Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir Read Free

only The Sisters but also Fanny. Their criticisms only strengthened the bond between my grandfather and mother, and they frequently defended each other to the rest of the family. Case in point:
    “Why are you wearing a tie,” Grandma Fanny said to Grandpa Morris. “It’s brunch.”
    “Leave him alone, Ma,” my mother responded sharply to her mother before training her big, lovely smile on her father. “I think he looks very handsome.”
    The Sisters pounced on my mother in retaliation. Ronnie and I put our heads so close to our soup bowls that we nearly dove in.
    “What? You didn’t have enough money to add buttons?” said Fritzi about my mother’s swing coat. “How do you close the thing?”
    My aunts snickered, but Mother was undeterred.
    “There isn’t meant to be a fastening. It’s the style . I made it from the same pattern Carole Lombard wore in Fools for Scandal .”
    “Listen to her,” Aunt Fritzi said, shaking her fork in my mother’s direction. “Now she thinks she’s a blonde movie star!”
    My aunts never held back their hostility toward the sister they had nicknamed the Schwarze Jabbe (“black frog”), because she had darker skin than the rest of them. Instead, they laughed at her expense over their barley soup. In the open war between my mother and her sisters, each side gave as good as it got. (When Aunt Fritzi was on her deathbed, suffering from emphysema and barely able to talk, lying there ashen and frail, she beckoned me to come closer. I thought she intended to kiss or embrace me, but instead she whispered in my ear, “I always hated your mother.”)
    Mom acted like she couldn’t have cared less what her sisters thought about her. At home she called them “classless” and “vulgar.” My mother’s ambitions went way beyond them.
    She was the only one in the family who changed her name, going from Goldie to the more American Grace Anita when she was twelve years old. (When Grace didn’t suffice in her remaking, she changed the spelling to Grayce.) After she appeared in a few school plays, she started to dream of a career as an actress—and even entertained the idea she might end up in the movies. Like so many other young girls at the end of the 1920s, she loved the new, exciting medium of the “talkies.” Mother saw herself up on that big screen while watching Mary Pickford play a melodramatic flapper in Coquette or Ruth Chatterton as the mother of an illegitimate child in Lionel Barrymore’s Madame X .
    But her deadly practical family thought she was out of her mind. No matter how beautiful she was, according to everyone except her adoring father, Morris, Goldie would never be in pictures. Grandma accused her of faygelech in bosom : “fluttering birds in her breasts,” or unrealistic dreams. By the time Mother became a wife and the mother of two sons, the only remnant of her acting fantasy was her singing “Papirosen” around the house. While preparing a pot roast for supper or rearranging the tchotchkes she so carefully accumulated, she warbled the lyrics of the popular Yiddish song about a poor orphaned immigrant girl, dressed as a boy, selling cigarettes and matches on the street.
    Kupitye koyft zhe, koyft zhe papirosen.
    Please, please buy my cigarettes.
    Still, she continued to see herself as someone special. She took after her mother’s hardworking ways only in the effort she put into reinventing herself. Mother took great care and a lot of time every day with her hair, makeup, and clothing—taking her cues from the latest styles of movie stars and magazine models. She was resourceful, making beautiful outfits with very little money, proud to look like a wealthy woman even though she was far from one.
    The most glamorous choice my mother made, however, was the man with whom she had fallen in love and married. Meir Myron Katz, better known to the public as Mickey, was something of a minor celebrity as a clarinet and alto sax player in Cleveland’s biggest music