Mother Love: Two Memoirs

by

Lev Raphael

What does it take to keep me reading a book and decide to review it? I’ve picked up thousands in my fifteen years as a print, radio, and online reviewer, and put them down for any number of reasons, some of them major, some of them possibly trivial. Didn’t like the narrator, thought the diction was odd, felt the situation was too familiar, read something similar just a week before, found the metaphors excessive, not in the mood for a first person narrator, hated the first line–you name it.

But sometimes I don’t even open a book to make any kind of judgment. Sometimes it just disappears into a pile, working its way lower and lower as more review copies pour into my study, or it gets stuffed in among other ignored books on a shelf and I only come across it by accident while looking for something else. That’s what happened with Howard Reich’s haunting memoir The Last and Final Nightmare of Sofia Reich, which I’ve had for a few years now.

When I opened it recently to the first chapter and started reading, I was hooked by the vivid writing, the electricity of the opening pages. The time is Christmas 1958, the scene is a crowded, noisy German bakery on the north side of Chicago in Germantown or “Little Deutschland,” where 200,000 Germans live. The personal connection was instant: my own Washington Heights neighborhood was called “Little Frankfurt” because of the tens of thousands of German-Jewish refugees who had settled there in the 1930s. And like Howard Reich, I grew up with the sound of German on the street and all around me. Unlike him, I wasn’t lucky enough to have a family that owned a bakery, making a vast panoply of rolls and cakes and pies of every description that he could chose from for breakfast. But the Austrian bakery in our neighborhood was a piece of heaven for me, with the best mocha birthday cakes I have ever had in my life.

So we’re there in the Reichs’ bakery, which is packed with Christmas customers and his parents are happily speaking in German, enjoying the holiday spirit and the cash flowing in. Then we get the shock: his parents were actually Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors who kept their identity hidden from everyone around them. This was yet another hook for me, since my novel Winter Eyes is built around a similar deception. But the book transcends that similarity, widening and deepening in unexpected ways. It tells the story of a heroic tormented Holocaust survivor, and it does much more than that, too.

Though Reich knew he was Jewish as a child, he didn’t know what that meant, except that he had to keep quiet about who he really was, especially with the German babysitter who took him to church every after school where he learned by example to kneel and pray as if he were Christian. He’s Jewish in the morning, Christian in the afternoon—and some weird mix at night. On top of that, he’s absorbing German, the language of his parents’ tormentors, and there is still the mystery of why his family is so small.

The strange balancing act ends because his parents’ thriving bakery falls victim to recession and they sell it to move from an apartment above the bakery to a house in a Chicago neighborhood that’s more Jewish, and then later move to Skokie, the Chicago suburb heavily populated by Holocaust survivors. With their Jewishness no longer hidden, his mother’s eccentricities burst into bloom. A chronic insomniac, she checks the locks frequently during the night and peers out windows constantly as if there are threats all around them. His father meanwhile downs shots of whiskey to help him sleep, and the Holocaust is now out in the open, though in bizarre ways.

“You wouldn’t last ten minutes in the Holocaust,” one aunt or another would say to me.

“You should kiss the ground every day that you have a mother and a father—do you know what I would give to have my parents?” my father hissed when I misbehaved or mouthed off.

“He doesn’t know how good he has it,” my mother would offer in support. “When I was your age, I was sleeping in the snow....”

No matter what I did wrong, my parents responded with telegraphic references to their youth—without once sitting me down to tell me the story of what happened. Perhaps they wanted to spare me unspeakable details. Perhaps they couldn’t bear to relive the full narrative, much less place the entire burden on a child. Whatever the reasons, the Holocaust became a kind of verbal bludgeon, used often—but for punishment, not enlightenment.

Reich escaped this turmoil through a love for jazz and classical music and writing, becoming the jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune, but his mother’s path was retrograde. After his father died, she became prey to psychotic delusions of being threatened with death, and the stories of her various hospital and nursing home misadventures are deeply moving.

He only gradually begins to connect her traumatic wartime years with her current trauma, discovering that she’s suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The book kicks into a whole new gear because Reich is compelled to take two difficult and demanding journeys: one to understand what late-onset PTSD is and how his mother can be suffering from it so many years after the Holocaust ended, and another to Poland to explore the Polish city his mother came from.

Both voyages are gripping and chilling in equal measure, but how could they be anything else? In the end, Reich understands his mother’s love for him in new ways, and his own for her has blossomed into this powerful, moving book that's a small gem of memory and investigation.

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An awkward adolescent, novelist Louis Gould was once allowed to borrow a gorgeous silk dress from her mother for a party, but this was no ordinary dress and no ordinary mother-daughter moment. Gould’s mother Jo Copeland (1889-1982) was a famous fashion designer noted for her glamorous clothes that starting putting American fashion on the map in the 1920s and 30s.  She was haughty, exacting, beautiful and demanding. “Don’t perspire in this dress,” she warned her daughter. “I never perspire. Why must you?'”

Of course Gould did, and went further: she passed out in it and threw up.  The dress was ruined.

As lavishly detailed in Mommy Dressing, which sat on a shelf even longer than the Reich memoir, Gould’s mother inhabited a luxurious world in which Gould was often a spectator.  Had she been prettier and more charming, she might have been as decorative as her pliable brother and Cary Grant-ish father. But she was difficult, obstinate, rebellious in the only ways she knew how: refusing to smile, refusing to eat, refusing to worship her mother.

There’s an element of Mommy, Dearest here as we watch Gould study her mother’s whirlwind life (and Crawford is mentioned in passing). A mixture of Auntie Mame and Cruela deVil, her mother erected rigid barriers around herself and in her life that seem utterly bizarre. Moving into a new Park Avenue apartment, she instructed her children and the household staff in how to treat the foyer, which had a marble diamond-patterned black-and-white floor. Everyone had to promise

. . . never to set foot on the white diamonds while traversing the foyer to reach our rooms, or when crossing in the opposite direction toward the kitchen. It was understood that we had little or no business in the dining or living rooms except to practice the piano.

Those rooms were to be dined in, lived in, by elegant grown-ups: men in dinner clothes who would come to escort my mother to the Stork Club or El Morocco, women whose black dresses rustled like birds’ wings and whose smiles were dark red, like those of movie stars. Some of them, were in fact, movie stars, though I didn’t know enough to be impressed by Dolores Del Rio or Greer Garson. I was away when Tyrone Power came to dinner [but] I did get to see that Joan Crawford had freckles all over, which gave me hope. And Eleanor Powell gave me her portable tap-dance board to practice on. But mostly I was confined to my room, supper on a tray at my school desk, facing the wall. While far away, across the sea of black and white diamonds, in the yellow room, or the one with silver birds on the walls, my mother dined and lived with passing strangers.

Elegant to a fault, known as “the Chanel of America,” Jo Copeland travels to Europe with steamer trunks bearing her entire wardrobe—just in case she might want something—and the descriptions of the laborious, painstaking packing procedures she had perfected is worth the price of the book alone. It reads almost like a film montage. Readers of the more recent memoir Them by Francine DuPlessix Grey will recognize this life as it weaves through the 40s into post-war Café Society.

What makes this exorcism of a memoir so perfect is that Gould is never self-pitying, and for all her eagle-eyed perception of her mother’s outrageous and sometimes cruel behavior, Jo Copeland is a sympathetic character. It’s not long before we see how she has created an image of herself she’s desperate to believe in, one that buries her past under furs, paillettes, cocktails, movie star clients—an entire lifestyle in the deepest sense of the word.

Gould’s mother “spent her life seeking refuge from the physical realities of body—birth, sex, passion, death. There she was, after finding her refuge, creating it, in the act of designing clothes. Such a perfection achieved; such a beautiful cover-up. Fashion as defense weapon, as bright armorial shield, for a body that must otherwise surely betray her. The art of dressing had to become not only life’a work, but ruling passion, in order to be her salvation.”

And so her elegance and self-regard are monumental, adamantine, leaving little room for messy, awkward children unwilling to be her acolytes.

One of the most affecting moments is a story of her mother’s Depression-era purchase of fabulous diamond and ruby bracelets, even while her husband complains that his Wall Street friends are ruined and committing suicide. Copeland is unapologetic: “I’ve earned them. I want them. I’m keeping them.” But when Gould later asks her mother if she was proud of having purchased them with her own income as proof of her successful designing career, her mother is appalled at Gould’s naiveté: “Proud? Every other woman’s jewels came from a man who loved her. Only I was cursed with talent instead.” But what talent! The workmanship of her designs was couture-level and she actually “scooped Paris with what came to be called ‘pret-a-porter.’ ”

The bracelets scene made me think of someone superficially totally unlike Copeland: Brando in “On the Waterfont” lamenting what might have been. For all her success, for all the glamour of her life, Gould’s mother was furiously unhappy and defeated. But the novelist in me can’t help wondering if Gould would have produced so many fine novels if her mother had been the stuff of a Hallmark Christmas movie. She certainly wouldn't have left us this amazing memoir that offers one of the most extraordinary mother-daughter portraits ever written.

Books mentioned in this column:
The First and Final Nightmare of Sophia Reich by Howard Reich (Public Affairs, 2006)
Mommy Dressing by Lois Gould (Doubleday, 1998)
Them by Francine DuPlessix Gray (Penguin, 2006)

Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.