Ilene Beckerman of Bethlehem Township writes memoir of her Jewish grandmother

Ilene Beckerman of Bethlehem Township has released a new book, “The Smartest Woman I Know.” It is about the grandmother with whom she spent her teen years.

How smart was her grandmother?

Here are some of Ettie Goldberg’s observations:

-- “Don’t envy anyone else; even Miss America can have hemorrhoids.”

-- “If beauty brought happiness, Elizabeth Taylor wouldn’t have needed so many husbands.”

-- “Thank God for the radio. I listen every day. I don’t have to buy a ticket. I don’t have to go someplace else. I don’t have to stop what I’m doing to look. I don’t even have to sit down. I can be standing by the stove, wearing my housedress, taking the fat off the chicken soup, and the President of the United States can be talking to me.”

-- When young Ilene discovered she needed eyeglasses and braces: “It’s not the end of the world. There’s already been a Jewish Miss America (Bess Meyerson, 1945). Now we need a Jewish woman President — so go do your homework!”

Although the book spares the reader the grim details, when Beckerman was 12, her hard-working mother died of a stroke and “my grandparents had no love for my father and they just took us.” Until she went off to college, Beckerman lived with her grandparents, proprietors of a Manhattan candy store on Madison Avenue between 64th and 65th streets.

Her grandmother enjoyed working in the store and bantering with the customers, one of whom was Sara Delano Roosevelt, who lived nearby. “Sara worried about her son Franklin’s future because of his polio… ‘Don’t worry,’ Ettie told Mrs. Roosevelt, ‘your son’s got a good head on his shoulders. I bet someday he’ll be president.’ Ettie told that to every customer who had a son. ‘That’s how you make a customer,’ she told me.”

The little, 100-page volume, published by Algonquin Books, is cleverly illustrated with a mix of photos and drawings.

Beckerman will be signing copies of it at the Clinton Bookshop on Tuesday, Sept. 6, at 7 p.m. and at The Bookworm on Saturday, Sept. 24, 2-3:30 p.m. in Bernardsville.

Beckerman, who is 75, lives near Hampton with her husband, Stanley, “in an old barn that someone put together with found material. I love it; there’s not a right angle in the whole place.” They have lived there for 14 or 15 years.

She scored a bulls-eye in 1995 with her first book, “Love, Loss and What I Wore.” The New York Times said, “This small gem is worthy of a Tiffany box.” It has since been make into a play that is currently being performed in New York City and Chicago.

Beckerman recalls, “I wrote my first book for my children; they didn’t think I had a life before them.” She made seven copies — one for each child and one for herself, “and somebody sent the book to the publisher. Then somebody called me.

“When my first book came out, my children were so proud of me.” Beckerman felt that the kids needed to see their mother get “some validation.” When she was raising her family in Livingston “mine was the house where, when the children and their friends wanted to fingerpaint, other parents would say, ‘Go to Mrs. Beckerman’s; she doesn’t care.”

After her first book, she went on a book tour. “I think because I was older, women could talk to me; they didn’t feel threatened. I met wonderful women across the country and they were asking me for certain kinds of answers. They asked for my second book. So she examined “all the myths I grew up with. I grew up when the music was Sinatra and you heard the words and you believed them,” and in the movies you saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers falling in love, and the myth of true love was perpetuated. So she addressed that in “What We Do for Love.” Her grown children’s excitement over her continued literary career dwindled when Mom wrote about her love life.