by dan pine
staff writer
The day I met Rhoda Curtis, she and I played a speed round of Jewish geography. Within a minute of our how-do-you-do’s, we figured out that she and my dad went to the same Chicago high school (Marshall) at the same time (class of 1935), and that she knew him.
A friend of my girlfriend’s mother, Rhoda is one of those spitfire seniors you can’t help but love. The daughter of Romanian Jewish immigrants, she could have been the woman Shakespeare wrote about when he said, “Age cannot whither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.�
Rhoda impressed me. Then in her late 80s, she was still teaching at California State University in Hayward, still traveling and raising a ruckus. She claims to be much more tolerant now at 90 — but I could detect traces of the in-your-face liberal activist of old.
“I used to be very confrontational,� she acknowledged. “I would argue for the sake of argument, almost in a talmudic sense. I was probably pretty rude.�
I wanted to write a story about her, but never had the right angle — until I learned Rhoda had written and self-published a memoir, titled “Rhoda: Her First Ninety Years.� She wrote the book in part to contend with and reconcile some major life mistakes. But mostly, she says, she set down her memoirs because she’s just a born storyteller.
Rhoda took seven years to write and rewrite the book (now available at Cody’s in Berkeley and on Amazon.com). It’s a tell-all — literally. Rhoda includes the exotic, quixotic and highly erotic. Yes, the book has sex in it. Lots and lots of sex.
She describes growing up in an observant household, trying to break free of her parents’ immigrant ways (“We were Chicagoans first, Jews second�), building a business and becoming a teacher.
She married three times along the way (each time to a non-Jew) and had numerous love affairs. But she was no self-absorbed hedonist. “It’s perfectly fine to take chances, — provided you are willing to accept the consequences,� she said. “To me that is a Jewish value. If you make a mistake, don’t whine. Understand it and learn from it.�
Though secular, she says the ethical basis of Judaism is her religion. “It’s like DNA, like being part of a long history inside you that’s so deep and goes back so far, it doesn’t need rationalizing.�
Her plan was to publish the memoir and take off on a flurry of promotional appearances. Then she tripped on a sock and broke her hip.
After the accident, Rhoda worried she might have to scuttle a public reading, but a book club that invited her moved the location from a living room to a hospital room. She read out loud sitting up in bed, and fully intends to show up for any future public engagements.
But the hip injury was serious. It meant giving up a measure of privacy and personal autonomy. She even had to wear those adult diapers and allow attendants to deal with her personal hygiene issues.
How hard was that for her? “It requires confronting your own inhibitions,� she says. “You have to try to shed those inhibitions and accept physical realities without the social finger-waving.�
I remember well as a teenager feeling disdain for adults, especially seniors. I couldn’t imagine why they bothered taking up space and how they could think that they might have anything to contribute to society. It was one of the more egregious misperceptions of my youth.
But now that I’ve started getting mail from AARP, I harbor no more such thoughts about aging or the aged. I can only look at someone who continues to lead as full a life as Rhoda Curtis and hope I can do the same. If her example is any indication, it appears that 90 is the new 70.
Psalm 90 –– how perfect is that? –– teaches us to “number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom.� I’m at that stage of life when the metrics have begun to matter, when it’s almost impossible to ignore the number of the days.
And then there’s Rhoda, who long ago happily lost count. As she writes in her book’s final sentence: “The future beckons, as always.�
Dan Pine can be reached at dan@jweekly.com.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California