Jay Landesman - Rebel Without Applause

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Rebel Without Applause

Jay Landesman

New York

Dedicated to my brother Fred.

The Roots of Rebellion

It never occurred to me that I could be a writer until my only nervous breakdown at the age of thirteen. I realized then that I had a way with words when I accused the woman struggling to keep me from throwing myself into the street of not being my real mother.

If I dont get a pastrami sandwich, Ill kill myself.

Dragging me reluctantly back to our house, she was convinced I was an ungrateful child. When I showed no remorse, she hustled me off to a local doctor who specialised in nervous children. His office was in the same building as my sisters dance classes. I thought I was going for lessons; I had always wanted to be a tap dancer. Instead, I was given a diet of Scotts Emulsion Cod Liver Oil and sent to an open air school for children of nervous mothers.

By the standards of any day, my mother, Cutie, was a remarkable woman. Youngest and plainest of six children of poor New York immigrant parents, she was a petite, beaky, cross-eyed Jewish Cinderella who stayed home to do the housework while her mother looked for husbands for Cuties two older sisters. It never seemed possible to Grandma that she could find a husband for Cutie until a handsome young artist from Berlin knocked on the door of their Hester Street flat.

My name is Landesman. In the directory I see your name is Landsman, without the e. Are we related?

Are you married? Grandma asked. When he said no, she grabbed him by the lapels of his tight-fitting suit and sat him down in the kitchen with a nice cup of hot coffee. His first sight of Cutie was of her on hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. Benjamin was impressed; he knew a worker when he saw one.

He was on the way to St. Louis, commissioned by the German government to decorate their pavillion at the 1904 Worlds Fair. Over the next three years he established something of a reputation in St. Louis as a muralist, specialising in Teutonic cherubs and playful nymphs. But he didnt forget Cutie and returned to New York to collect her and the gold watch Grandma promised him when they got married. He never got the gold watch, but he won a 24-carat bargain with a heart of steelmy mother.

The only thing Cutie wanted in life was a big family. Her first child, a girl, was so beautiful, people would stop and ask if Gertrude was a baby or a Dresden doll. Her second child, Alfred, was a quiet child who remained so for many years out of sheer boredom. Eugene was born with a shock of red hair and a pinched face; the neighbours said he looked like another Trotsky. It was 1917, the Russian Revolution, and Jews were proud of the ex-tailor, Lev Bronstein.

I was the youngest and determined not to be ignored. I was also the noisiest, making demands upon Cuties busy life out of all proportion to my size and status. At an early age I had to invent new techniques to get attention and I continued to do so for the rest of my life. It was a necessity during childhood, a mission through adolescence, and in later life my only hobby.

A rebellious child was a novelty when I was growing up. Cutie couldnt understand why I resented wearing hand-me-downs from my two brothers, or why the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit she whipped up for my sixth birthday was not good enough for my tenth! None of the family liked the clothes Cutie made for them. My fathers collarless silk shirts looked like nightgowns; Gerts little dresses were ten years out of style, and her own clothes looked like they came from Mrs. Pankhurst. It was no fault of her highly prized Singer sewing machine, whose hum was the most familiar sound of my early years. I sometimes thought that if it ever came down to a choice between me and the Singer, shed have picked the Singer. I couldnt blame her, it was much more reliable.

Each summer, Cutie would take the whole family off to remote parts of Missouris Ozarks, where running water and electricity were still novelties. She liked to keep us in touch with nature, leading us down to the creek every morning to plunge into the icy waters, thanking the Lord for giving her such a big, wide, wonderful world to play in at such remarkable low summer rates. She encouraged us to run around naked, but we had to wear shoes. She said that everything in nature is beautiful but she was never without her fly swatter, her patent medicines, her jars of Mum, vaseline and the family enema bag. She gave us daily warnings about poisonous snakes, poison ivy and constipation, and she lived in fear that nature was out to destroy us in spite of its wonders.

Country life had charms for us that Cutie never imagined. The outhouse was one of them; it prevented her from checking up on our bowels. But to us it was a little temple of contemplation with the sexiest pin-ups in the world torn from the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalogue. By summers end, there was nothing about womens underwear that I didnt know the price of, or range of size. The food we ate in the country was positively exotic compared to Cuties kosher cooking in the city. Everything tasted fresher and cleaner; even pork was allowed us as long as it was cooked to a cinder.

Every day was spent trying to get away from her organized recreations, preferring to follow the farmers children as they went about their chores. These summers gave me the feeling that I was part of a bigger family than just Landesmans. When father came out to visit us on the weekends and we were all together again, we behaved as we did in the city. We couldnt wait for him to leave so we could get back to natures follies. But by the end of the summer we were glad to get back to the city.

City life had its charms for a skinny kid like me with an insatiable curiosity. Our house on the corner of Arlington Avenue and Minerva fronted US Highway 40. Everybody travelling west had to pass our modest two-family brick dwelling with its front porch, sloping lawn and a wild hedge that always needed trimming. The stop sign at the intersection gave us a chance to say hello or exchange insults with the children from far-away places with exotic license plates. Being first to spot what state they came from was a fascinating game we never tired of.