By
David Gottfried
In 1963 or 1964, while listening to the radio, I blurted out, “That’s a shvatza (Yiddish term for black, often considered derisive and racist) girl singing, right.”
The neighborhood kids laughed. My Mother, who mightily endeavored to appear as cultured and politically correct as recently martyred Jackie Kennedy, was aghast at my use of the word “shvatza.” In a fit of rage, she immediately and aggressively smacked me. Since then, I have often used Yiddish slang, and especially words like shvatza, as if I were the second coming of that somewhat tacky comedian who seemed to be the Jewish version of New York’s Alfonse Damato, Jackie Mason.
Although my Mother loved Jackie Mason in private, in public she aspired to be austere, angelic, Anglican and very severe, something along the lines of a TS Eliot Poem. And if she couldn’t sucessfully pretend to be a rich English Bitch at the Ritz, she’d try for a French Catholic Look. After all, Joe Kennedy decided that Jackie Kennedy, being French Catholic, would walk John into the White House – Since Jack was Catholic, he’d have to marry a Catholic, but French Catholics had so much more class than Irish Catholics.
There was another reason for making like a French Catholic: My Father had just died. Although my parents had been separated, and although my Mother couldn’t stand my Father, she knew that she would really score social status points by using the simultaneity of my Father’s death, and Jack’s death – My Father had died two days before JFK died -- to imbue herself with the chic and splendid angel dust that seemed to cling to Jackie like a halo of frankincense or whatever it is that Catholics venerate. While my Mother imagined that she was as stately as Jackie Kennedy, I was trying to figure-out whether I was Bobby Kennedy or John John.
Of course, if my Mother really wanted to be French, she had to learn to speak French. Although she seemed to be a genius, as she was doing long division when she was four years old and had started Brooklyn College at the age of 15, she still couldn’t manage to be fluent in anything other than English. She had been studying French since high school, all for naught.
For whatever reason, after my Father’s death, my Mother returned to French with a vengeance. She decided to enroll the two of us in a course, in Brooklyn College, entitled “Mothers and Children learn French together.”
I didn’t like the course one bit. I wanted to watch Saturday morning cartoons. But for some reason, starting in December of 63, we were out the door every Saturday morning to go to one of the queerest and sickest classes I have ever been in. The class consisted of about 20 severely anxious and angry Jewish Mothers, and their kids, desperate to purge themselves of every last drop of Brooklyn, Jewish, Industrial, urban feeling. Instead, we were to be a limp and limpid palsied people, starched and straightjacketed like a priest leading mass at Notre Dame. Toward that end, we engaged in all sorts of language exercises.
First among these exercises were attempts to loosen us up so that we could really utter French vowel sounds with all the histrionic Edith Piaf emphasis of a nutjob going through his 19th nervous breakdown. When we pronounced the letter U, we had to enrich it with all of its pathological bluster and elan. A U was not a mere U; it was a fallopian tube flowing with all things feminine and febrile and fucking psychotic. An O was not a mere O; it was an oceanic, bellowing indictment against the world G-d had given us. An A was a fucking A, adamant and acerbic, acid-tongued and absolute.
But most of all, when my Mother and the other obnoxious mothers in the class practiced their French vowels, they seemed to be having a bowel movement for the kids’ benefit. When they practiced their vowels, and I heard them screaming Ahhh, oooh, eeeh, etc., I was hearing a voweled hallelujah chorus cum language lab lavatory. I never really understood this. We have vowels in other languages. Why do vowels in French sound so exaggerated when American Mother’s practice French.
When French people utter vowel sounds, they don’t sound like they are reaching for some toilet paper. But the American pseudo intellectual feels obliged to overact in obedience to the dictates of Ethel Mermen, Sophie Tucker, Barbara Streisand and other goddesses of the clit pantheon.
After the mothers dumped shit on their children, we kids became the subject of attention. We were taught songs. Actually, I remember only one song, Frerer Jocker. I think we sang that song for about a year.
I never knew what the fuck the song was about, but the meaning of the French words came to me by osmosis, I suppose.
For example, I kept hearing, “Al oh wetta” in the song. So I knew the song had something to do with bed-wetters. And “Frerer Jocker” sounded so much like “Faggot jock strap.” So I decided that they wanted us to sing Frerer jocker so we could be foreign faggots who sang on the stage dressed in only jock straps.
After about 20 minutes of singing about fairy freres, the instructor, who I was sure was a frerer jocker, brought out some tasteless cookies that he said were a chic thing to eat in Paris, and the obese Mothers would proceed to stuff themselves because even if the cookies were fattening, at least they were chic, and eating five of those terribly cultured cookies was, perhaps, the gustatory equivalent of getting 800 on the verbal section of the SATS.
Following class, the mothers and kiddies went to a very tacky café on Brooklyn ‘s Flatbush Avenue that seemed to have been built for Jews who imagined that they were rich French Catholics who partied with Maurise Chevalier in “Gigi,” which was showing in about 15 Brooklyn Movie theatres at the time. At the phony French café, we all ate the same thing: Pate on onion bagels. We ate pate because we had learned that it was sublime and chic and that’s what Jackie Kennedy and Truman Capote ate when they discussed Audrey Hepburn’s wardrobe in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Audrey’s interpretation of Truman Capote’s novel. (The pate was grossly inferior to my Grandmother’s kosher chopped liver served on rye bread.)
Our Mothers decided that our culturally superior lunch had to be succeeded by culturally superior entertainment. That, for some weird reason, meant a punch and Judy show.
I despised Punch and Judy shows because they implied that a six-year-old was as dumb as an infant. We knew the puppets in the shows weren’t real. We knew the puppets were animated by human hands and that the speech came from human voices, but we had to pretend that we were so stupid as to believe that the puppets were real animals and people and that they all spoke like people in America in 1963. The shows may have been neat entertainment for a two-year-old, but for a savvy six-year-old who already knew about the Cold War thanks to Saturday Morning Cartoons, starring conniving Russians such as Boris and Natasha (They may have been on the Bullwinkle and Rocky cartoon), punch and Judy shows were as insipid as punch, given to adults, spiked with Kool-Aid.
But French culture was not the only culture that was all the rage. So was German culture. And I shouldn’t be too hard on my Mother because some Jewish women, only 20 years after World War Two had ended, were ga ga over German culture.
For example, I spent my first three years of public school (kindergarten, first grade and second grade) in PS. 192, the same public school attended by Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground. The Jewish teachers in our school thought we would all be so adorable if we were little German boys and girls wearing drindls and lederhosen. They put on some goddamn dance festival in which all the kiddies had to dance for them, and the boys in the early grades had to wear ersatz lederhosen.
Of course, the teachers weren’t so crazy at to insist that our proletarian parents buy us leather lederhosen and so they brought in reams of cray paper and used infantile safety pins to attach the cray paper to our blue shorts to simulate lederhosen suspenders. We almost looked as doofish as Julie Andrews’ lederhosen-wearing back-up singers in “The Sound of Music,” a film which so mesmerized brain dead conservatives that 20 years after the film was released, President Ronald Reagan told his staff, immediately before a summit meeting with Maggie Thatcher and other Euro big shots, that because the Sound Of Music had been on Television the preceding night, he had had no time to read the one-page briefing for the summit.