MAYBE IT'S ME

Is an older woman who travels alone to a foreign country brave and independent ... or is she nuts? Come with me to Mexico, swim with me through some pretty scary underground caves, dance with me on Día de Muertos and tell me what you think.

How and where did most Jews learn to ski and skate and play tennis and golf? Not at the country clubs and resorts that banned them. Who was the first American Jew to earn Olympic medals in a Nordic sport? Tune in and learn about the role that Borscht Belt hotels such as Grossinger's played in teaching immigrant Jews the skills they would need to become, well, American.

Bingeing on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show took me back to my own first job--like Mary, I worked in a newsroom--and led me to ponder what we've lost and gained in decreeing that any type of workplace intimacy is verboten.

Were you forced to take a foreign language in high school? Do you remember sitting through hour after hour of language lab? So many people now speak English, why should we Americans bother to learn Spanish or French or German or Chinese or Urdu? And why on earth would anyone approaching their final years on the planet care if they could correctly conjugate the verb hacer? 

I really, really want a dog. Why don't I get one? If I do, will you pay for all its vet bills? Does everyone need to be a doggie parent to a furbaby? Can't you just own a mutt? 

Have you ever had a hard time convincing someone that something is wrong with your car, your house, or your computer and they really do need to fix it? Of course you have. I can't help you fix whatever needs fixing, but I invite you to compare your frustrations with mine.

Believe it or not, I've been told I had cancer SIX TIMES. Luckily, five of those diagnoses were wrong. But why were so many doctors so eager to tell me that I had a fatal disease? Is that any better than the way it used to be, when everyone--including doctors--were afraid to so much as utter the word?

Did you play a musical instrument in elementary school? Did you give it up? Why? Do you wish you had continued taking lessons? Is it ever too late to try again?

Are you--or someone you love--in denial about how much you're missing because you can't hear most of what other people are saying? Why are you so reluctant to make a trip to Costco and buy a pair of hearing aids? Why was I? 

What's it like dating the star of a reality TV show like The Golden Bachelor? Is there any hope for a woman in her sixties or seventies who still wants to find love before she dies?

Did you know that bridge was once the most popular game in America? EVERYBODY played. And now? Hardly anyone. So, why did I become obsessed with playing bridge? Why do any of us pursue the hobbies we pursue? Or do our hobbies pursue us? Why are we so afraid to admit we are who we really are? Why are some of us so afraid to admit we're average?

Why on earth would anyone miss the funky Catskills hotels and bungalow colonies where Jews vacationed for most of the 20th century because they weren't allowed to check into most gentile-owned resorts and didn't have the money to travel anywhere else? What do movies and TV shows like Dirty Dancing and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel get wrong? As someone who grew up there, don't get me started!

Are you spending a ridiculous proportion of your time in doctors' offices, at the gym, or in various beauty and wellness establishments? If we devote sall our time and energy to trying to stay healthy and youthful-looking, what is the purpose of being alive? Is there an age when you should just give up?

I signed up for what I assumed would be a very basic art class, strictly for beginners, but there on the stage stood a very handsome, entirely nude man I was expected to draw. What happens when we finally get up the courage to try to do something for which we've been told we have absolutely no talent? (Warning: this episode contains several instances of the anatomically correct word for what was hanging between that man's legs!)

My mother saw disaster lurking everywhere. Why did I take so many decades to believe she--and so many women like her--had a lot of reasons to be afraid, not only for herself but for all of us? 

What happens when you finally get the toy of your dreams ... when you're in your sixties? Will an Erector set help your little girl become a physicist? What do we really want from our parents?

We're forgetting just how horrifying it was to live through the covid pandemic, especially if you were elderly, disabled, or otherwise at risk. We're forgetting how many loved ones we lost, how many survivors were left with lifetime damage, both physical and emotional. Given that the current administration has decimated our defenses against any future pandemics, I felt the need to offer a reminder.

Why have I battled dybbuks, injuries, sexism, and the infirmities of age to continue playing competitive tennis? What has Title IX meant to women of my generation? And, if you'll excuse me for being corny, what can tennis teach us about how to live our lives?

I've been terrified of dying all my life. Now that I'm in my sixties, I'm even more frightened. So why on earth would I decide to jump out of an airplane?

Since my earliest years, I've been told I couldn't catch a tune in a gallon bucket. Nothing scared me more than singing in front of another human being, let alone an audience. So, what prompted me to take a class in which I would be required to do just that? Why do so many of us take other people's judgments about our abilities as fact when we could, if provided with a kind and generous teacher, learn to do nearly anything? 

My father was a dentist, so I was restricted to one sweet a day. But our house was stuffed with candies, cookies, cakes, ice cream, and other treats. That's the world we're all living in today ... filled with temptations that constantly assault us, even as we're advised to indulge only in moderation. Which is a good way to drive a person nuts. (Deliciously rich and perfectly salted nuts, coated in the richest, darkest chocolate ...) 

Why would anyone give up a cushy summer job in an air-conditioned office for a sweaty marathon waiting tables at a busy Howard Johnson's ruled by a hard-hearted jerk of a manager? Why do so many of us, when we're figuring out who we are, envy the lives of our classmates, which seem so much more desirable than our own? 

Why do we take so long to appreciate our parents for who they really are instead of scorning them for not being who we wish they were? Here's my version of a Father's Day tribute, a few weeks early ...

Dating is hell for everyone. But if you're a feminist in your sixties dating men in their seventies who mostly still view women the way they were taught to view them in the 1950s, you might find yourself wondering if you should spend New Year's Eve with a guy who claims to value you for your intelligence and independence, only to discover what he actually wants to do is tie you to the bed and punish you for being "naughty."

When I was young, my parents warned me against going anywhere alone. But how was I to accomplish anything I wanted to accomplish in this world if I stayed home ... or waited for some guy to accompany and protect me? Just as my parents feared, some pretty bad things happened. Today, we tell our daughters they can do anything a man can do. Yet the #MeToo movement has filled them with the same fears of sexual assault my parents instilled in me. What are young women supposed to do with all these contradictions? 

Come with me as I hunt for my grandparents' graves in the wilds of Queens, NY ... and discover how close my grandmother might have come to being one of those young seamstresses who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Let's hear it for Jewish socialists like my grandfather, labor unions, and cemeteries!   My grandparents' engagement photos, Joshua on the left and Pauline on the right

What happens when you fall in love with someone whose countrymen your family views as enemies? What if that person wants you to visit his homeland, which your ancestors fled to get away from his ancestors? Bad enough an American Jew should travel with her Polish Catholic boyfriend to Poland; even worse if she gets deathly ill there.

What do you do if your kid doesn't want to follow the religion that means so much to you? What determines what kind of person your kid grows up to be--who they are at birth or how you try to raise them?

How did a Jewish cemetery end up inside a General Motors Cadillac plant? Why did the city seize the Detroit neighborhood that once surrounded that cemetery, demolish the houses, businesses, and churches in which the Polish Catholic, Jewish, and African American residents once lived and worked and prayed, and give the land to GM? And why were my parents so upset that I was in a relationship with one of the Polish Catholic guys who grew up in that neighborhood (not his parents were any too happy that he was dating ME)? If you're interested, here's a link to the Chene Street Project that is mentioned in this episode, as well as its Facebook page.

This one is about a truly horrifying sex-ed book that has been chasing me around and trying to bite me for decades. Back in the 1950s and '60s, parents sure did a lousy job of teaching their kids about sex and love. The books are better now ... but our kids probably learn most of what they know from watching porn, which is even more upsetting than if they were given the book my mother gave me.

My parents were obsessive about keeping our 1950s ranch house spotlessly clean, well repaired, and orderly. They seemed to be afraid of everything. But why? Sadly, we often don't figure out the reasons for our parents' craziness until they're no longer with us.  I've included a photo of the house in 1954, the year my parents' built it. Here's a picture of me giving my dad a shave and haircut (without a blade in the razor or a pair of scissors, of course). 

Could the Shah of Iran have been Jewish? Maybe. What interests me even more is how family legends get started, what they mean to us, the amazing ways in which our family stories intersect with larger social movements and historical events, and how much we ever really know about our fathers. I've included a photo of Sidney Polivy with Episode 3. Here's a photo of Sidney (on the left) and my father (on the right) in India during WWII.

Could the Shah of Iran been a hidden Jew? According to my father's old army buddy, Sidney Polivy, he was Sidney's cousin. I'm including a photo of Sidney so you can compare it to portraits of Reza Khan and his son Mohammed-Reza that you can find online. The resemblance is striking. Listen to part I of this episode and see what you think ....  

In "Thin Air," I look back at someone who worked for my family when I was a kid--someone who was murdered--and try to figure out what was really going on in her life, what everyone turned a blind eye to, what they just couldn't imagine being true. Sometimes we need decades to make certain connections--in this case, the ties that connect a parakeet named Ish Kabibble to our family's cleaning lady, Helen, and my discovery of what it really means to become a writer, whose stories we are called upon to tell, and why.  I mention two stories you might want to look up, Gustave Falubert's "A Simple Heart" and Sherwood Anderson's "A Death in the Woods." 

Who makes it out of high school alive? Why? At what cost? And what do we owe to those who get left behind?  Join me as I read the first essay in my collection Maybe It's Me. If  you want to own a hard copy of Maybe It's Me, you can buy it online at Bookshop.org, at your favorite bookstore, or, if you must, at Amazon.com. You can find out more about me and my other publications at my website, www.eileenpollack.com.