Morningstar: Growing Up with Books

Sandra finally looked up, her cheeks red and wet with tears. “I’m not Catholic!” she blurted.

Before I could ask her what that meant—what were you if not Catholic?—Sandra ran out of the playground gate, down the sidewalk toward home.

Ten years later, I had a Jewish brother.


DURING SKIP’S CONVERSION I learned about the Jewish High Holy Days, the stories of Passover and Chanukah; I learned what it meant to keep kosher and what a family did on the Sabbath; I learned that some Jews wouldn’t use elevators or turn off lights from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. To me, it sounded mysterious and exotic. Then I read A Stone for Danny Fisher and, coincidentally, was cast as Tzeitel in my high school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof.

I had learned how to live through reading a lot of books, with a smattering of pop culture thrown in. And that year I learned about the pogroms in Russia, why Jews covered their heads and wore prayer shawls, and the importance of keeping their faith—all through a Broadway musical. With kerchiefs on our heads and aprons over our dresses, we sang “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” and we danced with brooms and clasped our hands together as we twirled to “Tradition.” During my marriage to the tailor Motel Kamzoil, the cast picked me up as I sat on a chair and danced, holding me aloft. Two months later I watched this happen at my brother’s wedding, shortly after he and his bride took their vows to “Sunrise, Sunset.”

A Stone for Danny Fisher opens at Mount Zion Cemetery a week before the High Holy Days. “For this is the week that Lord God Jehovah calls His angels about Him and opens before them the Book of Life. And your name is inscribed on one of those pages. Written on that page will be your fate for the coming days,” it begins, and then continues to explain that the book remains open for six days, during which you devote yourself to acts of charity, such as visiting the dead. To make sure you get credit for your visit, “you will pick up a small stone from the earth beneath your feet and place it on the monument so the Recording Angel will see it when he comes through the cemetery each night.”

Although much of the novel deviates from an exploration of Judaism, Danny’s Jewishness is established from the start. In the first chapter, two boys corner Danny in his new neighborhood and demand to know which church he will attend. When he tells them, “I’m a Jew and I go to shul,” one of the boys snarls, “Why did you kill Christ?” Reading this, surely I remembered my own interrogation of Sandra Goldsmith on the playground and my grandmother telling Skip that the Jews killed Christ. In the next chapter, Danny has his bar mitzvah, the scene rich with details of the synagogue and the ceremony. After school I was watching the boys in the cast of Fiddler practice singing “To Life” and in my bed at night I was reading about Danny’s parents shouting it to him at his bar mitzvah. Robbins describes the white silk tallith emblazoned with a blue Star of David and the white silk yarmulke that Danny wears; a few months later I sat in a synagogue at my brother’s wedding looking out at a sea of men wearing yellow yarmulkes to match the couple’s color theme.

I don’t remember the confluence of these events—my brother’s conversion and marriage, reading A Stone for Danny Fisher, and performing in Fiddler on the Roof—striking me then as important. But from the distance of years I see how a bestselling book and a popular musical helped me navigate the changes in my family, how they showed me through songs and stories a glimpse into a world I had been, until then, unaware of.

In all the years that have followed, I have visited dozens of countries and witnessed countless traditions and cultures. I’ve attended a voodoo ceremony in Brazil and visited a witch doctor in Uganda. I’ve been splattered with paint during the festival of Holi in India and heard the muezzin call Muslims to prayer in Egypt; I’ve seen single women wear their hair in braids by law in Turkmenistan and pilgrims approach temples on their knees in Tibet. All of these things, and so many more, I’ve watched with curiosity and an open heart. Thanks in no small part to Harold Robbins, Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick, who showed me a glimpse of a world and a belief different from my own.





Lesson 8: How to Have Sex


? The Harrad Experiment BY ROBERT H. RIMMER ?


I HAD EXACTLY TWO LESSONS IN SEX EDUCATION. THE first came from my ninth-grade, gray-haired, bespectacled home economics teacher. Mrs. Follett taught the cooking half of home ec, but one day she led all of us girls (the boys were busy building bookends in shop class in the basement) to the gym and showed us an antiquated-looking film on menstruation. We sat on the bleachers, horrified at the dancing cartoon ovaries and fallopian tubes and giggling as the bobby-soxed girls asked an offscreen interviewer why they suffered with pimples, cramps, and moodiness.

After the movie, Mrs. Follett brought us back into the home ec room with its stoves and mixing bowls and deep sinks, stood in front of us wearing a serious expression, and said, “Girls, there’s a difference between necking and petting. Necking is above the pearls, and petting is below the pearls. Necking is okay. Petting is not.”

She nodded solemnly, then handed out recipe cards for fudgies.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in this classroom full of daughters of immigrants—Italian and Portuguese and Irish, our mothers at work in mills or diners or industrial cafeterias—who felt confused. Pearls? Who in this town wore pearls? And what was above them? I thought of pictures I’d seen of flappers with their long strands of pearls skimming the hems of their short dresses. I thought of the movies I watched on television on Sunday afternoons with Doris Day or Grace Kelly in cocktail dresses, a necklace of pearls at their collarbones. Where, then, was the line between necking and petting? I needed specifics, clarity, my own set of pearls that fell to the perfect safe length.

Marie Mattias, my cooking partner, had already donned her apron and was collecting the ingredients for our fudgies. It was rumored that she had already kissed a boy, so perhaps this necking/petting thing made sense to her. I watched her place sugar and milk, butter and cocoa powder, rolled oats and peanut butter on our workstation. Beside us, my friend Jane was frowning—not at the recipe but at everything that had happened that afternoon, the dancing ovaries, the discussion of pimples, the pearls.