NORA EPHRON

Nora Ephron was interviewed by Charlie Rose last night. I knew the name, and might have seen it on Huffington Post, where she regularly blogs. It just sunk in that she’s also the screen-writer for movies I’ve seen, like Sleepless in Seattle, and When Sally Met Harry, movies that I considered fluff.

But in the Rose interview, Ephron struck me as very smart, forthright, charming, funny, aloof, stubborn and tough. She was born in New York in 1941 of Jewish literary artists, grew up near Hollywood, and graduated from Wellesley. As I watched, my attention rarely wavered from preoccupation with how she did or didn’t resemble a Jewish woman friend of mine, also born in New York, also of East-Coast-born Jewish parents involved in the arts. And who also attended an arts-oriented high school.

Yes, there was a racial resemblance between the two, both in physical and psychological terms. In Ephron there was the slightest hint of nasality, and her words were intoned with a distinctly New York speech style for women of similar class and intellectual background. But I only know for sure that I recognize it in my Jewish friend as I do in Ephron. Both women are atheists. Both are sexy and politically liberal. But both in their no-nonsense style are walled around with an overlay of social conservatism. Both are wholesome while edgy, and know how to take care of themselves. What I may never be able to decipher is how the style of these women, nurtured in the world’s greatest city, amid the intellectual and artistic ferment that defined the 20th century, reflect that context.

The hard-headed parts of these women would brush such thoughts aside. Still, I can’t separate either from the culture on which I was formed—Hollywood, the New York School of painting, Parsons, Yale. Jews were central both to that cultural milieu as well as to my immersion in it.