Читать книгу CALL ME PHAEDRA - Lise Pearlman - Страница 11

∎ 1 ∎

The Battle of Wills

“At times I felt I was literally gasping for life itself.” ¹

— FAY STENDER DESCRIBING CHILDHOOD CLASHES WITH HER PARENTS

Fay likely inherited her strong will, talent and ambition from her mother. Ruby Fay Lefkowitz was a native San Franciscan, born a few months before the 1906 earthquake to an immigrant rag and bottle peddler. Louis Lefkowitz had arrived in America as a sixteen-year-old stowaway from Hungary. Ruby’s mother, Lena, had been born in San Francisco of German immigrants, and boasted a rare eighth grade education. Lena, in turn, encouraged Ruby to become an accomplished piano player and star pupil at Girls’ High School. Ruby then won a $100 scholarship that covered four semesters’ tuition at the University of California in Berkeley. She later liked to remind Fay how she had to rise daily at five a.m. to get to the campus by street car, bus and ferry each day for the privilege of attending college.

Commuting to Cal was how Ruby met Sam Abrahams, who was taking the same time-consuming route across the bay in pursuit of a chemical engineering degree. Sam and Ruby finally saved up enough to marry in the winter of 1928 only to lose half their savings in the stock market crash of 1929. When the Great Depression followed, Ruby lost her teaching position at an elementary school to a man with a family to support. By then, Sam was earning a modest salary as a chemistry researcher. When Ruby became pregnant in 1931, the Abrahams splurged on a beautiful standing bassinette on wheels, a handsome white, wicker basket that would be reused by countless cousins and returned to Fay for her own babies.

During Ruby’s last trimester, Sam suffered from a near fatal kidney infection that kept him hospitalized for three months. As his life still hung in the balance, on March 29, 1932, Ruby delivered Fay Ethel Abrahams. Ignoring Jewish custom, Ruby gave her daughter her own middle name as a first name. When Ruby and her newborn went home, Ruby was unable to breastfeed, likely due to ongoing stress. Ruby split her attention between her infant and ailing husband as Sam slowly and miraculously recovered without losing a kidney, despite the doctor’s dire prediction. Yet Fay suffered all her life from mixed emotions about her mother, likely rooted in an early sense of abandonment.

Growing up, Fay was closer to her father. The Biblical injunction to help the needy was coded into the Abrahams’ genes. All of the family on her father’s side were brought over by her grandfather Harry Aviron from the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk, since medieval times a trading center with a longstanding Jewish population. When Harry Aviron was a youth, Brest-Litovsk had been under Russian control for over a century. Renewed pogroms caused many Jews to flee for their lives. Harry set off for New York, leaving behind his pregnant wife Eva and two-year-old son Sam. Immigration officials anglicized the spelling of his last name to Abrahams. The family would always pronounce it “Abrams.”

After months of fruitless search for carpentry work, Harry read the headlines about the Great San Francisco Earthquake and fire that left half the city’s population homeless. He headed west in April 1906 to be part of the rebuilding effort. He soon joined San Francisco’s well-established Jewish community and sent for his wife, young son and new baby, six siblings, his Orthodox Jewish parents and diminutive grandmother. After ensuring his own family’s safety, Harry Abrahams quickly joined the fledgling Hebrew Free Loan Association at his local synagogue. The group provided interest-free loans to help newer Jewish immigrants launch small businesses by buying a sewing machine or a vegetable cart to push through the streets. Harry took great pride in his own family’s quick rise to the middle class and his personal role in San Francisco’s recovery. He later drove family members around San Francisco, pointing out the houses he, as a carpenter, had built.

In April of 1935, Ruby gave birth to Elise “Lisie” Abrahams, just after Fay turned three. The young family was now complete. In 1936, the Abrahams’ one-year-old contracted pneumonia. Lisie wound up hospitalized for several weeks as she dwindled to an alarming thirteen pounds, losing more than a third of her body weight. For another three months, Lisie seemed to wake only long enough to eat. Decades later, Lisie would speculate that her mother’s prolonged distraction and grief instilled in Fay an enduring sense of abandonment and anger. Yet it was Lisie who was raised to take a back seat to her extraordinarily talented older sister in whom both parents evinced great pride.

A gifted musician with perfect pitch, Fay was eager to learn the piano at age three, but her mother made her wait until she was four to begin lessons. With Ruby as her first tutor, Fay happily practiced daily. Fay soon became the center of the entire extended family’s attention. She could play a song after hearing it once. Her parents began providing her with private lessons. The first to be hired was Pauline Newman, a lovelorn spinster, who recognized in Fay signs of depression. Newman shared her concerns with Ruby and Sam. The worried Abrahams ultimately took Fay to see a psychiatrist. The subject was so unmentionable that the couple tried never to discuss it in front of Lisie. Bouts of prolonged unhappiness would trouble Fay throughout adulthood as she exhibited other classic symptoms of bipolar mood disorder.

During the 1930s, Sam developed a specialty in asbestos, perfecting a number of patents. Sam designed non-combustible covers for ships’ boilers and pipes. In 1941, he was offered a prestigious job in Berkeley overseeing the construction and management of a plant that manufactured insulation for the war effort. Sam was not tall, but the successful chemist cut a dapper appearance with his well-trimmed mustache and stylish attire.

Sam and Ruby always lived in all-white neighborhoods. When they moved to the East Bay in the early 1940s, they found a modest rental home in North Berkeley and entered both of their girls in a local elementary school. School came easily to Fay, who soon skipped a grade, but Lisie always had to work harder. To assist with household tasks, Ruby hired a string of mother’s helpers from the Midwest, as did many of Ruby’s friends. Fay and Elise shared one bedroom; the mother’s helper stayed in the third bedroom. Each boarder received “pin” money for helping Ruby prepare meals for the family and for babysitting when Sam and Ruby occasionally went out in the evening. The mother’s helpers were not allowed to eat with the Abrahams. Instead, Ruby trained them to serve the vegetables at dinner in a side dish at each place setting and to answer to a bell that Ruby rang for additional assistance. Fay disliked her mother’s pretentious household arrangement and objected to treating the live-in household help as servants of a lower class, unwelcome at the family table. When Fay reached high school age, she insisted on having her own room apart from her sister. That ended the era of live-in mother’s helpers in favor of a once-a-week cleaning woman.

Though Sam had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish household, Fay and Lisie were raised Reform. They observed the Sabbath on Friday night, celebrated the holidays and studied for confirmation with the rabbi at a local synagogue. After dinner, the family played cards or a board game for an hour or so before each turned to other interests. Sam taught the girls the rudiments of chess, but had no patience for coaching them on the finer points of the game at which he excelled. Though Sam was authoritarian, Ruby’s controlling nature weighed much more heavily on Fay. Her mother tended toward hypochondria and took Fay to the doctor frequently. Fay particularly found oppressive Ruby’s preoccupation with making sure Fay’s feet and smile would be beautiful when she grew up. Fay wore glasses and orthopedic shoes with arch supports Fay considered hideous and unnecessary. Her teeth were straightened with braces she also abhorred.

At a young age, Fay began nervously chewing her fingernails until they were gone, which the doctor suggested could be cured by applying a bitter coating. Ruby gave up on the suggestion after a few tries. As an adult, despite her great pride in her beautiful hands, Fay could not altogether shake the habit of nibbling her nails to the quick. A more worrisome concern to her parents was a chronic breathing problem that, in retrospect, Fay assumed was probably psychosomatic. Lisie later believed Fay may have suffered from allergies as their father did. At the time, Fay’s constant snuffling perplexed them all.

Fay had many battles with her parents over breathing through her mouth instead of her nose. In the midst of a game of Parcheesi, she might excuse herself to go to the bathroom just to breathe without criticism. She told an interviewer thirty years later, “At times I felt I was literally gasping for life itself.”² Ultimately, Fay’s mother took her to an ear-nose-and-throat specialist who attributed Fay’s problem to enlarged adenoids and recommended their removal along with her tonsils. The thirteen-year-old insisted that her younger sister be examined too. Much to her dismay, Lisie, who had just been along for the ride, wound up scheduled for surgery at the same time.

Encouraged by Fay’s rapid progress as a piano student, the Abrahams devoted much of the family’s disposable income to more expensive lessons. Fay met with a highly acclaimed tutor twice weekly, while Lisie was offered lessons by his assistant. Though proficient, Lisie soon quit, finding the contrast in their abilities too painful. When Fay periodically shirked practice, her parents threatened to discontinue the lessons, but Fay always opted to reapply herself with renewed vigor. She gave her first recital before she turned ten.

Soon afterward, Fay was accepted as a student of the renowned concert pianist and professor, Bernhard Abramowitsch. When San Francisco Chronicle music critic Alfred Frankenstein heard eleven-year-old Fay play, he confirmed her parents’ opinion that she possessed exceptional talent. Any chance for her to become a virtuoso, however, necessitated long, regular hours of practice. Her parents decided to send Fay to the prestigious Anna Head private school — the only school around where classes terminated at one p.m., which allowed Fay all afternoon to practice.

The Anna Head boarding and day school then stood at its original 1887 location, on Channing Way in Berkeley. (It has since moved to the Oakland Hills and changed its name to Head-Royce.) Its Berkeley campus included a well-tended rose garden. In springtime, the quadrangle was surrounded by blooming wisteria. To Ruby, it seemed nearly ideal. The school had an excellent academic reputation with a top-notch faculty hired from Smith College. One of Anna Head’s alumnae was celebrated war correspondent Marguerite Higgins, who had just made headlines reporting from the front lines for the New York Herald Tribune. Marguerite’s mother was a French teacher at Anna Head. When Fay started seventh grade, the acting head mistress was Lea Hyde, a Smith Classics major who had been widowed at a young age. Smith taught English with sensitivity and compassion. It became Fay’s favorite subject.

Source: Head-Royce websiter https://localwiki.org/oakland/Head-Royce_School

The Anna Head School was still in its original location on Channing Way in Berkeley when Fay Abrahams attended it. The school later moved to Oakland where it is now known as Head-Royce.

Source: http://stitchesthrutime.blogspot.com/2015/07/marguerite-higgins-award-winning.html

War reporter Marguerite Higgins in 1942, whom LIFE magazine featured as a “Girl War Correspondent,” was one of Anna Head’s most famous graduates. When Fay later attended Reed College, she had a month-long affair with Higgins’ then estranged husband, Prof. Stanley Moore.

World War II imbued the Anna Head faculty and student body with a strong sense of purpose. The new school newspaper, Quips and Cranks, urged students to save metal, paper, cork and rubber goods for the war effort. Students knitted socks and sweaters and took first aid courses. The school social service club “adopted” two British children, mailed packages to soldiers overseas and organized a clothing drive for residents of a war-torn French town. Yet Fay hated her new regimen, particularly the drab gray skirts with white blouses and matching gray sweaters that all the girls were required to wear. Anna Head had recently established the then-novel concept of student government. The elected representatives, awed by their responsibility, dutifully issued pink slips to students caught talking in study hall or not wearing their uniforms.

What oppressed Fay most was that attending Anna Head kept her isolated from her peers in junior high school who gathered after school to socialize. Instead, Fay headed home each day for three hours of piano practice under Ruby’s watchful eye. At least, unlike Lisie, Fay enjoyed exemption from household chores. Even at family picnics, Fay was not allowed to participate in volleyball for fear it would injure her hands. Ruby and Sam had grown alarmed after a game of tag ended with Lisie slamming the front door on her sister’s right hand. Lessons continued with left-handed arrangements as the family waited anxiously for Fay’s bandaged finger to heal. For Lisie, her parents’ temporary ostracism was mortifying. For Fay, it was sweet revenge. Growing up, Fay found her younger sister irritatingly prettier than she was and disliked Lisie’s normal role as the good child, far more traditional than Fay, shier and more compliant by nature.

The highlight of Fay’s young musical career was a recital at the San Francisco Symphony at age fourteen. She performed the “Emperor Concerto,” Beethoven’s last piano concerto and an extraordinary challenge for a teenager. The thirty-five-minute piece ends with a dramatic flourish, often performed to showcase a pianist’s virtuosity. The symphony gave a formal luncheon in Fay’s honor to celebrate her performance. Though Fay said nothing to Lisie at the time, Fay actually felt badly that her younger sister had to suffer in her shadow in front of so many family members and friends, including their grandmother Lena, who sat in the front row with their parents. While basking in all that attention, Fay could not resist some mischief. After they reached home, a symphony staff member telephoned Ruby: Fay had been observed taking a spoon from her lunch table. Deeply humiliated, her parents made Fay return the souvenir. Sam and Ruby did not know, as Lisie did, that whenever the family dined out, Fay pocketed a teaspoon. Fay had stashed more than a dozen such flatware keepsakes in their shared bedroom.

After her debut, Fay complained to friends about feeling chained to the piano by her mother for seemingly endless hours of practice. Fay’s yearning for a normal teenage existence prompted frequent feuds with both of her equally headstrong parents. At nearly five-foot-eight, Fay was tall and big-boned, with long legs and an awkward gait. Intense and forceful by nature, Fay matured into an adolescent with thick, dark eyebrows emphasizing her expressive, intelligent eyes. Her features bore some similarity to the sensuous Mexican-Jewish artist Frida Kahlo.

Soon after the San Francisco Symphony recital, Fay rebelled in earnest. Anna Head had become even more intolerable when Lea Hyde’s second husband, Theophilus Hyde, returned from service in the Navy and resumed his stern leadership of the school. In shouting matches with her parents that sent Lisie scurrying out of the room, Fay declared she would no longer commit to concert piano training or go to Anna Head with its ugly uniforms. After finishing ninth grade, Fay wanted to attend Berkeley High School like her friend Hilde Stern, who had been the valedictorian of Fay’s confirmation class. The Abrahams held Dr. Stern and his family in high regard. Berkeley High provided a first-rate education; it ranked among the top public schools in America. So Fay won her battle, but agreed to continue with a lighter schedule of piano lessons, giving her parents hope Fay might still make a career out of her exceptional talent.

By 1946, when Fay started high school, war-time rent control had allowed the Abrahams to save enough to purchase a small, two-story, three-bedroom home with its own garage off Arch Street in North Berkeley for $6,000. For Sam and Ruby, the dormered house on Corona Court held appeal because it was located on a quiet cul-de-sac in one of two middle class sections of the city. The upper-middle class and wealthy lived in the hills, while the poor, including many newly arrived black families, occupied the flatlands of West Berkeley. All children were channeled through local elementary schools and junior highs, segregating them by the class-based neighborhoods in which they lived.

At Berkeley High, Hilde introduced Fay to a small group of bright and motivated girl friends with whom Hilde had gone to junior high school. As a Jew whose family had fled the Nazis, Hilde noticed little overt anti-Semitism at Berkeley High. Hilde’s older brother often dated daughters of well-to-do WASP families, but Hilde was drawn instinctively to those on the social fringe. More reserved than Fay by nature, the German immigrant enjoyed Fay’s vibrancy. Fay seemed particularly drawn to crossing class lines when making friends and tried harder than others to understand people from different social strata.

Hilde’s small group of self-described “shreds” included the daughter of a Christian Scientist family impoverished by the Depression, the daughter of a Baptist missionary back from China, the daughter of a carpenter with seven children, and the daughter of a divorced Catholic head nurse at a local hospital. Fay was the only other Jewish girl and the only girl with a grandparent born in the Bay Area.

Hilde’s friends accepted Fay into their circle only as a favor to Hilde. They realized Fay was a likely fellow reject of the cashmere-and-pearl in-crowd, but left to their own devices, Hilde’s friends would have been too put off by Fay’s arrogant streak. All smart and college-bound, the “shreds” engaged in mostly parallel activities to the Hill girls. They rarely gathered at Fay’s house where Ruby, now President of the Berkeley League of Women Voters, made them feel unwelcome.

Fay Stender

Source of photos from 1949 Olla Podrida: Berkeley Public Library, https://archive.org/details/ollapodridaunse_40

Source: https://www.google.com/

As a teen, Fay decided to expand her vocabulary by reading the dictionary from start to finish. She got as far as the letter “L.” Yet she and her classmates all knew the meaning of “olla podrida.” That was what the Berkeley High yearbook had always been called.

Fay joined the Pro Musica Club and, at 15, won an award as the best young musician in the Bay Area. She and her friend Hilde Stern were both members of the Honor Society, but Fay had another goal. She practiced long hours to make the cheerleading squad, to no avail.

Fay herself still pined for acceptance into the central extracurricular life of the high school. She wanted to join a sorority, but the only feasible one was composed largely of girls rejected by more prestigious sororities. Fay attempted to coax Hilde and her friends into pledging with her, but they displayed no interest. Fay also tried out for a position as a cheerleader, practicing endlessly, but failed to make the squad. Soon, Fay spent less time with “the shreds” as she initiated a series of one-on-one intense friendships that she dominated. It would be many years before Fay recognized her strong feelings for some close female friends as signs of bisexuality.

The most enduring of Fay’s new best friends was Wendy Milmore, who was a year behind Fay in school. The attractive brunette was soft-spoken and a good listener as Fay confided her insecurities and unhappiness. (Wendy would later embark on a career as a psychiatrist.) Unlike the shreds, Wendy marveled at Fay’s quick mind and fluency of expression. On more than one occasion, she had witnessed Fay busily writing lengthy diary entries. Stream of consciousness became Fay’s writing style. As a lawyer, she rarely edited anything she wrote.

Fay and Wendy liked to go on Saturday afternoon adventures by bus. On one such excursion at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the curious teens strolled past the public areas down restricted corridors and opened doors marked “Private” to see what was behind them. Fay would delight all her life in opening closed doors at public institutions to observe their secret inner workings. In one pivotal pretrial hearing when she represented George Jackson in the Soledad Brothers murder case in the spring of 1970, a surprised Salinas judge would grant Fay’s impromptu request to enter his chambers to prove the courtroom had more than one fire exit. The stunt drew applause from the crowd of Leftists Fay had bussed down to the Conservative community. Fay had just proved the courtroom had sufficient fire exits to allow all of them to watch the trial. The chagrined judge then made county history — to avoid a media circus like that in the 1968 Huey Newton case in Oakland and the recently ended Chicago Seven trial, he transferred the politically charged death penalty case to San Francisco.

While at Berkeley High, Fay’s stormy relationship with her mother continued. Freed from the dreaded Anna Head uniform, she surreptitiously snatched her mother’s charge card plate to buy colorful plaid sweaters and skirts at Hink’s Department Store on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Of course, the new clothes did not go unnoticed and Ruby forced Fay to take them back. Fay also showed her rebellious streak by playing hymns on Sundays at a nearby Congregational Church. To the dismay of church elders and titillation of her peers, she sometimes improvised a few bars of popular music. This trend — the glee in seizing opportunities to test the tolerance of those in charge — continued throughout adulthood.

Fay Abrahams and her close friend Wendy Milmore circa 1951

As teenagers, Fay and Wendy liked to go on Saturday afternoon adventures by bus. On one trip to the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the curious girls strolled down restricted corridors and opened doors marked “Private.” Fay would delight all her life in opening closed doors at public institutions to observe their secret inner workings.

Fay joined Berkeley High’s Pro Musica Club and in tenth grade, at age 15, won an award as the best young musician in the Bay Area for her performance of Chopin’s “Scherzo in B Flat Minor.” Her prize was an opportunity to perform as a guest artist with the Oakland Symphony and a $50 gift certificate, which Fay spent on a faddish, long-fibered coat.

For the most part, neither Fay nor her close friends paired off with a serious boyfriend in high school. Once during her junior year, unbeknownst to her parents, Fay went out driving in the Berkeley Hills with a male friend and two other couples in his family’s car. Her date missed a turn on the hairpin curves of Tilden Park, throwing them both from the car, which then rolled over and was totaled. Miraculously, none of the passengers was seriously injured. The Abrahams were so relieved when they collected Fay at Herrick Hospital that they forgave her deception. The nearly calamitous accident made Fay nervous about car travel for years. She would cower in the back seat whenever Sam sped down the windy coastal road to Carmel for family vacations. Yet in her thirties and forties, Fay would herself speed recklessly behind the wheel, frightening passengers with her cavalier attitude toward their safety.

In high school, both Fay and her friend Hilde easily made the National Honor Society. Fay particularly excelled in English. She took great notes in her tiny, neat handwriting and was a voracious bookworm. Studying for the SATs, Fay embarked on a project of reading the dictionary and got through the L’s before she quit. She considered herself above frivolous pastimes. She read news magazines voraciously, even managing to hide Time magazine issues in her music book when practicing the piano. Fay likely appreciated Berkeley High principal Elwin LeTendre’s message to the graduating class of 1949. Noting it marked the centennial of the Gold Rush, the principal admonished seniors that “some philosophers think that gold is a curse…. I hope that you will find great values in other than material things.”³

Yet Fay’s awareness of the fight against racial injustice in America — what would become the cornerstone of her career — came slowly. Relatively few blacks lived in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco until 1940. By 1946, when Fay entered high school, several hundred thousand blacks had migrated to the Bay Area. Many only found housing in the most undesirable locations. In Berkeley, that meant the flatlands below Telegraph Avenue. In Oakland, they poured into similarly neglected neighborhoods — the streets in both cities where Fay’s future Black Panther clients grew up.

When Fay started her junior year of high school, Time magazine printed a cover story on Jackie Robinson smashing the color barrier in baseball as National League Rookie of the Year. Prior to high school, Fay had not seen many blacks, except for a few cleaning women in her neighborhood catching the bus back to their own homes. No blacks attended Anna Head, and Fay’s group of friends at Berkeley High was strictly white. But Fay and Wendy noticed with curiosity when shacks arose on the outskirts of Berkeley and filled with poor black families from the Deep South. At Berkeley High, black students were almost exclusively placed in a different educational track from those bound for elite colleges and public universities. “Shred” member Joan DeLasaux was unusual in making friends with an African-American girl in her homeroom, to the strong disapproval of many white classmates.

Probably the best student in Fay’s high school class had been a Japanese-American, Margaret Ohara. Margaret’s family had been removed from the Berkeley community during the war as forced internees while Margaret was in junior high school. After the war, when the Ohara family returned, no one at school discussed that wrenching experience with Margaret. It was a taboo subject, as were the Depression-era troubles of Joan DeLasaux’s father. In the ’40s, one simply didn’t ask and didn’t tell.

Hilde Stern

Source of photos from 1949 Olla Podrida: Berkeley Public Library, https://archive.org/details/ollapodridaunse_40

Joan DeLasaux

Margaret Ohara

In junior high school, Fay’s friend Hilde from Hebrew School formed a group of self-described “shreds” outside the popular crowd and invited Fay to join them. Cross-cultural friendships like that of “shred” member Joan DeLasaux and an African-American girl in her homeroom were rare. Japanese-American Margaret Ohara was a top student whose family got sent to an internment camp when she was in junior high school. When she returended after the war, no one at school discussed that wrenching experience with Margaret. Nor did Joan DeLasaux share with school friends the Depression-era troubles of her father. In the ’40s, one simply didn’t ask and didn’t tell.