Inventing Memory Read Free

on modern Jewish history at Columbia and sang the siren song of youth and shiksatude that lures Jewish men from the partners who have in creasingly begun to remind them of their mothers and grandmothers. Lloyd was now beginning to make noises about wanting to come back, but Sara was suddenly not so sure she wanted him. She had come to like her independent life, rigorous as it was.
    "It's an amazing building," said Sara, hoping to ingratiate herself with Lisette de Hirsch, who absolutely glowed with pride during the tour.
    Privately Sara thought the place over the top, a mishmash of architectural styles—none of them in the best taste. The library, with its gaudy ark and priceless silver (all accompanied by donor plaques almost as big as the objects), was crammed with leather-bound volumes housed in dark mahogany bookcases, one of which revolved to expose a spiral staircase leading down to several levels of library stacks and a secret conference room with a green baize door and a round conference table that has been built into the bedrock of Manhattan. Nobody knew whether the chamber had originated as a wine cellar or if the Vanderbilt who created the house circa 1905 had added it as a hideaway during World War I. The subsequent owners refashioned it into an underground dining hall or conference room, with a dumbwaiter to the kitchen on the ground floor.
    Lisette opened a paneled door and pressed a button; elevator cables whirred as the dumbwaiter descended. It was fitted out with circular depressions for decanters of wine, dish racks for china, and a flat shelf for conveying large servings of food.
    Lisette proudly displayed this gadget to Sara. "They didn't have a servant problem in those days," she said, not knowing how much she sounded like a caricature of a rich woman. "One butler was waiting here to plate and serve the food and two kitchen maids to send it down after the chef had done his final seasoning. Some menus from those days survive. They were inordinately fond of seven-course meals, from soups to savories."
    Sara laughed rather too appreciatively. After all, this woman was one of the three who would decide whether or not to anoint her. She didn't want to sabotage her chances of getting the grant.
    For the moment, she would have to forget that her husband possibly believed himself in love with the Nazi bitch from hell, that since Daddy moved out her daughter had been wetting her bed and had begun therapy with a child psychiatrist who charged an outrageous three hundred dollars per forty-five-minute "hour." She had no wealthy relatives to bail her out and she was already behind with her rent and Dove's school bills.
    Sara knew she was short-listed for the plum of resident scholar at CJH, and she'd be damned if her habitual ironic defiance would lose it for her. She couldn't afford irony and defiance now. She had a kid to support.
    "What days those must have been!" Sara exclaimed in her best ingratiating manner. "Those days before income tax, those Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, days…"
    "Edith Wharton—though not Emma Goldman—was said to have dined in this very room." said Lisette, the buttons on her suit gleaming. "Apparently there was a literary dinner, and Henry James was also here. This was before they both abandoned New York for Europe."
    "I would be honored to work in such a house," gushed Sara, wondering if she wasn't laying it on a bit thick.
    Lisette's eyes lit up behind her expensive gold-rimmed granny glasses.
    "Oh, I do so wish more young people felt like you," Lisette said. "After the Holocaust, Jewish history must be preserved. It has never been more important. How did you get interested in Jewish history?"
    "When my mother died last year, I decided I had to know everything about our family—and naturally I was drawn here…. There's some rumor that my great-grandmother—whom I'm named after—was part of an oral history project before I was born or just after, but nobody seems to know where the