The performance, which was named The 614th Commandment, by no means ended after one or two or even three days of reading and tearing and burning. Shlomith had collected an appalling number of Maybaum’s books from every bookstore and second-hand shop she could find. She had sacrificed a small fortune in order to get her hands on every one it was possible to get. And the audience lasted as long as the books: all the way until May. (As a result of this, Maybaum’s work is extremely difficult to find anywhere. You have to shell out $147 for a ragged, used paperback version if you can even find one.)
A certain Andrea Dworkin also came to see The 614th Commandment, on a day when Shlomith was particularly bruised (who beat her into performance condition and where, that Shlomith wished to keep secret to the end). In Andrea’s opinion, the presentation was only disgusting, and she wrote an angry essay in the New York Post: “Anorexic-Masochist, the Wanna-Be Messiah.” Shlomith-Shkhina betrays feminists and Jewish women, imagining herself a reborn Simone Weil, how embarrassing! And Andrea wasn’t just anyone shouting from the bushes—she was a passionately worshiped and deeply despised belligerent, a militant feminist who had eaten herself into enormity, who thought that Zionism produced macho wife beaters and oppressors of Palestinians. And copulation was the same as rape, which was the same as the Holocaust of the Jews. And men were fundamentally evil. And women were supposed to be on each other’s side. Why on earth was a well-off woman like Shlomith playing victim again? Why was she using her slender body to repeat the wrongs the Jews had suffered? Were there no limits to her narcissism? Didn’t she understand she was damaging the cause she defended?
“I’m not a lawyer, I’m an artist,” Shlomith replied to Andrea in the next edition of the New York Post. “I show, I don’t argue or defend. Everything else is interpretation.”
Soon after this, Shlomith and Andrea were at Rockefeller Center for a taping of the Today Show. They glared at each other angrily from opposite ends of a curved sofa, hunched over uncomfortably. Between them the host sat straight as a board—the peacemaker, her long, beautiful legs smartly tilted to one side; that posture came naturally when you worked in TV, when you had to look, if not beautiful, then at least impeccable: no varicose veins on the legs and no runs in the stockings, and the camera could never, ever, under any circumstances, record even a promise of opening shins; the skimpy suit skirt had to stay on the thighs as if it was glued there; the slender kneecaps had to stay together as if they were sewn; the shins had to look more like plastic than flesh, and then you also had to be unaffected, from head to toe one hundred percent natural.
The host’s mahogany-colored hair was teased skywards, and her eyelids were weighed down by heavy arcs of turquoise that could have extended farther but for the thinly plucked eyebrows. But this make-up served, strangely enough, the impression of naturalness, because on television everything was different from the outside world. If you were naturally natural on television, all was lost. And besides, the host’s whimsical appearance calmed the picture frame, forming as it were a vertical divider between the spaces the two peppery women occupied. Without her, Shlomith and Andrea probably would have attacked each other, or at least that was the feeling that had been created in the studio. (We can only stand in silent admiration of the skill of the Today Show’s crew.)
There they were, the stars of the night, Lady Negative and Lady Positive: Shlomith, thin with curly hair and Andrea, fat with curly hair. One wore all-black overalls, held tight around her waist by a gold sequined belt but bulging loosely elsewhere, the other a mournful dark brown kaftan, brightened by an enormous Inca-style poplin vest. The conversation immediately went off the rails:
“My body is a transit place for the audience’s pent up feelings of anger.”
“Well, that certainly is pompous . . . Can we stop the bullshit? You do to your body exactly what you decide to do to it. You may not have heard but the battlefield is somewhere else entirely . . .”
“Of course I make my own decisions about my body! Pain is an important element in my work. I take possession of pain the same way I take possession of history: through my body. And you do the same thing: you take possession of something through your body . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, the personal is political . . .”
“Yes, the personal is political! I think you’ve eaten too much rugelach . . .”
“A few rugelach might do you good too, darling. All I can say is that it’s significantly easier to think when you’ve eaten properly. Hunger also shrinks the brain, if you didn’t know. It narrows the perspective . . .”
And so on and so forth. The talk show didn’t give a terribly flattering image of either zealot. And besides, they looked comically identical, with the only difference being that one was thick and one was thin. What else could they do but fight! They obediently played their roles. It was a masterstroke of casting . . . They taunted each other’s appearance, even though they were supposed to talk about the painful spots in Jewish culture. Maybe one of the production assistants sparred with them behind the scenes to bring out their worst
