In today's delanceyplace selection -- the
death of her father when she was not yet two, and the addition at age eight of
a stepfather who was verbally abusive to her and physically abusive and openly unfaithful
to her mother, left Barbra Streisand with a unyielding determination to
succeed:
"Every step [that Barbara --
later Barbra -- Streisand] took, every word she uttered, reflected the facts of
[her] short life, and all of it could ultimately be traced back to that day in
August 1943 when Emanuel Streisand -- scholar, poet, professor -- had died of
respiratory failure brought on by a morphine injection intended to alleviate
an epileptic seizure.
"It was a source of both pride
and comfort for Barbara that she had inherited her father's ambition and
intellectual curiosity. Emanuel had received his bachelor's and master's
degrees in English and education from City College in upper Manhattan, and at
the time of his death, he had been working on his doctorate. He'd taught
elementary and junior high school English, then got a job tutoring juvenile
offenders at a Brooklyn trade school. During the summers, he counseled kids at
upstate camps. He was a good, decent man who wanted to make a difference in the
world while also making something of himself. A pedestrian existence in
Brooklyn would never have been enough for Emanuel Streisand, Barbara was
certain. All of their lives would have been different if only her father had
lived. It was clear she was her father's child. Her mother had simply borne
her.
"And while Barbara hadn't gone
on to college like her father, she could have. She'd done well in school, even
though she'd hated it. ... Barbara had never fit into the routine of school.
She'd been a loner at Erasmus Hall, and even when the girls stopped ganging up
on her, she still kept largely to herself. She was an odd duck who, to alleviate
boredom one day, dyed her hair platinum blond. Sometimes she wore purple
lipstick to boot. She fit into no clique. The other smart kids shunned her
because she looked like a beatnik while the 'actual beatniks' avoided her
because she had 'brains.'
"Barbara's mother [Diana]
despaired over such antics. She simply didn't understand her. What her
sophisticated father had seen in her pedestrian mother Barbara could not
understand. Her mother wanted her to be just another cog in the wheel. She told
Barbara she should be a school secretary, just like she was. 'You'll get paid
vacations and summers off,' she argued. 'It's a steady job.' ... Never had her
mother said, 'You're smart, you're pretty, you're anything, you can do what you
want.' ...
"Affection wasn't forthcoming
from her grandparents either. Barbara's maternal grandfather, with whom she
lived during the first years other life, was a strict taskmaster who resented
the intrusion of his daughter's family into his household. Her paternal
grandmother, blaming Emanuel's widow for not taking good care of him, would actually
look the other way when she saw Barbara on the street, dressed all in black and
wearing purple lipstick. From nearly every adult in Barbara's early life had
come the same message. She wasn't any good. She did not matter. ...
"[And Diana], like her
daughter, needed a break from ... her new husband, who had come into their
lives when Barbara was eight -- the same year, not coincidentally, that
[Barbara's] tinnitus began. Louis Kind was a coarse man, nothing like the image
Barbara carried around of her noble father. Kind, already divorced and the
father of three, moved with his new family into a cramped apartment on Newkirk
Avenue, where he could usually be found hunkered down in front of the
television set watching pro wrestling with a beer and a bag of pretzels. Her
mother warned her that Kind was 'allergic to kids,' and no doubt especially to 'obnoxious'
ones, as Barbara admitted she could be. With her flair for melodrama, she'd
tell of slithering on her belly under the TV instead of walking in front of it
and risk getting yelled at by her stepfather.
"Yet no melodramatic tricks
were needed to elicit sympathy for the worst of Kind's behavior. More than once
he had called Barbara ugly to her face. He was truly cruel enough to call an
adolescent girl ugly. And though friends insisted that Barbara's mother had
tried to shield her from her stepfather's foul moods, Barbara could never
remember her mother defending her."
Author: William J. Mann
Title: Hello, Gorgeous
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date: Copyright 2012 by William J. Mann
Pages: 24-27
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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.
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