Francesca is a writer of non-fiction from London. When not studying at Goldsmiths, she teaches indoor cycling classes and Pilates. She is currently working on a series of essays exploring the scope of her appetites and the question of female hunger.
Email: Francesca.leonie1@gmail.com
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Schmaltz
“I’m sending you a picture of my great uncle Seymour, look how handsome he was.”
“He’s gorgeous, look at those lips.”
“You know the thing about Seymour don’t you?”
“No, what’s the thing about Seymour?”
“He was born on a tin boat travelling from Romania to Brooklyn. When he was sixty-five, he felt sure he was about to die, so he took to his bed and spent the next twenty years there kvetching ‘Oy!’ about everything.”
***
Cleo and I speak five times a week. We video call or we text. She is always in bed, I am often in my kitchen. We have a cigarette together, or several. We promise each other it will only be a quick chat, because we both have work to do, things to write, ideas we have spent all day avoiding. She is in New York, I am in London. It is night-time for me, late afternoon for her. Often it will grow dark out the window of her Brooklyn apartment over the course of our conversation. The sky will turn from blue to purple to black, in that way that New York skies do, impossibly delicate pastel shades smudging together until darkness obscures them completely.
We have been friends for twenty-five years, which is almost all our lives. She is neither a sister nor a best friend, but someone who resides somewhere in between. Our mothers are best friends; they are, in many ways, each other’s mothers because theirs died young and left them motherless. Both Cleo’s mother and mine recognise a kind of coldness, an anger that resides in us, their daughters, a disposition that reminds them of their long-dead mothers. We look like those unknown grandmothers too, a slice of their faces present in our profiles. It is a burden to be so like a woman you have never known. There is something effortless about our relationship, we have had so many years for it to marinate, there is a fluid familial connection, a lifelong history, a readiness to leave certain matters unsaid, an understanding of the hurt we have each experienced. To me, she is more beautiful, more brilliant, more critically insightful than any person I have ever known. She is often the voice in my head when I am weighing my options, she is the council I seek. We will likely be each other’s mothers too, one day, if the natural order of things is to play out.
When we were very small, my hair didn’t grow. Golden, cherubic curls framed my face but refused to grow below my ears. Her hair was waist length and deep, sumptuous brown, it still is. Mine has now caught up in an explosion of chaotic curl of many different hues. We are like the outfits worn by a girl band, the same fabric cut into different styles to distinguish us from each other. I remember being envious of her, the way her family felt like the magnetic centre of our lives, pulling my family in. Even the way in which her father’s illness became the setting for our childhood. We would run and play amongst the oxygen tanks and complex cancer accoutrement. I was by her side the day he died, we were seven and not quite able to grasp the magnitude of so great a loss. We sat in her bedroom and ran glitter mascara through each other’s hair.
After a lifetime of friendship, we now find ourselves doing much the same thing. We are both students, trying to turn ourselves into writers. I worry that she is better than me, more naturally gifted. She is quieter than I am, she always has been and from that quietness emanates a confidence I am unable to emulate. We spend hours on these phone calls. I call her after classes and whine about how no one gets me, how I fear my writing is being misread, not considering that the problem may in fact be me. She soothes and comforts me, she feels like the only person in the world who gets the point of me.
***
“How are you?” I ask her.
“I can’t write or think, but other than that I’m fine!”
“Excellent. I haven’t quite got around to working yet today. I’m lying in bed letting my moisturiser sink in.”
“That is important and tiring work. The evenings are often the best time for writing anyway.”
***
Amongst all of the many things that bind us to each other is the fact – deeply important to us both – that we are Jewish. We are, in some ways, more Jewish than our Jewish Mothers. Our incredibly beautiful, talented and successful Jewish Mothers. It never occurred to me to be threatened by my mother, until parts of my life began to unravel, then the feeling consumed me. Our mothers are needy, we must constantly reassure them that they are still beautiful and brilliant, it is exhausting. Being Jewish means something different to us than it does to them. After the Second World War, there was a golden-age of post-Holocaust, guilt-based acceptance of Jews. At the same time, many Jews sought to distance themselves from the horror of what had occurred. Some changed their names, others converted, many decided that to qualify as Jewish you had to be religiously observant. If their family practices were not tied up with religion, then many of the things that had made people feel Jewish began to slip away. Our mothers were expected to assimilate and largely they did, but now, as hostility towards us gains traction, both online and in the real world, Cleo and I reject the impulse to shroud our Jewishness in secrecy. We proclaim it loudly, at dinner parties with the Goyim, whose eye-rolls are invisible to others but perceptible to us. We know it bores them, but we tell them anyway, “As a Jew…” Cleo has told her boyfriend to fine her ten dollars every time she brings up being Jewish at one of these dinners, this will make him a rich man. Sometimes, before I go out, I stare myself down in the mirror, putting the finishing touches to my face and say, don’t talk about being Jewish tonight. But I can’t help it. Two glasses of wine and I am loudly discussing a recent study I’ve read about epigenetics and the legacy of trauma.
“How have you been?” An unsuspecting conversationalist might dare to enquire.
I can feel my brain shift into gear. Give them a normal answer, don’t talk about being Jewish.
“I’m feeling preoccupied with antisemitism on the internet,” I blurt out, ignoring all the other more appropriate responses. I have launched a grenade into the conversation, making it instantly unenjoyable and impossible to escape.
***
“Why do you think we are so preoccupied with being Jewish?” I ask Cleo. “I worry that we think it makes us interesting.”
“Perhaps.” She says, pausing to draw heavily on her cigarette. Her mouth, mesmerically full, adds opulence to a face that is usually scowling. “Or maybe it’s an act of defiance.”
***
I am trying to figure out who I am and I hope that by eating bagels and peppering my conversation with Yiddish and Hebrew, I might begin to resemble something I recognise. Perhaps the right combination of cured fish and unleavened bread will unlock something within my DNA. There is this feeling I have of not belonging to anything, of always feeling on the periphery of life. I understand that this may be simply the nature of existential loneliness, however, perhaps it is also because the world does not always feel a welcoming place for someone Jewish like me. This is integral to the immigrant mentality, or the dilemma posed by living in the diaspora. My mother is an immigrant and, as a child, I told her I had what I identified as ‘inherited immigrant syndrome’. This is more profound than the mere feeling of not belonging, it is a condition that permeates your life: the fear of throwing anything away; a need to always have the cupboards stocked with food; a resistance to making big last-minute plans; a childhood terror that every time your parents leave the house, they will die and your greatest fear will be realised – you will find yourself truly alone. This kind of diasporic distress complicates your identity further and isolates you ever more, especially if, like me, you are not religious. I write with my laptop propped up on a copy of ‘Judaism for Dummies’. A book that remains unopened, but whose presence serves to remind me of my resistance and reluctance to take the necessary steps that might lead me towards some cultural resolution. My fear, for it is fear and always fear that holds me back, that keeps me in stasis, inactive and dissatisfied, is that I may well find I don’t belong in organised Judaism either. This is the curse of the immigrant who has strayed too far from familiar soil, she is neither this nor that.
***
“Have you read this?” Cleo asks me, holding up a blue book.
“Fierce Attachments? No, I’ll order it immediately.”
“You will love her. She walks around New York with her mother and her mother grabs random people on the street and says, ‘this is my daughter, she hates me.’ I’ve passive aggressively given it my mum to read, you must do the same.”
I look up Vivian Gornick, the book’s author, she is beautiful in a way that is familiar to me. An Ashkenazi woman whose face bears the imprint of our Middle Eastern heritage. When the book arrives, I gulp it down and then order as many of her other books as I can. Reading Gornick helps, she is able to crystallise an emotion that has thus far remained undefined. She identifies many of my discomforts, gives voice to my loneliness and shares my inability to heal myself through work. There is a moment in Fierce Attachments where she describes how, while at college, all the non-Jewish men were intrigued by her. “Brash, difficult, ‘gypsy-dark’ (meaning Jewish from New York).” They wanted to sleep with her, to conquer her, but never to stay with her. This is a feeling I know all too well, a feeling that often makes me feel worthless and unwanted. I had never before attributed it to my Jewishness. Gornick helps me, of course she does, there is nothing quite like that blissful feeling of finding yourself on the page, but the experience she describes still does not fully belong to me for her experience is a distinctively American one, it’s a New York experience and its setting insulates it from me because of the New York-ness of it all. New York, where so many cultures battle it out and still manage to retain a real sense of themselves. America, where the success of Jewish assimilation has left those of us in other parts of the world struggling to understand why we still feel so left out.
***
It’s Hannukah. Cleo sends me a picture of the view from her bed. The sheets are crumpled, a sinuous grey kitten is stretched out and a chocolate babka lies half eaten in a blue box from Zabar’s. She lives in a Jewish city. All of the things we are trying to absorb and reclaim are all around her. Most of the things we are trying to absorb and reclaim are comestibles. “Not one drop of Gentile blood,” she likes to boast of herself. I am only half really, except that the cultural fabric of my family heavily favours the mother.
***
“How did those soup dumplings go the other day?” This time when I call her, I am the one lying in bed.
“Terribly. If they had worked I would have sent you a picture. I’m trying something else tonight.”
She sends me a photograph of chicken feet, crossed elegantly like the hands of a very elderly woman, long nails filed to a point, thin skin struggling to contain the tendon and the bone. In the next picture they are in a plastic bag in the fridge, marinating in something thick and red. It looks ghoulish, like a bag of remains.
“Delicious!” I write back.
“I’m going to make Bao buns for Jake.”
“I wish I was there with you, snuggled up, eating Chinese food.”
***
Cleo always enters into mini marriages, she sets up camp with someone sweet and stabilising. I hurtle from one bad experience to another. I thought it might be helpful to outsource my identity crisis to a man. If I could just find a nice Jewish boy, like she has, maybe I’ll feel complete. My method, in almost all things, is to make a fairly half-hearted effort at something and then find myself astonished that it hasn’t worked out perfectly. I connect with someone on a dating app: Ben, 29, from North London. Ben is his real name; it won’t really narrow down the search if you go looking for the man in question, there are many Jewish Bens. We met, after a few days of conversing, in Regent’s Park. He was late and I was early and it was dark – cold and misty in that perfect London way. We walked a bit, getting to know each other with the familiar discomfort of a first date when two people, with no context, are trying hard to be themselves but can’t help performing a little, anxiously trying to morph into the kind of person they think their companion might like. There was something effervescent about it, the promise, the hopefulness, something that ignited someone jaded like me. I noticed that I was walking differently, trying to exude an ease that my body isn’t used to, resisting pulling my coat around me, despite the chill, so that my form could still be made out. After endless wandering through empty streets, with Christmas lights strung up above us, twinkling and lighting our path, we found ourselves outside a delicatessen. “Would you eat a bagel?” I asked. “I would,” he answered. We took our picnic – one toasted bagel with egg salad, a latke and two pickles – to a bench. As we sat down, unwrapping the food of our people, it began to rain. Just a drizzle, light and inconvenient. We persevered, through interesting conversation both personal and political, but the egg salad refused to stay within the confines of the bagel and oozed in unseemly fashion out the sides. We laughed, self-consciously, and passed each other napkins back and forth. I was in a Nora Ephron movie, with sharp dialogue and just the right amount of schmaltz. Finally, I thought, I’ve found a man who might settle the inner-turmoil.
***
“Well?” Cleo messages me.
I send her a series of voice notes, each gushier than the last.
“It was the most Jewish date ever. We ate bagels and had a tentative kiss. He’s so sweet.”
***
Two weeks later he invited me over to his house for dinner. He was astonished that I was on time, declaring that I didn’t seem like the kind of person who would be punctual. We ate, and afterwards sat on his sofa, where the conversation took a turn. He asked me if I usually dated Jewish men, I said something pithy about how my romantic proclivities were non-discriminatory. I asked him the same question. “Oh God. Never.” He said, practically spitting his wine back into his glass. I was suddenly very aware of the top I was wearing, lime green and completely sheer, and the fact that, at this point in the evening, the lipstick I had so carefully applied was likely cracked and clinging to the dry skin of my lips.
You win none, you lose all of them, apparently.
I tried again, with another Ben, just a few weeks later.
Someone I went to school with assembled a motley crew, a Frankenstein’s monster of a friendship group to spend the weekend in Wales. Thirty of us descended upon an unsuspecting village, bewildering even the grazing sheep that dotted the hills. Though we were not all known to each other, we were united in our determination to stay up all night and sleep all day. Within moments of arriving, I fell madly in love with a tall boy with a lustrous ponytail. He was, as I suspected, Jewish. Night fell and the darkness intensified his allure. He was very thin, wore tight burgundy velvet trousers and pointed boots, which clipped along the floors of this little wooden house, as he moved from room to room. At some point in the evening, emboldened by a heady cocktail of narcotics, I began a twenty-five-minute performance to a captive audience, people incapable of getting up from the sofa on which they were slumped, who had to endure my display. I’m being self-deprecating of course – a famously Jewish characteristic – they were enchanted by me. I was wearing red crepe palazzo pants and a bikini top, my hair hanging long and wild. I felt sensual, devoid of inhibitions and totally confident in my expertise as a dancer and lip-sync-er, which might of course have been the drugs. The only thing that let me down was my footwear, a pair of Birkenstock clogs and walking socks. Featured in my performance was the Chaka Khan favourite ‘I’m Every Woman’ and ‘Dirrrty’ by Christina Aguilera. It was not a coherent setlist, but then the party goblin cueing up the songs in the corner only seemed able to open one eye. The tall and handsome Jewish man watched me move and his gaze spurred me on. I thought it was a sure thing. Later, at six in the morning, I was lying in his arms as he stroked the back of my neck. We were in my bed with three other people, half-listening to someone blither on in fragmented sentences. I nuzzled into his chest and ran my fingers up and down his lean, tanned arms. Then, when the story finally finished, the stroking stopped. He got up and went to bed. I slept alone. As we all said goodbye the next afternoon, packing our belongings into cars, he leant into the window of the vehicle I was going to attempt to drive back to London. “Let’s do Shabbat,” he said. He straightened up to his full height, turned on the heel of his pointed boots and walked away. “I’ll bring the challah,” I called after him, knowing I would never see him again.
***
“It’s so weird, I’ve been partying way too much recently.”
“You always say that. You are always partying way too much. It’s not so weird.”
She does little to hide her disapproval, and I wilt, as she sees through the lie I have been telling myself.
***
The very nature of illegal substances is that they give you the illusory sense that you belong – in this outfit, at this party, in your skin. But when you awake, at four in the afternoon the following day, you find yourself bitterly burdened by emptiness – a hollowness that is felt more keenly because of its proximity to the sensation of being centred, felt mere hours before. You can recall a moment of bliss, but it’s receding fast, the flash of red crepe, the touch of fingertips on the skin of your back, the way someone shouted too loudly in your ear over the metallic shake of tinny techno. These things that made you feel molten like schmaltz, rendered chicken fat, golden and silken, impossible to resist. However real it felt, it was not true belonging. It was escape, diversion, a tactic. As are bagels, I suppose, because toasted bread piled high with loveliness is sure to make you feel better but eating it doesn’t make you Jewish.
***
We are in that ghostly space between Christmas and New Year, and I feel terrible because of all the work I’m not doing. I call Cleo.
“Perfect,” she says as she answers, “I was just rolling a cigarette.”
“Have you watched The West Wing?” I ask.
“No, but Mum and Reuben are watching it now.”
Our families always do things at the same time.
I tell her that I have managed to watch twenty-three episodes of The West Wing in six days. There are a hundred and fifty-six episodes in total, I estimate I will be done in three and a half weeks. The West Wing is Jewish, because it was written by Aaron Sorkin and he is extremely Jewish. Not every character is a Chosen Person, but the ones that matter to me are. In the very first episode, three of President Bartlet’s senior staff members are trying to resolve an issue with three conservative Christians. The night before, Josh was on TV with a Christian activist, who baited him until he got angry, which is just so Josh. In the meeting the following day, where Josh is supposed to apologise for his outburst, this same woman accuses him of having a “New York sense of humour”. The conversation moves on, but Toby has clearly been stung by that line and is now quietly seething with bitter hurt, which, as you know, is so Toby. “She meant Jewish”, he says. I gasped softly and said aloud, “yes she did.” And immediately started crying. So me.
***
I see what I am trying to do, but I am critical of my methods. We are sometimes guilty of leaning a little too heavily into our suffering. Suffering is a source of pain, yes, but can also provide reassurance. It is that safe place my brain is programmed to return to. Being Jewish provides the framework on which to hang my isolation. It is the clause that gets me out of the contract, but I think I am reading it wrong. It’s not that these things don’t exist, they do – the world does not take kindly to Jews – but there are other truths too. There are other reasons why I don’t write, why my relationships don’t work out, why I stay up too late or spend money I don’t have on things I don’t need. All of the things I do to alleviate my anxieties actually contribute to them. I am one of the great alchemists of anxiousness. The many hours I waste looking at my phone means I spend too much of my time comparing my insides to other people’s outsides. I have configured my own internal algorithm to support my alienation and in so doing, drive myself deeper into abstraction.
Yet I do have an anchor, a small figure on a bed many thousands of miles away. There is a premium put on romantic love, but this love, between Cleo and me, is the most substantial in my life. The distance between us intensifies the longing, it illuminates our need for each other. The conversations I have with her are the most important moments in my week; they return me back to me. I think something is wrong with me. She thinks the same things are wrong with her. I worry I am not clever enough for what I am studying, she tells me that I am. She reads what I write and picks out the bits she loves the most, the moments that caught her because she could hear my voice saying them. Those are my favourite bits too. I read her writing and tell her she’s the real deal, this is proper literature, it is clever and complicated and dark and funny. It is all the things I want my writing to be too. Any envy I may feel is superseded by my overwhelming love for her.
***
“Do you want a quick cigarette?”
“Give me five minutes.” I write back.
I sit at the kitchen table and roll one. It is cold and I don’t like being alone down here. I keep the lights dimmed, outside the wind picks up and branches begin to voice their rattle. After exactly five minutes, I call her.
“Did you read the Fran Lebowitz thing I sent you?” She launches straight in, we are always mid-sentence.
“Not yet.”
“Read it now while you’re on the phone to me”
I do. Whole minutes pass in perfect, pin-drop silence.
“Have you got to the bit about writing slowly and that her fulltime job is watching daytime television?”
“Yes. How familiar. I wish I was brave enough to be so grumpy.”
I tell her about a story I am trying to write, about a woman and her grandmother. I can’t seem to wrangle it, it resists being put into a shape, I’m trying to make it too many things at once.
“I want to write about us,” I say, “about these conversations, about why we feel so Jewish.”
“Then do that.”
“Really? What would you want your name to be?”
“Cleo.”
Two hours pass, we float in conversations deep and shallow and kiss each other goodnight through pixilated screens. I extinguish my cigarette, walk upstairs and get ready for bed.
My phone pings.
“I love you so much it makes my heart burst.”
“Me too. It’s agony.”