The Raiders

1

"Shiksa!"

The first time she heard the word spat, it was not directed at her but toward her Aunt Leia, her mother's younger sister. That would have been — Oh, she had been seven or eight years old. Aunt Leia had been twenty-six or twenty-seven at the time.

The occasion was that Leia had broken the Shabbat that morning. While the men of the house were at worship, Leia had discovered that someone had forgotten to buy the extra bag of bagels that should have been in the house because they had four guests. Leia had slipped out of the house, first carefully covering her head with a scarf, as a modest Jewish girl did before she went out on the street. She had walked eight blocks to the market run by goyim on Eighty-seventh Street in Ozone Park. There she had made a purchase. She had touched money on the Shabbat. Someone saw, and someone brought the word to Rabbi Mordecai Graustein.

"Shiksa!"

It was not Leia's first transgression. She had broken the law before. What the family held most against her, though, was that Leia had reached the age of twenty-six or -seven and was not yet a wife and mother.

Nor was she finished with offending. When she was twenty-eight she would marry a young man from New Jersey and move with him to a town there. He was a member of a Reform congregation. They reared three sons in Reform Judaism. Rabbi Graustein forbade his wife ever to see those children, or ever again to speak to her sister. (She did see them, as he probably suspected, but husband and wife avoided confrontation by pretending she obeyed his injunction.)

Rabbi Mordecai Graustein was the father of Golda Graustein — Glenda Grayson. He was a formidable man. If not for her certainty that he loved her, little Golda would have been afraid of him. He was a bigger man than most: broad-shouldered, bulky inside his long black coats. He wore starched white shirts with collars buttoned tightly to his throat, without neckties. His beard usually covered his throat in any event. He wore his black hats set squarely on his head. He was a respected man in his Queens neighborhood. Many people spoke of him as holy. Men came to the house seeking the benefit of his wisdom and learning. Men came to him to hear him elucidate the law. Worried men came to the house to hear his opinion of the frightful things happening in Middle Europe.

Golda listened respectfully sometimes, and one day she heard him rule that the law proscribed the making of fire on the Shabbat and therefore light switches should not be moved on that day. Flipping a switch caused fire to appear inside an electric light bulb, he reasoned; therefore the switches should be set before the Shabbat and not touched until the Shabbat was over. A yeshiva student gravely but humbly argued the question, and the rabbi patiently overwhelmed his argument with citations to holy books.

The student then asked if it was lawful to allow a gentile servant to turn lights on and off during the Shabbat. The rabbi pondered for a moment and ruled that it was.

Golda learned to speak and read Hebrew and Yiddish. That was a necessity for her brothers but not for her, and that she took the trouble to learn earned her a measure of respect not earned by her sisters. She learned many things besides: to speak quietly and carry herself modestly, to light the Shabbat candles at the proper hour, to make the proper responses as her father led the family prayers, to keep the meat dishware separate from the milk dishware, not even to wash them at the same time.

She always knew — she couldn't remember when she had not been aware of it — that she and her family were very much like most of their neighbors and very different from other neighbors. The men who came to see her father dressed exactly as he did. They wore beards as he did and kept their heads covered, if not by hats then by yarmulkes. The women, too, dressed much alike, very modestly, and covered their heads before they left their houses. They shopped only in selected stores, where things suitable for their use were sold. They shared a body of special knowledge, and they shared customs and traditions that seemed foreordained and inescapable.

Yet, she knew from an early age that not everyone lived as her family did. She learned, too, very soon, that some people hated her people. Her brother Elihu came home one day from school when he was nine, bloody and bruised. He had been set upon by other boys and beaten. "Irländers," her father had grumbled. "Italianers. Katholisch. Sturmabteilungers." It never happened again, but Golda heard them yell sometimes — "Jew-boy! Kikey!"

She understood why those boys hated her brother. They were jealous of him because he was far brighter than they were and had a much better future ahead. He might become a rabbi like her father or a diamond merchant like her Uncle Isaac, while they were headed for toil on assembly lines in factories or greasy labor in automobile repair shops.

If they could get even such jobs. The Great Depression, which touched her family little, reduced many of their families to penury. Envy was the source of their hatred. Those whom G-d did not favor hated those whom He did. Throughout history, it had always been so, her father explained.

2

When she was seven her family took her to a street fair, and there for the first time she saw people dancing. Dancing! They moved their bodies, especially their legs, in rhythm to music and laughed and shouted in happy exuberance. The men danced first, then the women. Golda was ecstatic. She tried to do the steps. Her mother had to restrain her from trying to mimic the men's dancing, which would have been unseemly; but when the women danced she allowed the little girl to try the steps.

Golda could dance. Before her first experience with it was over she discovered something even more exhilarating than the dancing itself: that it made her the focus of attention. People close to her turned away from the women's dance to watch the little girl. That very first time she responded to them by mugging — grinning and rolling her eyes — and discovered they liked that, too.

Dancing was not a transgression. It should be done decorously, with appropriate modesty, but to enjoy it, even conspicuously enjoy it, did not offend. Nothing in the law, her father said, forbade people from enjoying themselves. Indeed, he had no objection to her mother enrolling her in a dance class, where she studied ballet. Her only problem with that was that her father judged tutus immodest and insisted she must dance in a knee-length skirt. But he never came to the dancing classes. He only supposed she would wear a tutu. He never dreamed that what she really wore was tights — leotards.

In this little friction over what she would wear in her dancing classes, Golda for the first time felt a tinge of resentment about separateness. She was the only girl in her classes asked by her family not to wear what the others wore; and if she had done it, it would have embarrassed her, not to say humiliated her. She didn't want to be different. She didn't want to be identified as someone unusual, peculiar.

She wondered then why her father dressed eccentrically, why she was supposed to keep her head covered outside the house, why they were obsessed about keeping the meat and milk apart, why their family and nearby friendly families were so different from all the other people she saw as she rode the bus to her dancing classes. She ventured to ask her mother, not her father, and was told that they obeyed the law and followed tradition, which was what G-d wanted them to do.

G-d wants us to do, G-d tells us to do. (They never broke the law that forbade them spelling out the name of the Deity, and in Golda's mind, God was G-d.) What G-d wanted seemed to justify everything.

She rode to and from her dancing classes with a girl who said she believed in God but believed very differently.

"Why is it," she asked this girl on the bus one day, "that God tells you to do one thing and tells us to do something else?"

The girl shrugged. " 'The Lord moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform,'" she said. "We are God's children. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

By the time she was fourteen, Golda Graustein was very secretly, but very definitely, a skeptic.

3

When she was fifteen she was introduced to the young man Rabbi Graustein had tentatively decided would be her husband. His name was Nathan. He was a student at the yeshiva, preparing himself for the rabbinate. He was eighteen years old.

Nathan was a slight young man, timid in the presence of the lordly Rabbi Mordecai Graustein, and respectful toward the rabbi's daughter. He was only an inch or so taller than Golda and probably weighed less than twenty pounds more. She disliked the redness of his full lips. She disliked the straggly patches of whiskers that grew here and there on his cheeks and jaw — which he might have shaved, she thought, until he could grow a manly beard. She disliked his totally practical little round silver-rimmed eyeglasses. He wore a calf-length black coat, wore his white shirt buttoned up and without a necktie, and wore his black hat set precisely square on his head — all like her father, only on Nathan these things did not lend dignity. Above all, she disliked his bland sincerity.

He had been in their house four times before he spoke a word to her. Then he said, quietly, bluntly, "Our fathers have chosen us for each other."

"Perhaps," she said noncommittally. "But that's a long time from now."

"Yes," he said. "I must continue to study."

Neither of her parents saw her first dance recital. For six months she had been working with Mrs. Shapiro, her dance teacher, to develop a routine. Her mother didn't know and probably would not have told Rabbi Graustein if she had.

The recital was given in the recreation hall of a temple in Hempstead, Long Island. When Golda mentioned that it was being presented in a Jewish temple, her father frowned but did not ask what kind of house G-d had that included a recreation hall. To the Graustein family, Hempstead sounded like a distant place, certainly one they could not reach conveniently, and they accepted the assurance that the young dance students would be transported there on a bus and returned by nine o'clock in the evening. In fact, that was the only negative reaction they had to the recital — that the bus had returned at 9:46.

They did not see their daughter perform. She was sixteen. She had ripened into a leggy, busty young woman. Some of the dancers in the recital were tap dancers, some essayed ballet. Golda Graustein came on the stage in bright-red hip-high leotards glittering with spangles, wearing a red spangled top hat and net stockings, and carrying a stick. She did a solo piece. She danced, and she sang, and twice she dropped in a one-liner — her own, not authorized by Mrs. Shapiro. She mugged. She rolled her eyes. Her enthusiasm was infectious. The audience stood to applaud and called her back three times.

"I will be a dancer. I will be an entertainer," she told her mother in the quiet of her bedroom that night.

"Your father has chosen a husband for you."

Golda's answer was simple. "No."

It was the first time he called her a shiksa.

He would no longer pay Mrs. Shapiro to teach her. Mrs. Shapiro taught her anyway. He wouldn't give her bus fare to go to her classes. She walked, until Mrs. Shapiro found out and gave her bus fare.

Naomi Shapiro had danced on Broadway in the 1920s and early '30s, without much success; and when her figure began to thicken they had discontinued hiring her.

"They will break your heart, darling," she told Golda. "You must think. You must think — "

Golda was eighteen. "I must think of the alternative," she said. "Marriage to a pale, pimply ... unmanly — "

"I can arrange an audition. You see what you will have to compete with, then you will know."

4

Before this audition, Golda lost her virginity. More accurately said, she did not lose it; she got rid of it, something she had ceased to prize. She gave it away in a darkened rehearsal room at Mrs. Shapiro's studio, to a dancer two years older than she was: a muscular, handsome, manly youth, everything Nathan was not.

Doing this, she made her first great mistake about love. Innocent, she did not understand that a man could do to her what that young dancer did — unless he loved her. Oh, maybe not loved her in the great romantic way they heard sung about on records and radio, but cared for her at least. How could he have struggled with her through the ritual of passion without caring for her?

But he had. He was a nice Jewish boy, too. He thrust his big fat organ into her and caused her pain and pleasure and afterward treated her as a nuisance he didn't want to tolerate anymore.

A week later Mrs. Shapiro accompanied her to her first audition. It was, of course, a revelation. Golda discovered that she was only one of thousands — tens of thousands? — of girls who were dedicated to dancing and yearned for a place in the chorus lines of Broadway shows. She was seen at all only because someone felt he owed a favor to Naomi Shapiro.

She did not make the first cut.

As they stood on the street outside the theater in the rain looking for a cab to take them to the subway station — Golda depressed, wearing a scarf over her head, a too-short raincoat, saddle oxfords, and bobby sox, everything unstylish — a man walked up to them.

"Hi, Naomi," he said. "Disappointed?"

"I'm not," said Mrs. Shapiro. "I warned her. I suppose Golda is. Golda Graustein, meet Ernie Levin."

Golda looked at this man. He was maybe fifty years old. He wore a pork-pie rain hat and a black raincoat. He was not as tall as she was. His face looked squashed down, as if the jaws of a vise had been tightened on his skull and jaw, but an irrepressible smile shaped his eyes and mouth.

"Nice to meet ya, Miss Graustein. The first thing to do is change that name. The next thing — What are you, Hassidic? The next thing is to toss away the scarf, get your eyebrows plucked, get your hair cut, and learn to wear makeup."

"Ernie is an agent," said Mrs. Shapiro without enthusiasm.

"I was back there," said Ernie Levin. "I saw the audition. I can get ya work, kid. I can place her in the Catskills this summer, Naomi. Next fall, off Broad-way maybe. Forget the chorus line, Golda. You got a shtick. That's why you'll never make it in the chorus line. You'd pull too much attention. What they want is uniformity. It's grunt work anyway. How old are ya?"

The family schism followed.

"You will do no such thing. You will marry Nathan before the summer is over and settle down to a proper and honorable life."

"No, Papa. I will not marry Nathan. I do not want to marry him. I don't love him."

"He is a good young man. He will be a rabbi. You will be the wife of a rabbi. Every girl wants to be the wife of a rabbi. You will share in the respect and honor that will be accorded him. The matter is settled, Golda. I have promised you to him. I will hear nothing to the contrary."

"I know a little of the law myself, Papa. You can't force me to marry Nathan. What is more, I am seventeen years old and will soon be eighteen. I can leave your home."

"SHIKSA!"

5

She worked that summer — the last summer when the world was at peace — at two borscht-belt hotels. To her disgust and shame, she discovered that she was expected to wait tables at lunch as well as to perform on the stage, two shows each evening. Ernie Levin told her not to worry, that was the way you broke in. He told her she was getting experience. He pointed out to her that she was allowed to work solo, to dance and sing, to crack jokes, and most of all to learn her trade.

A comedian was the star of each show, and she worked behind five of them that summer. There were other singers and other dancers, but what Levin told her was true, that she had a small lead role in each show and was allowed to polish her shtick.

She wore leotards and net stockings, sometimes a top hat, and sometimes she used a cane. Levin urged her to study her audiences, to see how they reacted to what she did. It was essential, he insisted, that she develop a rapport with audiences. She must not just offer a prepared shtick, like merchandise on the counter of a store: take it or leave it. She must learn to respond to the audience's reaction, changing not just tomorrow night but right now if she saw she was not carrying the audience with her. The worst mistake of all, he told her, was to resent an audience that did not seem to like her, and to defy it. The customer is always right, he said.

She wrote to her mother that she lived in the waitresses' dormitory and that she ate kosher. She wrote that they did not perform on the Shabbat. What she did not write was that she no longer covered her head whenever she went outside. She did not write that she had given herself to one of the comedians. She did not write that once again she had misunderstood the quality and nature of a man's attentions and had annoyed him by falling in love.

When she returned to New York she was pregnant.

Resourceful Ernie Levin moved her into a flat with another client of his and arranged for her to have an abortion. It was not done by a back-alley abortionist but by a White Plains gynecologist. The doctor was a woman, and she was competent and sympathetic. Even so, the operation was painful, and it left Golda feeling she had committed an unpardonable sin.

"You have two choices, my child," Ernie had told her. "You can go home to your family, since after all you must have a home and support for you and your child; or you can abort the pregnancy. I have work for you. I can book you into clubs. God forbid, I should ever urge a young woman to have an abortion, but I want you to know what your options are."

"I have no options," Golda had said tearfully.

"I have a word of advice," said Ernie. "Do not be so ready to give your person to a young man. You are naive. You must be less trusting."

The doctor who performed the abortion gave her more specific counseling about birth control.

Ernie took her to a tiny comedy club in Lower Manhattan, where she auditioned for the owner — who had been told she was twenty-one. He wanted a different act. She could dance a little, okay, and she could sing a little, okay; but he wanted more jokes. It was, after all, a comedy club. And the songs — He wanted bawdy songs. And no bra under the leotard, okay? If she bounced around a little, the audience would love it.

In his office Ernie rehearsed her with a string of jokes. He bought some, stole others. Some were coarse, some weren't.

Golda used them all, and the audience liked them. Ernie got her permissions to use several songs from what were called party records. She got wild applause when she danced and sang, "Bounce your boobies."

It was a tough grind. The club didn't open until nine o'clock, and it closed at three in the morning, by which time she had done four shows. But the owner renewed her contract three times, and she performed there for a month.

Her last night someone yelled from the audience, "Hey, Golda! Where'll you be next?"

"Yellow Calf," she said. Ernie had already arranged her next booking.

"See ya there!" yelled the man in the audience.

6

Clubs announced new shows by running little block ads in the tabloid papers, and before the winter was over those little ads were promising a performance by the hilarious dancing comedienne Golda Graustein.

She polished her act. Comedy-club audiences were far tougher than the audiences in Catskill hotels. They were unforgiving. They didn't see her as a kid trying to please them but as part of a show they'd paid good money to see. They demanded earthy humor, filled with sexual innuendo. Sometimes insinuation wasn't enough for them; they wanted their comedy literally raunchy. Golda had to be taught, and Ernie Levin was her teacher. He began to buy jokes for her. A young writer fed her lines for ten dollars apiece. One night she got a huge laugh from a parody on the song "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," including the line "I suck like an Electrolux," and later she blushed when she found out what it meant.

What she was doing was not what she had meant to do and be when she was first inspired to dance and sing. But she had to make a living.

Eighteen years old, Golda had to make a living. She was allowed to visit her family home in Queens, but never to eat a meal there, never to stay overnight. Her father absented himself from the house if he knew she was coming. He declared she degraded the family name and left word that he would appreciate it if she would call herself something else.

Ernie Levin said she would probably do better if she did change her name. So ... Glenda Grayson.