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EDNA FERBER AND OUR MOTHERS' AMERICAN DREAMS
By Susan Dworkin
My mother, May, and my
mother-in-law, Dvora, had very little in common - but they both loved
the stories of Edna Ferber.
In a writing career that spanned the
first sixty years of the 20th century, Ferber penned just the sort
of novels that May - a native-born New Yorker, the child of immigrants
- could not get enough of. They were great American adventures starring
ordinary women who struggled and survived, always against a background
of magnificent scenery -- the Texas of Giant, the Mississippi of Show
Boat, the Alaska of Ice Palace.
May delighted in those glamorous comedies
like "Stage Door", "Dinner at Eight" or "The Royal Family", on which
Ferber collaborated with the indefatigable George S. Kaufman, one
of her literary pals from the Algonquin Round Table. She admired the
photos of Ferber lounging on the verandah of her country home, among
pots of scarlet geraniums, and pointed out to her attentive daughter
that Ferber's wealth came to her by her own devices, not because some
man had died and left her a fortune. "If you must be a writer, Susan,"
she said, as though I were about to launch a suicidal attack on Everest
without ropes, "for God's sake, write like Edna Ferber. Everything
she writes sells in the millions, and she has such fabulous style."
By "style", May meant that grand dame nose-in-the-air hauteur which
enabled a regular woman to come on like royalty. May loved the confidence
with which Ferber wore her outfits by designers like Trigere and Scaasi.
(The latter being Isaac spelled backwards. A Jewish joke. That's what
I loved.)
May assured me that Ferber had once
been married. It wasn't true. In those days, a woman had to make a
choice between family and art. Ferber chose art, ended up alone, self-described
as "a Jewish nun", and doted on other people's children. Edna Ferber's
most important Jewish novel was Fanny Herself, published in 1917,
a clearly autobiographical map to her Midwestern girlhood and the
yearnings of her Hebraic soul. The heroine, Fanny Brandeis, feisty
and ambitious, was tempted by assimilation but proved too wise to
succumb. She yearned for wealth but cared desperately about the plight
of the poor. She wanted independence and dreamed of love. To the joy
of Ferber's readers, Fanny managed to have both, long before "having
it all" was a feminist slogan.
Fanny Herself was my mother May's Jewish
Jane Austen novel, the hit romance of her youth. But to my mother-in-law,
Dvora, arriving in Detroit from Poland in 1921, Fanny Herself served
as a socio-political guidebook that demystified American Jewry. A
Zionist, a socialist, devotee of the stories of I.L.Peretz and the
Yiddish intellectual tradition, Dvora read Ferber's description of
the rural Wisconsin Jewish congregation in Fanny Herself and said
to herself: "These are the American Jews who arrived before me. These
are their shuls, this is their babka, this is how they dress on Yom
Kippur. Thanksgiving is their secular holiday. The women often go
to work and earn their own living and travel, yes, they travel alone
from New York to the Rockies. Like Fanny Brandeis, they pay their
own rent in Chicago. This novel is my window on American possibilities."
Dvora never tried to dress like Edna
Ferber, as May did. But she learned from Ferber how to fearlessly
explore her new home. She practiced how to be a smart woman in a free
country and accepted that the price a smart woman often paid in hers
and Edna Ferber's generation was to end up alone. And from Ferber
and her fiercely independent American heroines, Dvora learned how
to bring that off with fabulous style. When I was recently directing
the new audiobook recording of Fanny Herself, I imagined all three
of them sitting there in the booth with our actress. I saw May, who
eventually got her own verandah full of scarlet geraniums, and Dvora,
who eventually explored half the world, and Edna Ferber, droll, brilliant,
elegant in her favorite Trigere, writing our mothers' American dreams.
Susan Dworkin
Jewish Contemporary Classics, Inc.