urging of Nanny Mama, who sided with her beloved son- in-law—they went to Havana. And Essie had a great time. In Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself , which Judy has always called her most autobiographical book, the pro- tagonist, Sally— a Jewish girl whose family has relocated from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Miami Beach, grandmother in tow, on account of her brother’s nephritis — eagerly awaits her father’s monthly visits. And when her father ar- rives, he brings not just hugs and presents, but adventure. On one flight to Miami, he meets Big Ted Wiskoff, a fun- loving, somewhat shady New York character who invites Sally’s parents out to dine with him and his lady friend, the seductive Vicki. On their first excursion, Sally’s mother gets tipsy, for the first time in her life. “I still don’t see how you could have let me . . .” On their next couples date, the Freedmans bring along Sally and her brother, even though Sally’s mother doesn’t approve of the unmarried Ted and Vicki. “I certainly don’t think it’s wise to expose the chil- dren to them,” she says. But her father prevails, and Sally has the time of her life, dining at the fancy Park Ave- nue Restaurant (which really existed); in the ladies’ room, Vicki shows Sally how she polishes her diamonds, which Ted bought for her. “I do for him and he does for me,” Vicki tells Sally, who is a bit too young to catch the implications. Big Ted Wiskoff was based on a real acquaintance of Rudy’s, a wheeler and dealer named Ed Weiss. Rudy had met Ed at a lunch counter in Miami Beach, and Ed later persuaded Rudy to invest some money with him. Rudy never saw his money again, but he couldn’t help but like Ed. The one time Rudy invited Ed and his girlfriend—whom Judy remembers being named Vicki—to the Sussmans’ house in Elizabeth, it prompted a fight. “My mother had a fit,” Judy said. “She wanted nothing to do with him.” Still, Essie “was a hostess to the end, serving food and setting out the card table, where the four played gin.” In Miami Beach, Judy had her first crush, on a classmate named Peter Hornick (in the book, lightly fictionalized as Peter Hornstein). She spent countless hours on the beach. She took ballet classes —“I was in ballet class with a girl who could do acrobatics and back bends and cartwheels, and oh, I so wanted to be like her, but I was never able to do a perfect cartwheel.” She nevertheless decided to put on an acrobatic and dance show for the adults in her build- ing. She recruited the other children who lived there, and they charged for tickets, with all the money going to charity. “We did dance numbers, choreographed, of course, by me,” Blume said. “I wanted to be a star.” She had hand- printed programs that read, “Starring Judy Sussman as Her- self.” “And I remember it as being a very awful production. But you know, all the parents and the kids all enjoyed it.” In the novel, Sally’s family moves south in the fall of 1947, but the Sussmans actually decamped for Miami Beach in the fall of 1946, scarcely more than a year after the end of World War II. The bad news kept dribbling out of Europe. “It seemed to Sally that somebody in her family was always dying,” we read near the beginning of the novel. “The last time they’d sat shivah was in November when Ma
apartment at 1330 Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the beach and Flamin- go Park, where the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates set up camp for spring training. From the time they arrived, Judy was happy. She loved the beach. She could ride her bicycle year-round. Dropped into a new school in October, she quick- ly, almost effortlessly, made friends. In Elizabeth, Judy had been a “small, shy, anxious child, with eczema” who would “play alone for hours, bouncing a ball against the side of our house, making up stories inside my head.” In Miami Beach, the imagination didn’t disappear— if anything, it was amplified by a new- found sense of adventure—but she no longer kept herself apart. She discovered an inner extrovert, an outgoing self who could navigate new worlds with aplomb. Still, she missed her father. And she worried about him. Essie’s sister and brother-in-law, Frances and Herb Gold- stein, had moved into the house in Eliz- abeth to keep Rudy company, but what if they could not stay the hand of fate? “Two of his brothers died at forty-three,” Judy said. “Forty-three was the bad year. If only he could make it past forty-three, everything would be okay.” Rudy had been born October 15, 1904; the bad year was imminent. “I worried terribly,” Judy wrote. “I be- came ritualistic. If I did this or that fifty times, my father would be safe. I made bargains with God. I would get a 100 in my spelling test if he would keep my fa- ther safe. I felt it was up to me to keep him alive and well. A terrible burden for a young child. I never told anyone what I was thinking or feeling. Never. It’s a won- der I had any energy left.” Her father didn’t die, and his monthly trips to Miami Beach, reuniting the fam-
ily for weekend adventures, were some of Judy’s favorite times. They weren’t free of drama, but now family fights and squabbles took on a storybook quality, as if they were happening to another family, one far from the New Jer- sey family she knew. For example, on one of Rudy’s trips south, he and Essie quarreled about whether they would take a short trip to Havana (a quick airplane hop away), which in the days before communism was a nightclub-and- casino playground for Americans. “My mother did not want to go,” according to Judy. “This was the difference between them. He was adventurous, up for anything, and my mother did not take risks or want to take risks.” In the end — at the
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