Going Home Again
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing GOING HOME AGAIN BY BARRY GEWEN WHAT FIRST engages a reader of Cyra McFadden's sharp and affecting reminiscence, Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir (Knopf, 178 pp., $16.95), is...
...Boston Soy (Knopf, 178 pp., $15.95) begins with Hentoff's symbolic excommunication by a panel of three rabbis in 1982 for protesting Israel's invasion of Lebanon...
...Luxury was a motel room to sleep in, complete with a gaggle of cowboys sprawled out on the floor, using their saddlebags as pillows...
...McFadden, for the most part, avoids these pitfalls...
...It then takes readers back to his formative years, so that he can explain how "my life as a heretic [is] a tradition I keep precisely because I am a Jew...
...Then there was Cy' s insanely possessive second wife, Dorothy, who pursued an unrelenting guerrilla war against Cyra even from the deathbed . The waste, the nothingness such lunacies concealed give the book its particular poignancy...
...She had logged 150,000 miles before she was three...
...If it shouldn't have happened, it didn't...
...Her mother, Pat, a star of the St...
...These people all seemed to specialize in denial...
...When Cyra was an infant the family lived in a 1937 Packard, following the rodeo circuit from Edmonton, Alberta, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana...
...But he does not give us enough of his jazz experiences, and Boston is not all that different from New York...
...Hentoff is able to bear witness to the jazz scene of those years as few others can, and yet many of the pages of his autobiography ring with echoes that will not go away, themes that have been handled too often before...
...he indicates his lasting admiration and appreciationby dedicating Boston Boy to her...
...Cy, for his part, did not speak about Pat for 25 years after he had successfully remade himself...
...Roy sat at the head of the dinette-set table, his eyes worried and watchful, and led us out loud in unison chewing...
...Both were narcissists, in love with clothes and themselves—so self-absorbed that they once completely forgot their young daughter and had to drive back 70 miles to retrieve her from a motel room...
...Writers & Writing GOING HOME AGAIN BY BARRY GEWEN WHAT FIRST engages a reader of Cyra McFadden's sharp and affecting reminiscence, Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir (Knopf, 178 pp., $16.95), is the oddity of the material...
...He even tells his own Jewish mother story—about the time he moved into an apartment at age 19, and she came uninvited on the first day carrying a tureen of chicken soup...
...It was as natural as breathing...
...Her father was Cy Taillon, the "Dean of the Rodeo Announcers...
...14,15,16...
...Just as Cyra McFadden felt the need to flee her background, so Hentoff had to escape his, and like her, in middle age he now seeks to recover it through recollection and prose...
...To get there, he discovered a number of paths...
...recreation, a bourbon-and-branch at the local bar...
...Journalism and jazz criticism, the two areas where he has most made his mark, also provided avenues for him...
...Not the least of her virtues as a writer is an admirable poise...
...Like David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, Cyra experienced sudden and disruptive changes of fortune...
...Forgetfulness came naturally to Cyra's deranged mother, of course...
...Though her mother once danced in the chorus of a New York revue called Rain or Shine, and Cyra herself now resides in San Francisco, the places that provide the setting for this book are pinpoints-on-a-map like Nampa, Idaho, Puyallup, Washington and Belle Fourche, South Dakota...
...Cy came from Cavalier, North Dakota, Pat from Paragould, Arkansas...
...By the end of his life he was blending grain and molasses into breakfasts of sludge, which his wife flushed down the toilet when he wasn't looking...
...My parents attracted a retinue, people drawn to their specious glamour...
...Each turned to show business to escape what Marx called the idiocy of rural life...
...Not many have had such childhoods...
...The others had to work at losing their minds...
...A feisty, free-spirited woman ready to take on her own church and even the Cardinal when necessary, she hired Hentoff as a 15-year-old volunteer to help with a campaign against anti-Semitism in Boston...
...Growing up in Boston in the late 1920s and '30s, Nat Hentoff, the son of first-generation Jewish immigrants, had another way...
...She gained stability, but it was the stability of a prison...
...The Taillon marriage did not survive this roustabout life of all-night poker games, drunken brawls and amorous "buckle bunnies...
...He would not enter Brooks Brothers until his late teens for fear of being snubbed in that sanctum sanctorum of gentile haberdashery...
...Pat, a victim of venereal disease, survived several nervous breakdowns before succumbing to a steadier madness...
...Hentoff knew a larger world existed beyond the synagogues and street gangs, and he was instinctively drawn to it...
...While she was growing up, Cyra had to make her way in this family where everyone was busily obliterating everyone else...
...icons could have no truck with drunkenness, passion, divorce, VD, and madness...
...Jazz was an influence from the time Hentoff, at 13, first heard Artie Shaw's "Nightmare" blaring from a record store...
...The leaves changed color while we sat over a single dinner...
...In their particular small pond, a world where Fargo represented the Big Time, the Taillons were the bewitching barracudas...
...In this case, however, it led to a touching, altogether delightful book...
...His sixth-grade teacher, Miss Fitzgerald, had persuaded his parents to allow him to venture out of the neighborhood for his education...
...It is easy, in describing so constricted a scene, to stumble into either condescension or nostalgia...
...Asa 12-year-old, he sat on the porch of his house on Yom Kip-pur—the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, whose observance includes fasting—and ostentatiously devoured a large salami sandwich...
...I think my stepmother convinced herself that my attachment to the Taillons was the result of a mix-up in the record-keeping procedures of Deaconness Hospital...
...Now, if Hentoff had been raised in Missoula...
...Within two years, he was discussing the meaning of life with some of his idols at alocalclub...
...Louis Municipal Opera in the 1920s, was a professional stunt rider," so fearless that the cowboys gathered at the fence to watch her, wondering if this would be the night Cy's crazy wife killed herself...
...Pat'sbusybody sister, IlaMae, cranky and self-righteous, wrote at least one letter a day to Pat and Roy, ungrammatically recounting the latest familial disasters as she cheerfully twisted the knife...
...Anti-Semitic Irish toughs constantly menaced him—except on the occasion when he convinced some gullible bullies that he was Greek by reciting his lesson from the Odyssey...
...They married a mere 24 hours after meeting . Inventions of their own imaginings, they conducted themselves with devil-may-care panache, setting off sparks wherever they went...
...Rain or Shine has a Dickensian quality, though without the Victorian's sentimentality...
...Nobody had ever told us to acknowledge Christian houses of worship that way, but I couldn't remember when I hadn't spit at churches...
...Roy would not allow Cy's name to be mentioned in his house...
...Meals were a special trial...
...After the divorce, Cy eventually got enough of a grip on himself to become a Western icon second only to John Wayne as a symbol of the virtues of rugged individualism...
...In any tale about growing up Jewish, it takes a great deal these days to avoid sounding like a walking cliche...
...when the adolescent Cyra wished to demonstrate her rebellion against her father, she unabashedly declared that if you've "seen one rodeo, you've seen them all...
...But the master of the art was unquestionably the jealous Dorothy, who could not bear the thought that her husband had loved another woman before her...
...Their son needed no persuading...
...At about the same time, he got himself thrown out of Hebrew School for asking too many questions...
...It was a climate that might readily have produced neurosis or worse...
...Hentoff has his jazz and the Boston setting to distinguish him from the more typical "New York Jew...
...And the prestigious Boston Latin School, far from Hentoff s home, was a miniature melting pot where merit alone was rewarded...
...The main feature was chewing every mouthful of food 30 times to 'get the good out of it...
...The pleasures of muckraking, including the importance of speaking truth to one's own tribe, he learned from Frances Sweeney, the crusading editor of a small paper called the City Record...
...She also "believed in covering things with other things: beds with bedspreads, chair arms with doilies, my mother with more clothes...
...Two weeks after her parents' divorce, Pat married Roy Qualley, a straitlaced family friend, obliging the young girl to give up her flamboyant gypsy life for the Lutheran rectitude of Missoula, Montana, and the torments of assiduous gentility...
...As she pictures them, Cy and Pat were too similar to develop any genuine compatibility...
...Dickens-like as well are the other supporting players, a collection of seriocomic obsessives whose crotchets the author sketches in caricature...
...One, two, three, four...
...his wife's infection he and Ila Mae referred to as "malaria...
...Itwasashortsteptowritingaboutthem, "my chief rabbis for many years," for Down Beat magazine...
...Their daughter fled to the big city and an antithetical existence as a writer...
...Family meals consisted of hamburgers and a scoop of mashed at a roadside cafe...
...Hentoff came from a family that used to spit whenever it passed a church...
...I would be going to their school, in their part of town, and so I would be not only learning Latin and Greek but learning about them...
...Roy was a health-food nut, too, who followed a simple principle: If it tastes good, it is bad for y ou...
...they seemed togive off light, noise and gaiety, like a house in which there is a perpetual party going on, and people gravitated to them and stayed...
...This memoir is her attempt to pull the pieces together...
...The public library "was such neutral ground that acolytes of Father Coughlin kept their epithets in their pockets when sitting across a reading table from a Jew with a yarmulke on...
...Tricky as it was, she evolved a host of psychological stratagems to erase the evidence of his previous marriage, namelyCyra...
Vol. 69 • June 1986 • No. 9
