Faderman - Naked in the Promised Land: a Memoir

Copyright 2003 by Lillian Faderman

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Faderman, Lillian.
Naked in the promised land / Lillian Faderman.
p. cm.

ISBN 0-618-12875-1

1. Faderman, Lillian. 2. ScholarsUnited StatesBiography. 3. LesbiansUnited StatesBiography. 4. JewsUnited StatesBiography. 1. Title.

CT 3990. F 33 A 3 2003
305.48'8924073092dc21 [ B ] 2002032233

To ensure the privacy of certain persons who appear in this book, some names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

eISBN 978-0-547-34538-3
v2.1017

F OR A VROM

My deep gratitude goes to the many friends who read this book in its numerous versions, made helpful suggestions, and gave me encouragement: Rosie Pegueros, Ruth Schwartz, Linda Garber, Barbara Blinik, Ruth Blinik, Joyce Aiken, Rosalind Ravasio, Charlie Bolduc, Joyce Brotsky Virginia Hales, Sharon Young, and Olivia Sawyers. Special thanks to Frankie Hucklenbroich, Steve Yarbrough, and Beatrice Valenzuela.

It would have been impossible for me to finish the manuscript without the gift of time from my colleagues and the administration at California State University, Fresno. Im especially grateful to Luis Costa and Michael Ortiz.

My editor, Elaine Pfefferblit, believed in this project from the start and has made me feel her support. Thank you. Sandy Dijkstra continues to be a great friend and a terrific agent.

Im blessed in my familyAvrom Irwin Faderman and Phyllis Irwin. Thank you for your sweet nurturance.

H OW COULD I NOT have spent years of my life lusting after the golden applethe heft of it, the round, smooth feel of it, the curve of it in my small hand? When I was three months old and a war was raging across the ocean, my mother rocked me in her arms in a darkened theater. On the silver screen, here in America, in the Bronx, was Charles Boyer, a duke with a mansion in Paris, another in the Loire, another in Corsica. His sumptuous abodes were concocted by a lunatic confectioner: furniture, curtains, ceilings, wallsall of billowy whipped cream. If the movie had been in Technicolor, everything would surely have been ivory, heaven blue, sun gold. My mothera shopgirl, an immigrant, no husbandstared with open mouth, rapt, all but drooling at Boyer and paradise. When she remembered, she dandled me a bit in her arms, praying I would be silent long enough to let her seeone more glimpse of the duke, of his mansion, of the story. This she told me.

I did not cooperate. From fitful sleep I awoke to bawl, to shriek with new lungs, with all my strength.

To the lobby and back with me. One more glimpse for her, and to the lobby again.

See, she softly crooned. Look, see. Standing in the back of the theater, she held me up to better see the screen. It was the handsome duke she wanted us to see, and the many mansions. For a moment my mouth was open too in rapt attention.

We went home together, I in her arms, in the late October cold sunset to our little rooms in the Bronx. She wrapped the blanket tighter around me and held me to her breast so that no cold could reach me. But her head was full of Duke Boyer with his bedroom eyes and kissy mouth and mansions.

For my first three months wed been living on relief, as welfare was called in New York in 1940, and my mother didnt have to work. We could go to movies together to our hearts content. But it couldnt last.

You have to sue the babys father, the relief worker told my mother in the loud voice she used for people who didnt speak English well. The Bronx cant be supporting you and her forever. She printed the address of the public lawyer in big, careful letters and told my mother what subway to take.

Thats not my baby, my father swore on the stand, and the judge believed him. He didnt have to pay my mother a cent.

The Bronx didnt have to pay any more cents either, the relief worker said. That was when my auntthe funny monkey, my mother called hercame to live with us and take care of me, and my mother went back to the garment factory where shed been a draper before I was born. No more movies and outings in the cold for me.

My aunt kept me well bundled in the cramped and overheated apartment and crooned Yiddish lullabies to me all day long. Unter Lililehs viegeleh... Under little Lillys cradle stands a pure white goat. The little goat went to market, to buy you raisins and almonds. A foghorn voice came out of her short body. I stared up at her with huge love eyes. She held me to her heart and I crawled in forever, she said. A kush on dyneh shayneh bekelech, a kush on dyneh shayneh pupikel, a kiss on your pretty little cheeks, on your pretty little belly button. Smack, smack would go her lips in big goopy kisses on my briefly exposed skin, and I was beside myself with glee.

My mother called her Rae, and Id never heard the word aunt, so when I began talking I called her My Rae. I became roly-poly because My Rae was always sticking into my mouth big spoonfuls of whatever she was cooking in our small kitchenprune compote, potato and carrot tzimmes, boiled chicken with noodles, My-T-Fine Chocolate Pudding. Open the moileleh, the little mouth, she said and grinned ecstatically when I did. In went the compote, in went the tzimmes. A michayeh, a pleasure, she said. I learned to walk months later than most kids because when My Rae wasnt cooking or making her sewing machine go whirr, whirr with the piecework she did for money, she never let me out of her arms.

My Rae and Mommy: immigrant girls in American finery, 1920

They were the only two of their family who, in 1923, had made it to the safe shores of America, long before Hitler marched through Prael, their shtetl in Latvia, and wiped out everyone elsea crippled brother, two sisters, the sisters husbands, the sisters five children. It was not supposed to work out that way. This is what you must do, the grandmother I never saw told her eldest daughters, my mother (a sylph, an eighteen-year-old beauty) and my aunt (a bulldog, the chaperone). The poorest of the poor were going off to America and sending back dollars and pictures of themselves dressed like the nobility. Why should her two daughters be any less lucky? They were to marry rich men in America and bring the rest of the family over.

Theyd been in America for almost twenty years, their parents had died, and neither my mother nor my aunt had married, not even by the time I was born to my mother and her lover in 1940. Shed been with him for eight years. Hed told her from the beginning that he wasnt the marrying kind, but she loved him, so she couldnt help herself.

Then, not long after my mother lost the paternity suit against my father, Hitler invaded Latvia. When the silence from Prael continued, month after month and year after year, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, my mother blamed My Rae for all of it.

You! Its all because of you. I could have brought them, but you said no. First we get married, you said with your big mouth. Lousy bitch, Ill tear you to pieces like a herring. A fig on you, and she thrust her thumb between her index and middle fingers, waving it in front of My Raes nose in a shtetl version of giving someone the finger. I sat on the bare floor and bawled. And Moishe would have married me, but you had to butt your lousy two cents in.