Fear of Flying

The plane lands in Frankfurt to refuel, and Isadora is reminded of death camps. She is depressed by how “square” the analysts are; they claim to be leftists, but they are conservative and reactionary when it comes to women and capitalism. She reflects on one analyst, Kolner, who called her “aggressive” when she protested conventional expectations of women. She ended up yelling, insisting that men created the concept of femininity to subdue women and arguing that he, a man, should not be telling her, a woman, what it means to be a woman. He suggested that she leave, and she was careful not to slam the door as she did so, as that would have confirmed his opinion. She felt jubilant and went immediately to a shoe store to spend the $40 she would have paid for her session.

Isadora looks down at her new sandals as she reboards the plane, muttering “Mother” as she does when she’s scared. Notably, she calls her own mother Jude, short for Judith, in recompense for her own name: Isadora Zelda. They arrive in Austria, and its similarities to Germany make her panicky. She’s aware that if her parents had been German Jews rather than American, she would likely have been born and died in a concentration camp in 1942, despite her blond hair and blue eyes. She despises the Germans’ “aggressive wholesomeness.”

When Isadora and Bennett get to their hotel, he falls asleep immediately. Around 3:30, they “rather languidly made love” and are on the way to the University of Vienna by four o’clock (33). She resents Bennett for not smiling, kissing her, buying her flowers, or being a stranger on a train with whom she could share a “zipless fuck.” She considers what Freud believed women wanted: a “stiff prick […], assuming [men’s] obsession was [women’s] obsession” (34). When they arrive at the University, a woman tells her that press isn’t permitted. Bennett looks at Isadora as if telling her to calm down, which infuriates her. An Englishman overhears the conversation and begins to flirt with Isadora, telling her he will ensure that she gets into the conference even as he squeezes her bottom. He invites her for a beer across the street, and she tells Bennett where she’s going, but he’s busy talking to other analysts. Over a beer, the man tells Isadora that she looks Jewish, that he likes Jewish girls because they’re so good in bed. She becomes very aroused.

They order another round of drinks, and he says his name is Adrian Goodlove, though it was originally “Hadrian” until his father made his mother change it to sound more English. Isadora reports that her father changed their surname from “Weiss” to “White” for a similar reason. She realizes that Adrian is “the real zipless fuck” (41). Later, Bennett is aroused by Adrian’s obvious pursuit of Isadora, and they have sex, both thinking of Adrian, though for different reasons. Bennett and Isadora met at a party when she was 23 and he 31; she was divorced already, and he’d never married. Her first husband experienced psychosis, so she became determined to marry a psychiatrist, someone with the “key to the unconscious” (44). In fact, Isadora sees each of her lovers as a reaction and “antidote” to the one before. Brian Stollerman, her first husband, likely had schizophrenia and believed he was Jesus. He tried to strangle Isadora when she questioned this delusion. When he was taken to the hospital for treatment, she realized she wanted his opposite, and Bennett Wing was that. She loved his last name, his hairless body, his silence, and the fact that he was a Chinese man “hung up” on Jewish girls. While they have sex, Isadora fantasizes about Adrian, and afterward she feels that she’s perpetrated the worst kind of betrayal. Despite her belief that “99 percent of the people in the world [are] fucking phantoms” (49), she is not comforted.

Isadora dreams of Adrian and Bennett riding on a seesaw and discussing her treatment before Adrian begins shaking the seat, hurting Bennett. She tries to stop him, but her words don’t come out right. They never do in her dreams. She wakes Bennett with her noises, and he goes back to sleep immediately. She thinks of the two years she’s spent debating whether to get pregnant or leave him. Pregnancy seems to her “like a tremendous abdication of control” (53), and she longs for control. She wonders if she’s unnatural. When she was a child, her mother expressed resentment of her, claiming she’d have been a famous artist were it not for Isadora and her three sisters. Isadora’s father traveled the world for his “tzatzka business” while her mother stayed home and fought with her own parents. She argued that women must choose between being artists and having children; unlike men, they cannot do both. Isadora feels that her mother made her expectations clear by naming her “Isadora Zelda,” and to get pregnant would be to deny not only her name and her destiny but her mother as well.

Isadora’s older sister, Gundra Miranda—who goes by “Randy”—married a Lebanese physicist, had four sons, moved to Beirut, and then had five daughters. Lalah Justine, four years Isadora’s junior, married an African American doctor, and they live lavishly. Lalah had two years of fertility treatments before giving birth to quintuplets. Youngest sister Chloe Camille married an Israeli Jew who went into his father-in-law’s business. They have one son, the blond and blue-eyed favorite grandchild: Adam. When Isadora’s first book of poetry came out, Randy insulted it and screamed that having kids is the most important thing a woman can do. Isadora hid in the hall closet as she did when they were kids and Randy would beat her up. She felt safe under her mother’s fur coat, then and now. Isadora should be proud of her book, she knows, but her family thinks she’s a childless failure. Though she knows it’s absurd, she still feels the need to apologize to anyone who compliments her work. She feels like a hostage of biology, of her own feelings, of society’s views of women, and of her fears. She wonders what it means to be a woman because she doesn’t want to be like her mother and Randy. Despite Randy’s husband’s insistence, Isadora refused to apologize. When she accused them of trying to convert her, they claimed they were only trying to help her.

Before living in Heidelberg with Bennett, Isadora was never “self-conscious” about being Jewish, despite others’ antisemitic remarks. Her grandfather even accused her of being an antisemite; she wasn’t, but she didn’t feel very Jewish. Her family celebrated Christian holidays, calling them solstice and equinox celebrations. Isadora’s mother espoused reincarnation. The family didn’t act “Jewish,” but when Isadora set foot in Germany, she suddenly felt her heritage. Bennett had been drafted, prompting him and Isadora to marry and move to Heidelberg to escape the draft. The marriage was “strange,” and they both hoped it would rescue them; instead, they drowned in hostility. Whenever she tried to write, she was afflicted by crippling self-doubt; she hoped the marriage would provide an escape.

Instead, in Heidelberg, Isadora felt beset by two enemies: the Viet Cong and the Germans. The other wives seemed always to be anticipating a “Cinderella evening” that never came. The American families spent copious amounts of money, trying to create the illusion of home and of fulfilling lives. It felt like living in a prison. For the first time, Isadora developed an interest in the history of Third Reich, and she almost believed the Germans who said they hadn’t known what was going on in the camps. She marveled at the “diabolical beauty” of German fruit markets. It made her hate the Germans.

Isadora learned to drive in order to explore more freely. She befriended a German man, Horst Hummel, who had been a Nazi and was the only person she met who admitted they’d “loved Hitler.” She detested the hypocrisy of everyone else who denied this. Every German she met claimed to have been part of the resistance, but she knew that in reality most Germans had supported the Nazis. Hummel was a printer, and he asked Isadora to be his American editor. He wanted her to write a column on tourist attractions to attract more English-speaking readers, then he would translate her columns into German for German readers. Initially, she did as he asked, but then she wanted to write about a hidden Nazi amphitheater she found in the woods; no one in Heidelberg would acknowledge its existence, and this made it more appealing to Isadora. She went to the library to do some research, and she found that books containing references to the structure had been censored; she checked them out, took them home, and steamed off the patches of paper covering the offending text. She grew incensed, calling for “truth above beauty” and calling the patches “examples of all that was odious in life and art” (93).

When Hummel read her column, he told her she didn’t understand the Germans. She called for honesty, but he says that Germans “loved Hitler,” and if they were honest about that, she would hate it worse than their hypocrisy. He tells her that, during the war, the press corps deliberately concealed information about the death camps. Most people, Hummel said, are dishonest and not heroic at all. Isadora realizes that he’s right, that she isn’t really honest either. Figuratively, she patched her own life, censoring moments in her past that she didn’t want to examine.