The Artfulness of Women by Naomi Weiss is a multigenerational story of ambition, love, and resilience. Tender and unflinching, it asks: what is inherited, what can be broken, and how do women—through song, art, and sheer will—carve their own path? Below is an excerpt from the novel.

Bayla Rothschild maneuvered herself to standing. With pro found ignorance and a ferocious dread of childbirth, she aimed her body toward the bedroom door and waddled on bare swollen feet when a burst of warm liquid gushed down her legs causing an embarrassing flood on the Persian tree-of-life runner that covered the upstairs hallway. The past nine months had left her grotesque, misshapen, exposed, and stuffed. What consequences would her body inflict on her next? With the water drained out of her, she stood cemented in place. When her husband saw she was missing from their bed, she had already turned to stone.

She would never remember how he managed to get her dressed, coax her down the circular staircase, along the marble hallway, through the garage and into the roomy back seat of their blue Ford sedan.

Down the cobblestones of Beleaguered Hill’s steep incline, past elegant homes lined up like picture postcards, their lawns silver-gray in dawn’s winter frost, she dug her nails into the seat with one hand, and with the other, tried to steady herself.

“I don’t know what to do,” she shouted because no one had ever told her, and who could she ask when such things were rarely talked about? In wide-eyed panic she glanced back at the Victorian house at the top of the Hill, the maroon gables and dark blue tower.

“Grab hold,” her husband yelled as they headed into the valley. He reached back with one arm, but the car swerved on to Main Street and she was thrown from his grasp as everyday places flew by: the Grocery, Five and Dime, Fletcher’s Soda Parlour, Holiday’s Music and on the last block, the Odeon Cinema.

Across the railroad tracks, past steel workers’ row houses, beyond the Ohio and Chesapeake railcars loaded with newly-milled girders, early risers, who spotted the blue Ford sedan, plunged the town into such a flurry that phone lines were as pregnant with the news as the mother about to give birth.

“We saw them.” “The Mister and Missus.” “Flew down the hill.” “The baby is about to be born.” “An heir for Amory Lane!” “At last!”

The car screeched to a halt at the hospital’s circular driveway where personnel in white uniforms were anxiously scurrying about. As the sky began to lighten, a squarely built matron elbowed her way through the crowd and opened the sedan’s back door.

Sprawled across the backseat, her coat thrown open, her navy blue maternity dress exposing a thigh, her hat flung elsewhere, Bayla extended one leg in a futile search for solid ground beneath her navy-blue oxford. Her success unlikely, two nurses reached into the car to pull her forward while a third rushed around the other side and pushed. An orderly raced over with a hospital bed and breathlessly cranked it upwards to meet the patient’s buttocks. The moment she settled, an excruciating pain seared through her middle and she erupted with a three-octave roar.

Like infantry on the run, they whooshed her down a long cor ridor, into a harshly-lit room where she labored long and hard.

“Grab the bed posts,” a nurse commanded. “Push. Push.”

Bayla gripped the sides of the mattress. She tore at the sheets, clutched the white cotton blanket, and pounded the pillow behind her.

“Make believe you’re a dive bomber like in the war,” the nurse ordered. “Get those Germans. Push for France. For England. Push again.”

“I can’t. I can’t.”

“You must. You’re having a baby.”

Bayla drew in a slow, deep inhalation, and released a long rasping, “I’ll get you for this, you bastard.”

The nurse laughed. “Once the baby is in your arms, you’ll forget.”

Unaware if it was night or morning, or how many dawns had passed, on January 25, 1941, after some thirty-six hours, the doctor entered Bayla Rothchild’s uterus with cranial forceps to deliver an eight-pound, five-ounce baby girl.

Her husband slept in the waiting room two nights in a row, praised her strength and courage and did his best to overlook how determined she was to ignore him. He knew the birth of their child had little to do with what she wanted most in the world.

She and her husband had never talked about a baby. They had talked about her career. She had a voice, not like a prize to be won, but a gift already given. Not measly or high-pitched, but a deep, soulful sound is what she had always imagined for herself. And luckily she had grown into a tall, heavyset young woman whose square jaw and wide cheekbones produced a singing voice that perfectly fit her expectations. Singing was her joy, her self-worth, her fatal flaw, her passion, her dream. Her promise to herself. And
in its place—motherhood. As if that were the best she could do.

———————

When Bayla opened her eyes she was lying on a steel-hard gurney in a dark, cold place that echoed its own silence. Her insides felt so stretched, she might as well have squeezed Pittsmill’s public library building from between her legs. Suddenly a slab of light, and a voice.

“You’re in recovery, dear. Time to tinkle.” The nurse pushed an icy metal bed pan under her bottom. “Be a good girl now,” she said then disappeared, taking the light with her.

Certain nothing would ever again go in or out of anyplace down there, Bayla tried to inch herself off the thing, but the shrill clang when it struck the floor startled her, like a fitful awakening. What am I going to do with a child? “Love it and care for it,” her husband had said. 

But maternal love, how and where would she find it? She was frightened to be a mother, frightened she might treat the child the way her mother had treated her. And what if in the future, who could predict it, this infant might one day do to her what she had done, what she had to do given her mother’s rages, her mind here, then gone? Where were the guarantees for such things never happening?

“Childhood,” she said aloud, as if she’d had one.

She could still picture men lining up at soup kitchens during the Depression, and hear her mother telling her she had to quit school, the one place she felt like somebody. She was fourteen years old, her second year at New York City’s Hebrew Technical School for Girls. When she objected, “They should take a meshugeneh from the asylum and put you in his place,” her mother yelled, called her a dumbkopf. Who else could support them in their two-room, third floor walk-up, on 236 East 89th Street, a toilet down the hall, shared with four other families? Didn’t she realize an einhoreh was pestering their lives, jeering at what little they had?

Her mother’s arthritic knees and stiff nubby fingers forced her to quit working at the millinery shop on Rivington Street. Now she sewed at home in a wheelchair donated by the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society; beautiful hats for fancy ladies, piecework, that barely paid enough to put food on the table.

And her father, who held her as no father ever held or loved a child, had kissed her good night, and walked out. She was seven years old.

I am looking for my husband, Yosef Yosefa Szabo, ironworker, 36 years old, small, dark mole on right brow. He left me with our young daughter. Whoever sees or knows of him take mercy on us. Words dictated by her mother, written in Bayla’s childish hand on a scrap of paper, sat for weeks on the kitchen counter. But so shameful to admit, “You can’t send it,” her mother said. She meant to the column that reported runaway men in the Forverts, the Jewish daily newspaper. She cursed the fates instead, adding hours to her work pinning, cutting, and sewing under a dim bulb.

By the time Bayla was fifteen, with one year left to graduate, she knocked on doors after school in search of work: “I saw your ad…. I’m experienced in… I’ll be the best….”

When she returned home, she’d gather her dolls from the fire escape outside the kitchen window, where she had placed them each morning for fresh air and sunshine, dolls she’d fabricated from old socks, embroidered their faces, their outfits from her mother’s remnants scattered on the floor. At bedtime, she’d place them on the cot where she slept too close to her mother, and sing them the song of Hungarian girl’s names that her father had taught, names she gave her dolls: Arish, Bidi, Shari, Marishki, Rosalli, Ella, Bella, Utzi, Carolina.

When the day came to tell the principal that she’d found a job, she walked slow and begrudging along the gray corridors. At the large metal double doors that would never again welcome her each morning, the slightest push would not lead to her future, as her mother had promised, but to the end of her life. Never again would a teacher commend her smocking and embroidery, her grasp of a Willa Cather novel or an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem. Never again would she jump Double Dutch at recess, or have her music teacher praise her singing “Flow Gently Sweet Afton.” Like someone packing a suitcase, Bayla stuffed inside herself everything she could about her years at school. She would become not a seamstress, the fancy word on the “wanted” sign outside Goldmacher’s door, in the garment district, on Tenth Avenue and 33rd Street, but an operator who sewed outfits that turned people into what they did: assembly-line workers, prisoners, zookeepers, garbage men.

Et va zoh. This is how it must be, she heard her father say in Hungarian. Not wanting to disappoint him even then, she brushed away tears with her forearm, bit her lip, and walked into the harsh glare of city streets.

The time reserved for her growing up fizzled like chicken fat in a heated fry pan. It was winter, 1930. The worst of the Depression.

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