” The so-called radicals were, in Kann’s view, individuals who “retained a Jewish identity, but they were people with a national and a world perspective.”

To Isaac and Judith Kael, it was plain that such an intellectually inquisitive community needed a proper social gathering place, and Isaac became one of the founders of the Jewish Community Center of Petaluma. Plans for the center got under way in 1924, but when it became apparent that the community hadn’t raised enough money to pay for its construction, Isaac traveled to San Francisco and appealed to the wealthy Haas family of the Levi Strauss Company, well known for their support of Jewish cultural enterprises. The Haases came up with a sizable gift, and with Judith serving tirelessly on the building committee, the Jewish Community Center of Petaluma opened on August 2, 1925. Its activities were focused on Jewish cultural and religious issues; the individual organizations that made the center their home included both the men and women’s branches of B’nai Brith, Hadassah, and Poale Zion. Jewish performers and lecturers on Jewish topics visited the center, spurring the locals to engage in colorful and often heated debates on topics of international significance. Sometimes the locals themselves banded together to perform readings from Yiddish literary classics.

To Kenneth Kann, the community of Petaluma Jews “bore an unmistakable resemblance to the
shtetl
, the Jewish village of Tsarist Russia.” Certainly the Jewish farmers’ customs seemed quite alien to many of their gentile neighbors, and their relations were not always harmonious. In school the Jewish children were frequently subjected to racist slurs by their gentile classmates. Annie Kael, for instance, was a good student and generally well accepted, but even though her gentile friends were allowed to come to the Kael house to visit, the reverse did not hold true. The success of the Jewish Community Center, however, made Isaac something of a local golden boy, and many of the prominent gentiles in Petaluma held him in high esteem. Still, the esteem was qualified. One local dignitary referred to him as “the one white Jew in Petaluma.” Many local Jews were given bank loans on the condition that Isaac cosign for them, which he was more than happy to do.

This early part of Pauline’s childhood unfolded in an ambience of comfort and security. She enjoyed life on the farm and, though she was too young to have much to do with the egg business, she liked spending time outdoors in the temperate climate. At many of the meals, nearly everything on the table came from the land—chicken, eggs, and vegetables and fruits directly from the garden. The film critic Stephanie Zacharek, who met Pauline in the early 1990s, observed that “she loved to eat and cook, and she was very conscious of what she ate and the quality of the food. She said, ‘It’s because I grew up in the country, and we always had fresh vegetables and eggs. That was part of where I came from.’”

Despite being an agricultural community, Petaluma was fertile ground for any child interested in reading and writing and ideas. The community overflowed with the traditional Jewish love of culture and learning. Many of its ranchers subscribed to the Yiddish-language newspapers from New York and engaged in spirited debate about world issues. “Such wonderful evenings we had talking about books in Petaluma,” recalled Basha Singerman, a Russian immigrant whose family moved to the area early in the twentieth century. “Yiddish books—the classical writers, history, politics. Books were our life in Petaluma.” And there were silent movies in town, which the entire family attended. Pauline remembered sitting on her father’s lap and being enthralled by the “flickers” if impatient with their intertitles: “We were so eager for the movie to go on that we gulped the words down and then were always left with them for what, to our impatience, seemed an eternity, and the better the movie, the more quickly we tried to absorb and leap at the printed words, and the more frustrating the delays became.”

From the beginning it was clear to the family that Pauline was exceptionally clever. She learned to read at an early age, and both Isaac and Judith encouraged her interest in books. As a small child, she devoured L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, collections of fairy tales, and Edith Maude Hull’s torrid
The Sheik
, filched from her older brothers. She was extremely precocious, and her older siblings delighted in the astonishing observations that routinely popped out of her mouth. Like her sisters, Pauline was diminutive. (Family members jokingly referred to them as the “Three Amazons.”) Rose was industrious and earnest, eager to fit in with her peers; Anne was a quiet, disciplined, and bright student; and Pauline was the talkative one who couldn’t help but call attention to herself, the one whose intellect was the most obvious and least conformist.

Isaac’s success and popularity in Petaluma no doubt encouraged him to indulge in his principal vice: pursuing other women. By the mid-1920s he had developed a reputation as one of Petaluma’s smoothest ladies’ men. There was one particular widow whom he joined for frequent dalliances. As a way of covering up his motives, he often brought along Pauline, who would play outside while her father paid court.

Throughout her writing career, and even to an overwhelming degree throughout her personal life, Pauline was extraordinarily reluctant to discuss her childhood and adolescence. Stephanie Zacharek remembered that she would talk about her past “only in a vague sort of way.” Even people who felt that they knew her quite well realized at some point or other that she had revealed next to nothing about the dynamics of her family life, especially her relationship with her mother. When Kenneth Kann called Pauline to interview her for
Comrades and Chicken Ranchers
, she provided him with a one-sentence reply: