him as “the one white Jew in Petaluma.” Many local Jews were given bank loans on the condition that Isaac cosign for them, which he was more than happy to do.
This early part of Pauline’s childhood unfolded in an ambience of comfort and security. She enjoyed life on the farm and, though she was too young to have much to do with the egg business, she liked spending time outdoors in the temperate climate. At many of the meals, nearly everything on the table came from the land—chicken, eggs, and vegetables and fruits directly from the garden. The film critic Stephanie Zacharek, who met Pauline in the early 1990s, observed that “she loved to eat and cook, and she was very conscious of what she ate and the quality of the food. She said, ‘It’s because I grew up in the country, and we always had fresh vegetables and eggs. That was part of where I came from.’”
Despite being an agricultural community, Petaluma was fertile ground for any child interested in reading and writing and ideas. The community overflowed with the traditional Jewish love of culture and learning. Many of its ranchers subscribed to the Yiddish-language newspapers from New York and engaged in spirited debate about world issues. “Such wonderful evenings we had talking about books in Petaluma,” recalled Basha Singerman, a Russian immigrant whose family moved to the area early in the twentieth century. “Yiddish books—the classical writers, history, politics. Books were our life in Petaluma.” And there were silent movies in town, which the entire family attended. Pauline remembered sitting on her father’s lap and being enthralled by the “flickers” if impatient with their intertitles: “We were so eager for the movie to go on that we gulped the words down and then were always left with them for what, to our impatience, seemed an eternity, and the better the movie, the more quickly we tried to absorb and leap at the printed words, and the more frustrating the delays became.”
From the beginning it was clear to the family that Pauline was exceptionally clever. She learned to read at an early age, and both Isaac and Judith encouraged her interest in books. As a small child, she devoured L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, collections of fairy tales, and Edith Maude Hull’s torrid The Sheik, filched from her older brothers. She was extremely precocious, and her older siblings delighted in the astonishing observations that routinely popped out of her mouth. Like her sisters, Pauline was diminutive. (Family members jokingly referred to them as the “Three Amazons.”) Rose was industrious and earnest, eager to fit in with her peers; Anne was a quiet, disciplined, and bright student; and Pauline was the talkative one who couldn’t help but call attention to herself, the one whose intellect was the most obvious and least conformist.
Isaac’s success and popularity in Petaluma no doubt encouraged him to indulge in his principal vice: pursuing other women. By the mid-1920s he had developed a reputation as one of Petaluma’s smoothest ladies’ men. There was one particular widow whom he joined for frequent dalliances. As a way of covering up his motives, he often brought along Pauline, who would play outside while her father paid court.
Throughout her writing career, and even to an overwhelming degree throughout her personal life, Pauline was extraordinarily reluctant to discuss her childhood and adolescence. Stephanie Zacharek remembered that she would talk about her past “only in a vague sort of way.” Even people who felt that they knew her quite well realized at some point or other that she had revealed next to nothing about the dynamics of her family life, especially her relationship with her mother. When Kenneth Kann called Pauline to interview her for Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, she provided him with a one-sentence reply:
“Chicken ranching? I can’t remember a thing about it. But just ask me about the Mystic Movie Theater in Petaluma.”
In the early 1960s, before New Journalism had really taken hold and it had become acceptable for reporters to impose their own personalities on their work, no one really expected a movie critic to share personal information in a review. So it came as something of a surprise when Pauline did just that in her Film Quarterly review of Martin Ritt’s 1963 Western drama Hud. She felt that the material had been misinterpreted by both those who made it and the critics who reviewed it. To them, the character of Hud, played by Paul Newman at his most