The Perils of Pauline / the Lessons of Leah

Happy New Years by Maya Arad

Bienvenue and welcome back to Musée Musings, your idiosyncratic guide to Paris and art. For two weeks in August, I was in my new favorite place, Normandie. Part of the time with my always and forever favorite guy, Nicolas. Next week, I’ll tell you about some of the things I did and a few of the things I ate during this, my fourth trip to Normandie. Today though I want to tell you about a book that I read a couple times over the summer and that I have been ruminating about, too - Happy New Years by Maya Arad. The first time I read the book, I was doing a million things - traveling with Nicolas in Berlin, flaneuring with Nicolas in Paris. I only had short spurts of time to read. This book was the perfect companion for that kind of reading. It is set up as a series of letters written by someone we’ll call Leah because that’s what the author calls her.

The conceit is this, in 1966, Leah writes a letter to the women she knew when they were all students at the same teacher’s college in Israel. After she and her classmates have all scattered to take teaching positions in different parts of Israel. The book is called Happy New Years because Leah sent her letter and the ones that followed to coincide with the Jewish New Year.

After a miserable year in the Negev Desert, Leah has the opportunity to teach in the United States. Well, actually someone wanted her out of the way and tricked her into going to the United States, but we’ll get to that later. Once in the United States, she kept writing letters to her former classmates. A letter every year until 2016 - that’s 50 letters in all. We follow Leah from the Negev Desert to Worcester, Massachusetts and then to the Silicon Valley, just south of San Francisco. Funny that I should know both places, I spent an agreeable summer in Worcester many years ago as a recipient of an American Antiquarian Society fellowship and I made the same pilgrimage that Leah did, from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. I emigrated from Philadelphia rather than Massachusetts but I was just as happy as Leah was to go from snow to no snow.

Most years Leah writes two letters, a group letter to her former classmates and a private letter to the one person she considers a true friend, Mira, who Leah affectionately calls Miraleh. Although there is a backstory to that true friendship, too.

The group letters are mostly upbeat, celebrating Leah’s successes, minimizing her setbacks. In the private letters Leah writes for Mira’s eyes only, we learn about the series of challenges that Leah seems to confront without let-up. She shares her pleasure at the birth of her two sons with everyone. It is in her letters to Mira that we initially learn the truth about her marriage to a gambling alcoholic. Changing jobs and changing men gets an upbeat spin when she shares them with the group. In her letters to Miraleh, we learn about why she had to change jobs, why she had to move across the country and why she is no longer with whatever man she wrote about in the previous year’s letter. She shares her financial successes with the group and only admits to the chaos of her finances when they are more or less resolved, in her letters to Mira. Leah is more honest and open with Miraleh but she is also more bitchy. She seems unable to forget a slight, no matter how ancient. She remembers all the unkind things people did and said to her and about her when they were at teachers college. Since we only get Leah’s version of these events, it’s difficult to determine where the reality might lie. Has Leah always been too thin skinned or was she singled out and mocked as she alleges, because she was an immigrant, because she was pretty, because she wore homemade clothes, because she wore too much make up. We’ll never know. After a while, you want to ask Leah (or at least I did) why she wants to maintain contact with those women. What does she have to prove to them. What does it matter what they think - about her or anything else… But hey, that’s me.

As I read the letters, there were times I wanted to shake Leah and tell her that she was falling into the same kind of trap, falling for the same kind of man. I wanted to ask her if she had not saved a copy of the letter she had written five years ago or even the one she had written the previous year. Sometimes I even dreaded continuing with a particular year’s account, knowing that Leah was about to get herself into a mess again. Leah was very proud of her looks. She was always writing about how people thought she was beautiful. But being beautiful was as much a curse as a blessing for Leah. The women she encountered didn’t trust her and the men only seemed to be interested in one thing. She saw her physical beauty as a strength although many times it was her undoing.

Many of the yearly installment offer, from Leah’s perspective of course, a window into what is happening in the United States and how what is happening in Israel is perceived by American Jews. She reflects upon what it’s like to be an Israeli living in the United States. And what it’s like to be an Israeli watching her country at war from afar. At first she insists that she has no intention of remaining in the U.S. and then, after an abortive attempt to return to Israel with her Jewish American husband, she doesn’t talk about returning permanently to Israel anymore. She has two American sons, after all.

In some of her letters, Leah marvels at the appliances that are in every American home - like washing machines and clothes dryers, central heating and air conditioning. And the products on the shelves of every supermarket, like cake mixes to which you only have to add an egg and some oil to make a cake. Leah was happy with how little effort it took to bake a cake. That surprised me because in the graduate marketing course I took one year at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the professor explained the rationale for requiring that an egg and some oil be added at home to boxed cake mixes bought at the store. He said that Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines could easily have incorporated an egg and the oil into the mix. But whatever testing they did showed that American housewives would feel guilty about feeding their families cakes made entirely from mixes. They decided that the women would get a sense of ownership if they had to do something, like add an egg and some oil. It worked.

Leah accepted the idea that when she got married, she would stop working ‘outside the home.’ That she would make her husband, her house and then her children the center of her life. But when, not long after the birth of her second son, she found herself a single mother who needed to earn an income, she was as creative and inventive as anyone could possibly be in finding a job, in augmenting her income. Sure, many of her schemes didn’t pan out but her enthusiasm was unwavering. As were her non-stop efforts to create nice things for her two boys. It was pretty impressive.

There’s a sort of Forrest Gump vibe to Leah’s correspondence as 50 years of technological innovations in America make their appearance one after another. I was most charmed by Leah’s delight when she first encounter a photocopier. For a letter writer who needed to make multiple copies of the same letter, a photocopier is nothing short of miraculous given the constraints of using carbon paper as she had been doing for previous years’ letters. When computers arrive in her life and printers with them, she is even happier. In one of the final letters, after 3 letters have been returned to her, ‘address unknown,’ she asks if anyone would prefer to receive her letters by email.

As I was reading Leah’s letters, I remembered a stack of letters my friend Ann presented to me about 20 years ago when I returned to Australia for the first time in 15 years. They were letters I had written to her and she had saved. I had forgotten about them completely. As I reread them, I came upon names and places and events that I obviously thought worthy of writing about then, but about which I had mostly forgotten. By the time we saw each other, which is 20 years ago now, Ann and I had become less regular correspondents. I wanted to correspond by email. She was only interested in corresponding the old fashioned way. We eventually lost touch. If I had been willing to keep our correspondence going, I might have over 40 years of letters to plough through and maybe even the beginnings of a memoir!

I read Happy New Years twice. With the second reading, I went from thinking of it as a Perils of Pauline to a Lessons from Leah sort of book. It’s a book that encourages you to look for patterns in your own life - like how you manage to keep meeting the same kind of people and keep getting into the same kinds of situations and even making the same kinds of mistakes. This disciplined way of looking for patterns in your life can be liberating.

This book is the perfect book for every type of reader, indeed every type of writer. If you only have time for reading in brief snatches, then read one year’s entry at a time. If you have difficulty restraining yourself from devouring entire books at one go, discipline yourself by determining how many years of letters you want to read and then stop.

If you are of a certain age and thinking about your life, about how you got to where you are and where you might be going, this book offers suggestions for organizing your thoughts. If you have ever thought about writing a memoir and don’t know how to begin, this books might just offer the ideal solution. Although for most of us it’s too late to write a letter a year for the next 50 years, maybe you can begin thinking about your life in units of time, like a year. If you start small and think incrementally, who knows what might happen.

Leah’s last entry is dated 2016. By then she had begun taking a writing course taught by the author of this book! I would like to think that for the next two years she devoted her time and energy to transforming an unwieldy series of letters into the book of her life. I say 2 years because 2018 is the date given to the addendum of Leah’s book, written by Leah’s older son, Yanatan. (the anglicized spelling of his name is Jonathan, it’s from the Hebrew name which means ‘gift of God’.’)

Yonatan’s reflections offers another way you might go about thinking about your life. The editor of the book asks Yonatan to tell her a little about his mother. He says he barely knows anything about her, except that she was born in Poland in 1942 and emigrated to Israel in 1950. There has to be more to that story. Where were she and her family during the Holocaust. Had they hidden, had they been rounded up? Anyhow, the editor suggests that rather then talk in generalities, he should concentrate on objects that he associates with his mother. It’s an exercise that she does with her writing students. That frees his memories up and he begins with the heart shaped cookie cutter. And like throwing a pebble into a pond, that reflection leads to another and then another. Some memories are painful - like the humiliation his mother suffered when she had to pay for their food with food stamps. And some of his reflections are unkind, like his perception of his mother’s obsession with her looks. Yet finally his reflections paint a picture of a woman who tried very hard to do her best, especially for her boys.

There’s so much more in this book, from affairs with married men and abortions to gay sons and drug addicts. The adage that old men want either a purse or a nurse was brought home in Leah’s telling of her relationship with her final companion. It reminded me of the court case that Nellie Jacquemart endured when her husband’s nephews tried to get rid of her. Nellie’s tale has a happier ending!

Now is the perfect time to read Happy New Years. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, a time of introspection and prayer, begins this year at sundown on September 22. Maybe reading it will inspire you to think about your own life.

Here’s the link to review I wrote last year about Maya Arad’s book, The Hebrew Teacher.

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to Comment on the last several posts, they are so very much appreciated.

New comment on “I have this urge, this compulsion, to share my enjoyment…” Ma Normandie. :

Dear Beverly, You have opened my eyes to David Hockney after reading the current and previous postings. Although I knew his name, remember seeing at the de Young in San Francisco his The Bigger Exhibition, 2014, your many descriptions and interpretations of his work has been a wonderful discovery. This is true also of all I read about the Bayeux Tapestry which I saw many years ago in Normandy. I now wish I had made time while I was in Paris recently to see the show at the FLV. I did catch online under the CULTURE THING a detailed view of it, however. Sad to learn about Hockney's declining health. "Do remember they can't cancel spring.” Susanne

New comment on Petit Prince + Marcel Proust = David Hockney:

Your latest Hockney celebration adds so much to my far too brief time there before I had to dash off to catch the train back to London. It has given me that chance to linger and enjoy in greater depth. Thank you. Kathy, Oxford, England

New comment on A Master and his Muse: (part 1)

Another fascinating, illuminating post about artists and small museums I've heard of but never paid much attention to. Thank you Beverly. Hope to get back to Paris soon and go museum hopping. Cecily

My sister lives in Paris, and I visit her yearly. She says it is time I signed up for your fabulous newsletter! We will definitely see the exhibition at the Maillol, as your piece has enticed us! Thank you. Janet, Sherman Oaks, CA

New comment on A Master and his Muse, part 2 :

Wonderful! What grand history. I thought I knew about Dina. It turns out I knew very little about. Cynthia

Always interesting. Kathleen

That was fascinating. Thanks again. Vincent A.

Wow Thanks for the article and the figures! So good to see this story in one of its best depictions on the Internets! Oleksii