Saturday's Child Read Free

the camera with a slightly amused expression, just short of a smile, but Rose wears her frown like semaphore signaling a storm, and her posture is as rigid as the corset encasing her bulk.
    Then again, she had reason to frown. Life had uprooted and disappointed her sorely. She had made a real “catch”—a man of prestige, a rebbe —married him, and started a family, only to be hauled away from hervillage into a strange new world where he couldn’t find a synagogue to hire him, so had to clerk in a hardware store. She, who was to have lived her life as a rebbitzen , a rabbi’s wife, the most respected woman in the village, became a nobody—poor, without prominence, burying three infants in childbirth and raising the two sons and three daughters who survived in an immigrant Jewish community based in, of all places, Atlanta, Georgia. He consoled himself with books, Caruso’s phonograph records, and scrambled eggs. She consoled herself with rage.
    The sons, naturally, were the hope of the family. My memories of Uncle Aham and Uncle Samuel are so hazy they might as well be cut from gauze; I was barely a toddler the few times (I’m told) I met them. By then my mother, Faith, was already in flight from what remained of her family, except for her two older sisters, Sally and Sophie.
    These three women shared a lifelong bond: resentment. They co-cherished indignation as if it were a family heirloom, and their lives provided them with ample justification, as in the case of their brothers: the boys had been sent to college, but the two older daughters were flatly denied higher education, while my mother was permitted to sample it but was yanked out after one tantalizing year. My uncles and what families they eventually had accordingly vanished into a category that, had it been acknowledged, would have been labeled “Don’t-discuss-around-the-child-unless-absolutely-necessary-and-then-only-in-Yiddish.”
    Both aunts, on the other hand, were vivid presences throughout my childhood. Much as each of the three sisters considered herself unique, they all shared the same body type (short and overweight), and they all exhibited certain similar characteristics. Among these was an excessive reverence for perceived authority: bus drivers and waiters were addressed as “Sir”—but this was definitely not out of any courtesy or respect for the working class; in Georgia, they were working class, yet under my grandmother’s tutelage they carried themselves instead as Daughters of a Rabbi. More likely, such obsequiousness was rooted in first-generation-immigrant anxiety, or further back, in the periodic pogroms that would terrorize their native village. In any event, whatever rebellious energy the sisters possessed they reserved for use at the kinship level, to be expressed through continual railing against existence—in the guise of blood relatives.
    They also shared a capacity for exaggeration that rocketed past puny artinto stratospheric lie. No doctor could be merely good; to warrant confidence, he (and it was “he” then) had to be “the top in his field,” “the best in the world,” the medicine-magician “sheiks journeyed from Arabia to see.” (I kept trying to figure out why he chose to practice out of a two-room office in Yonkers.) A low- or mid-level theatrical agent or a would-be producer became “the most powerful man in show business.” Even a plastic necklace cleverly molded into fake coral spikelets was once vigorously defended as “rare coral, imported direct from the Great Barrier Reef.” Since the sisters’ own individual and collective histories were also prime subject matter for their exaggerative talent, they frequently reinvented themselves, their present, and their past. But they rarely did so in concert, which meant screaming matches over whose version was true. Sometimes I had a French great-grandmother named