Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan by Paula Marantz Cohen Page A

Carla over his bifocals and leaning back in the plush recliner behind his desk. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”
    As he had made clear at the bookstore a month earlier, Dr. Samuels was not your conventional psychiatrist. He had no use for the medical mumbo-jumbo that many psychiatrists employ to give their work an aura of importance. He did not pretend to arcane knowledge or boast long years of esoteric training. Instead, he presented what he did in straightforward and pragmatic terms. “Life is mostly common sense,” he liked to say, “though sometimes you need a little help with the sense.”
    Leonard Samuels had started his practice thirty-five years ago in Cherry Hill. He had come to this suburb of Philadelphia when it had only recently been settled by Jews eager to live outside the confines of the big city. Denied access to the venerable South Jersey towns of Moorestown and Haddonfield, this population had taken root in the intervening space, creating a sprawling suburb with a wide array of services tailored to their tastes and needs. As the residents liked to say, “We have no cherries and no hills, but we do have the best discount shopping in the Delaware Valley, a few good diners, and more synagogues than you can shake a stick at.”
Struggling with the pressures of upward mobility and assimilation, they also had a predictable cornucopia of neuroses. Leonard Samuels, therefore, had his work cut out for him.
    Samuels liked to say that he had originally vacillated between a career in medicine and a career in the rabbinate. He had found the perfect compromise, he explained, in the practice of psychiatry, where he could solve problems and pontificate but did not have to answer to a higher authority.
    He based his practice on the assumption that he could help solve his patients’ problems because he had similar ones himself. He too had grown up poor and been nagged by an ambitious mother to work hard at school. He too had resented the pressure and the constant criticism (the familiar refrain in response to the 98 percent on the test:“So where’s the other two points?”). But in retrospect, as he reminded his patients, who were in the throes of nagging their kids to death, his mother had been right and the pain he’d suffered had been all for the good. “Look at how well I turned out,” he would say, gesturing proudly to the wood-paneled office. “Sometimes it’s your duty to make your children miserable.”
    Because Samuels believed his patients could profit from his own experience, he made no secret of his personal life. On the contrary, flying in the face of psychiatric convention, he flaunted it. One wall of his office was covered with photos of his children and grandchildren, with a section devoted entirely to pictures from their bar and bat mitzvahs. Another wall was decorated with his wife’s neo-Expressionist paintings. (“Had she started earlier, who knows?” he often mused. “She might have been another Picasso or Chagall.”) A third wall contained prized baseball memorabilia. Having grown up in Brooklyn, he had been an avid Dodgers fan as a child, and his subsequent devotion to the Mets was so strong that he was known to tell Yankees fans to go elsewhere. (Now living outside of Philadelphia, he made special allowance for the rubes who rooted for the Phillies.)
    To have an established weekly appointment with Dr. Samuels
was highly prized among the cognoscenti of Cherry Hill. Just as area residents believed that an engagement ring should never be less than two carats (“It’s an investment!”), they likewise believed in maintaining a standing appointment with Dr. Samuels (“You never can tell when you might go off the deep end”). Even if the bar mitzvah was over and the problem with the daughter-in-law resolved, who knew when a crisis might hit or a child or husband might need to be set straight about