My Dream of Association with Gilda Radner Has Come True
I just found out that Green World has been shortlisted for the 2025 Story Circle Network Gilda Prize, part of the SCN Women’s Book Awards.
That’s Gilda, as in Radner, as in the woman who introduced me to humor. Brilliant humor. Here’s the award description: “For memoirs and collections of personal essays that dare to tell the truth with heart, humor, and originality. These are stories that make us laugh out loud—even when they break our hearts—and that stay with us because they’re fearless, funny, unmistakably real, and always kind (even when satiric).”
My parents let me watch Saturday Night Live beginning at an absurdly young age. As anyone who has read my memoir knows, Jewishness was a fraught topic in our house. My parents had escaped Nazi Germany. They didn’t fit in with the American Jews in the neighborhood. They were suspicious of synagogues, rabbis, and nice Mrs. Schwartz who served me chicken soup when I went to play with her daughter. There was absolutely nothing funny about being Jewish.
Except Gilda. On Saturday nights, my parents and I would assemble in the living room, my father sunk low in his lounge chair, my mother and I on the brown polyester couch with a giant bowl of buttery popcorn. I was allowed to have as much soda as I wanted, and I indulged, slurping down so much Pepsi it’s amazing that I ever caught a wink of sleep after the credits rolled. The Gilda bit that made the greatest impression on me was the ad for Jewess Jeans. Remember that? She’s dancing with abandon in a photo shoot, loving up her Semetic aesthetic in a way that shocked and thrilled me. I was always so self-conscious about my Jewish looks, my Jewish identity. I wore my Gloria Vanderbilts (and my Jordache, of course) and hot-ironed my frizzy hair to try to look as mainstream (read: not Jewish) as possible.
Years and years later, when two guys in grad school confessed they privately dubbed me “The Jewess” because they thought I was hot, I took the compliment. I love that, I told them.
In honor of Gilda, and my parents, who taught me that sometimes a kid’s best education can happen at midnight with a lot of caffeine:
🎵🎵🎵 She’s the Jewess in Jewess Jeans 🎵🎵🎵