From THE MODERN REVIEW,
VOL. 1, Issue 3, Spring 2006, p. 57-62
Some parents move east for the sake of their children’s
education. Mine moved west so my father could play golf. He
played golf three days a week at the legendary Hillcrest Country
Club, a golf club created by Jews who were excluded, by virtue
of their Jewishness, from L.A.’s other clubs. My father was one
of the original 495 members. Membership included oil rights,
which largely paid the members’ dues.
At Hillcrest he hung out, visited, lunched with (I don’t think
he actually golfed with them --did they actually play?) the
Jewish comedians of the day -- the Marx Brothers, the Ritz
Brothers, Jack Benny, George Burns, George Jessel. Why were the
Jewish stars almost all comedians? Was it OK to be Jewish if you
were a studio head or a comedian (you might have to change your
name) but not if you were a so-called serious actor -- Piper
Laurie, Kirk Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lauren Bacall,
Shelley Winters? Were those the only examples? We didn’t know
then that those actors were Jewish, any more than we knew that
Rock Hudson was gay or that Jeff Chandler was a cross dresser
(see Esther Williams’ memoir). Those truths were hidden,
un-known, like the tornadoes that visited Pasadena and downtown
LA, which Mike Davis, in his book, The Ecology of Fear, says the
city fathers conspired to keep secret. How did they manage to
keep tornadoes secret? They did though. We had no idea.
“With an average of two or three tornadoes a year, the incidence
of twisters in the LA basin is slightly higher than in
Oklahoma.” (1)
My father was a great raconteur and loved to mimic, in his
nonspecific European accent, the American and particularly the
Southern accents he had, as a recent immigrant, just
encountered. As a result, the comedians called him “Tex”. His
real name was Sylvain, which the locals pronounced “Sylvan,” as
though he existed, appropriately enough, in a sylvan glade.
“The key experience behind Adorno’s critique of mass society was
his miserable exile in southern California.” (2)
My sejour, my sojourn, in Beverly Hills coincided with what
Alice Jardine calls “the first American fifties”, 1945 to 1955,
the period that has been theorized as the genesis of the
postmodern era. She says the greatest danger for women was
perceived as ambition; and for men, conformity. I agree. She
identifies that period’s burning question as how did this
country get from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Disneyland in ten
years, via the Alger Hiss case, the Rosenberg event,
McCarthyism, and the Korean War. Wow! Good question. I was only
dimly aware of those events. All I remember is, precisely,
visiting Disneyland the year it opened, 1955. In the seventies,
in New York, my husband and I became friends with Alger Hiss,
who was still being trailed by the FBI.
“If you have fallen on hard times, you will have better hard
times in California...you can live here in more comfortable
straitened circumstances than anywhere else.” (3)
I was a fulltime resident of Beverly Hills from the age of three
to the age of eighteen, that is, from 1941 to 1956. I attended
the El Rodeo School from the 1st to the 8th grades, and
graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1956. It was a joke
or it was no joke. A police car patrolled the streets every half
hour, but there was no crime. Or if there was, we were unaware
of it, it was invisible, like the tornadoes, the gays, the cross
dressers & the Jewish movie stars. Oil revenues supported the
schools -- there was an oil well on the Beverly Hills High
School property -- as they paid the members’ dues at the
Hillcrest Country Club. Those who walked were suspect. The
police used to stop my grandparents, who lived in New York and
visited us in the summers, and who had the European habit of an
after-dinner stroll, to ask where they lived, and could they
supply a local address.
A kind of preternatural calm, a calm beyond calm, held sway. As
Luis Bunuel, who lived there during the war, said, “It was a joy
to walk the streets of Beverly Hills . . . to luxuriate in that
sense of order and security, to enjoy that American amiability.”
(4) Only a surrealist would notice. This is the Beverly Hills of
my childhood. To grow up there as a (Jewish) refugee from the
war in Europe was to be (come) a (child) surrealist. Or an
absurdist.
The air was soft, sun-kissed like the oranges.
It was a skin thing.
I do remember fog, blinding fog,
and sunlight.
. . . the artificial sunlight of luxurious torpor . . . (5)
we were (all) blinded by the sunlight.
Beverly Hills -- its immaculate houses, wall-to-wall carpeting
tended by live-in maids, manicured lawns nourished by
underground sprinkler systems (we turned them on at dusk),
flowerbeds cared for by Japanese gardeners (ours was Belgian).
The water was imported (we never asked), the flamingoes on the
front lawns (not ours) were plaster, the flowers were real. In
the back garden there was a barbeque and a swimming pool. The
streets were safe.
It was restful, expansive, serene. Beautiful sunny days,
dazzling blue skies, dappled shadows . . . . Me and my shadow,
all alone and feeling blue. . . . .
To this day, I am moved by leafy shadows, wherever I see them. .
. .the light of unearned nostalgia... . .a dreamless, seamless
whole . . . . (6)
A kind of eternal quiet prevailed. There were no electric
leaf-blowers or lawnmowers, no honking horns or traffic jams.
There were no boom boxes or loud music. Even the weather seemed
calm in those days. The neighbors were silent. We didn’t know
them, we didn’t even know what they looked like. I never
wondered. Not that the lots were so big, but they were private,
bounded by ever-green trees and shrubbery. People got into their
cars and drove away. We didn’t see their faces. There were no
joggers on the streets or even pedestrians on the sidewalks.
There were no children at play. They played in their own
generous back-yards.
My questions about meaning bumped up against this perfection.
Affidavits
I came as a refugee from the war in Europe so I knew from my
nightmares that there was another reality. But here there was no
fear except in me. Here, one beautiful sunny day followed the
next. There was no knowledge of disruption, disaster and death.
The contrast with my nightmares confused and disoriented me.
There was barely any awareness of war among my schoolmates. They
learned no geography or history. They didn’t know if Europe was
in Belgium, or Belgium in Antwerp (“Anne-twerp!” they yelled,
gleefully). In my house there were affidavits and anxiety. My
parents were frantically trying to save people. I didn’t realize
you had to put up separate sums of money for each refugee you
sponsored:
One chief way in which the emigres came into contact with the
locals was through the scramble for affidavits. Their desperate
efforts to save relatives and friends still trapped behind Nazi
lines were immeasurably complicated by a U.S. government
requirement that every entering refugee had to be sponsored by
some individual who could submit an affidavit and accompanying
financial statement guaranteeing economic support of the refugee
for a period, if necessary, of up to five years. The same
collateral funds could not be used twice, so there emerged a
feverish quest to fiind new sponsors, usually Americans, who
would be willing to post the required bond on behalf of people
they didn’t even know. (7)
But when the war was over my parents said, nothing happened.
On Jewish holidays my friends and I went to the beach. This
provoked some resentment amongst the Christian children who had
to show up at school. My performance of Beethoven’s Funeral
March at a piano recital produced helpless giggles from my
friends. The future seemed predictable. Children lived for the
day, or at most, the next day. “Life is a bowl of cherries” they
said, echoing the 1931 song. Compare that to the New Yorker’s
“shit happens.”
In the end,
A lost world was replaced with one in which nothing seemed to
happen.
That was my parents’ version of our war,
their mantra,
Nothing happened.
And it seemed that nothing did.
Notes
1. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear
2. James Miller, Lingua Franca, Dec/Jan 2000
3. Alfred Polgar, German refugee satirist, quoted in Fred
Grunfeld, Prophets Without Honor, McGraw-Hill, 1980, p. 178.
4. Luis Bunuel, My Last Sigh, Knopf, 1983, p. 195
5. Senator J. William Fulbright quoted in The Fifties, Blanche
Wiesen Cook and Gerald Markowitz,1996.
6. Lawrence Weschler, “L.A. Light” The New Yorker
7. Lawrence Weschler in Exiles &Emigres ed. Stephanie Barron,
Abrams, 1997, p. 346
- Anne-Marie Levine