Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [7]
He quickly found that he had become a pariah, as far as the other chicken ranchers were concerned, and the people who had always seemed to look up to him were now plainly uneasy, avoiding him when he ran into them on the street. There was nothing for Isaac to do but pull up stakes and move to San Francisco, where he hoped he might be able to piece together a new life for his family.
CHAPTER TWO
Isaac Kael was only forty-five when he lost the Petaluma ranch, and initially, at least, he was confident that he was capable of two more decades of solid work. Taking into account the expertise he had developed during his years as a chicken rancher, he decided it would make sense to go into the retail poultry and produce business. When the Kaels arrived in San Francisco, he immediately sprang into action and, using most of the little money that was left, leased three separate stores. As he had no equipment, no license, and no product, he sent Louis, now in his early twenties, to the Jewish Welfare Foundation to take out a series of modest loans to help launch his new business.
Isaac enjoyed a few reasonably profitable months as a poultry retailer and greengrocer until October of 1929 and the Wall Street crash, after which it became a constant struggle to keep the business going. He tried to put on a brave front by taking the produce salesmen out for nice lunches; in private, however, his confidence began to desert him. He pined for the days when he had been a man of influence in Petaluma, and succumbed to bouts of nerves and melancholy.
Judith was forced to work in the grocery store, and she despised catering to the public even more than she had disdained life on the farm. Her disposition worsened, and with Louis and Philip out on their own, the three daughters still at home all gradually withdrew, in different ways, from her. Pauline’s niece Dana Salisbury believed that “Pauline had no patience or even any kind of feeling for her mother.” Nevertheless, Judith remained a powerful spur to her daughters’ education, constantly putting money aside in the hope that one day they would all be able to attend a four-year college. She was delighted when Annie—who now called herself Anne—was accepted as a freshman at Berkeley. According to Salisbury, Anne felt that “these ideas had saved her life. Reading and listening to music had given her a whole world, and she was thrilled to be able to pursue the life of the mind at Berkeley.”
Judith’s advocacy was not something that Pauline spoke about easily in later years. But she carried a sense of it inside her. In her review of James Toback’s 1978 movie Fingers, she observed, “All of us have probably had the feeling of being divided between what we got from our mother and what we got from our father, and no doubt some of us feel that we’ve gone through life trying to please each of them and never fully succeeding, because we have always been torn between them.”
By the time Pauline reached high school, it was clear to her family that she was a girl with an intense intellectual drive and wide-ranging talents. “The youngest in a large family has a lot of advantages,” she once said. “You pick up a fair amount of knowledge from your older siblings, and your parents don’t worry too much about you.” Not only was she unusually well-read for someone her age, she had learned to play the violin, and her teacher was certain that if she kept working at it, she could become a superb musician. Most of the time she played classical music, and she went regularly to hear Alfred Hertz guest-conduct the San Francisco Symphony, but Gershwin and Ellington ultimately proved to be as much her taste as Dvořák and Mozart. At San Francisco’s Girls’ High School, which she attended from age fourteen, Pauline