IMPOSTER or CHARLATAN at 93
The most difficult subject to write about is the me of now. Who wouldn’t avoid dwelling on what it feels like to be nearing ninety-three, or what to do next at that age? Instead I’ve been searching for clues about my identity. Who am I? Who have I been? Why is this so puzzling?
Despite usually succeeding at whatever confronted me, I’ve always felt like an imposter. Unsure of my identity -- of what I really want. Always ready to doubt and disagree with authority but uncertain why. At the same time perpetually feeling in danger of losing it all. Always hoping for praise (but never admitting it). Feeling puffed when someone in a public place stares at me and seems to be telling a companion they recognize me, even though I knew deep down that’s not what’s going on. Time after time trying something new without preparation, and usually succeeding despite that lack.
I lucked (or faked my way) from drudge-on-the-set to writing and directing a kids’ TV program in less than a year. Knowing nothing about the corporate world I begged a clerk’s job at a Park Avenue consulting company front-loaded with Harvard Business School graduates and ended up a front-office principal. With no training or experience in the day-to-day process of running a business, after hitting it off well during a job interview, I jumped directly to a job as subsidiary president at a fortune five hundred conglomerate. At the end of this merry-go-round I closed my game-of-chance career after being hired to run a national dispute resolution program (though I had no knowledge of that discipline) just because the head honcho knew me from a former work relationship.
So, I’ve floated through my life in a boat without an anchor. Paddling with my hands and time-after-time getting somewhere great, a charlatan with magic oars. Looking for why it occurs to me that my career as an imposter grew out of my mother’s journey through womanhood, and how that caused me not only to skip the anchoring discipline of religion, but to be whipsawed by it. For many years as I grew up I may have been Jewish. But I was a Jew sealed in a box.
There were some very religiously observant people in my background. My mother began that way. She should have been a good Jewish mother, her father being an orthodox cantor and all that. She could make great matzoh ball soup and blintzes. But she changed soon after entering womanhood. I blame it on her unfortunate marital matters and on the depression, not only hers but the entire world’s, as her life unfolded in the 1920s and 30s, her 20s and 30s as well.
She grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania where her parents had settled. She was trained as a singer, but Scranton was not an operatic mecca and she took a job in a dry goods store just after finishing high school. There, a travelling salesman on an upward- mobility track in his adopted land, fell for her on one of his sales swings about ten years after he came to America to seek his fortune. He returned to Scranton several months later and swept her off her feet. My father Eric Harry Goldeman. A prototypical German- Jew. More than just an assimilated agnostic, he unabashedly mocked folk in his forsworn faith for sticking to their religious guns. He enticed my future mom into marriage and to moving to New York City, far from the parental nest in Scranton, PA. To perhaps a place to sing. Their marriage didn’t last long, maybe ten years, but sufficiently long to ready mother, freed of all religious restraints to become a card-carrying free-thinker, a kind of Daisy Miller, the Henry James character in his book of the same name who, around the
beginning of the same century mother grew to womanhood in, defies proprieties much to the discomfort of the book’s stuffy narrator. Mother probably knew little about upper crust etiquette. But her defiance was similar in mold to Daisy’s. Pushing conventions, and her religious upbringing, under the rug. Consequently, she exposed me to nothing having to do with her parental faith in the years after her marriage ended when I was five. Until, many years later she agreed to try something (at my expense) when we landed on a free rental in our years on the run.
Until that turning point the period after the divorce gave her a chance to fly. Nailing down her new freedom a few years after father Eric left, she married a dashing Cuban-American flamenco dancer, Octavio Linares, who dabbled as a business man, running a castile soap company owned by a Russian-American millionaire, Albert Moldavan.
We lived well, mother, Octavio and I. First in the upper 80s, then in London Terrace, a classy square-block building complex in the 20s with fourteen entrances manned by three shifts, each with 14 doormen and 28 elevator operators. Unfortunately for her, Octavio really was even more a free spirit than she. Three or four years after their marriage he skipped out with his secretary, returning to his home in Cuba where, I later learned, he came to an untimely end.
Octavio gone, mother and I were now high and dry in the depression’s midst. Me in tug, she jumped from Manhattan to lower cost Brooklyn, and lured annually by rent concessions, from one low cost apartment to another. When I was twelve, a no-rent-at- all (and almost free food) opportunity arose. We were invited into her brother Sam’s apartment. Sam had not escaped nearly as much as mother the steadying tug of religious customs, including an inbred understanding that the coming-of-age ritual is a tried-and-true pier for young man’s launch into adulthood. Now I know that we Jews call it Bar Mitzvah. Then it was a tradition no one had ever even mentioned to me. But I was approaching the age when “today I’m a man.”. Sam urged, maybe demanded, that I be prepared to experience the rich ceremony.
I was enrolled in a Hebrew School on Coney Island Avenue near Avenue H, about half way up the Brooklyn artery with its new streamlined trolley cars running between Prospect Park and the crowded summer playground’s beautiful sandy beach and Steeplechase amusement park.
Hebrew school didn’t go well for me. I sat in a classroom learning how to read and recite words whose meanings were an unsolved mystery. Probably the other students had studied them in earlier years and knew what they meant. The idea was to learn to chant the strange guttural sentences on the magic day when we became men.
There were some benefits. About a month in I learned from one of the other boys that a candy store on a corner along the way sold cigarettes for a penny a piece. Thus I learned to smoke on the way home from Hebrew school. This new temptation, my own ascent into manhood, was easy to understand and adopt. I also learned that Bar Mitzvah was a time for gifts, a principal one the butt of a joke. “Today I am a fountain pen.” I didn’t learn much more. And the promise of gifts was apparently an insufficient lure.
In a rare, until that time, act of rebellion, I refused to go on. Thus might have ended my journey into orthodox manhood. But not so.
Mother was changing, maybe wearing down; regretting her vivid past. Growing more attached to her family. And involved with its intricacies. So much so that our stay at her brother’s flat became untenable. Families often fight even as they love. Hers, mine, suffered that syndrome in spades. So we moved to escape the turmoil, this time for its proximity to her aging parents, to a little apartment on Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn facing the wide entrance to New York’s Harbor. (I apologize for the digression into politically related history but can’t help mentioning that a huge public works landfill project extended the little Gravesend Bay beach in front of our apartment house out many acres. Its sand dunes providing gently rolling cover for lovers’ evening trysts. This entire fill-area later became the site of a new parkway enclosing Donald Trump’s father’s enormous home construction project, yielding some of the fortune contributing to the current uneasiness many of us share.)
Mother realized how important my Bar Mitzvah was to her father. She and he reached a bargain; a rapprochement. My grandfather would coach me, privately, to carry out my Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Over the next few months I dutifully went, after school, to my grandparents’ apartment. Grandpa and I sat in their narrow little kitchen at a folding table he had built and attached to the wall opposite the sink. I laboriously learned to read and pronounce, in the proper order, the appropriate words for my July birthday, my thirteenth. He was grimly patient.
My grandfather was an honored elder at the synagogue a block from his apartment. On a Wednesday of the week of my birthday he led me to the imposing attached buildings running all the way Along Benson Avenue between Bay 27th and Bay 28th streets. They housed the big Shul for Saturday services, the Hebrew School, various meeting rooms. The wide arching front steps to the synagogue proper, a spacious theater with beautiful stained glass windows and balcony for women congregationalists, kitty-cornered at the junction of Bay 27th and Benson. They were not to be my steps. Around the next corner, in the same building complex, but on Bay 28th street far from the synagogue, a few concrete steps led down via a side entrance to a small basement room for minyans. These were the daily prayer sessions. They required at least ten adult adherents in one room. Men. Only men. Each day a group of very religious elders would join in that room without a rabbi to self-conduct various ceremonies including yahrzeit, the annual prayer for the dead. My grandfather had devised a clever alternative to sneaking me into manhood without the embarrassment of exposing me (and him) to the full congregation during Saturday services. He led me there for the ceremony.
I left the room after successfully mouthing the, to me, meaningless litany. Without a pen -- or congratulations from family and friends, an imposter Jew who needed to absorb the moral strictures of my religion before and after that without the fence of tradition to lean on. I continued to sneak my way into successes. But ill trained in my identity.
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