Returning, p.29
Returning, page 29
The magical world that Father had built for himself was entrancing to those invited to enter it, especially children. They’d be quizzed about the fine points of grammar, asked to solve one of the topographical puzzles he collected, given a small stack of memoranda on those yellow punch-holed sheets of paper and asked to respond. If a child couldn’t solve a puzzle, he’d affect shock—it was so simple! If she could solve it, he’d affect astonishment—it was so difficult! The person on the witness stand would be asked to defend some indefensible practice, like the use of which to precede a restrictive clause; if they couldn’t, he’d invite them at least to join in his shock and indignation. On Sunday afternoons, we’d go on one of his excursions (at that point, a convertible dark blue Porsche had succeeded the Jaguar), not only to visit relatives but also to see things that had aroused his curiosity, such as trees with unusually large girths—he had invented an adapted tape measure for this task.
I’m aware that one of the odd things about my family was all the things that, by today’s standards, we should ideally have talked about and didn’t. During the height of the civil rights movement, which was all-consuming in Louisiana and had been a major cause of Pop’s, it didn’t come up in our highly specific dinner table conversations directed by Father. (I do remember, in those years, hearing the sound of spirited conversations in the kitchen; curious, I’d open the door, and everyone would instantly fall silent.) Of course we didn’t discuss the major events in Jewish life, in America or in Israel, either. It was inconceivable that we would have frank conversations about the careful bargains that underlay Father and Mother’s marriage. I don’t remember our household as being cold, or lacking in intense mutual love that we all felt. It was more that somehow the condition of all the accommodations we’d made was that life had to be what we said it was, what we wanted it to be, not something that was out of our control and constantly changing, or that demanded ongoing reactions and recalibrations from us.
I’m looking at a few documents Mother and Father left behind. One is a photo album memorializing an event Father staged some time in the early sixties, which he called a levee—according to the dictionary, “a reception held by a person of distinction on rising from bed.” The invitation has three young couples—from the highest rank of New Orleans society (meaning of course not Jewish), except for Mother and Father—requesting the pleasure of your company at a garden party in honor (that’s “honour”) of the tenth wedding anniversary of George and Anne Montgomery. George was Father’s close friend; his father and Pop had both been close associates of Samuel Zemurray, the Jewish immigrant who had come to New Orleans from Russia as a young man and who wound up inventing the banana-importing business, and also the practice of staging U.S. government-assisted coups d’etat in Central America to ensure that governments hostile to American banana companies would not remain in power. Anne Kock Montgomery came from the family that had owned the sugarcane plantation next to Palo Alto. (The Civil War skirmish that still draws souvenir hunters to Palo Alto is called the Battle of Kock’s Plantation.) The party was in Audubon Park, which long ago had been the plantation where Etienne de Bore had demonstrated that sugarcane cultivation was possible in Louisiana, an event that not so indirectly accounts for my being here today. Ancient, gnarled live oak trees draped in Spanish moss evoked the park’s origins. The photographs in the album, obviously taken by a professional engaged for the occasion, show men wearing top hats and cutaways, women wearing flowered dresses, long white gloves, and broad straw hats, holding parasols, and guests being ferried around the park in horse-drawn carriages with liveried drivers. The one picture of Mother, who must have been newly returned from her temporary escape to New York, presents her standing with the other hosts, a tight pearl choker around her neck, flashing what I imagine to be a self-conscious, pasted-on smile.
Then there’s a set of beautiful color sketches on tracing paper, accompanied by a handwritten letter in French, evidently from an expert Father had located in Europe, proposing various heraldic shields that could represent the possibly noble lineage of the Lemann and Berthelot families—who were itinerant peddlers and fur trappers, from what the documentary record shows. And I have a letter from Father to Julian Feibelman, from 1963. If you belong to a synagogue, you’ll know that every year you get a form letter from the rabbi, reminding you of an approaching yahrzeit, the anniversary of the death of a parent, and hinting that in addition to the customary prayer you might want to say on this occasion, a memorial contribution might be in order.
Father, Mother, and their cohosts—the Montgomerys and the Walmsleys—at a “levee” in Audubon Park, early 1960s.
Observing yahrzeit connects you to the past. It reminds you that you are a link on a chain that extends very far backward. It is a practice that Father’s grandparents and great-grandparents had scrupulously followed, but when he got one of these letters from Julian, he wrote back: “I believe this matter arose once before and we replied to you that, while we are aware of the anniversary, it has been a tradition in our family to celebrate births rather than deaths on the theory that it is the birth for which we give thanks, rather than the death.” From this same period, there is a letter from Stephen, who lived just as lavishly as Father did, to Julian complaining that Temple Sinai’s dues were too high. Many years later, I found out that Stephen’s wife, Shirley, had been raised in an Orthodox home in New Orleans, something that nobody ever mentioned during my childhood. It was part of moving up, moving on, to sever the limiting connection to the past and begin anew, on very different terms that weren’t Jewish in the same all-encompassing way.
One of the heraldic shields my father had someone design.
In our part of New Orleans, everybody had known everybody else for generations; many of Father’s closest friends were the children of close friends of Pop, whom he had known since his days at nursery school. We all lived in the same neighborhood, and it wasn’t unusual for a family to have lived in the same house through two or three generations. There wouldn’t have been any point to our pretending not to be Jewish, because everybody thought of us as Jewish and that would never change. We were Jewish, and, beyond that, we were conspicuously different from most people we knew in New Orleans in ways that comported with what people thought Jews were like. We had rooms full of books in our house, we had more money, we had modern art instead of hunting prints on the walls, we didn’t drink much by New Orleans standards. What Father wanted was for being Jewish to mean what he remembered it as meaning when he was growing up, before the Holocaust, before Eastern European Jews had become dominant in American Jewish culture. He wanted it to be elegant, comfortable in the wider world (especially the upper-class world), free of imposed restrictions, not too conspicuous. What he wrote to Julian about yahrzeit he said to me many times, about a wide variety of Jewish customs and practices that over the years became part of my adult life. Why did Jews wear “headgear”? Why did they wear prayer shawls? Why did they eat smoked salmon, when everybody knows that’s Scottish, not Jewish? All these at heart were variants of the same question: Why couldn’t things still be the way they were at Temple Sinai in the 1930s?
Thinking back to Mother and Father’s formative years in the 1940s and early 1950s, when they made their way from their separate corners of the Jewish world to Cambridge, met, fell in love, decided that their two sensibilities could be successfully united, and moved to New Orleans, it looks to me one of those recurring times of abrupt divergence in Jewish life. Like the German Jews who went through emancipation in the nineteenth century, they convinced themselves that they were seeing the advent of a newer, more hopeful way of being Jewish. Most American Jews were ardently embracing Zionism, which because of the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel had gone from being a long-running but not so immediately consequential preoccupation among Jews to being a palpable, ever-present, undeniable reality. Zionism made Father and many other German Jews in the United States (there were no more German Jews in Germany, except in displaced-person camps) intensely uncomfortable. It was, simply put, too Jewish, requiring incessantly reminding the world of our disruptive presence as a distinctive people. Fortunately, by his lights, another path was available, the one he and Mother chose, which represented a kind of hyper-Haskalah for the late twentieth century, in which you’d persuade yourself that all the main sources of oppression of the Jews over the centuries—religion, nationalism, ethnicity—would now finally yield to modernity and rationality, thanks to advances in science, especially the kind of social science Mother and Father were studying, and a collective determination never to relive the horrors of the war. Why should we cling to the superstitions and the tribal loyalties of the past, when they were on the way out?
Invitations
In New Orleans Father took on the project, to be carried out with exquisite delicacy, of getting our family admitted into New Orleans’s highest social rank. His parents had lived through the period when this had become impossible: his mother had been a debutante, but now there were no Jewish debutantes, and his father had been a founding member of the New Orleans Country Club, but now its doors were closed to Jews. Father aimed to reverse these reversals. His partner in this effort was George Montgomery, who, as much as anyone, was the master arbiter of New Orleans high society. George was a sharp-eyed, witty, convivial man with a broad ruddy face, whom I can’t picture without a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, bursting with some juicy piece of information that he was eager to convey. He exemplified the New Orleans principle that social status was a separate domain, not connected to one’s professional life as it is in most places in America; he was so supremely an insider that he could indulge in the luxury of making fun of what was ridiculous about his domain, even as he ruled over it. Every year on Mardi Gras day the Rex parade would stop at the home of George’s wife’s family, the Kocks, on St. Charles Avenue, so that the king could offer a toast. This was an honor accorded no other private citizen.
Father’s fiftieth birthday party was a black-tie dinner at Quercus held in 1976, the house blazing with light, the walls filled with Father and Mother’s collection of modern art, servants in uniform passing heavy-duty drinks, the murmur of the guests’ conversation occasionally interrupted by a shriek of hilarity (New Orleanians aren’t especially restrained). At the crucial moment, George stood up and said, with tears in his eyes (and Father’s too), “The most Christian man I know is a Jew, Tommy Lemann.” The absolute security George felt about his own social position, plus some liberal impulse stirring within him, led him to want to take down the Mardi Gras krewes’ barrier against Jews, or at least against the Lemanns. Because Father’s parents had been invited to the Montgomery family’s annual party at noon on Christmas day, where there would be crustless duck sandwiches—the fruits of the labors of the hunters who made up the majority of the men at the party—and eggnog and hearty exchanged greetings of “Merry Christmas!,” we were invited too. Most of the members of Temple Sinai went to an all-Jewish Christmas party hosted by one of the members, with Julian Feibelman in attendance. Somewhere in New Orleans there must have been Jews who didn’t celebrate Christmas at all, but they were unknown to us.
One year George arranged for Father and Mother to be invited to one of the leading Mardi Gras balls, Atlanteans. It was Mother who first reported the news to me; Father treated matters of that level of gravity with discretion. (I would guess that George had also been responsible for my eighth-grade invitation to the Squires ball.) I think Mother was less excited by the prospect of going to the ball, and more by its being something that we could have fun discussing, because of its forbidden quality. But when the evening of the ball arrived, neither of them could hide where they were going, because it required dressing up—white tie for Father, some kind of pale floor-length gown for Mother. Afterward Mother gave me a report. The male members of Atlanteans were masked. Their wives and female guests were not. They sat in the balcony until they were invited to dance with the members. George’s generosity extended to the unmissable gesture of seating Mother next to Anne Kock Montgomery, his tall, regal, Roman-nosed wife. Father’s role was to act as a kind of assistant to the members, conveying their invitations to the dance floor and escorting the women to them, but, as a mere aide in a metaphorical mating ritual, not being permitted to dance himself.
What did everybody think about the Lemanns being there? It was hard for Mother to tell, because of the masks. The men who had asked Mother to dance were obviously the ones who approved, but they were not supposed to identify themselves to her. Who were they? She could only guess. And who, behind his mask—surely it would be somebody Mother and Father saw constantly in other circumstances and knew well—was scowling over this gross violation of tradition, this insinuation of Jews into a place where they weren’t welcome? And, afterward, how had Father and Mother done? Had they slipped up and acted in some way that could have been construed as Jewish, which is to say, unacceptable? I don’t know, but that evening seems to have brought Father’s Mardi Gras ambitions to a close. I don’t remember their setting off for any balls again.
It now looks to me as if no matter how hard Father tried, somehow, at least in the eyes of others, our Jewishness kept reasserting itself, just as it had in the utterly different environment of Cambridge in the immediate postwar years. The most obvious ways were through the social antisemitism of the clubs and krewes, or the occasional taunts that would be directed at my sister and me at the overwhelmingly non-Jewish Country Day School: someone would roll a penny up the aisle past my desk, to demonstrate that as a Jew I loved money too much to be able to resist pouncing on it. I had a friend at Country Day whose parents were divorced, which was rare in that time and place. His father had moved away and none of us had ever met him. His mother remarried and his stepfather—one of us, a German Jew—began proceedings to adopt his stepsons formally, which would entail changing their last name from Thomas to Freiberg. One day my friend’s father turned up at the school and asked to see his son. This was to give him a lecture about how he didn’t want to go through life with a Jewish last name. He was young, he had no idea of what a fearsome price he’d pay—of how much would be closed off to him. Think of the jobs you wouldn’t get, the clubs you couldn’t join, the girls you couldn’t ask out.
These glimpses indicated that there was a more extensive conversation about us going on out of our sight and hearing. What was it like? Who among the familiar constellation of people we knew spoke about us as vulgar or greedy or strange, and how exactly did they put it? Would it ever end? And on the other hand, I think of Mother and Father as yearning for a comfortableness that people on the other side of the American Jewish cultural divide, the less assimilated side, could get through Jewish means, but that were unavailable to them because of the path they had chosen. Quercus had two libraries, a public one for entertaining guests and a private one for Mother and Father. Their large collection of Jewish books was kept in the private one. Father studied ancient texts in their original language with a teacher every week, as many observant Jews do, only the texts were by Homer, the language was ancient Greek, and his teacher was a Catholic priest who was a professor at Loyola University. He had a strong interest in the archaeology of the ancient world, which he expressed by supporting a Harvard project in Turkey; he never went to Israel, which would have marked him as being too Jewish. He always noticed, but always privately, when someone Jewish ascended to a prominent position, and he also wondered whether concealing or downplaying their Jewishness had contributed to their ascent. A critique of Jews by non-Jews was eternally playing in his head. Perhaps this critique also functioned as a test he thought we ought to apply to ourselves, so that we could extirpate from our self-presentation, even from our private thoughts, anything that people who didn’t like Jews regarded as Jewish.
In his last years, when he was well into his nineties, on a feeding tube, and confined to Quercus, Father, skeletally tiny and frail, maintained his characteristic fierce energy and curiosity to an astonishing degree, but sometimes he would offer me a moment or two of open self-reflection, which hadn’t been customary for him. I noticed which topics were available for this and which ones weren’t. He spoke often about his not having been elected to the Harvard Law Review, as Pop had been, when he was a young man. This may have been a sign that the life of a business lawyer was not a perfect role for him; his sense of himself didn’t rest firmly enough on his ability to perform legally in a driven, superior way. (Monroe & Lemann went out of business in the 1990s, and Father spent the rest of his career as a much-loved senior counsel at a newer and less patrician firm.) He’d tell me that he had been able to live so grandly because of his inheritance, not the income from his legal practice.
