To read a brief biography of Naomi Weisstein, please click here. 

MY CALL TO COURAGE: TRIBUTE TO MY MOTHER.

 by Naomi Weisstein
About thirty or forty people are present at the service, most of whom are friends of my sister Debi and Debi's husband, Irwin Unger, an NYU history professor. Irwin made his reputation by attacking the New Left in the 'sixties. He also hated feminism and kept Debi, a smart, witty, wonderful writer, from pursuing an independent career. Instead, she helped him write his many books.  Their friends who are present include a lot of right-wing historians, who repeatedly blocked the nomination of Jesse Lemisch, my historian husband for membership in the CUNY graduate faculty. Anthony ("Tony") Marcus, Debi's hunky son by an earlier husband (#2), has tried to invite the dance instructors that my mother, Mary, loved and the gays she treated as a psychotherapist, but Debi has vetoed all this, for reasons of hyper-respectability.

    HATS, HAIR, AND YARMULKES. For the funeral, Debi is very blonde and is dutifully wearing on her head a black doily apparently given to women by the funeral home, so as not to offend G-d. No other woman there is wearing one. Mary, a lifetime atheist, would not have been happy.  Irwin is gray-haired, with a toilet-brush mustache and a yarmulke. Betsy Marcus, Debi's daughter by the earlier husband, Bob Marcus, has luxurious thick curly hair.  Tony, the hulking son, has shaved his head bald for the occasion, somewhat like Yul Brynner in "The King and I": it's an appealing gesture. Jesse, in his blue blazer, striped shirt and purple tie, looks like a banker, but his silver hair goes in many different directions, revealing the sedition within.

Irwin reads Debi's remarks, followed by talks by Betsy and a grief-wracked Tony. Then, in response to the rabbi's gesture, Jesse moves towards the podium. Seeing this, Debi puts her head in her hands; Irwin shifts around uncomfortably and looks back at the funeral party from his front row seat. They had "neglected" to tell me and Jesse where and when the funeral would take place. Now their worst fears may have come true.  Naomi, the "bad" -- sister- the embarrassing atheist new-left-swear-to-tell-the truth COMMIE FEMINIST, Harvard Ph.D. sister -- has found out about the funeral anyway. At various points in the following, Debi's son, Tony, who is seated next to her, leans sharply away from her, and raises his fist in the "right on!" gesture.
 
What follows is a slightly expanded version of my eulogy as delivered by Jesse.

Events at the service, and a few later interpolations, appear in italics.

    I'm Jesse Lemisch. I'm Naomi's husband. Naomi is very ill, bedridden and under 24-hour nursing. Her sweet and generous nurse, Ann St. George, is taping this service so that, in that way at least, Naomi can participate. Naomi asked me to say a few things on her behalf.

    I adored my mother and I miss her ferociously. There was also a lot of conflict between us over the years, and my feelings are inevitably affected by the fact that, when I got sick in 1980, my mother seemed to more or less abandon me.

Later, I learned that Mary's will left the bulk of her estate to Debi, Tony and Betsy.  I believe that this favoritism was due to constant manipulation and coercion from Debi.  During the time the will was executed, Debi and Irwin had moved into Mary's West End Avenue apartment and had blocked Mary from visiting me.  Debi had a history of lying about me to our parents.  Who knows what Debi told Mary about me when Debi did not permit Mary to visit?

Debi also abandoned me.  She refused to speak to me for the first 15 years of my illness -- even while living in the same building --complaining that to be involved with a sick person would retard her personal development.

    But what I want to remember today are the wonderful things I got from my
mother. A few stories come to my mind.

    GRANDPA DESECRATES THE TEMPLE.. I remember Grandpa, who had a been-there-done-that expression, reflecting a profound savvy - -  a Jewish Humphrey Bogart. A Menshevik who came from Russia at the turn of the century, he became an anarchist and a union organizer. Mary often told me, with delight, the story about how, at Yom Kippur, to show his contempt for religion, he would sit on the steps of the temple -- smoking, and, at the same time, munching on a pastrami sandwich.
Comments from the floor: "it was ham".

    The legacy of resistance went from Grandpa, to Mary, to me. Grandpa was a cabinetmaker, and he encountered enormous anti-Semitism at many of the places where he worked. He always fought back. At one shop he once took a hand saw and held it in front of him. "I hear some of you don't like Jews", he said. "Speak up", he continued. "Who are you?" He never had trouble there again.

    MARY PLAYS LIKE AN ANGEL AND ACCOMPANIES PAUL ROBESON.  Mary got her fight from Grandpa. She combined her own early rebellious spirit with her art. As she developed her piano skills, she played at socialist and anarchist events and then at a Workmen's Circle memorial for the Socialist leader Eugene Debs in 1926, where she accompanied Paul Robeson. It seems like a scene from a Doctorow novel. "Mary, you play like an angel," said Robeson, kissing the top of her wooly orange head after the performance. Think of her, with her brilliant blue eyes and her wiry red hair, dressed up in one of Grandma's home-sewn pinafores, blushing fiercely through her translucent skin. She remembers this moment as one of the high points of her life.

    Inspired by all this, Mary went on to Juilliard. She studied with Aaron Copland, composed like Scott Joplin, and then and later, she played Beethoven, Mozart and Bach. But most of all, she played Chopin, as feeling and passionate as the composer himself. Until I got too big to fit, I used to pretend I was the household cat, crawling on top of the piano when Mary was practicing.  I'd sit there for hours, hugging my knees, looking and listening, rapt. Mary did play like an angel.
    Sometimes, Mary played like a militant angel come down from heaven to set things right in this world of injustice, with a heart full of riot. When I was first told that Mary had died, the strains from Chopin's fiery "Revolutionary Etude" flooded my head.

    MARY AND SAM, AND MARY'S MUSIC. Mary married Sam, a good and honorable lawyer in Harlem.

Sam could accomplish near miracles in defending his clients -- he got an acquittal for a man who shot at five cops, wounding three; and another for a former junkie who had inadvertently accepted $200,000 worth of heroin in the mail from an ex-buddy who was trying to set him up. Sam was considered such a treasure in the community that when he returned to his office after the 1964 riots (black militants had advised him to stay away for a week, shortly before the riots began) -- his was the only building left standing at 126th Street and Lenox Avenue.

    But, Sam came of age during the depression, and he was always panicked about money. In addition, he was very much of his time and culture, believing women should be "practical" (his words) -- subordinate housewives. He didn't understand Mary's artistic ambitions, her "romanticism" (as he called it) and he snored loudly during her concerts.
Was he really asleep? Given the drama of Mary's performances, it's hard to believe.
    His insensitivity to music was so great that -- as Mary would tease, covering up her hurt and anger -- he mistook the street sounds of crashes and sirens for bands of roving musicians.

Debi cries out, in a tortured voice, "That's not true!
In response to Debi's interjections, Jesse says, "Debi, you will get a rebuttal."

    Mary suffered badly under Sam's old-fashioned patriarchal rule. For some years she struggled heroically to keep up with her music (just as I would later struggle, in sickness, to keep up with my science). Then Debi and Naomi arrived, and Sam, stingy and fearful, refused to provide the financial support that would allow Mary to continue her career.  The suppression of her music -- and, as I came to understand later, the deprivation of the ecstasy that she felt when performing -- was to take a heavy toll on Mary.  Frustrated at her inability, against all the obstacles, to maintain a musical career, and a proto-feminist in her rebellion against the assigned role of motherhood, she would rage at us girls. Giving up on plucking the chicken for dinner she would hurl it at us. The peas followed.

    Mary eventually had to give up her music, but she never gave up her drive for autonomy; she never gave up her fight. She went back to school and became a psychotherapist, and gave her patients her own brand of decidedly unorthodox Freudianism, including a standing instruction to her female patients: "make him give you oral sex."

Tony reports that she told a hard-of-hearing gay patient -- so loudly that Tony feared the neighbors would hear -- "You must not let him butt-fuck you until he takes you in his mouth!"
Her patients were devoted to her. Even when her memory went, they kept coming. Some of them still call me.
    Mary even figured out how to start performing again. A month after Sam died, Mary walked into a Fred Astaire studio and signed up for classes in the tango. She began to win prizes in dancing contests, traveling to Atlantic City and the Virgin Islands with her devoted dance instructors, whom she, in turn, worshipped.

    MARY YIELDS TO MY REBELLIOUSNESS, PART I: THE HAIRBRUSH STORY. Mary was a true original and, despite the turmoil, she was a uniquely wonderful mother. In the late fifties I bought a pair of Bermuda shorts for an audition as the Wellesley freshman "tree day" comedian, for the outrageously high price of $10. Sam made the family watch every penny, and Mary screamed at me, "How could you do this to us?  You know how hard Sam works!  How hard I work? I have to walk up four flights of stairs to get to my students so that you can go to Wellesley!"
You just can't live like your rich friends! How could you?"  I was brushing my hair in
front of Mary's mirror.  I threw the hairbrush at her. It landed on Mary's shoulder. KERPLOP! Mary froze. Total shock! The brush tumbled to the floor.

Debi puts her head down.
Then Mary started laughing, gasping out between bursts of laughter, "Keep the shorts, little monkey. Keep them."

    MARY YIELDS TO MY REBELLIOUSNESS, PART II:I STAY AWAY FROM TONY'S BAR MITZVAH. When would that have been?
Cries of "1976" and "1977"

Tony's approaching bar mitzvah was the biggest moment in Sam's life -- for the son he never had, a full-dress induction into the patriarchy.

Debi throws her hands to the sides of her head, projecting back to her friends a look of great contempt for me. Anne's tape of this moment captures a classic tableau of hatred.

But it was 1976, and despite my love for Tony, I wasn't interested in inductions into the patriarchy. In 1976 I wanted to smash the patriarchy. (I still do.) Besides, I had
heavy professional pressures in Buffalo, and I told Sam truthfully that I just couldn't get
away. "You demon!" Sam shouted.
At this point, Tony's head is bent away from his mother at a 45-degree angle.
A few days later, Mary -- invoking Grandpa's Yom Kippur heresies -- told me that I didn't have to come. "I was pretty sure you wouldn't show up, anyway" she said.

    I FIGHT WITH SAM ABOUT GOING TO WELLESLEY, AND MARY COMES TO MY SUPPORT. For the better part of his life, Sam made a substantial living. But his depression-era ghosts never left him. He wanted his daughters to have a trade so they could make it through the next depression -- secretary or bookkeeper. Mary wasn't having it. She wanted her daughters to be great in the world -- at whatever they did best. A concert pianist, like her, was first on the list, but I couldn't learn to read music, and Debi didn't practice. So anything else that Debi and I could excel at would be fine with her.

    When I received notice that I had been accepted at Wellesley, I knew that Mary would be thrilled. But Mary was away in Puerto Rico on one of her adventures, posing as a reporter for a Pablo Casals cello festival. (Years earlier, Mary had similarly pretended to be writing for MASSES AND MAINSTREAM on a visit to Mexico, getting to Mexico City and putting up with a Communist family suspiciously a day before Trotsky's assassination.)

Debi covers her face with her hands.

Back to the Wellesley acceptance: "Oh, Debi!" I started crying with joy and surprise. "I've been accepted at Wellesley!"
Perhaps because there was so little love to go around, Debi seemed always to want to turn Mary and Sam against me. This time, she flew into the living room screaming "father! FATHER! Naomi got into Wellesley and, now she is acting like a rich bitch! Make her stop!"
Sam stomped into the room and began punching and slapping me: "Now you think you're a rich bitch, do you?" he shouted. "Rich bitch!"

"Stop this!" Debi cries out in a tortured voice from the first row, "Stop! Stop!" In response to Debi's enraged response, Jesse adds: "Debi was there and played an active role in this." Tony caresses his mother's shoulder.
    I fled from the apartment on 71st Street, and hung out with my pre-hippie hippie friends until Mary finally came home. "Mother," I said, "Let me go to Wellesley. Please!"

    Mary did. She went back to work, arduous work teaching homebound children in four-story walk-ups, and I went to Wellesley. What a liberation! At Wellesley, I discovered my voice -  I became a feminist, comic, and scientist, with performance skills that Wellesley delightedly encouraged and that came, profoundly, from Mary.

WHAT MARY GAVE ME MOST OF ALL. Mary's response to authority was complicated. Although she sometimes gave in, her first answer was generally, "sez who?" -- pure Jewish Bogart.  And it is speaking of this side of Mary that I want to say, in conclusion:

And, my tragic and beautiful Mary, my playful, adventurous Mary, my anarchist, break-out Mary who loved to laugh and had so little opportunity to do so during your life together with the sometimes funny, sometimes loving, but mainly angry, punctilious, upright, grim, and haunted Sam, I must tell everybody about my legacy from you, one that I treasure above all others. It is my combativeness. I have been bedridden and totally disabled for almost twenty years now, but I refuse to die off in my heart, and together with my heroic husband, another brilliant warrior like you, we fight every day against the insurance companies, the pain, the ignorant doctors, the loneliness and isolation. And we do this because I am your daughter, Mary, and you taught me to do this. Despite the turmoil, the conflict, and the seeming abandonment, -- you were my inspiration and my call to courage. You still are.
Jesse steps down from the podium. Tony, who has been sitting next to Debi throughout, approaches him. In his head, Jesse sees a re-run of the Jack-Ruby-murders-Lee-Harvey- Oswald tape. But Tony gives a prolonged embrace and praises his remarks. Jesse says: I did
not mean to hurt your mother. Tony says: these things needed to be said; these were the stories Grandma told me over and over again, the stuff she was most proud of. Debi's eulogy could have been any sweet little old lady. It wasn't grandma. Yours was.