Two Supplicants in the Queen City
Here is my great-grandmother Natalie Reichert: sitting stick-straight, alone in a small, open buggy. Grinning. Her dark, windswept hair snakes over her shoulders. Tugging lightly at the reins of the horse, she appears both regal and carefree.
Where and when it was taken isn’t clear. The setting is rural; perhaps somewhere in the Pennsylvania countryside, not far from the rust-belt town where Natalie’s immigrant-rabbi-father secured a pulpit early in his American career, before returning himself and the family to New York.
But in this photograph of young-adult Natalie, my great-grandmother looks the way I imagine her on the eve of her brief, treasured excursion west, in 1917. Candid; wide-open. Poised, but not posed. Setting off from New York City, her birthplace and home, on an adventure. In 1917, at twenty-four, she is a high-school graduate, working, unmarried.
I did know her in the time we shared on earth — she died at ninety when I was almost eight. Not merely a framed photograph resting on a bookshelf, not only a weaving of second-hand stories, as my other great-grandparents were. But: I didn’t truly know her. How could I have? So I’m looking for clues, because Natalie—dramatic storyteller, self-styled somebody — was the first elder in whom I saw myself.
The evidence before me: photographs, correspondence. A memoir, too, which she wrote during World War II in the form of a series of letters to her as-yet-unborn grandchild, my aunt Isabelle, the firstborn daughter of the firstborn daughter (my grandmother Jeanne) of the firstborn daughter (Natalie). I wonder: how much can I glean of her at twenty-four, embarking on adventure; or at fifty-one, writing the story of her life-so-far? There are words and images aplenty. But also artifice. And silences. Much to excavate; much to imagine.
I have been twenty-four; now I am fifty. I am searching for signs of who I really am. Maybe, in circling back to Natalie, I might begin to thread my own way through this strange tapestry of fate and choice, family and self. I might begin to weave myself a story that holds weight.
And so: It is 1917, and Natalie Reichert is going west.
She has pleaded with her parents to travel to Ada, Ohio, to witness her brother Irving — the next sibling among five, Natalie being the oldest—perform in a nation-wide college oratory contest. She feels she has earned herself this pleasure. She is making enough money not only to buy her own clothes, but to convey allowances to both her mother and her siblings. Her parents — the family is close, her father Isidor a watchful rabbi-paterfamilias — agree to let her go.
Irving invites her to join him in Cincinnati afterward for six months or more. In her own recollections of this time written some twenty-five years later, in April 1944, Natalie imbues her reunion with Irving in Ohio with the delicious joy and spaciousness of an escape from the drudgery of everyday working life. This is how it seems to me as I read her words, typed onto paper more than eighty years ago.
I turn the pages, and I search for evidence of the woman that she really was.
* * *
Eighty-eight years later, I too went west from New York to Cincinnati. I was in graduate school at the Jewish Theological Seminary and had won a research fellowship at the American Jewish Archives, housed at Hebrew Union College, the rabbinical alma mater of my great-great-uncles Irving and Victor (Natalie’s brothers). I broke the visit into two: one in swampy August, one in crisp November. It was 2005; I was thirty.
Above all, I remember this period as one of frantic begging to the universe: please, let me find all the materials with which to build a dissertation, to launch my nascent career as an academic. Please, let me be worthy of this fellowship, this journey. Please, let me get pregnant. Please, please, please. I couldn’t imagine a life without vocation, or a life absent of my imagined future family. I wanted both.
My husband T and I were then officially trying to have a baby. I deliberately gained fifteen pounds in the previous year, following a phase of disordered eating and exercise while preparing for my grad-school comprehensive exams that saw me drop to a pre-pubescent weight. I didn’t start menstruating again after getting off the birth-control pill at twenty-nine, in that time of jutting hip-bones and three-bites-of-oatmeal-for-breakfast.
I staged my own intervention. Found an endocrinologist to monitor my hormones, prescribe pills. Now I was eating and eating, in desperate hope of jump-starting my cycles. As I packed for Cincinnati, I was surfeit with panic, self-hate, despair. The very opposite, it seems, of that state of mind with which Natalie set forth. And yet: I too was an adventurer. Who knows what might await?
* * *
1917. Irving wins the national oratory competition, Natalie cheering him on. He returns to Cincinnati, Natalie by his side. Irving situates her in a boarding house near to his; she takes all her meals with him, either at his boarding house or at the University of Cincinnati dining hall. He arranges for her to enroll in classes in psychology, English literature, drama. She accepts invitations from his friends and classmates to concerts, plays, and dances, overwhelmed and delighted by their attentions.
Both siblings are dramatists, performers. Irving the orator, declaiming not only on the stage but on the page; his letters, then and ever after, blaze with caustic wit, his language dexterous and strongminded and ruthless. A politician’s smooth instincts, a prophet’s spiky tongue. Natalie is the would-be ingenue, with her elegant singing voice and now, her leading role with the Dramatic Circle of the Wise and Rockdale Centers of Cincinnati. Holding court among a bevy of suitors.
But their father, Isidor, makes it clear that he is uneasy about Natalie’s tenure among the Cincinnati set. He writes from New York:
When going out with friends do not forget yourself. Recite not, nor sing, nor do anything which might detract from your dignity. Be calm, not boisterous, suppress your somewhat girlish wildness and you will be admired by all with whom you chance to come into contact. We who know your character can vouch for your purity, but strangers judge from outward appearance and observation and the righteous are often condemned innocently, for this is the way of the world.
“Recite not, nor sing”? Reciting and singing were central to Natalie’s non-working life, crucial to her sense of self and, indeed, to the sanctioned, applauded role she played in her own family as theatrical darling. Her father must have known that one of Natalie’s chief occupations during this time in Cincinnati was as a student of drama and literature. Surely this fact surfaced in correspondence with her parents, though I have no direct evidence of this.
Natalie in the Queen City in 1917; me, there, in 2005. Two women. Our bodies under scrutiny. For me, the conflict was internal — to train the recalcitrant female system to do its “job,” by means of medical intervention; to somehow (impossible!) neutralize the disgust with which I beheld the infertile too-muchness of my unruly flesh. For Natalie, the conflict was external: a father’s exertion of control over how his daughter comported herself. My twenty-first-century self bristles at Isidor’s directives. But what can I say now in defense of the woman I was then, at thirty, manufacturer of my own chastisement? This punishing surveillance is something we share across the generations, Natalie and I, in its various forms, even as I wield the twenty-first-century tools to detect it.
Her father must have grasped the extent to which young men — Irving’s classmates, fraternity brothers, friends — are buzzing about her. Why would he have penned this advisement, otherwise? And indeed, one suitor in particular calls on Natalie with increasing diligence and ardor in these months. Unnamed in her 1940s memoir, this young man, an “exceptionally brilliant” rabbinical student — as well as a University of Cincinnati matriculant like her brother Irving — reads love poems to her in the parlor of her boarding house.
I imagine: Natalie’s round cheeks flushed, her mouth twisting with wry laughter, her dark eyes dancing. The young man inches closer to her on the plush-covered piano bench, there in the parlor with its maroon damask curtains and its faint gardenia scent. His hands rest on either side of his lap, a pinky brushing her thigh — just for the count of one in-breath — where it meets the surface of her skirt. Down the hall, perhaps the matron of the boarding house is dressing-down the kitchen girl for bringing in cracked eggs again. Natalie’s hands hover, descend, the other women’s voices banished by the first plinking notes of the piano. A velvet pause, and then Natalie’s deep-ruby vibrato fills the room. “Roses of Picardy,” I think, for this imagined set-piece. Her would-be beau joins her for the chorus — a wobbling tone, he’s no Caruso, but his notes are so pointedly gentle that she blushes all over again.
Romance. A novel experience for Natalie — conscious for the first time in her life, as she recalls later, “of more than a passing interest in a member of the opposite sex.”
* * *
T and I lived on the same dorm hall our first year of college. I don’t remember the first time we met. I don’t remember the sequence of events that led to our friendship, but it happened quickly and held fast: like two kids clambering over a jungle-gym in accidental companionship, falling into steadfast alliance. We were two fresh-faced, indie-rock types from the periphery — he from Nebraska, me from Georgia — toting our hinterlands-versions of middle-class cultural capital to New England.
In this space we somehow knew each other right away. It is less what we talked about that connected us (though we and our friends were a talky bunch); the two of us did things together, ventures spurred by let’s-put-on-a-show-kids curiosity and moxie. In February of freshman year, we opened a café-slash-music venue in the basement of our scruffy dorm out of a shuttered former cafeteria. It was in the course of this intensified partnership that we became more than friends. The Health Department shut us down a month or two after the café debuted. The relationship lasted.
One thing, at least, I share with that eighteen-year-old self, as I sit here writing as a fifty-year-old woman: I hover, perpetually, on the brink of Something. On the threshold between what is and what could be. I am still, years later, a shapeshifting creature in that borderland, restless and Janus-faced. Then and now, I burrow myself into anticipatory pessimism, angry that what I wish to happen hasn’t happened yet, watching my encroaching passivity curdle into aversion for the very thing I want. Until desire overcomes despair, and the cycle begins again. Love. Sex. Creative aspiration, professional ambition. Children. Everything and nothing might happen, and won’t, and will.
It was in this very limbo of inchoate self and destiny, the winter of our first year of college, that I lay on T’s twin dorm bed in a post-smoke bliss. He ran his fingertips along the inside of my arm. A move as melting and undeniable as a sliding glacier. My stomach dropped, thrilled by the sensation, but I also wanted to pick myself up and run away.
I don’t remember if it was days or weeks later that we kissed for the first time, but I think he reached for me before I reached for him. Hurry up already; leave me alone. Not yet. Now. Not yet. Now.
* * *
In the same letter instructing Natalie on virtuous comportment, her father Isidor cautions her against distracting rabbinical-student Irving from his vocation:
We are happy to hear that you are having such a glorious time. I fear, however, that your presence in Cincinnati at this time may hamper our boy and keep him from doing his full duty toward his work which means so much to him. For pity’s sake, child, avoid being in his way as much as you can and do not interrupt his labors. This is simply a reminder for I know you have his interest at heart even as we do.
The letter, signed “Your most affectionate parents,” closes with expressions of tremendous yearning for their missing daughter.
These letters from home cajole, manipulate, reinforce the gendered expectations that ruled the day. But perhaps Natalie ultimately saved these letters and shares them at such length in her 1945 memoir, which will circulate widely for decades to come among the extended family, not because they indict but because — in her eyes — they exonerate. Natalie’s tendency in her memoir is to gild her family’s portrait, to laud personal triumphs and furnish happy endings. It’s hard to grasp hold of her real, unvarnished emotions, here and elsewhere in its pages. But perhaps it truly is her parents’, and especially her father’s, love and concern that mattered most to her, in retrospect — and perhaps even at the time.
And yet: in writing about this moment of fatherly admonishment for posterity, she controls the telling. As author of a memoir, she has the last word.
* * *
Photographs: facts and fiction, then and now.
Scrolling recently through the digital photo album from that first trip to Cincinnati in August 2005, I am reacquainted with exploits in the city with T, those times I wasn’t deep in the archives. One of our favorite forms of communion has always been exploring the built landscape, especially in underdog cities and neglected neighborhoods, in search of off-the-map oddities. There I am in a red t-shirt in front of the historic Plum Street Temple, a neo-Gothic-meets-Moorish synagogue built in 1866, its central, lacy Cyclops-eye of window just above my right shoulder. I considered myself woefully zaftig at that time, having diligently regained all the lost weight (and more) in the quest to start ovulating again. But I can admit to myself now that I looked young and healthy as a ripe peach, despite my endocrinological travails.
There are twenty or so photographs in all, and the images capture our antics and moments of repose. What you don’t see here is the sadness, and the anger. How we fought at the time over my furious despair. T, so sure it would all work out one way or another, baby-wise, while I roared flames at his reassurances. But I needed (and still need) his optimism — or more precisely, his equanimity — even as it infuriated (and still sometimes infuriates) me.
Sifting nearly twenty years later through the photographs from that August, I pause, mystified by a nighttime shot of me from a low angle; in the background, a spot-lit, fake giraffe towers overhead from behind an iron fence. A little googling prods my memory: this is outside Jungle Jim’s, a famous Cincinnati amusement-park-like grocery store. For the first time, the date-stamp in the digital file catches my eye. August 4, 2005. Exactly one year before the first of our two children was born.
Vocation. Family. I wanted both. I still do.
* * *
In Natalie’s memoir, the letter of concern from her father serves as prelude to another: an entreaty from New York that cuts her residency short, that brings Natalie home from Cincinnati once and for all. A turn of events that ultimately sends her into the arms of a new suitor: my future great-grandfather.
In paragraph after paragraph of this next letter, Isidor bemoans his eldest daughter’s absence, speaking for himself and — with every “we” and “us” — her mother, family friends, Natalie’s peers. But it is his need that grasps the bonds stretching between them and pulls and pulls:
Now, my dear daughter, you know that I am not given to flattery but I am most sincere when I say that we miss you dreadfully…. Our home seems to have undergone a most radical change. No callers, no telephone calls, no singing, nothing seems worthwhile and all because the home’s chief attraction is absent. Now that will not do! I am not going to stand for anything like that any longer.
…I have grown very fond of you since you are away from home. I really and truly appreciate you dearly. If I could I would hug you tightly now and squeeze you until you scream….
“Feeling none too sure of my emotional state and unable to resist so appealing a letter,” as Natalie writes in her later memoir, she and Irving agree it is time for her to return to New York. And thus the “care-free, happy days in Cincinnati” come to an end, quickly and irrevocably. Natalie’s talents and appeal — her magnetism, her singing — are not only admirable but irreplaceable, in her father’s eyes, according to this letter. But only as long as these charms are deployed in the proper place: in a familiar New York City landscape, with her parents looking on.
I imagine the vignettes leading to Natalie’s first encounter with my future great-grandfather as a montage on a silent-film reel. Natalie boarding the eastbound train, her Cincinnati beau pressing a heartsick farewell letter into her hands. Natalie’s “o” of delight when, ensconced in the family home again, she picks up the telephone and is invited unexpectedly to the wedding of a family friend. A close-up of the “too alluring” dress hanging in her closet, frowned upon by her rabbi-father but the only gown in her possession as she awaits the delivery of her traveling-trunk from Cincinnati. Her handsome nineteen-year-old brother Victor presenting himself on the threshold as her “date” to Max Spiegel’s wedding. The pair entering the wedding reception, dashing and high-spirited, drawing all eyes.
And behold, as the black-and-white reel jumps and fizzes: someone gestures the sibling pair to the dinner table to be seated near a young engineer, the “handsomest… young man” Natalie has ever seen “outside of the movies.” She shoos her brother Victor away so he might dance with the eligible young women in attendance. The engineer turns to her, abashed, and the intertitle reads: “Aren’t you going to dance with your husband?” Natalie’s teeth like pearls in her open, laughing mouth, that early-film brilliantine haze about her eyes, her hair. Speaking words that we can’t hear but which we smile to see on the card that flashes onscreen next: “Oh! That’s my brother. I am not married.” And then Abraham Sprung asks Natalie Reichert, newly returned from Cincinnati, to dance. And they do.
Natalie and Abe marry on April 30, 1918. By then, America has been at war in Europe for over a year. As Natalie settles into married life in New York, Natalie’s brothers offer their services to the Jewish Welfare Board, organizing support for American Jewish soldiers at home and abroad.
* * *
In the fall of 2022, seventeen years after my first residency in Cincinnati at the American Jewish Archives, I seated myself again in the reading room. A Fellow once more, this time embarking on an amorphous family-biography project. All this Reichert material, collected by Great-great Uncle Victor for decades, mine to explore.
There was a time when I saw myself largely as heir to the intellectual tradition of my great-great-uncles, Victor and Irving. It was Natalie’s brothers, after all, whose fortunes extended beyond the realm of the familial and amateur, to the respectable, professional realm to which I aspired. (For them, the rabbinate; for me, an academic career in Jewish studies.)
But deeper within me, there was Natalie, waiting. The theatrical ingenue and charmer at twenty-four. The aspiring writer who penned a memoir in middle age. The daughter, the sister, the wife, the mother. This ancestor, this matriarch, this elusive prism from which I am partially, indelibly, refracted.
And so: there I was on a November Monday in the Archives, my first day at work as a Fellow. I pored over the voluminous, unprocessed files of Great-great-uncle Victor. The Queen City stunned me with the late-autumn cold that seeped in from the giant windows. I pinched paper, onionskin, card-stock — decades-old — with icy, cloud-white fingers. Read a letter, laid it on the stack. Read a letter, laid it on the stack.
The city outside the Archives’ windows had changed since I was there last, back in 2005. The University of Cincinnati, whose compact, 1920s core of grand brick halls is only a couple of blocks up the slope from Hebrew Union College, had pushed well beyond its original grid. Gleaming new buildings rose along wide swaths of pedestrian-friendly byways with their fresh landscaping. Down the steep hill past both campuses, Clifton and Ludlow Streets still proffered slightly grubby wares and eats. But the whole area — downtown, too — had passed through the late-capitalist looking-glass and wore a new confidence. I wondered if the students and young families I passed on my neighborhood perambulations knew anything of the uprisings against police brutality that occurred just over two miles away, in 2001; at the time, it was the largest such uprising in the country since those which exploded in 1992 Los Angeles. Its shadow — and the racial tensions beneath it — lay unmistakably across the city when I explored it seventeen years before.
The sparsely populated Hebrew Union College campus, though, was cowled in melancholy; the news broke near the time of my November visit that the Cincinnati site, Reform Judaism’s birthplace in nineteenth-century America but now the forgotten forbear of the New York and Los Angeles campuses, would be shut down. Examining letters between the Reichert brothers dating from the late teens, I immediately recognized the illustration running across the top of the HUC letterhead: the jazz-age, neo-gothic façade of the dorm in which I slept during my visit. The building that once housed my Great-great-uncle Victor as a new rabbinical student — following in his big brother’s footsteps — when it was brand new.
Without a rental car (by choice), I roamed less adventurously than during my earlier stint as a Fellow, in 2005. I was less restless, anyway, this time; largely content to spend my days sifting through the old family documents. I felt that this visit, unlike the one seventeen years before, was on my own terms. I was no longer the grasping, would-be high-flyer. In her place, a woman who had won some and lost some and knew that this in-betweenness is all there is. Accompanied in this ugly-beautiful limbo of realness with two teenaged children and a partner of twenty-eight years, back home in Durham, North Carolina. And there, in Cincinnati, this unexpected second act, spelunking in the deep caverns of family history, at the intersection of my academic training and my heart’s-work as a creative writer.
* * *
That very first morning of my latter-day fellowship, I stumbled across an unexpected sight: lined stationery with an unusual, printed illustration on the top-left. Wolf dressed as Granny, spectacles askew, red tongue dangling, hairy outstretched foreleg upon an undulating quilt. Just out of reach, Little Red wears polka-dots and a round bloom of bonnet and an expression of innocent surprise. Hands frozen in a “dear me!” gesture.
Beneath the illustration, a child’s cursive. Three thank-you notes on this stationery in succession:
Dear Uncle Victor,
Why don’t you send me that magazine you always used to send me every month. I miss it and I miss you to [sic]… When will you come agin [sic] at what time I will be waiting for you…. Dear Uncle Victor I have no more to tell you but I will send you a Chanukah card. Please answer me….
Dear Uncle Victor,
My cold is much better but it is not all better yet. I thank you for the magazine before I get it. I want to grow up and be a great woman like you but I don’t know what I’m going to be yet….
Dear Uncle Victor,
I thank you for the magazine that you sent me. I am reading the book that you sent me long ago and the name is Heidi I like it very much…. I love the poetry books and I know a lot of poems from it….
The year: 1928. The cursive, straining to be neat, belonged to my nine-year-old paternal grandmother, Jeanne Eleanor Sprung. She was born in March 1919, after a difficult pregnancy for my Great-grandmother Natalie, who was struck with influenza during that year’s famous epidemic and became desperately ill. Perhaps this is why my grandmother was sickly during her first decade on earth, suffering from long-lasting colds, often in bed reading — as this series of thank-you’s attests.
“I want to grow up and be a great woman like you,” she wrote her Uncle Victor, a gendered confusion so naked and sure that, there in the reading room of the Archives, tears pricked my eyes. This jumbled equation no doubt made the grown-ups laugh at the time; but my mouth trembled as I transcribed my grandmother’s words, overcome by this moment of startling contact across the years. I want to grow up and be somebody, a thinker and writer and maybe even a rabbi like you, is what I think she meant.
I lingered on the closing remark in her little-girl penmanship: “[B]ut I don’t know what I’m going to be yet.”
* * *
On the last morning of the end of my second and final visit of this fellowship year, I walked downhill through Burnet Woods — a stretch of semi-forested urban parkland that retains an aura of wildness. An old residential street runs alongside it, and I ambled here in the cold bright spring dawn. Though I had discovered and noted Irving’s long-ago address while in the Archives that week, I turned up no trace when I pored through my notes that morning before dawn. This final neighborhood walk was meant to be a communion with the site where Natalie would have visited her brother regularly during her solo adventure in 1917. But in the moment, I had no way of telling which address along the street was Irving’s.
Only now, several years later, does it occur to me to search online for the house on Bishop Street, and I find it easily. It’s a little farther down the hill than I wandered that last morning, showing its lovely brick exterior on Google Street View. The façade in the digital image appears old enough to be the site that Natalie would have recognized. I think of my great-grandmother: adventure thwarted, she relinquished this landscape and circled back to family — present family, future family. And yet she also saved those letters from her father. Not simply to rot in a box in the back of some New York City closet, but to use as evidence of this abandoned excursion. To testify with, when the time arrived. To offer up some clues of who she really was.
Writing family. Writing. Family. These things that feed each other and struggle for supremacy, then and now and always. I know, because they define my life and work too.
Two women on the verge in the Queen City: I see us now, me and Natalie, on pilgrimage to that place, a century apart. Supplicants, in our differing fashions. Two women charting their ways, beckoned by ambition, drawn too by the magnet of family life.
Everything and nothing might happen, and won’t, and will.
