Bella’s prickly embrace

Her voice, Norman Mailer once said of Bella Abzug, “could boil the fat off a taxicab driver’s neck.” Even people who loved her found her threatening. “If I was afraid,” said Gloria Steinem, who at first was “very, very put off” by the brash New York congresswoman, “to see Bella being a whole person, anger and all, that was because I was still afraid to be a whole person myself.”

Steinem is one of dozens of friends, foes and family members who spoke to Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom for “Bella Abzug,” a book that incorporates these interviews with excerpts from the influential feminist’s unpublished memoirs to create a kind of conversation about the woman, the politician and the times in which she lived.

The conversations are organized around consecutive periods in Abzug’s life: the early years in the south Bronx fighting for Zionism at age 11, working as a young lawyer on civil rights and civil liberties (many of Abzug’s clients were victims of the McCarthy witch hunts, and her most famous case was in 1950 when a black man, Willie McGhee, was sentenced to death for a consensual relationship with a white woman), her years as a congresswoman from Manhattan, her work building the women’s movement (founding the National Women’s Political Caucus and other organizations), her life as a wife and mother, and her international work on women’s issues.

Threatened or inspired, it is fascinating to see how many people used the same words to describe her: aggressive, intelligent, focused. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) recounts how, as she travels around the world, she meets women who introduce themselves as “the Bella Abzug” of Russia or Kazakhstan or Uganda. What they really mean, Clinton says, “is that they’ll never give up.” Since Abzug’s death in 1998, Levine and Braun write, no voice of “outrage and defiant optimism” has emerged to replace hers.

Abzug was the right person at the right time in history, many of the contributors point out. “We lived at a critical point in history, and so what we did hit the wave of history just right,” says pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, who was not always a staunch admirer. (In one scene recounted here, Friedan threatened to throw a plate of spaghetti at Abzug, who was wearing a white suit.) “[Y]ou’d think there wasn’t room for two of us, but it turned out there was.” Those were different times, several people noted. “You can’t get passion with e-mails,” says Eleanor Smeal, who led the National Organization for Women for many years. “They’re wonderful for telling people the meeting is set for two o’clock, but they are terrible for exchanging ideas. . . . Bella wouldn’t be an e-mail person. She’d be a talking person.”

Of course, the sections in Abzug’s words are the most appealing and unforgettable. The personal, intimate recollections add even more depth to this multidimensional figure: Shirley MacLaine on feeding Abzug a macrobiotic diet; Amy Swerdlow and others on Abzug’s pushiness (a born politician, say several contributors); Martin, Abzug’s beloved husband of 42 years, quoted on a TV talk show saying that great sex is what made their marriage work. And her daughters, Liz and Eve, speaking with great dignity and honesty about being raised by their nanny, Alice Williams, and about being embarrassed, on several occasions, by their mother’s outspoken behavior. Both girls were constantly sent to the principal’s office as a result of their parents’ political activities.

The trade-offs are obvious in this life of great commitment: “Outside of Martin and the kids,” wrote Abzug, “I don’t feel very related to most people at this point. On the surface I appear to be very involved in a lot of social relationships. But that’s just not the case, because inside I’m not relating to anybody. I find it all a strain and an interference. I feel detached in social situations. I’m always thinking about other things, about Congress, about the issues, about the political coalition I’m trying to organize. It never leaves me.”

The book is a who’s who of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, and certainly of the women’s movement: Erma Bombeck, Jimmy Breslin, Susan Brownmiller, Mim Kelber, Maxine Waters, Geraldine Ferraro, Ed Koch, Esther Broner, Hillary Clinton, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, and many others. In less skilled hands, this format, a sort of Judy Chicago dinner party of a biography, would have been clunky, cacophonous, forced. But the good ears of the authors (both are prominent authorities on women’s issues and former editors at Ms. magazine), their sense of humor about their subject (as well as awe) and the honesty that Abzug so obviously inspired in the people around her make this a remarkable work of oral history.

It is also a fond, provocative testament to a remarkable life.

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Bella Abzug

An Oral History

Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 320 pp., $25