Young romance
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MAX: Max, interviewed by Lisa or talking with other family members MAX: I'll tell you about my love affair before sixteen... before I came to America. I fell in love with a girl... my mother's sister's daughter. My cousin! She was so pretty... something like you! I was so serious about her that when I came to America, I was sixteen and a half, I kept writing letters to her. I was so serious [at] that time, I thought that right away I gotta get married. She answered me, and... I came to where the girl was... before I went to America. So I had a boyfriend, a friend... So, like two girls that get a liking for each other, I get a liking for him. And we shared our secrets! And I remember I used to get letters from that girl, and we both read the letters. Heh, heh... And we had to answer the letters, we also did it together!
LISA: Lisa, interviewing her grandfather, Max Whatever happened with that girl?
MAX: She got married I suppose! Without me! My friend, his name was Avram Hirsch. So soon I got a letter... on the telephone, was no telephone, excuse me. There was no telephone... heh, heh... And he came running, as we made a date, and we got it, and we used to read the letters, and answer the letters, it was real pure love…
NARRATOR: Lisa, backgrounding/commenting. Pure love was a relatively new concept in the shtetl. The arrangement of marriages was another way parents could insure economic stability for their children; romantic love was foolhardy and impractical. Matchmakers earned a livlihood –although meagre at best– well into the beginning of the twentieth century and could be found hawking their services on the Lower East Side. But the same circumstances that caused the physical uprooting of a people were also responsible for a spiritual uprooting of traditional values and mores. The Western world brought ideas of love and romance along with railroads and mass production. It was inevitable that with exposure young Jews would begin to yearn for its rewards and emulate its social traditions. There is little apparent difference between Max's episode and the antics of an adolescent American boy today.
MAX: I think I told you once, that when I became 15 years, I developed a romance! And the maidel's /21/ name was Faigeleh. Faigel was a girl's name. And Faigeleh, is like now, a pet name. So I was so serious about that girl, that I thought she was the prettiest, and the smartest and sings better than everyone, and I took into my love my friend, Chaim Moshe. Together we used to write the love letters! Together, I mean it! We'd both read them! And both answer it, too.
NARRATOR: Max Leavitt was a sentimental romantic of the most extreme kind. No doubt the qualities of Faigeleh did exist; or that they were the source of his attraction. It is possible that Max exaggerated the entire "affair" for the sake of sensation. It is equally possible, however, that it was not an exaggeration to him at all; it could very well be that this was the only way he remembered the romance. In contemporary psychological terms we might interpret it as a fantasy escape; a defense mechanism against a hostile world. But to Max it was just an unconscious means of acquiring some happiness – real enough, if only fanciful and temporary.
LISA: Did you know this girl in school?
MAX: You see, she was in the family... Both the same age, foolish in love...
LISA: She was your first cousin!?
MAX: My first cousin, yeah. But she was very sweet. And she enjoyed that intrigue about love letters, and she wrote me my answers, and me and my boyfriend used to answer her. It was like a triple, a triple love...
LISA: Did first cousins marry then?
MAX: Yeah, sure.
LISA: That's interesting. So why did you stop writing her?
MAX: Well, when I came to America I wrote to her a few letters, and then by itself... it vanished, it vanished, it vanished... Especially when I got acquainted with Jennie! This wasn't no more kid love, no?
NARRATOR: Enjoying the recounting of his "love affair," Max nevertheless acknowledges the adolescent nature of the romance. While in the shtetl it was an amusing game to play, but which was disposed of with emigration and adulthood.
MAX: Life wasn't the altogether, like they sing in the songs, misery, misery, misery. We lived our youth, and with all the fun and all the romances that you hear about nowadays, legally and illegally, it was the same thing seventyeight, eighty years ago...
LISA: What do you mean, legally and illegally?
MAX: I mean you find now the burlesque, the dirty pictures and all this... those things were going on in our years too!
LISA: Yeah, pornography?
MAX: Pornography! Not exactly like it is today, because everything today, is, everything is carved to the point, to make it worth... but the urge for sex was that time the same thing as it is now. Same thing! Boys from twelve, from thirteen, fourteen made love, with girls, same thing, were curious about the other sex! Otherwise they wouldn't have no generations!
NARRATOR: The above exchange was quite a shock to my naive sensibilities.I seem to have one set of beliefs for myself, and quite another for those of Max's generation. I found it startling that an 85-year old man would speak so explicitly, and also that there were, in fact, such activities among the Jews of Tsarist Russia. In the Broadway hit, Fiddler on the Roof, in which the wondrous effects of romantic love were explored and ultimately accepted by a Jewish father, it never occurred to me that sex might be a factor.
Traditionally the Eastern European Jews did not consider sexual activity as impure or evil; as a requirement for procreation, it was seen as a positive good. But the concept of sexuality as a basic form of entertainment certainly did not exist in shtetl life until the end of the nineteenth century, when the influence of Western values began to have an impact. An oppressed people who were continually faced with economic deprivation were not likely to deprive themselves sexually; as soon as something better was offered they welcomed it wholly.