Yiddishlands: A Memoir

7. Malvina’s Roses

The Eclaire on West 72nd Street was New York City’s equivalent of Café Rudnitsky, the kind of place you might go on a first date, where by day the dozen or so round marble and wrought-iron tables were occupied by retired ladies with heavy make-up, some with nose jobs, others—not. It was Malvina’s venue for showing me a good time, and with her bleached blond hair, cut stylishly short, still looking every inch the actress, she fit right in. On our first rendezvous, I ordered the Peach Melba, in order to judge if The Eclaire was any match for Rumplemeyer’s on Central Park South where my parents took Eva and me twice in our life (it wasn’t, and the strawberry jam was cloyingly sweet), and I learned that Malvina was now married to a former opera singer who had made it rich and forbade her from performing on the stage. Through Max, who owned antiquities from Moshe Dayan’s private hoard and had gold in a Swiss bank, I later discovered the Boyaner shtibl on West 81st Street where, like some penitent from a novel by I. B. Singer, he prayed every Friday night, and it was because of him that Malvina kept a kosher home; her pre–Yom Kippur meal of steak and baked potatoes would sustain me through the fast for five or six years in a row. Scooping the vanilla ice cream from the bottom of the fluted glass dish— pardon my mentioning meat and milk in two consecutive paragraphs—I 41 7 Malvina’s Roses asked Malvina about the roses, and she burst out laughing. Neither had she any recollection of ever having shared a bed with Mother. But the next time wemetandwereseatedatherfavoritetable,shedidproducefromoutofher suede handbag a studio photo of herself as the Young Hasid. The group photos of The Strúgatsh Band—Di Bande, for short—the cabaret theaterthathadtakenVilnabystorm,werethemostraucousinmother’salbum . They crowded around Grisha’s radio, each emoting a different look of rapture and astonishment. Their autographs appeared on the back of another picture, inscribed “Mashen, der mamen fun der velt, to Masha, Mother of the World.” Masha was their mascot, the theater her home. She put on a pretty good act herself, because by now she was both motherless and homeless, living firstwithherfather,thenwithherhalf-sisterMina,andfinallywithherbest friend, Rivele Amsterdam; this, despite a late-night visit by Mr. Amsterdam , who offered to “comfort” his daughter’s girlfriend. They were all her buddies: Zalmen Hirshfeld, Yoysef Kamien, his wife, Nadia Kareni (as extravagant as her stage name), and the sisters Esther and Malvina Rappel. Malvina somehow got the juiciest parts: a dervish, a clown, a young Hasid, and most famously, The Street Walker. Jewish Vilna nearly came to blows over this one, because Olla Lillis of the rival Ararat Troupe had introduced the song in a raunchy, Brechtian style, while Malvina performed it to melancholy perfection. The cabaret crowd was fiercely divided between the Ollalístn and the Malvinístn. Mother, of course, sided with Malvina, imitating her performance before the regulars who gathered each evening at Grisha’s house. The story of Grisha her half-brother might itself have been written for the stage. Upon returning from Kharkov, one year shy of receiving his medical degree, he was hired by Dr. Zemach Szabad as the assistant director of TOZ, the Society for the Protection of Health, and married the beautiful and talented Nadianka, the only daughter of the owner of Vinisky’s Bank. They lived on Small Pogulanka, on the hill, and Nadia’s collection of dolls appears in every group photo, taken with Grisha’s Leica at what seems to be one endless party, especially the one in which Mother, Rivele, and all her student friends stage their own Troki Concert in makeshift costumes (Mother, in drag, has a cigarette dangling from her dark lips, with a man’s arm draped over her left shoulder). “We never knew where the stage ended chapter seven 42 and life began,” she said, flipping through the album, and because Di Bande refused to perform offstage, the crowd at Grisha’s took up the challenge . Mother made Malvina’s repertoire her own. Once, just before a new show was about to open, Malvina was having trouble memorizing the lyrics of “Kh’vil nit zayn keyn rebbe, Save me from becoming a rebbe,” which had been written out...