Inventing Memory by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online

woman from steerage whose beauty, liveliness, and intelligence captivated me. I helped her with English and she drew my portrait, which I treasure. But now she has disappeared from my life forever.
    Tell me, dear Editor, how shall I find her—or am I insane to think of making her my wife? I cannot forget her.
    I know she is poor, but as the poet says: A pretty face is half a dowry. I can supply the other half. Please advise your desperate reader.

    An uptown man whose heart is downtown

    ANSWER:
    We cannot advise this writer concerning this matter. Some mixed marriages are happy, some are not. Also, the writer seems not to have considered the woman's feelings. The advice to the writer is: honor the young woman's opinion.
    We print this letter in the hopes that the woman will contact him if she has the desire. If she does not contact him, we advise the writer to let the matter drop.

3

    Sarah
    YENTL MEETS THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
    1906

    Darkness, the old mother, has not forgotten my East Side.
    —MICHAEL GOLD

    W hen I saw the letter printed in the Forverts , I immediately tore it out and hid it in my corset so that Levitsky would not see it. Somehow I knew that despite his reticence about sex, he would not be happy about the existence of a rival for my attentions. He might be afraid to make love to me himself, but that didn't mean he was not possessive. The territorial drives of men are not only about sex. Possession is a fiercer joy. Levitsky had made my life better, and I had no intention of giving him up.
    It was not only the work but the newfound sources of entertainment. He would take me to the Yiddish theater, happy to have a pretty woman on his arm and to have people think we were lovers. At first I was glad to conspire. With the money I was making from my catalog work, I could afford new clothes, and the theater was the place to show them off. Afterward we would tour the Yiddish Rialto on Second Avenue (this was even before the Café Royale), and Levitsky would beam with naches when all the theatrical riffraff—or slumming Avenoodles—looked hungrily at me.
    What myths have grown up about the Yiddish theater! You'd think it was the old Globe itself and that every playwright was Shakespeare. Not that they didn't plunder him—and everyone else they could steal from. Like Hollywood, which it in fact gave birth to, the Yiddish theater stooped to conquer. Respect for the intelligence of the audience was hardly rampant. Everyone went for the cheap laugh, the crocodile tears—and the audience loved it. The audience made more noise than the actors. Still, the Yiddish dramatists stole from the best—Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov. In one offering, Hamlet (played by the great matinee idol Tomashevsky) was a rabbinical student who came home to find that his uncle, the old rabbi, had married his mother and knocked off his father—with a poisoned matzo, no doubt. What shreiing there was! Who would have guessed that all of Denmark was inhabited by Litvaks! (Tomashevsky was a rather plump Hamlet—not exactly Valentino—but the Litvak ladies swooned nevertheless!)
    There was also the Jewish Doll's House . (Ibsen, of course, was claimed by all progressive Jews as a landsman.) In the Yiddish version, Nora was called Minna and took in a handsome young anarchist boarder with bedroom eyes who immediately enlightened her and her daughter about female emancipation and woman's suffrage, not to mention the eighthour day. Having renovated their brains, the boarder now commenced to renovate those parts that were sacred to Venus—excuse my French—while the old papa dovened , turned a blind eye, and went on paying the bills. Ibsen, meanwhile, rolled over in his grave.
    Not so different from show business today, when you come to think about it. My grandson, Lorenzo—God help him—has just produced a gay musical Hamlet in which Hamlet and Horatio are lovers, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern run a bathhouse in Wittenberg, and Ophelia and