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Free To Be

Visible

Nice Jewish Girls, edited by Evelyn Torton Beck.

By Debbie Gross

Throughout Nice Jewish Girls there is a feeling of sharing and questioning-it is a book of discovery. This anthology includes poems, essays, pictures, and fiction by both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. There are essays and letters about being a Jewish lesbian in Israel and in the United States. Women write about growing up Jewish in different parts of the world.

In JEB's photo-essay, "That's Funny You Don't Look Like a Jewish Lesbian," she writes, "My denial of my Jewishness was always by silence, by

omission: after all, I was not a religious Jew, why bother to mention it?” As I read that I thought of my own feelings of isolation, of feeling that there were no other Jewish lesbians, or at least they were not visible as. Jewish lesbians. And yet through this book I have realized that many well known lesbian authors, are Jewish-Nancy Toder, Alice Block, Elana Dykewoman, Ruth Geller and many more. Perhaps out of my own ignorance or by omission I never identified these writers and others as Jewish lesbians. There are many parallels to the isolation I felt before I came out, feelings of "I'm the only one".

As many writers in this anthology have expressed,

Now

I too have felt invisible-invisible as a few in the.lesbian community, and 'Invisible as a lesbian in the Jewish communty. I hope that people will read this book and question and learn. This is the first anthology of its kind. I hope it will give all of us the strength and the freedom to be visible. As Evelyn Torton Beck says in her excellent, introduction, "Having to hide: a sure sign of danger":

Beck goes on to write about anti-Semitism in the lesbian-feminist movement, both in literature and in various conferences. Later in the book there is an essay by Irena Klepfisz, "Anti-Semitism in the Lesbian/Feminist Movement" which includes a list of questions to help all of us "identify...sources of shame, conflict, doubt and anti-Semitism”.

Nice Jewish Girls raises many questions. There is a (continued on page 10)

****7. Gammy

↓

Silver hairpins

and purple dresses

that bagged at the waist

aven over her corset,

Grandmothers

a nevy blue hat and a pocketbook

and sensible shoes that went stump

stump

as she walked along in her heavy complaining walk. Oh dear oh dear oh dear the shoes seemed to say.

I thought Gammy was old old

old as forever,

walking through the house saying sadly to my mother, "To think that a daughter of mine would smoke!

After the way I brought you up!"

I remember her bending over to get dressed.

She wore a peach slik teddy.

I was thinking how soft old people's skin is,

how nice and fat and how it wobbled.

She was fifty-five then. Fifty-five

was time to be old, to wear dark dresses

and thick black shoes with laces;

to wear your teeth only to go outside.

She prayed with her teeth out.

"Dear God, please help Wilma remember

to take the brown perta off the lettuce

before she puts it in the salad....

The brown part Isn't good for you."

She would ask God for any old thing.

2. Grandmother

& ,e

Carol Crawlery

Grandmother lived with Aunt Isabel in a big dark house where the sun always seemed to slide around the rooms

a little piece at a time: There were unused bedrooms,

* cupboards, places where they kept things

leftover from other days, other people.

"Long before you were born," they said.

Grandmother saved her wedding gown and a place of the cake.

"It's an ashes of roses gown," she said. *Tiny satin shoes.

And she kept a little coat that had been my father's

make when he was four years old.

She never let her smile go over the edges; Berit was always a permitted smile, best and she sighed a lot and took naps with a black stocking over her eyes. Fsaw pictures of her when she was young and it always looked as if she were sighing.

I did see a picture of her smiling, once.

She was standing by her brothers. ·They went to Harvard and Yale,

became lawyers, professors.

She stayed at home and learned what she could.

I found a photo of her at a women's rights rally

in a crowd of women with their droopy hats:: She was in the front row, on the left, looking happy.

-by Barbara Angell

3. Widows

In October the sun gets sad,

It leans over, everything is yellow,

It says so sorry so sorry so sorry,

and my grandmothers whisper,

"There are Things In Life you don't talk about."

I always wondered what had happened,

If one day, drinking tea or something,

watching the sunlight falling through the curtains,

they decided it was time to be old.

Their husbands were only photographs now:

Granddaddy Tanner with his white mustache and crinkly øyes, Gammy's husband with black hair and a big head..

He looked stern. Metal rimmed glasses.

He was a doctor and nothing was ready on time for him.

• His wife was careless, she wrote rhymes about robins and Je

and forgot to get dinner on the cook's night out ther

Gammy always came home late in the afternoon,

my mother told me, threw her hat and coat on the couch

and rushed to the bathroom, oh dear oh dear.

She was late because she had secretly gone to a Ladies Aid and Dr. Traphagen didn't allow it.

After a while, my mother, a little giri,

started getting dinner on Thursdays,

and he patted her head and said,

"Someday you'll make somebody a good wife."

*Their husbands were stories now,

finger raised in warning, or a memento

of some old, possible love

like Grandmother's green ring.

Sitting in the kitchen with Grandmother, drinking cambric tee, my sister and I always asked to touch the ring..

"It's tourmaline," she said.

It was something magic from a long time ago

when Granddaddy with his white mustache

lived with her in the big dark house,

and all the things she 'saved were now.

Old rose petals in a jar.

It smells nice, she said,

but those were dead roses left over

from some summer years ago,

and the light hung down so low; it was fall, and everything lying on the ground,

and time to be old, time,

to set everything in place, in jars, closets, cupboards; to label things by year, to lold and put away.

from Games & Puzzles by Barbara Angell

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Ayeril/LNS

September, 1982/What She Wants/Page 7