wondered.
“More than anybody,” Yetta declared, in the same sweepingly confident tone that Daddy had when he made his pronouncements.
Grandma Lansky liked to talk to Daddy in Yiddish, not to keep secrets like Mommy did, but because that was her first language, and Daddy’s, too. When Mommy was there with us, I think that made her uncomfortable. But she often let Daddy take me alone. The only old world she liked was France, not Russia. Yetta was a wonderful cook; all her Jewish classics, like lokshen soup, latkes, blintzes, and gefilte fish were, to me, better than Dinty Moore’s. Somehow with her, I had a big appetite, but nowhere else.
My first inkling that I was Jewish came from Yetta. I was totally confused, going from her world in Brooklyn back to our world on West End, from blintzes to bacon. Somehow I had a sense that Brooklyn, even fancy Brooklyn, was more real than West End. In a few years I would see exactly how right I was, how the Beresford, the ultimate New York building where we would soon move, was one big mirage.
CHAPTER THREE
M AKE B ELIEVE B ALLROOM
I n 1942 we moved to the Beresford at 211 Central Park West, on the corner of 81st Street. This was a real castle in the sky, built in 1929, just before the crash, when rich people thought that the sky had no limit. Our apartment on the 19th floor was vast (Jerry Seinfeld lives next door today), with a huge terrace overlooking Central Park and an army of doormen and elevator men in fancy uniforms to wait on us.
Our unit, 19J, was as close to a palace as you could have in New York. There were four bedrooms, two maid’s rooms, a restaurant-sized kitchen and pantry, a breakfast room, a dining room, a marble foyer, a paneled library for Daddy and clothes closets Mommy could live in, a vast living room, and more bathrooms than I could count, with black tiles and stall showers with multiple shower heads. The bathrooms were so art deco that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Fred Astaire coming out of one of the showers. Daddy’s library was my favorite. It looked like it came from a European university. He had walls and walls of books and three sets of encyclopedias: Colliers , the Book of Knowledge , and the Britannica . There was nothing he didn’twant to know about. For an eighth-grade dropout, he was the most learned man I ever saw.
I had a huge room where I could see the spires of the new George Washington Bridge in the distance over the water towers of the Upper West Side. They sort of looked like space ships. The room was blue and white with fleur-de-lys wallpaper and French provincial furniture. Throughout the apartment were priceless Oriental rugs and silk carpets that the maids took up in spring to display the parquet floors. Summer was too hot for rugs. Mommy got her help from Mrs. Gooding, who ran an employment agency in Harlem. She looked just like Aunt Jemima on the pancake mix boxes. Mommy kept Mrs. Gooding very busy, because no maid could get the apartment clean enough. She was always on her hands and knees cleaning up after the maids. A microscopic amount of dust would drive her crazy, and she would be on the phone to Mrs. Gooding to find her someone new.
If I thought Mommy was away all the time buying clothes and getting beauty treatments, decorating this apartment would take her away forever. Mommy loved to decorate, to design built-in furniture and discover rare pieces. Her impeccable, refined taste ran to French antiques, hence my French nursery school. I later learned that the buildings across Central Park on Fifth and Park Avenues were more “exclusive” than the Beresford, which was another way of saying they didn’t accept any, or many, Jewish families, not with poor Russian roots like Daddy’s. In the 1950s bestseller Marjorie Morningstar , Herman Wouk’s Jewish princess heroine lived in the Beresford. Given that my parents didn’t see us as a Jewish family, I’m surprised, particularly given my mother’s
“More than anybody,” Yetta declared, in the same sweepingly confident tone that Daddy had when he made his pronouncements.
Grandma Lansky liked to talk to Daddy in Yiddish, not to keep secrets like Mommy did, but because that was her first language, and Daddy’s, too. When Mommy was there with us, I think that made her uncomfortable. But she often let Daddy take me alone. The only old world she liked was France, not Russia. Yetta was a wonderful cook; all her Jewish classics, like lokshen soup, latkes, blintzes, and gefilte fish were, to me, better than Dinty Moore’s. Somehow with her, I had a big appetite, but nowhere else.
My first inkling that I was Jewish came from Yetta. I was totally confused, going from her world in Brooklyn back to our world on West End, from blintzes to bacon. Somehow I had a sense that Brooklyn, even fancy Brooklyn, was more real than West End. In a few years I would see exactly how right I was, how the Beresford, the ultimate New York building where we would soon move, was one big mirage.
CHAPTER THREE
M AKE B ELIEVE B ALLROOM
I n 1942 we moved to the Beresford at 211 Central Park West, on the corner of 81st Street. This was a real castle in the sky, built in 1929, just before the crash, when rich people thought that the sky had no limit. Our apartment on the 19th floor was vast (Jerry Seinfeld lives next door today), with a huge terrace overlooking Central Park and an army of doormen and elevator men in fancy uniforms to wait on us.
Our unit, 19J, was as close to a palace as you could have in New York. There were four bedrooms, two maid’s rooms, a restaurant-sized kitchen and pantry, a breakfast room, a dining room, a marble foyer, a paneled library for Daddy and clothes closets Mommy could live in, a vast living room, and more bathrooms than I could count, with black tiles and stall showers with multiple shower heads. The bathrooms were so art deco that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Fred Astaire coming out of one of the showers. Daddy’s library was my favorite. It looked like it came from a European university. He had walls and walls of books and three sets of encyclopedias: Colliers , the Book of Knowledge , and the Britannica . There was nothing he didn’twant to know about. For an eighth-grade dropout, he was the most learned man I ever saw.
I had a huge room where I could see the spires of the new George Washington Bridge in the distance over the water towers of the Upper West Side. They sort of looked like space ships. The room was blue and white with fleur-de-lys wallpaper and French provincial furniture. Throughout the apartment were priceless Oriental rugs and silk carpets that the maids took up in spring to display the parquet floors. Summer was too hot for rugs. Mommy got her help from Mrs. Gooding, who ran an employment agency in Harlem. She looked just like Aunt Jemima on the pancake mix boxes. Mommy kept Mrs. Gooding very busy, because no maid could get the apartment clean enough. She was always on her hands and knees cleaning up after the maids. A microscopic amount of dust would drive her crazy, and she would be on the phone to Mrs. Gooding to find her someone new.
If I thought Mommy was away all the time buying clothes and getting beauty treatments, decorating this apartment would take her away forever. Mommy loved to decorate, to design built-in furniture and discover rare pieces. Her impeccable, refined taste ran to French antiques, hence my French nursery school. I later learned that the buildings across Central Park on Fifth and Park Avenues were more “exclusive” than the Beresford, which was another way of saying they didn’t accept any, or many, Jewish families, not with poor Russian roots like Daddy’s. In the 1950s bestseller Marjorie Morningstar , Herman Wouk’s Jewish princess heroine lived in the Beresford. Given that my parents didn’t see us as a Jewish family, I’m surprised, particularly given my mother’s
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