Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist

The Women's Section

The Women’s Section The Women’s Section, 1997. Framed text with photos reflected on mirrored Mylar. Helene_ebook.indd 13 4/11/12 3:38 PM It was on our street in Boro Park that my father, Uncle Abe, Uncle Morris, and other shul people, like Louie Cohen and Julius Bienenfeld, would ceremoniously walk with a special Torah that had been rescued from the remnants of devastated Europe in the early forties. They walked it to the Young Israel shul on Fiftieth Street. The most heavenly privilege, from the look on the faces of those in the processional, was to be the one who held the Torah. I, being an Orthodox girl, never knew what that honor felt like, but I did know that the greatest calamity was to drop it. That was like dropping a newborn on its head, and the punishment for this great averah (sin) was a forty-day fast. Forty days! Moses waited forty days on top of Mount Sinai to get G–d’s laws, and after he finally had them in hand, he got fed up with the idolatrous party scene below with the golden calf and threw down the tablets, so he had to spend another forty days creating the commandments without G–d’s help. It’s funny that Moses did not get punished for the lack of anger management he displayed when he smashed G–d’s stone tablets. That act seems more worthy of a permanent time-out from the promised land than the incident that actually caused Moses to be banished; he struck, rather than tapped, a stone with his staff when G–d commanded him to bring forth water. Moses assumed that G–d needed a little push to make water gush out of stone, but G–d, in his omnipotence, needed only a light tap. You don’t slight G–d. I HAD a dazzling Hebrew teacher, Miss Kasha, who told us in class that her great rabbi father wrote two thousand interpretations on the first word of the Torah, bereshis (in the beginning). I wish I had raised my hand to ask Miss Kasha if perhaps her mother, Mrs. Kasha, might have written just one comment of her own, so there would be 1,999 by her father and one by her mother. But thoughts such as this had not yet germinated in my brain. In fact, I could hardly think at all as I stared at Miss Kasha in her dark purple wool dress that reached up to her Modigliani neck. She wound her blond hair into a tunnel on top of her forehead, held in place by a single bobby pin. I could look through this tunnel when she turned to the side. I tried to comb my own hair in a tunnel like Miss Kasha’s when Anna, our housekeeper, wasn’t around to tightly braid my unruly hair. Another wondrous thing about Miss Kasha was her dark purple lipstick, so dark it was almost black. It was called “Indigo,” which sounded like the foreign land of India. I wasn’t allowed to wear lipstick then, but on my wedding day when I was eighteen I wore that same dark indigo lipstick. There were always teachers the girls flocked to, rushing to hold their hands. Only two girls could do so at a time, and I usually didn’t care to compete with them. But in the fourth grade, I wanted to be one of the girls who bravely held Miss Kasha’s beautifully manicured hand with the blackberry nail polish covering each divine long fingernail. Alas, this was one of the opportunities I missed; I was too shy to rush to Miss Kasha’s side, lest the sound of my skipping heart be detected. At recess, the girls in my eighth grade class played jump rope outdoors. Only Marilyn Shineman, one of the more developed girls, and skinny me chose to stay upstairs together in the girl’s bathroom to talk about our bodies. Marilyn wore a shirtwaist blouse with two pockets that lay over her blossoming breasts. Her shoes were those loafers that had pennies tucked into the folds of the leather. I don’t remember if the loafers came with the pennies or if you had to put in your own. Marilyn put on a show for me, taking out the pennies from her loafers and placing one penny in each pocket of her blouse, so that miraculously, the pennies...