She sat in the chair in my father's office, reciting her qualifications for the job. When she smiled, her top and bottom teeth glistened like a Spanish dancer's. She was beautiful - five feet seven, straight back, long shining dark hair, hazel eyes. She had just graduated from college, where she majored in movement in the Isadora Duncan tradition. The story goes that my mother went to the Bronx Y to get a job giving classes in dance. But they and America raised smart, goal-oriented children. Their children must have supported them, because my grandfather never left the shul for his hardware store. They lived in a clean, old apartment on College Avenue in the Bronx. His tiny wife, Ida, kept an Orthodox home.

It was a position of great responsibility, great dignity. My father was the director of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of the Bronx. He bent his head over the radio every Saturday afternoon to listen to the Metropolitan Opera. He kept a neat, tight, muscular body all his life. He graduated from Columbia, where he had studied economics with John Dewey and was on the wrestling team. My father, Abraham, was the good son, the good man. His brother, Aaron, and sister Anne were show business lawyers. My father was born in the Bronx, the youngest son of Polish Orthodox Jewish immigrants. Witia was determined to plunge her hands into my baby fat and model me into a superior, beautiful being, who would either marry rich or rise above all others in the arts: ballet, theater. And she wanted to make it happen for her daughter. The Jewish child hunted in her cellar by goyim on horseback was transplanted to a new land where anything was possible, if you made it happen. Lee Grant and her mother, Witia.ĭidn't young Witia from Odessa expose the child in her belly to every art museum in New York City, every day that she could carry me on her long legs? The magic of transformation was real in her young life. My mother's job was to mold me into her American Dream.

I Said Yes to Everything by Lee Grant