Her autobiography is 970 pages, excluding prologue, epilogue and credits. With its 59 chapters, Barbra Streisand’s tome is rivalled in length only by the 68 chapters of Jawaharlal Nehru’s autobiography, Toward Freedom, which he wrote while in prison before becoming the first Prime Minister of India.
Nehru turned his book around in a year, but it took 40 years to convince the actress, singer and director to tell her story, because, as she writes: “I prefer to live in the present.”
For her many fans, this book is the definitive gift and, fittingly, in the first chapter – Pulaski Street – Barbra writes about Hanukkah (US spelling) and the smell of her grandmother Esther’s cinnamon cookies. After her teacher father Emanuel died in 1943 aged 35, Barbra, then 15 months, and her nine-year-old sister Shelly, went with their widowed mother, Diana, to live at their grandparents’ flat in Brooklyn.
As a venerated entertainment figure of the faith, the expectation was that Barbra’s book would be peppered with enough yiddishkeit to warm the kishkas. But she has, in fact, gone overboard balaboosta-style with a generous serving of anecdotes beginning with five-year-old Barbra going to shul with her grandpa, Louis Rosen, being called fabrent (on fire) by her bubbe and learning Hebrew at a yeshiva.
There, a teacher told her she shouldn’t say Christmas. “But as soon as she walked out the room, I kept repeating ‘Christmas! Christmas!’ And prayed to God that he wouldn’t strike me dead.”
Years later, it was her Hebrew learning that drew her to the short story Yentl the Yeshiva Boy by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Arriving mysteriously in a package from a producer in the winter of 1968, when she finally read it, Barbra was “captivated by the tale of the young Jewish woman in 19th-century Poland, whose soul thirsted to study Torah”.
Many tried to discourage her from turning that story into a film she wanted to direct and star in… “You can’t play a man. It’s ridiculous,” said her then partner Jon Stewart in 1978. But as Barbra admits with unflinching honesty, as she does throughout her book, “when someone tells me I can’t do something, it makes me even more determined to do it”.
The evidence of that determination is written large in the chapter Papa Can You Hear Me? where she documents the disinterest of studio executives (even the Jewish ones) in the project she loved. Barbra felt they were afraid the subject was ‘too Jewish’, adding, “I think Jews are still ‘the other,’ in some ways.”
In her book, she references Mark Twain’s 1899 essay Concerning the Jews, in which he equates anti-Jewish hostility with jealousy. In citing Twain, Barbra demonstrates her scholarly grasp of antisemitism, and her knowledge extends to many other subjects, particularly script-editing, in this compelling opus.
