Hedda Edelbaum, a Meadow Lakes resident, has found her personal voice in her recently-published memoirs, "Pisces with Yeast Rising."
By: Scott Morgan
HIGHTSTOWN Hedda Edelbaum was never one to believe in the stars, even though she admits to having been born beneath a lucky one. But when she married her third Gemini, even she had to wonder if there was anything to this astrology thing.
It was a little late to come to the stars for guidance, she knows. But rather than a search for future direction, Ms. Edelbaum wanted to see if her first eight or nine decades matched the intended cosmic path.
Boy, did they. Rash and hasty? Yes. Sincere and passionate? Check. Love of drama, theater and food? Well, she wrote a cookbook in the 1970s and was named for a character in a Henrik Ibsen play.
So it is little surprise that when this 89-year-old Pisces, a resident of Meadow Lakes, set out to write her memoirs, she did so knowing she was right on track. OK, so maybe she’s not entirely sold on the notion that Jupiter and Mars have etched her life in stone, but she is sold on the spice of life. And though she admits her first 50 years were a struggle to find her own voice, her second 50 are shaping up nicely indeed.
In "Pisces with Yeast Rising: A Memoir of Passionate Journeys," Ms. Edelbaum, under her alternate identity, Hedda Hendrix, conquered that struggle with her own voice to recount a life in politics, the kitchen and beneath her share of stars with a little spice thrown in, of course. The book was published last month.
The title itself reflects her zest. Her life, as seen through a baker’s eye, is like a loaf of bread. She writes, "Add yeast to the basic ingredients, wait for the dough to rise, then knead and pummel it several times before you put it in the oven." That, she said, has been the process of summing her life in less than 150 pages.
It was the freedom of memoir that also drew her to recount her life. Memoir, she said, allowed her to draw on her memory, rather than on documents of information.
Born to Latvian immigrant parents on Feb. 24, 1913, Ms. Edelbaum said her mother, Sophie Liverman, wanted her to be a performing artist. Piano lessons were chased by lessons in ballet, but Ms. Edelbaum does not hide her lack of performing talent.
"I was no Mozart," she said.
But what she was, she soon found out, was a writer fitting for a Pisces, it would seem, since the sign is often intended to be the great communicator. When she sat down to tell her life story, she said, the memoir, more so than the strict biography, allowed her to find that inner voice she had been honing all her life. Through the memoir, she said, "I was able to relive the most important things. What you remember is what’s important."
Her long career behind the scenes of public life began with Lane Bryant, the women’s clothing company. Her father, Albert, had co-founded the company around 1908. From the early days of haircuts in the company’s barbershop (she hated her first bob cut, by the way), Ms. Edelbaum eventually moved on to public relations for Lane Bryant. She sought her identity as an individual and as a woman through a fast-moving century of change, surrounded by high-profile friends of her father. Men like David Sarnoff, who would become president of RCA and NBC. But she also was surrounded by old-fashioned ideas of womanhood; ideas like those of her mother, who wanted her to marry well and live the good life.
But such a life was not entirely for her. She married a pair of Gemini (not at the same time, of course) and had a son, Paul Zimmerman. The marriages were far from storybook fairy tales, but after being "twice bitten," Ms. Edelbaum met Saul Edelbaum (her third Gemini) and they have, at least so far, been living happily ever after.
What has been less easy was the death of her son (British Film Award-winning screenwriter of "The King of Comedy" in 1985) to cancer at the age of 54. She said simply that his encouragement of her work, even posthumously, has inspired her memoir.
After Lane Bryant, there was Adlai Stevenson, for whom Ms. Edelbaum worked through the course of three campaigns. A self-professed lover of politics, Ms. Edelbaum served as chairwoman of Women for Adlai Stevenson, a voters organization in Westchester, N.Y., throughout Mr. Stevenson’s trio of lost attempts to gain the presidency. She eventually joined the John F. Kennedy campaign, gaining her first, and only, political triumph.
But after the failure of Sen. Eugene McCarthy to gain the nomination for president in 1968, Ms. Edelbaum waived off the political life. On leaving the political ring, to much derision from her peers, she said she understands the phrase, "If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen." But being no stranger to kitchens, she said, "I didn’t mind the heat, but I couldn’t take the smell."
Ms. Edelbaum eventually founded the Literary Symposium at Westchester Community College in Valhalla. Inspired by Norman Mailer’s gathering of great writers to a symposium in New York in 1984, Ms. Edelbaum pooled some of the great literary talents of the day (Margaret Atwood, Susan Cheever, Roberston Davies and E.L. Doctorow, to name a few) to discuss, en masse, a particular topic, rather than standing at a podium and lecturing.
The idea caught on and the symposia continue to this day. As a matter of fact, in 2001, Ms. Edelbaum herself was brought to the symposium as author of her story-laden cookbook, "First You Steal Two Eggs." She also was presented with a plaque for her role of service to the college, a plaque she proudly hangs in her studio space in her Meadow Lakes home.
The literary life has since fit her well, she said. Though she said she is sad to have come to personal writing so late, she said also she is glad to have found that elusive personal voice she’d been hiding all this time.
"This book has been my own search for my own creativity," she said. "Writing gives me an outlet."
And though she acknowledges how much she enjoys her current digs at Meadow Lakes (mainly because the stresses of maintaining a house and getting around are gone), she said it is the writing, the continued search for voice (and spice), that keeps her such a youthful 89. She added she has received a heap of praise from the newest fans of her work, many not yet even half her age.
"I’m glad I struck a bond with young people," she said. The book "says, ‘Whatever your age, there will need to be adjustments. You need to call on certain universals to deal with it.’ "