Fear Of Flying

Before I lived in Heidelberg, I was not particularly self-conscious about being Jewish. Oh I have certain memories: my grandmother lathering my hands between hers and saying she was washing away “the Germans” (her pu

Every Christmas from the time I was two, we had a Christmas tree. Only we were not celebrating the birth of Christ; we were celebrating (my mother said) “The Winter Solstice.” Gillian, who had a crêche under her Christmas tree and a star of Bethlehem over it, disputed this hotly with me. I resolutely echoed my mother: “The Winter Solstice came before Jesus Christ,” I said. Poor benighted Gillian’s mother had insisted on a baby Jesus and a virgin birth.

At Easter, we hunted for painted eggs, but we were not celebrating the resurrection of Christ; we were celebrating “the Vernal Equinox,” the Rebirth of Life, the Rites of Spring. Listening to my mother, you would have thought we were Druids.

“What happens to people when they die?” I asked her.

“They don’t really die,” she said. “They go back into the earth, and after a while get born again, as grass or maybe even as tomatoes.” This was strangely disquieting. Perhaps it was comforting enough to hear her say, “they don’t really die,” but who wanted to be a tomato? Was that my fate? To become a tomato with all those squishy seeds?

But like it or not, it was the only religion I had. We weren’t really Jewish; we were pagans and pantheists. We believed in reincarnation, the souls of tomatoes, even (way back in the 1940s) in ecology. And yet with all this, I began to feel intensely Jewish and intensely paranoid (are they perhaps the same?) the moment I set foot in Germany.

Suddenly people on buses were going home to houses where they treasured clever little collections of gold teeth and wedding rings… The lampshades in the Hotel Europa were suspiciously finely grained… The soap in the restroom of the Silberner Hirsch smelled fu

Given the perspective of history, it’s clear that Be

So Be

From the first, the marriage was strange. We’d both expected rescue. And there we were both clawing at each other and drowning together. Things turned hostile in a matter of days. We quickly went from verbal assaults to utter silence, punc-tuated by lovemaking that kept on, amazingly enough, being good. Neither of us quite knew what we had gotten into, or why.

Before we came to Heidelberg, the setting for the first two months of our marriage was as strange as our reason for getting married. There we were, two terrified, transplanted Manhattanites, plunked down in San Antonio, Texas. Be

I stayed “home” in a sterile motel outside San Antonio, watched television, tinkered with my poems, felt enraged and powerless. Like most native New York girls, I had never learned to drive. I was twenty-four and stranded in a Texas motel facing a sun-parched strip of highway between San Antonio and Austin. I slept until ten-thirty, awoke and watched television while I carefully made up my face (for whom?), went downstairs and gorged myself on a Texas brunch of pancakes, sausages, and grits, put on my bathing suit (which was growing tighter and tighter), and baked in the sun for two hours or so. Then I swam in the pool for five minutes and went back upstairs to confront my “work.” But I found it nearly impossible to work. The loneliness of writing terrified me. I looked for every excuse to escape. I had no sense of myself as a writer and no faith in my ability to write. I could not see then that I had been writing all my life. I had begun composing and illustrating little stories when I was eight. I had kept a journal from the age of ten. I was an avid and ironic letter-writer from age thirteen, and I consciously aped the letters of Keats and G.B.S. throughout my adolescence. At seventeen, when I went to Japan with my parents and sisters, I dragged along my Olivetti portable and spent every evening recapitulating the day’s observations into a loose-leaf notebook. I began to publish poems in small literary magazines during my senior year in college (where I won most of the poetry prizes and edited the literary magazine). And yet despite the obvious fact that I was obsessed with writing, despite publications and despite letters from literary agents asking whether I was “working on a novel,” I didn’t really believe in the seriousness of my commitment at all.