Shiksa Goddess or, How I Spent My Forties (review)

Any number of modern American playwrights are Jewish—from Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller to David Mamet and Tony Kushner—but almost none of them, with the possible exception of Clifford Odets of Awake and Sing! fame, would be considered a Jewish dramatist in the way that Bellow, Malamud, and Roth are thought of as Jewish novelists. Much the same point could be made about Wendy Wasserstein, who remains best known for her Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning Heidi Chronicles. Although a nonobservant Jew, Wasserstein does, as she says in interview, still suspect that her “idea of show business comes from hearing cantors [in] temple”; and she attributes “also that sense of community and melancholy and spirituality” to her roots. Yet among her plays (including Uncommon Women and Others, Isn’t It Romantic, and An American Daughter), only The Sisters Rosensweig “has to do with coming to terms with one’s self, and in this case coming to terms with one’s religion and one’s heritage, and in that case coming to terms with Judaism, which is a very complicated issue.”

That ambivalence finds expression in the title of Shiksa Goddess, which collects three dozen occasional pieces (including essays, interviews, short playlets, snatches from a work diary, and even a “LUMP [Last Unattached Male Persons] List”) about midlife matters, culminating in two consuming personal events: the death of her older sister from cancer and the premature birth of her daughter Lucy, conceived through in vitro fertilization when Wasserstein was forty-eight. Mostly, their tone is unapologetically comic—a perspective the author feels “embraces the widest human conditions”—while their subjects reflect her recurrent concerns with “politics, the arts, and women’s equality.” A true believer in “the tenacity and continuity of her women friends” as “the signature of a truly enviable woman,” in these pages Wasserstein seems overly harsh about Hillary Clinton for sending “confusing signals” by being “the loyal, betrayed wife” who stands by her man, at the same time that she lauds Martha Entenmann, developer of the see-through pastry box in the 1950’s, for her blend of entrepreneurship and motherhood.

The granddaughter of a Yiddish playwright, Wasserstein’s own early theatergoing became the source for her only children’s book, Pamela’s First Musical. But ever since she took lessons as a child, her real infatuation has always been the ballet, which perfectly melds content and form and where a disciplined community of artists “create so elo quently in silence” and achieve something “profoundly true.” One of the most affecting pieces in this collection recounts Wasserstein’s efforts to develop a new young audience for Broadway by taking a multicultural group of eight accelerated science and math students from DeWitt Clinton High School to a variety of plays and then out for pizza and conversation. They go from being embarrassed about theatergoing as a decidedly uncool, boring activity for classy older whites to seeing “the art form [as] gloriously compelling”—and their tutor can only hope that somehow the price can be made right to ensure their continued attendance.

As a writer, Wasserstein is something of a major procrastinator when it comes to meeting deadlines, and so, between Christmas and New Year’s, she usually finds herself holed up in a room at an inn, sometimes with her cat for company. Hotels, she finds, are a good place for not avoiding writing, since “A hotel room is as close as modern life comes to a monastery”; at the same time, while residing in one, you never need to “Book a hotel room for an affair.” While as a comic dramatist Wasserstein might claim an affinity with Kaufman and Hart and Noel Coward, it is to Chekhov that she pays her greatest allegiance—there are, after all, three Rosensweig sisters. Calling Chekhov “a master of time. How it advances. How it damages,” she reverences the “sad-funny, funny- sad” Russian for his lack of pretentiousness, for his non...