Professor David Assaf

I met with Professor David Assaf at a kosher-style restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  He arrived carrying a backpack and a camera, taking photos of everything around him: me, his chicken soup and kneidel dish, the Israeli shopkeeper who came by to chat. He humored himself extensively on account of my “Hungarian,” or Ashkenazi-accented Hebrew.

His spirited, rapid-fire speech—in English with a thick Israeli accent—lapsed into Hebrew occasionally, but resulted, nevertheless, in a delightfully engaging and thoughtful discussion. At the end of our interview, Professor Assaf insisted I accompany him to nearby Zabar’s, for a peek at his favorite apple strudel.

David Assaf is a professor of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, specializing in the history of Hasidism. In particular, he has earned a reputation for uncovering tales of scandal and ignominy previously ignored in Chasidic historiography: the rebbe’s son who converted to Christianity; the rebbe who attempted to commit suicide; Chasidim harassing and beating up other Chasidim. Assaf is the author of Derech Hamalchut (“The Regal Way”), Ne’echaz Basevach (“Untold Tales of the Hasidim”), and many essays on the history and development of the Chasidic movement.

Professor Assaf’s latest book, Heitzitz ve’Nifga (”Peeked and Got Injured: The Anatomy of a Hasidic Dispute“), is about Bernyu, the son of the rebbe of Ruzhin who, in the year 1869, abdicated his position as rebbe and joined up with the Haskalah movement. The resulting uproar led to the decades-long feud between the Chasidic courts of Sanz and Sadigura, marking one of the most tempestuous periods in Hasidic history, involving hundreds of rabbinic leaders and dozens of Hasidic communities throughout Europe. Heitzitz ve’Nifga was released on May 9, 2012, from University of Haifa Press and Yedioth Books. —Frieda Vizel

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Frieda Vizel (Unpious): What’s your personal background?

Professor David Assaf: I grew up in a religious Zionist environment. I was religious until my university days. I prayed three times a day, wore my kippah, tried not to touch women—shomer negiah, etc.

At one point during my university days, I had a personal realization: I don’t have any religious emotions. Nothing. I fooled myself into feeling it when I prayed.  Then, through my university studies,  I became exposed to the critical approach to history and the study of Jewish civilization, where I learned new ways of thinking and exploring. The whole critical approach of studying the history of halacha and the history of tradition made me feel that… ehhh… it’s not like I used to think. Plus, one very important book influenced me tremendously.

Unpious: Which book?

DA: A book by Yeshayahu Leibowitz. He was a professor at Hebrew University. He was Orthodox. He spoke out against the occupation, against the combination of religion and state, and how the halacha should be changed from the Orthodox point of view. My sister bought me the book.

Unpious: What made her get it for you?

DA: It was before my army service. During those days we used to buy books as gifts. [Laughs.] It influenced me to think critically about religion, to realize that you can’t disconnect one particular religion or belief system from another, and to recognize the cultural contexts and  historical developments of each.

Also, one of the most common factors leading religious youth away from the fold is the contradiction between sexual life and religious life.  When you’re Orthodox and also  a maturing young adult, you’re unable to express your sexuality, and that leads to significant inner conflict.  Especially for men; where it starts with masturbation—Why are you laughing?

Unpious: It sounds ridiculous.

DA: It’s not ridiculous to those who believe. It’s horrible.

Unpious: How did leaving affect your relationship with your family?

DA: When I traveled abroad for an extensive period, I drove on Shabbat, ate anything and anywhere, and didn’t wear my kippah. It was hardest to take off the kippah. You can do anything, you can be a horrible person, but if you wear the kippah you belong. When I returned to Israel it was hard to act that way. I tried to explain to my father what had happened to me. He tried to sympathize but said, “Whatever happens, don’t remove your kippah.” Not because he didn’t want to feel embarrassed. He just thought I was young and confused, a little tzidreyt.

It was very difficult to just remove it. I started wearing hats, like baseball caps, etc. I finally took it off and the sun kept shining. My father took it very hard. He was very upset.

Unpious: That’s very interesting.

DA: You know why it’s interesting? I’ll tell you. It’s because every generation has the same story. It just changes the names. But the point is this: there is something that religious education can’t tell you. That there are people without the gene of religion.

Unpious: What’s the gene of religion?

DA: You know, most people are religious; they believe in some kind of God. Why? Scientists used to say that every man has a religion gene. In other words, our biology dictates that we be religious and believe in God. But there are people without this gene. I love to learn about religion, and I find it fascinating to study, and I’m happy that there are people who believe in God because otherwise life would be a little boring.

Unpious: So you’re not anti-religious?

DA: Of course not! As long as it doesn’t interfere with my life! [Laughs.]

Unpious: You’ve done a lot of work on the history of Chasidism, and you uncovered stories that Chasidim would very much have preferred that they be kept under wraps. What led you to this field of study?

DA: As a college student I took a trip to Poland and it completely changed my thinking, it expanded my horizons vis-à-vis Eastern European Jews. Having decided that I would like to explore something about Eastern European Jewry, it was a rational decision to explore Chasidism. Very shortly after I began my studies, I came to the conclusion that 19th century Chasidism was a neglected field. None of the scholars took it seriously.

Unpious: Why wasn’t it important?

DA: Most of them considered it a declining era within Chasidism. Scholars concentrated on the 18th century, the time of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, but they purposely avoided touching later periods, when Chasidism became a mass movement with its various leadership dynasties. Scholars considered this to be a corrupted and declining—even primitive—phase, not deserving of any kind of scholarship. For example, Shimon Dubnov, who was the father of critical history in the field of “history of Chasidism,” ended his writings about Chasidism at the year 1815, because he considered the period after that to be the declining phase of movement.

Recent scholarship, however, considers this phase to have been the opposite of a decline. This is really the most important period; this is when the movement took its form. Besides, there were many impressive personalities during this “declining” period who also deserve to be studied. So I wrote my doctoral dissertation and my first book on this period. The book was called “The Regal Way,” and it was about the Rizhiner, [Rabbi Yisroel Friedman]. He lived a very lavish and extravagant lifestyle, and he was involved in several very dramatic episodes during his lifetime. For example, he gave his consent for the murder of two informants in 1836, and was then imprisoned by the Russians for four years.

So in my academic career, I always look for a dramatic story. I’m not a scholar of boring stuff. I look for stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. All my books and articles tell good stories. Even detective stories. For example, one major story required researching the footsteps of Moshe, [the son of the first rebbe of Chabad who converted to Christianity]. That’s a real detective story.

Unpious: So tell me, what was Chasidism like in the time of the Baal Shem Tov?

DA: It was a decentralized movement, and there was no intention of it being anything else.  The Baal Shem Tov and his disciples never thought they were creating a mass movement. Chasidism then was really just an elitist circle. Not a movement at all!

Unpious: Are there more “untold tales” that weren’t included in your book?

DA: Many. There were many incidents that were covered up by Chasidim.  You know, think about what happened recently in Viznitz. The rebbe passed away two months ago. Everyone knew he suffered from dementia for more than ten or fifteen years. He’s not serving in any real leadership role at all. And there’s this sensational story about the split between his two sons. Now they are two separate communities. But now, in the age of smartphones and with aggressive media—which tries to be first to get the scoop and to report on the scandal—these things can’t be covered up anymore. But think what would’ve happened if there was this sort of family drama back in the 19th century; it would’ve been totally covered up. So this is my work, to assemble small details in order to understand the full story.

Unpious: In Solomon Maimon’s memoirs, there are some pretty odd incidents in his account of visiting the Magid of Mezeritch. There’s one incident of a guy being beaten because his wife gave birth to a girl. Does that story sound likely?

DA: I have an article on that in Hebrew! There’s good reason to believe that his depictions are accurate because the aphorisms he cites and the descriptions of the environment match up with what we already know.  But the problem is that Maimon didn’t understand the scene properly. Early Chasidim had some unusual rituals, such as kulen zich (standing on their heads) or shtipen zich (pushing and shoving one another) in order to provoke happiness. Maimon could have witnessed one of those practices. It wasn’t about the baby being a girl.

Unpious: What were Chasidic women like?

DA: There isn’t even a term for a Chasidic woman in Hebrew. A Chasidah? That’s a bird. Although there’s been some interesting scholarship on the Maiden of Ludmir, who was said to have tried to be a Chasidic rebbe.

Unpious: What has been the response to your work from Chasidim?

DA: Chasidim make up a major part of my work’s readership. Those Chasidim are not typical though. They are interested in the history and culture of Chasidism. Take, for example, my first book about the Rizhiner. There is no question that many Rizhiner Chasidim, including the rebbe, read it. But they didn’t acknowledge it. They don’t put it on their bookshelves. My books are not easy reads, but these chevra read everything that I write. They sometimes know what I wrote better than I do. They read, they comment, they write to me. There are many Chasidim who subscribe to my blog. I have readers from every branch of Chasidism. And there are also my informants. They derive some kind of pleasure from seeing this sensational stuff in print.

Unpious: Have you received many negative reactions to your work?

DA: It’s interesting that when it comes to contemporary Chasidic politics, you can read a lot about all the controversies. But it’s not allowed when it comes to earlier generation. Some kind of paradox.

At one of the launch events of my work “Untold Tales,” one of the participants asked, “We know that you are going to write a book about Bernyu [the Rizhiner’s son, who defected to the Maskilic camp]. Is it true that the Sadigura Rebbe called you and warned you not to do it, and that if you do your end will be in gehenom [hell]?” I had heard this rumor. It was not true. If it was true, it would’ve been part of my book. But I never experienced harsh criticism. Because the best Chasidic strategy to deal with discontent is just to ignore it. Instead of arguing with you they simply ignore you, because they know that there is no argument that they can win.

Unpious: The longest thread ever on the HydePark Internet forums, running about 70 pages of comments, was a discussion  about your work on the “Atzor, Kan Choshvim” forum, in which you participated extensively. What motivated you to participate to that extent?

DA: First of all, I was flattered that my book was an issue. And I thought it would be a really good opportunity to be part of a community that discussed it. But then there were those who couldn’t handle my criticisms, and accused me of forging documents. To a historian, you can’t make a worse accusation.

But it’s good for a book to get this kind of feedback. I hope my new book gets a cherem [ban]. That would be really good. Everyone would read it!

Unpious: Did you ever meet with any Chasidic rebbes?

DA: No. They don’t want to meet me. Wait! I met the Skverer Rebbe ten years ago. One of the prominent Chasidim, who admired my work, invited me to come to his place in New Square. It was Chanukah. It was actually a nice experience. He introduced me to many people. I shook the Rebbe’s hand. That was all.

He probably washed it afterwards.

Unpious: How do you connect Chasidic history to contemporary Chasidism?

DA: There is no other Jewish movement or trend that survived so long. Think about it.

Unpious: Why do you think that is?

DA: Because Chasidism faced such trauma during the Holocaust  that it gave rise to a rebirth of sorts. The process of starting over, and also the nostalgia for a lost past, proved invigorating for a renewal. Also, it’s much easier to remain ultra-Orthodox in a capitalist society. In the past, if you chose to be ultra-Orthodox you chose to be poor. It was much more difficult to be ultra-Orthodox in Poland. Chasidic Orthodoxy has integrated into capitalist and democratic society so easily, and the fact is they’re flourishing. Nobody disturbs you. You get a degree of autonomy. It’s not expensive to maintain an Orthodox system, to maintain schools and be provided with kosher food. Also, the tradition is so elastic and flexible that by now it has become almost natural.

If we look at the history of Chasidism we have two different movements. Chasidism in the 18th century has nothing to do with contemporary Chasidism. The contemporary Chasidic movement is a product of the 19th century, not the age of the Baal Shem Tov. Because the Baal Shem Tov never planned for it to be a mass movement, only for certain elite circles. It was only the 19th century institutionalization of the movement that found a way to spread the message and to diversify the movement into various streams.

One of my reasons for studying 19th century Chasidism—as opposed to the contemporary version—is that I like to write about dead Chasidim. It’s very difficult to speak of today’s Chasidim; doing work on dead Chasidim allows me to walk on more solid ground. People say: “But you publish only scandals! Why choose davka to tell your readers unpleasant stories and not others?” The answer is: because there’s no drama in a pleasant stories, no conflicts, no human impulses, so it is not interesting.  I search for both the truth and the drama. I don’t hate or despise anybody.  On the contrary, I try to understand the Chasidim from their own point of view.

Unpious: What are biggest threats to Orthodoxy today?

DA: The Internet and feminism. That’s what I always say. It’s already been proven that Orthodoxy can survive modern life. The Internet, in my eyes, is the biggest problem for them. The problem is not the pornography. You are now able to reach everything. You have access to all sources of information. You have knowledge everywhere without any inspection. In other regards, they could check if you comply; they can check the level of a woman’s tzniyus, they can check what kind of books you read, what kind of education you give your children but with the Internet, they can’t control you like that. All the secular knowledge; it’s very tempting. It passes through the ghetto wall and it’s very powerful.

Also, feminist ideas have the potential to dismantle existing constructs. And this is a big threat to Chasidism. Feminist attitudes are spreading into Orthodox culture. Women are getting different messages about their importance and responsibilities.

Unpious: Do you think it will cause a new Haskalah?

DA: No, not in the 19th century sense. I think, if there’s anything of that sort, it’ll be just a drop in the ocean, a marginal phenomenon.

Unpious: You write an entertaining blog in Hebrew called “Oneg Shabbat,” (Onesh, or “punishment,” in short) in which you trace the secular roots of Chasidic songs and post other interesting findings. What makes you write it?

DA: It’s another way for me to bring my ironic approach to life and history. It helps me remember who I am and what the significance is of what I do.

It’s not significant! [Laughs.]

Photo: Flickr/bitchcakesny

The sun is hot and the city seems to be pushing inward, pressing down on me like a David Bowie and Queen song, as I squint and focus on the silver pavement in front of me. Pedaling my bike lazily down Bedford Avenue in the early evening chokes me, catches my breath, and provokes little beads of cold sweat to drip down the middle of my back. And it’s not the heat, because it’s still only springtime, it’s still only seventy degrees out.

I gaze longingly at the men in their dark coats and hats, white shirts and black pants and shoes, as they bustle purposefully to and fro; and though I know they won’t, I silently will them to look at me. Look at me, look at me. I don’t bite. There’s nothing wrong with me. I want to be friends. I like that we’re different from each other. Why don’t you? Look at me.

The sun sparkles on the newly-green trees lining this main thoroughfare into the heart of Williamsburg, reflecting off of the dirty glass of the graffiti-ed brick buildings.  I stand up on my pedals and cross Williamsburg Street East and then West, the filth and noise of the BQE suffocating me further. No one looks at me as I meander down Bedford, except maybe a few naughty children and a couple of curious housewives, their heads wrapped tightly in scarves of muted color. Those who dare to look my way gape at my tattoos and my cut-off jean shorts, complimented by a pair of ripped purple tights and old black-laced Chuck Taylors with holes in the bottom; they look and then they quickly turn away.

I love Williamsburg – I am not having trouble breathing because of the dense Brooklyn air, so much more polluted than my native-Maine lungs would prefer. I love Williamsburg – and I think I might be able to breathe when Williamsburg finally loves me back.  I’m a nerdy, overeducated outcast in my own rock n’ roll subculture and I’m an immodest, brazen goy girl who is not to be looked at in yours.

I ride through Hasidic Williamsburg to the Bedford Avenue bars some spring, summer, fall evenings, sure; but I live in BedStuy – and I don’t hang with or enjoy a hipster crowd, even though I end up at some of the hipster bars on occasion to meet friends. I’m much more fascinated by my Hasidic neighbors, who unlike the Williamsburg hipsters I have encountered, seem unreachable and aloof only because of a longstanding and unspoken cultural impasse that is masqueraded to the public as a unilaterally outspoken choice. This prohibition leaves me longing for friendship, and finds me taking out library books and watching movies, wondering what it is like inside the off-limits buildings with Hebrew writing adorning their facades. Between my disinterest in hipsters and my obsession with Hasidim, I remain in love with Williamsburg, and yet am left wondering why nobody will welcome me home.

The road bends and I reach Division Avenue, where I narrowly escape being hit by a minivan as I dart across the street after the intersection where the bike lane ends and Bedford Avenue becomes a bit quieter. I smile and wave at the Hasidic man in the van who pointedly doesn’t look at me, and pedal on past the playground where adorable little girls in matching dresses, and little boys with their yarmulkes and peyos, scream loudly in a language I don’t yet understand. They ride alongside me on their scooters and bikes for a moment, looking only straight ahead or at each other, before they reach their mothers and wait for the walk signal to cross South 9th. I smile at them anyway as I ride by, because they’re so cute, and because I find innocence, true innocence, so very becoming.

The sun slinks toward Manhattan, behind the Williamsburg Bridge, splaying out in brilliant vermillion streaks into the East River. It is not quite visible from where I wait at Broadway to leave Hasidic Williamsburg behind me and enter the land of bars and hipsters, my heart sinking in my chest. I know there is something in Hasidic Williamsburg that I have been looking for; for all I’ve read of its complications and indiscretions, still most of them are no more complicated or indiscriminate than my daily life. For all I’ve seen of Hasidic Williamsburg, and my burgeoning but limited interactions with my neighbors, I know I can learn a thing or two about how to be good – if only we could really look at each other.

The men, though aloof, seem more approachable and daring than the women – I almost don’t even want to imagine the burden on the women’s shoulders to uphold such intense piety for the whole community. I always feel conflicted as I gravitate toward Hasidic men because it is easier, and because, after all, I am a woman. I remember the time I was crossing Dekalb on Bedford in my own neighborhood and I caught a man staring at the tattoos on my arms. I looked him shyly in the eyes and he looked back at me. I looked away, and back again. He was still staring at me. Why can’t we be friends? I had pleaded silently.

I lock up my bike on the opposite side of Bedford Ave, the sun behind me now as I squat down to link together my tires and secure the frame with a heavy lock to the street sign. I take a deep breath, wishing I could breathe properly, and dodge a fixie as I make my way into Luckydog to meet my friends. They will inevitably tease me about my obsession with Hasidim, about my unnecessary detours along Bedford Avenue, and in spite of all of this, the fact that I am not, in any way, Jewish. I shake my hair to fluff it up a little after my ride, saddle up to the bar, order a pint of Yuengling, and vow silently to myself that I will make friends with my Hasidic neighbors. I just have to catch someone’s gaze… and keep it.

I liked our friend. He was smart, handsome, witty, a damn good writer, and ambitious.  He also had this air of “I belong here,” and here was wherever he happened to be. Although his physical appearance told a different story—thin and bony, awkward joints—in fact, it screamed Jewboy, former sissy pants, sickly kid, these two traits coalesced in a very appealing way, to me at least. So much so that I found him in a hallway in Williams Hall, I just said, “Hey, you, come for Shabbos.”

“I’ll just come for dinner,” he said.  “What’s the address?” We did not know each other then.

He had graduated from the Columbia Writing Program a few years earlier, and that spring of our visit was back teaching there.  He was also just coming off the high of having his first novel compared to Philip Roth in the Sunday section of the New York Times.  “Fucking Roth, man,” my husband would say. “Yeah, fucking Roth,” he would say.  In truth, though, he was stalled in his own writing, someplace one hundred pages into a second novel, floundering, frustrated and scared—fucking Roth, I thought.

In his tiny kitchen I asked what the novel was about, and he said, “Chasidim.”  I was incredulous. “What the fuck do you know about Chasidim, you know not a thing.”  He had no Yiddish, no Hebrew, had once asked me to translate “boychik,” and wrote more like F. Scott Fitzgerald than I.B. Singer.  As far as I could tell, the comparison in the Times was obligatory because of his last name and his shocking Semitic appearance. He shrugged. “Breaking out,” he said as he wiped his hands on a dish towel and looked at me and my husband.

I immediately thought I knew where he was going: sell out—hot, sweaty, horny Chasidim.  Chasidim fucking, swinging from chandeliers, wife swapping on the down low—oh no, not on my watch.

“I am so tired of that novel,” I said. “Come on.” My stomach a roil of anger and revulsion, but I said nothing else.   I sulked.

After about six cups of coffee in his stifling apartment he suggested I go for a walk with him over to Columbia. He said there was someone he wanted me to meet.  On the way I almost asked him, what about the credo: writing what you know—but I didn’t.  To be honest, I quickly got lost in my own reverie, and after a couple of blocks I was fully expecting to meet Harold Brodkey or Gordon Lish, since both breezed in and out of Columbia and both were so worth meeting. And at this point, my friend, I think, owed me something.

We arrived just as classes were letting out and the quad filled with students. He suddenly started waving wildly. “Hey, Malky!” he yelled, and a tall modern looking Chasidish woman stopped, tucked her notebook into a stylish camel bag and stood waiting on the stone path. I eyed the bone-colored stockings, expensive ones, and the taupe shoes.

“Wait till you meet her,” he said. “You’re going to love her, smartest woman ever.”  I didn’t know how smart she would be but I knew she was strikingly beautiful, tall, poised, groomed—the silk blouse with off-white piping screamed rich and of course married and the cute neat page boy sheitel and fawn pillbox howled.  I did a mental tally: her bag alone was at least four hundred dollars, the petite gold watch, the diamond pedants around her neck, it felt like I was seeing those escaped green parrots flying through Flatbush.  I could not figure it out.  I felt suddenly naked in my yellow hippie skirt and Israeli top and brown sandals.

I was told that she was studying “linguistics,” which is by no means an easy course of study.  Linguistics is the calculus of language, filled with equations and very exact sounds, discrete units of language and theories.  I barely made it through linguistics–barely.  I did not tell my friend that I was gripped, not by curiosity, but rather by suspicion.  I did not trust her and my friend was not to be trusted on any account; he was a writer, de facto an opportunist.

Parrots: Why was this woman studying linguistics, where exactly was her husband and what were, I assumed, her many children? She looked to be a few years older than me and a few years younger than my friend.  When he introduced me it was clear that he had told her about me and I was meant to serve to legitimize him in some way.  Writers pull all kinds of crap on people, so I assumed he wanted an invite into her world for his book, research.  I was only partially right.  We exchanged some pleasantries.

“Oh, you look so Israeli,” she said as we began to walk toward the library —he needed a book, and she needed books—I don’t remember. I do remember, though, that when she went off into the stacks to get something and we were waiting for her he was practically breathless.

“So what’d you think, isn’t she something, have you ever seen anybody like her, she speaks four languages, oh, and sharp, she’s sharp.”

What I thought was he was about to get swatted down like a fly.

“What I think,” I said. “She’s married.”

“Oh, yeah, I know,” he said. “But that was forced. Her family made her. Not real.”

I turned the words made over in my mind and hoped that I would not spit venom at him.

No Brodkey, no Lish, and I did not want to debate what constituted a “real marriage.”

“Look,” I said, “she said two words to me, and I can’t detect brilliance from that.”

“Trust me, she is the smartest woman I have ever met and for god’s sake take a look at her, that’s real beauty.”

Okay I would grant her beauty but not go an inch farther.  I began to sense that my friend really was only writing a novel secondary to pursuing one.

What could I say about this woman? She looked, well, beautiful, but also old enough to have at least five kids by my calculations.  She did not seem “standoffish”—in fact, after she returned from the stacks she rapid fired questions at me.  Where was I from, oh, she had relatives nearby, where did I go to elementary school, “yeah, that makes sense, but it is now another type of school”—oh, she had a cousin here and one there.  I told her both my parents were only children and I had no cousins.  Really, I did not want any part of whatever this was.  She pursued every topic: where did I go to college, Pell grants.  My mind swirled.  I could only silence her when I told her that the famous linguist Noam Chomsky’s grandfather “learnt” in the Mir yeshiva and that they were distant mishpacha, just a thin blood tie to Yerucham Levovits, and yeah, for real, Franz Kafka had been engaged to the Gerrer Rebbe’s second daughter, the famous redheaded one who saved Jews during the Holocaust, but she broke the engagement. And why did she think so many Gerrers were redheads—weird, right?

From standing there I could not get a sense of what was going on. She only mentioned her husband once, and while she did not sound like a young bride puffed with pride, she did not say anything that sent up a flare either.

I was more concerned about my friend.  So far, in the course of that conversation he had invited her to join him both at the Yaddo writer’s colony and at McDowell.  Where, it was common knowledge, people just drank, made connections, screwed each other, and drank some more.  As if, of course, she would just leave her husband and, of course, go spend a week with him upstate, in the beauty of the trees, nature and a converted mansion, and fall into this very pattern.  A part of me wanted to pull him up short on his stupidity and arrogance—to imagine a woman, any woman, would just drop what they were doing to follow him—and another part of me wanted to explain how many social and cultural lines he was crossing.  This woman baffled me.  Why was she even speaking to him?

To say he just wanted to get laid by some Chasidish beauty would be grossly unfair of me, although the thought skimmed the surface of my mind.  If I had to characterize it now I would say he was, simply put, in love and looking for ways and excuses.  Anyway, what I remember my friend told me: her husband was ill, not an invalid but he had something, heart, kidney.  What he did not say, but I surmised—they had fertility problems, because I noticed she had mentioned her sister’s children but none of her own. When she went to the desk to check the books out, my friend leaned over and told me that she was the daughter of an important rabbi. My fury unrestrained, I hissed back, “They’re all the daughters of important rabbis. Itzy Shmulick the grocer never had a daughter, only big shots have daughters.” But what was really upsetting me was his disregard for a marriage that was not his own and seeing him so emotionally out of control, unmoored, pursuing something so off the wall. It scared me.  I accrued resentment; I had introduced him to at least four nice, normal Jewish women and he had found something wrong with each.  Then he wants me to meet this, a married Chasidish woman.  Are you frickin’ nuts? I wanted to ask.  Do you know what these people are like?  I did not even know how I would frame it to my husband, and I understood clearly why he had only asked me to go.

Up until this point he had shown no interest in anything remotely Jewish.  When my husband would go on his tirades about my family in Monsey he would join in and they would both somehow turn it all back to the political problems in Israel, the parasites living off the tit of the state, in America the ignorance, the lice, the hepatitis, scams, welfare, yada yada yada.  In fact, both of them together could have had punch cards, to clock in at hating pan-Orthodoxy, ball park figure, a good 20 hours a week.  Just say the word “Charedi” to my husband and he’d cock his forefinger and thumb to my temple and then to his. Our murder suicide pact.

“Right,” he’d say.

“Right,” I’d say. “Better dead.”

“You know she can read Proust in the original French,” My friend said.

I have never been good with situations that strike me as teetering on immoral or messy—affairs, sex outside of a marriage were scorched earth in my mind.  It would be close to 15 years later when I was 37 that I would ever have to confront adultery.  The academic world still seemed where I wanted to be and rife with such shenanigans.  I figured out pretty early to just not involve myself, which was hard when I felt pressured into saying or doing something. On the other hand I did not want to lose a friendship that seemed, well, the only writing friend I had.  So very early I just learned to accept, this is what people do.  So I nodded and smiled.

I am not sure what happened between Malky and my friend.  I do know he took her upstate and they spent a day together in Woodstock and took pictures. Did her husband hobble around the house that day or was he bedridden?  I know that after that trip my friend once even went as far as to go to her house in Brooklyn, knocked on the door in the middle of the night, maybe in some irrational state reserved only for a Chekhov story, and yes, he was invited in and he met her husband.  I tried to imagine him standing there in that sad childless house with dark Hungarian furniture, the table laid with a white damask cloth fringed in gold tassels, and I think I even may have said: leave it alone, they have enough sorrow without you.

That next winter he paced, he sweated, he called us at all hours, but I had made clear that I would not discuss her in any way, shape, or form.  I wondered if I was being cruel.  Maybe just two lonely people, maybe there was something there, but too bad, I thought, you can’t have everything in this life. But she was always there on the next word to leave his mouth if I allowed, caught in his throat, a harsh wind blowing through an unzipped jacket. There was nothing to talk about.  Honestly, sometimes I thought her a callous bitch, a real bitch.  I had a fantasy about going up to her and saying: “Why?” How could she have not known how he felt?

After about nine months he no longer seemed on the edge, and in fact acted like he didn’t want to mention her again.  I certainly did not bring her up.

Some years later when his second novel finally came out to much fanfare, and after we had lost touch, I read the review in the Sunday New York Times. It said:  “Set in Upstate New York and an enclave in Brooklyn, this novel is about a desperate and childless Hasidic couple that devised an elaborate scheme, to have the wife impregnated by an unsuspecting, soulful Jewish college professor.”   I turned the paper over so I would not be staring at his photograph.

Okay, I thought, she was that smart.

Tales of struggle in which ultimate redemption comes from the telling of the tale itself—which is true for many of the ex-Orthodox narratives—are not new. The most memorable encounter of such was, for me, in the book “Push” by Sapphire. It was the Summer of 2010, and the book’s film adaptation, “Precious,” was then playing in theaters. At the time, I was balancing summer courses, an internship, and a weekend job, so when I had a rare day off, I chose to indulge in what a friend called a “light read,” and picked up the book. At the Lincoln Center courtyard I sat down on a bench facing the angular void between the Metropolitan Opera building and the home of the New York City Ballet. Legs folded beneath me, I curled the soft cover of the book into the palm of my left hand, and found a quote from the Talmud on the very first page:

“Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers: ‘Grow, grow.’”

I was surprised to see the Talmud quoted there, a familiar face in a book in which I expected a world of strangers. I knew the outlines of the story: a young African American girl named Precious who was raped and impregnated by her father. I expected to read with voyeuristic interest, looking in on an experience so vastly removed from my own. Yet there, setting the tone for the pages to come, was a quote I had heard many times throughout my Hasidic childhood.

Much like the marathon Talmud study sessions of my yeshiva days, I finished the book in one sitting. The book ends with Precious, HIV-positive and mother of two children by her own father, joining a support group, making up for her missed education, and writing poetry. Despite the unforgiving world presented in the book’s pages, Precious’s sense of redemption and triumph was palpable.

Precious couldn’t undo anything that had happened to her, but Precious’s triumph, like the triumph of many heroes and heroines of literature who lived to tell the tale of their journey, rested on the idea that creating and formulating your own personal narrative is the ultimate expression of freedom and empowerment. That all the struggles and hardships experienced along the way are given meaning when they are part of your own final story.

Releasing the back cover from the tight clasp of my thumb and forefinger, I got up from the bench and walked towards the circular fountain in the center of the courtyard. With shows about to begin, ticketholders began filing into the open space in pairs of two, heading towards the theatres at the three sides of the plaza.

Rethinking the story, I thought about how Precious’s desire to tell her tale is both the desire of every artist and also the desire of every human being with personal experiences and insights. And it is that same desire on the part of many ex-Orthodox individuals that has brought their stories to a wider audience. What seduces these storytellers to tell of their experiences is the knowledge that others would give up something of their own, either money or time, to read or to listen to their personal narratives of struggle and redemption. Perhaps, then, the quote from the Talmud at the beginning of the book was wrong. What every blade of grass wants to hear is not an angel whispering, “Grow, grow,” but an audience cheering, “Congratulations, you have grown.”

And that, I see now, is where this desire, like every other deep desire, has its dangerous slope. The ex-Orthodox archetype that the media demands, and which we have been eager to feed, is the same blade of grass grown with the same formula; the skeptical child that becomes the eager library visitor that becomes the carnivorous porcine enthusiast. These stories give us an opportunity to hear an audience say, “Congratulations, you have grown,” but they offer only tales whose characters are fungible and whose events are simple variations on a single theme. These stories don’t tell those who struggle with finding their own narratives, the growing blades of grass that haven’t yet determined which way to bend, that their own stories, with their own unique memories of their pasts and hopes for their futures, those stories, too, can be written and told.

In our desire to broaden our audience we must be cautious not to narrow our voices. Too often, our tales descend quickly to the banal drama of buying our first pairs of jeans, or of wondering who the hell the Beatles were, or any of the other shared experiences of encountering for the first time that which most people take for granted. These episodes are often designed to capture the outsider’s fascination, but contain, in the larger journey, only a blip of significance. As a result, the tales of our journeys feel as if they are dictated by the outsider’s fascination rather than by the complexity of each storyteller’s unique experiences.

When the movie “Precious” was nominated for an Academy Award (along with “The Blind Side,” another story about a young struggling African American kid), Cornel West, the noted scholar and Princeton University professor, remarked, “With all the richness in black life right now… the only thing Hollywood gives us is black pathology.” What he meant was that all these stories, while, ostensibly, reflective of the lives of contemporary African Americans, are more specifically about what is wrong and faulty in those lives rather than what is rich and nuanced and multi-faceted. Perhaps a similar concern can be said of the emerging portrayals of ex-Hasidic life, especially as our stories move to television audiences, where the entertainment value lies in showing our pathologies rather than celebrating our often chaotic journeys that don’t necessarily provide made-for-TV moments. The narrative of struggle, of individual quests for meaning and personal identity, of pursuing dreams and making tough choices, risks being replaced with the pursuit of cheap laughs at those who get it wrong. To paraphrase Dr. West: With all the richness in ex-Orthodox lives… what we are given is ex-Orthodox pathology.

Perhaps, as we tell our stories, we should try to be less like the blades of grass quoted from the Talmud and more like the bent over angels doing the whispering. By now, the formulaic version of how an ex-Orthodox grass grows has been told and retold many times; from chulent to cheeseburger, from sex in the dark to sex in the park. It is time to tell the story of how different and how bendable every blade of grass is and its unique potential for being not one among indistinguishable blades but with its own characteristics and variations, with its own speckles of brown and the heights to which it alone strives. Perhaps even, our stories can shift from being the recycled description of the vulnerable and pitiful strands of grass we have been portraying, to being like the bent over angels that whisper, “Grow, grow.”

It was these two words that I most longed to hear that evening as I stood near the Lincoln Center fountain preparing to leave. The performances inside the theatres surrounding the plaza soon reached intermission, and the open-air terraces above began to fill with theatre-goers enjoying the cool summer night air, leaning against the railings, champagne flutes sparkling against the lights of the plaza. Returning my book to my backpack, I realized how, like the strict ultra-Orthodox life and like the media portrayal of the ex-ultra Orthodox experience, these performances, too, tell carefully orchestrated tales to captivated audiences. What none of them have is someone, without a preconceived idea of what a story should be like, who would bend over and whisper to the boy silently leaving the plaza: “Grow, grow.”

Author’s note: “To be sung like a country-western, ballad-like reggae kind of rhythm thing while strumming on a guitar and chewing on a piece of herring.”

* * *

Well I went to shul one shabbos day,
And fantasized about my old sweetheart Faye,
Could have sworn she was there on account of the smell of her cologne;

But I couldn’t tell for sure, ‘cause there was a mechitza,
and my heart was dancing up a rina and a ditza,
Cause I missed that Lilith real bad since the day she was gone.

So I whispered to the shammos that I’d pledge 10 dollars,
Maybe throw in a kiddush and some homemade challahs,
If he’d just get me up there on the bimah – you know — for an aliyah.

I figured, once I’m done with all my brachos,
I’d tell them “Boys, you can all just kish mir in tuchos,
‘cause the only real reason I’d come up there was to see her.”

So they called my name and I stood up,
I saw the bulge in my pants and decided to stop,
And maybe say the sh’ma and pray that the thing would go down.

You know, I never did like the idea of Mechitza,
But right then it was the shul’s most welcome feature,
‘cause I’d be a kneidel in borscht if Faye coulda see’d me now.

So I grabbed me a tallis so no one would see,
And the shammos said “Nu?” and I said “Nu who, me?”
And I hurried up the aisle a-limpin’ and a-shakin’ away.

I climbed up the bimah, and said my blessin’,
Looked over the mechitza and just stood there guessin’,
Whose cologne that was; ‘cause there was sure no sign of Faye.

Well, the shammos said “amein” and he started to chant,
I saw this fox of a woman and I began to pant,
Hell, we was chantin’ and a-pantin’, I was sweatin’ like the mornin’ dew.

He came to a break and I said, “Keep on readin’”,
He mumbled something about the drawbacks of separate seatin’
I told him “I need to stay up here, awhile, ‘cause I just met someone new!”

Well the shammos read through the very next parsha,
and to make a long story short, that’s how I met Marsha,
And as for Faye, I hear she ran off with a Zen Aquarian.

Now Marsha was frumm so I had to teach her,
How to make beautiful..uh…prayer without a Mechitzah,
So now we davven in a shul that’s both nudist and egalitarian.

You see, the way I was brought up, men and women didn’t mix,
And you didn’t pray with members of the opposite sex,
Or you’d lose your kavanah and have lewd thoughts, maybe waste your seed that night.

Now I don’t know where all that stuff is written,
But no matter what side of the Mechitzah you’re sittin’,
Y’can’t help but wonderin’ – like — what’s happenin’ on the other side.

So God bless the folks who are for separate seatin’,
Whether it’s for prayer, weddings, or just plain eatin’,
‘Cause I don’t mean to sound like some New Age heretical preacher,

But as for me, well I guess I’ll just take my chances,
‘Cause I love nothin’ more than praying with all of my senses,
‘Cause I’m not only post-denominational, I’m also post-mechitzah.

“Uh, Shaye, maybe we should go find another shul, it looks private here. There’s maybe twenty people.”

“Twenty people’s not private. If you want to stay out here and wait, fine. But I’m not walking all over again to find another shalom zachor.”

I hesitated. He walked in.

Moishe turned to me. “Shloime, he’s right. It’s getting late, this is probably our last one.”

We filed into the corner shtiebel and pretended to belong.

It wasn’t really necessary. Everyone was joking or eating or schmoozing. Nobody noticed when we walked in, except a big, red-faced guy sitting close to the door, who greeted us with “Mazel Tov! Mazel Tov!” and turned back to his drinking buddy.

A quick glance to the head table found Shaye shaking the baal habos’s hand and making loud, smiling conversation. Shaye was a pro at this. He’d play the politician, answer a few questions about which yeshiva we were from, who his father was, make a joke, and back out. The whole thing took two minutes, after which we were as welcome as anyone. I wanted to make sure the father knew I was one of the merry yeshiva men, so I moved in to get in on the closer. Shaye was making his shalom zachor pun when I got there, a stupid line he issued with such confidence that everyone laughed anyway, and shook the guy’s hand.

“Sit down,” the baal habos said, making a show of hospitality. “There’s plenty of chairs. There’s still cholent. And beer! You want a beer before you start singing, right?”

“Sure,” I said, putting on my charmer face. A waste. He’d already turned away to schmooze with his friends. So much for being cool. Well, I’d settle for being drunk. I went back to the table where Moishe and Moty were already pouring from a bottle of Chivas into plastic cups half-filled with Coke. Shaye was sipping a shot straight while leaning his chair back to shmooze with the guy two seats away from him, laughing it up like he owned the place. I thought of trying to look  that cool, but didn’t want to waste my only chance of sustaining my buzz for an act I probably couldn’t pull off. The guy I tried it on would probably get bored, then annoyed, then look at my booze, then kick us out. I just mixed it with the Coke like the other guys.

We drank, ate some chickpeas and cholent to look normal, drank more, performed the right songs at the right times, drank some more, when suddenly I had to pee and figured I should get the heck out before the alcohol kicked in and I did something stupid. I turned to Shaye.

“I need to pish.”

“Yeah, me too.” He grinned. “See you outside.”

I went down to the restroom, but Shaye headed straight out. When I got outside, I found him zipping himself up in front of a stucco house across the street. Shaye had strong religious views about showy houses that he liked to express through urine. We waited for the other guys to file out.

“What do you want to do now?” someone asked.

A certain yeshiva was mentioned and shot down. A guy someone knew who had a hot sister was briefly considered before someone mentioned the time.

“Let’s just go back,” Shaye said. “There’s nothing going on.”

“There’s never any girls anywhere to talk to,” I said.

“Oh, they’re around,” said Shaye. “You just don’t know where to look.”

“Yeah,” said Moishe. “Big talker. Like you’re getting all this action all the time. I love how you talk about yourself. Man of mystery.”

Someone laughed. “You tell yourself what you want,” said Shaye. “Before I frummed out, they were all over me.”

“Before you frummed out,” Moshe sneered. “So, what, that’s like 8th grade? Yeah, I’m sure you were getting mad tail there in elementary school–”

A group of girls appeared from around the corner and walked onto the road to avoid us. We tried to get them to look at us. Moty even said “Hey.” We stared at them as they walked away.

“Bitches,” Shaye said.

“What?” Moishe said. “They’re frum.”

“Frum, my ass,” I said. My horny and drunken energy suddenly turned into anger. “Did you see them? They all do that. All dressed up with makeup and tight clothes, and then if you say a word to them, they’re like, ‘You pervert.’”

A smaller group of girls tried to pass us single-file without looking.

“Whores!” I yelled at them.

Moty grabbed me. “Shut up. You’re drunk.”

Only two girls looked at me. The rest started to walk away as quickly as possible. One of the two girls, a pretty one, with silky hair that seemed to slide all over her face, squared herself and looked Moty in the face. “Why’d he say that? I want to know.”

Moty grabbed me under the arms and began pulling me away.

“No, you don’t,” he said to the girl. “He’s drunk, just walk away.”

I shouted again. “You want to know? Tighten your shirt a little more. I can’t make out your nipples entirely.”

Moty smacked me across the face, and grabbed my arm hard.

I laughed out loud, wild, ringing laughter. “Burn in hell, you bitches!” Screw them!

*  *  *

Fifteen minutes later we were walking down Avenue M and East 6th Street, heading towards the dorm. I was almost gone now and stumbled along with everyone as best as I could. I was trying to look around for anyone we might know, but that quickly became too much effort. I worried about tripping and ripping my suit. I focused on walking and making crude jokes about whatever the guys were saying. Amazingly, when a rebbe from our yeshiva  walked past, I sobered up in an instant, walked normally, even offered a respectful “Good Shabbos.” The second he turned away, my knees wobbled and I had to grab a nearby wrought-iron fence for support.

Shaye spoke up suddenly, quieting us. “There’s Ari Katzenstein.” He nodded towards the other side of the street. A kid who looked a couple years older than us, sporting ripped jeans and a zip-up jacket leaned casually against a tree, smoking a cigarette.

“Man,” Moty said. “He’s smoking on Shabbos in public. Where is he now?”

“Priority One, I think,” said Shaye.

“Nah, they kicked him out,” Moty said. “They caught him dealing.”

Moshe looked up. “That guy’s a drug dealer? He looks like a punk. I could take him.”

“Don’t,” said Shaye. “He’s like 20. And he knows guys.”

“FUCK that!” I said, feeling tough. I paused for a split second and then ran wildly across the street.

“Shloime! Get back here!”

Shaye ran after me, followed by Moty. Moshe hung back, yelling and laughing.

People think you can’t fight while drunk. That’s not true. You can’t fight well, but you can sucker punch as good as anyone. You don’t feel shit, and your fear is down to reserve levels.

I don’t remember exactly what happened then, but the general consensus is that I ran up and started making semi-intelligent threats at Katzenstein. Shaye tried to pull me back, until Katzenstein punched me in the head. Then Shaye went crazy on the guy, punching him again and again till Katzenstein was on the floor. Shaye kept kicking him as if he would never stop. I remember taking punches from a tall guy who had been walking nearby and then I jumped him in a bear hold and brought him down. I squeezed my hands around his neck, and choked him for what seemed like a long time while the guy kept making my face jerk around with what were probably frenzied punches. I don’t remember letting up, but Moty, who was a huge guy, claims he made the guy stop hitting me and then ripped me off him.

Later that night, I found myself in my bed and woke up to go to the bathroom. My face and head throbbed like hell. As I opened my fly and looked down, I saw Shaye on the floor next to the toilet. He had cuts on his face and neck, and he was fast asleep, drooling onto his undershirt. I smiled.

This story is a work of fiction. Which is not to say it didn’t happen.

Photo: Flickr/Jenna Carver

The truth?

The family was different, especially the mother.  The neighbors knew nothing about her—as she offered nothing to them.   They did not know that her mother-in-law by sheer force of will had arranged the marriage and pushed for it over two continents, through a stream of correspondence and overseas calls.  In addition, they had no way of knowing the mother and her husband were cousins and that she brought with her into the marriage not a small amount of money.  They were oblivious to the fact that the husband had left days after her most recent conception as if he had a premonition.  What they could see was that she wore her hair long, uncovered and loose. A mane of dark brown, it would always catch the slightest breeze and cause her to toss her head back and with one hand sweep the hair away from her face.  Other married women wore their hair under wigs or covered by a scarf.  The closest she came to looking Jewish was bible sandals with bare legs.

Their house: a remnant that the adjoining neighbors hoped would be torn down—moss green, slanted at the roof, it leaned against underbrush and overgrown trees, an inlet of neglect, twice removed from the newer mirror image split-levels that flanked it on either side.  The orchard that had sustained generations of land owning, hard-working Gentiles reduced to an apple tree in every other front yard.  To everyone else’s eye the old stone front seemed to have less of new American potential than the rest of the neighborhood, certainly fewer new appliances, less wallpaper. To the mother it seemed perfectly American, the America she admired, culled from literature, handpicked fruit—Nineteenth Century and Yankee Emily Dickinson, later—Twentieth Century, waspy, Cheeveresque, ice clinking in a martini glass.

Rumor had it that the house was bought for cash because the mother said to the realtor she did not like paperwork or men in dark blue bank suits.  Inside, thumb-tacked and taped to the walls were posters from distant farmers’ markets, Frank Stella exhibitions, and quaint products, elixirs not sold for half a century, if ever.  Throughout the house stacks of books created an obstacle course, so moving from room to room had to be done with care. The furniture was mismatched and quirky; at the tables, chairs were unpredictable, some were whole, others were not, like lame animals allowed to remain out of kindness.

Doing her best to distance herself from the immediate surroundings, the mother insisted that she was educated and cultured and, as if one thing followed from the other, showed little interest in the price of eggs or the latest trends in child rearing.  She told this to the girl often.  And in this tight family-centered community she did not deign to interact with the neighbors and had turned down invitations so often until they stopped coming.

In contrast, the other mothers watched children play in tight yards. They understood the inherent dangers, bones snapping like twigs, skulls cracking, eyes taken out, the infinite possibilities of hurt the world had to offer.  They concealed this knowledge from their children with talk of recipes and feigned anguish at every toy dropped inquisitively down the toilet.  They exchanged smiles and shared the bonds of friendship.  Yet nothing humbled her, not the initial warmth at the door, not the meals sent over when they first moved in, not the offers to share in car pool.   Aliza Ahronson Berg would not go and join them. She had not lowered herself to that. She would not even give them a second glance when she backed the car down the driveway, getting out to get the mail dressed in a fringed brown leather jacket and peasant skirt with mauve ribbons tied in little bows and stitched around the hem line.

In this self-imposed brilliant creative isolation they sat inside through long afternoons. The mother read poetry and advised the girl to have a critical mind.  Long drags on a cigarette, she repeated lines from poems—“Do I dare to eat a peach” or “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”  Wisps of wordy smoke puffed into the girl’s face.  After, she looked up and directly at the girl, waiting for some mysterious response, as if it were her highest priority to convey that a trivial life was worse than anything else possible.  Gaze fixed.  Her eyes implored the girl—say something, say something, you dimwit.

“Mrs. Failkoff said today that there was a giant hanging on Noach’s ark,” the girl offered because it was what she was thinking about, since it had just started to rain.

“And they pay her a salary for this?” the mother said.

Stung, the girl would then look away toward the drained multi-colored antique maps of the world hung on the walls, feeling a hot blister of hurt rising in her throat.  She was told they are in the world.  Lands conquered and claimed.  Independence fought for and won, revolutions in the street. The mother had placed the maps to show that the world has changed, and will change again.  Tacked to the fridge was a picture of the President under which it said, “Would you buy a used car from this man?”  Alongside it were pictures of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.  The girl thought them both very ugly.

In every area, Aliza Ahronson Berg dabbled in domestic trickery; laundry went undone, dishes piled up, produce that had been left out bred swarms of tiny flies that rose up whenever anyone walked past.  By her own confession it amused her to have things in the fridge become covered over by a fuzzy green and black skin.  Meals were a whole other kettle of fish, sometimes a complete dinner of artichokes or chocolate sandwiches.  With an emotion stronger than any ordinary envy the girl wanted, longed for what she had seen others have on their plates for meals.  She would ask for mixed canned or frozen vegetables, confetti of color, or even meat with a sauce, or a soft white bread sandwich.  In fact what the girl felt was hunger, and she would learn to savor that, too.  Once, at the ShopRite, the mother agreed and placed in the wire cart a white plastic bag of vegetables that the girl hoarded in the back of the freezer.

The girl attended a school with some of the other girls on the street.  A small, worn-to-the-bone school with dingy ceiling tiles that hung slack overhead.  She was often late or not there at all.  When she was there, most of the teachers overlooked her.  She kept to herself, and during the times that they all stood, siddurs opened, she always kept her place during the concentric rings of prayer.  She watched the other girls the way she might have watched fish sliding behind glass in an aquarium.  They were neither unkind nor generous. They treated her with a practiced indifference.  The mother did not ask her about school and did not look up when she pushed the mimeograph worksheets under her nose, did not react as she repeated something the teacher said.

Most days she walked home from school, as it eliminated the seat on the bus dilemma. The bus was a complex social situation, based on family, older siblings, cousins and a father’s occupation.  She would just as well walk herself over the railroad tracks and past the store with takeout chickens turning on a spit in the window.  Even the newest stores, still with Grand Opening Sale hung in the window, already looked shabby.  Along the way the sides of buildings and phone poles were hung with posters.   Whole collages plastered with the faces of the leading rabbis of the community, announcing lectures telling people not to mingle with the Gentiles, not to dress immodestly, or to give money to help a certain widow with twelve orphans.  Likewise the weekly local newspaper often ran the names of people called to the Beit Din, the court that presided over all matters, cat calls to guard your eyes, guard your mouth and guard your children.

When the long driveway snaked at the pine tree the girl would quicken her pace and cut across the yard to the back kitchen door next to the bay window.  Always through the ice lace on the pane she could decipher the mood she was about to enter. Dirty dishes on the table meant nothing, a book open and out signaled the mother had gotten out of bed and moved through the house.

It was March; there were still some patches of snow on the ground and the lawn was pitted with small pools of melted brown broth.  Through the window she saw them both standing in front of the white refrigerator. She recognized Mrs. Leiber from the library, her very white skin, brown eyes and pursed mouth—she always looked as if she was about to say something but never did.  Her only awkward feature was her nose, which came to a near perfect point at the end.  Her skin glowed like a cameo.  She saw her mother’s hand around Mrs. Leiber’s upper arm and the other plunged splayed fingers into her hair, their lips touching and Mrs. Leiber’s head tilted back as if she was looking up but her eyes were closed. Her sheitel, not just a wig but stylized stiff blond with outward turned curls on either side, was not on her head and she had short-cropped, very black hair and looked a bit like Joan of Arc.  She was dressed in the mother’s blue and white striped robe and stood barefoot.

When she opened the door from the entranceway she heard them—a Morse code of sighs.  The sounds so unfamiliar she could only intuit a meaning; a noise like a knife cutting air.   She would not get the sound out of her head for a long time. “I’m so wet,” Mrs. Leiber said.

“Oh,” Mrs. Leiber said when she noticed the girl standing in the kitchen. She then gave an automatic reflex of a smile, as if she had just opened her door to unexpected and unwanted guests. The mother spun around on her heels to face the girl.

“Don’t you knock? Didn’t I teach you to knock?”  her mother said.

“Knock? It is the kitchen, no door,” the girl said.

“Aliza,” Mrs. Leiber started, trying to soothe what she uncomfortably noticed as the mother’s anger rising.  At that moment, Mrs. Leiber looked sweetly into the girl’s face and at once noticed that just like the mother she had one blue and one green eye.

“Aliza, she has mamish, exactly your eyes.  I have never seen it before and now I have seen it twice in one day.” She said it in a gusty and tender voice, as if a peacock had just displayed its plumage for her.  She put her cameo white hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“I have eight children and they all have the same color eyes,” she said as if they had been cheated out of something.  Mrs. Leiber continued to take in the girl.  She noted that she had on shoes at least three sizes too big, and the shoulders of the sweater were nearer the elbows.

“Such a day,” she said looking at the mother. And then, realizing she was just wearing a robe, Mrs. Leiber fled the kitchen and then reemerged fully dressed and politely excused herself out the back door.

“She’ll be back,” the mother said as she closed the screen door and placed Mrs. Leiber’s forgotten sunglasses on the counter.

She was the oldest, the other two were babies—one could walk with a tipsy gait, the other did not even sit up and only took a bottle.  They all looked somewhat alike with fair skin and light eyes.  The girl had wheat colored hair that she braided herself each morning, using the chrome trim on the side of the oven as a mirror and old rubber bands saved from newspapers. The babies mostly slept dressed only in undershirts and diapers.  They never went out and there was neither stroller nor carriage.  They both always smelled funny, like rusty nails.

The mother wanted to go to protest the war. She said that they would write a lawyer’s number on their arm with a ballpoint in case the cops arrested them. The mother put combs in the girl’s hair like a Spanish dancer and said, pointing to a map, “The world is changing and we will be part of it.” She did a little dance around the dining room adjusting the volume to Joan Baez on the record player: “you got to walk that lonesome valley, you got to walk it by yourself, ain’t nobody here can walk it for you, you got to walk by yourself…” each chord loosening the knots in the coarse ropes of conventionality.

As the weather warmed Mrs. Leiber visited.  Often the girl would get home from school to find both women outside sitting on a blanket under a tree drinking tea from glasses.  When she would leave to return to her own house, Mrs. Leiber always headed down Viola Road, past the twisted rows of apple trees on either side, crossing over Route 306 to the intersection, the invisible boundary into the area where the women wore small pillbox hats over their sheitels, where English was only spoken by outsiders.

Even making her way on the gravel side of the road Mrs. Leiber never looked disheveled in the smart European suits favored by the wealthy Chasidic women, crisp lapels on the jacket, a mid-calf skirt of the same material and her wig frozen into style.  She returned to her younger children, to the maid, to the cooked foods in the kitchen. Mrs. Leiber spoke German with her mother, sometimes French.  They both spoke many languages and had lived in other countries.  Mrs. Leiber’s husband traveled for business, every week to a different place—Antwerp, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, London.  Money poured in as if from an open spigot.  Her children were all over the world, schools in England, Switzerland, Jerusalem.  Despite this she did not seem worldly or sophisticated. She had a house full of beautiful things, Persian carpets, a French Armoire, gilt edges; but these neither reminded her of what she had lost, nor symbolized what she would have.  A silver pitcher was a silver pitcher.  It sat on a table.

The commonality between the two women was what the grandmother would later call “wanting the wrong things in life” and having “an upside-down head.”  She said this flatly without judgment as if she was commenting on the color of the sky.  What they shared was an impression of the world before and away from this place.  They both expected bread to have a hard outer crust, for a seamstress to arrive at the house when they needed an outfit, and that everyone played either piano or violin.  The particular America around them, with its subdivisions and long vistas, did not hold their attention.

To hear the mother tell it, the world separated as neatly as a sheet torn from the top of a tablet.  There were good people and bad people.  Nixon/bad equals Vietnam/bad.  Martin Luther King/good equals he was shot.  A few complications: the Russians had Hitler alive and hidden.  The FBI read people’s mail, and had lists. The mother was sure she was listed and her mail was read.  Whenever a piece of mail had the slightest crease the mother held it to the light, convinced it had been opened, read, resealed by an entire team of government gnomes hunched over an expansive dark wood conference table.  The people in this small community were bad; they were, she did not even hate to say it, little petty Jews.  They are not on a list.  Even as the mother explained, it laid on Mrs. Leiber’s brain as a thick fog.

“Come on Viv, don’t you read the newspaper? Can’t you see what’s going on?” the mother asked putting her hand on Mrs. Leiber’s shoulder.

The mother came from a big city, and had studied at the Sorbonne. She spoke languages, European languages. Not Yiddish—that is not a language, more of a vulgarity.  Even though nothing in the house matched or was a set, such that the neighbors at first asked when the furniture would be arriving, she had silver flatware and trays and a sterling tea set and candlesticks to prove her lineage. These were the artifacts of class.  She was elegant but that was not important—she merely held it out like a religious relic of where she came from—an ulna bone, skull plate, a shard of wood.  Her people (that she would never see again) had been well known, celebrated, cosmopolitan.  Chasidic stock, yes, but versed in the arts and sciences, physicians, musicians, and even an astronomer. European émigrés who had swept into every tearoom of the world’s grandest hotels.  They walked in the paved streets, not in wagon ruts or muddied cow paths. Ghosts now, billowing, translucent, hovering near the tiers of a wedding cake chandelier. The mother has no mother or father and no brothers or sisters. Only a mother-in-law that she called my soon to be former mother-in law.  She was waiting for an attorney to recalibrate her life and at the same time waited for people’s minds to open.  She felt it all was right at hand; she felt change like a warm breath on the back of her neck.  Then she will assume her rightful place wearing the crimson mantle, standing at the podium ministering to a congregation of fledgling radicals.  She circled rentals in the Village Voice.

Stonewall was amazing. “A kick line down the street,” the mother yelled into the phone to Mrs. Leiber. “You know, like show girls, moving toward the police—the New York City police.”  She was trying to explain this in three languages to Mrs. Leiber, who did not understand.

“Women? Dancing in the street?” Mrs. Leiber asked.

“No, Viv, men, dressed like women,” the mother went on.

“Why, dance in the street, and what, in a skirt?  I don’t know what you are talking about.  I don’t understand—kick line.” Mrs. Leiber turned the new words over in her mouth.

The days lengthened and night announced itself with the distant twinkle of fireflies. By July there were gatherings of the exiles at the moss green house—friends came, they drove up from the city and held poetry readings in the playroom. Someone read “Howl” and all of Walt Whitman’s “I Sing The Body Electric.” Sometimes they brought food, strange gooey concoctions from Chinatown, bits of red floating in a brown sauce eaten with black lacquered chopsticks.  The guests sat on the counters in the kitchen with legs dangling or Indian style on the floor using teacups for ashtrays. They blasted music and opened windows.  Like a memorized dialogue, the girl heard about Jacques Brel and Lotta Lenya and living in Greenwich Village.  Sometimes they nodded at the girl as she worked at her pink yarn and knitting needles or made a potholder at a small red loom.

It took some convincing because the first week of July was usually when the Leibers took their family vacation in the mountains.  Mrs. Leiber agreed to just stop in. She had made some potato pirogues that she would bring.

“Do you see what I have going on here?” the mother would say to her friends. “You drove in, did you see them? It is like an ant hill, and they don’t even speak English. It is a nightmare.” And with that the mother would flop into a chair and pick at the stuffing leaking from a tear in the upholstery.

It was a new atmosphere, especially for Mrs. Leiber, seeing Aliza with other people, and people like these—friends. From the embrace of the over-stuffed chair the mother was holding court.  Men were gliding through the rooms bare-chested while off in a back room the babies were frantic and screaming.  A cloud of smoke engulfed the room.  The girl watched Mrs. Leiber’s face tense as she stood holding her plate of pirogues.  The music was rebellious and lewd, a man belting out oh baby, oh baby, something something, I’m on fire.

“Oh, Viv,” the mother called out, patting the arm of the chair. Mrs. Leiber did not move and looked transfixed on an invisible thread.  She did not smile at the girl or at anyone.  Her head turned to follow one person and then to look at another. Some had torn and patched clothing, and bare feet with filthy heels.  Somehow they seemed sinister and menacing, like she had walked into a bad neighborhood.  The girl could see she felt terribly uncomfortable and terribly sad all at once.

Mrs. Leiber was relieved and confused when she pulled the door shut behind her unnoticed.  She was grateful to be going to a bungalow in the mountains with her family.  Quite suddenly she longed for her husband, the sound of his quiet voice, almost inaudible, longed to talk about their children, in that moment her life seemed as simple and unexpected as an instant Polaroid, glossy but real and important and hers.

What sent it all careening out of control and over the cliff was the day at the dress store a few weeks after the party.  Mrs. Leiber returned from the mountains but now kept a distance.  Nearly frantic, the mother went in and bought Mrs. Leiber crinolines and petticoats. In fact, after looking through the racks, she took the whole new Fall line, piled them on the counter and told the lady at the cash register to have them delivered to Mrs. Leiber, as a gift. She then asked for a card to enclose. The lady at the counter looked over the huge pile at the mother with an expression of confusion.

“These aren’t your size,” the woman said.  The girl recognized her as the mother of a classmate.

A comet streaking past, the mother flashed her a fierce and haughty look. “I told you to pack them and deliver them, and if you must know, they are a gift of love, for my lover.  So nosey, why are you so nosey?”  She hissed like the start of a teakettle.  It was this look and that voice that caused the woman at the counter to recoil.  To turn instantly away from the gray cash register and to reach for the phone the moment the door closed behind the mother.  The woman at the counter called the rabbi of the shul off Route 45; she called the principal of the school, who was the brother of the rabbi of the shul off Route 45. She called her own husband to come and pick her up—right away.

In the car the mother slapped the girl across the face, even though the girl had said nothing.  She must have realized what she had done. She pounded the steering wheel over and over with her hands and bit her lip.  The mother drove the girl home and left her at the end of the driveway and then turned the car around in a wide sweep.  The girl watched as the car snaked back down Viola Road.

The men were out walking with the boys, the street began to fill.  Inside houses meals were being prepared, tables set.  The girl ran into the moss green house.  There was no mother, no father.  The babies were flushed from screaming, their hair matted to their heads with sweat and dirt.  The girl took a bag of frozen peas and sprinkled it into the cribs for the babies to pick up and eat.  By this point they were greedy and smelled. She remembered that baby Freeda needed a bottle and she propped up for her by wedging it between the crib slats—like a water bottle in a gerbil cage.  They pulled and strained against being lifted. The mother, a rogue pigeon escaped from the cote, did not return. The girl ate raw meat because she had been warned never to go near the stove with her long hair.  The first few days the girl imagined that they were like a land-locked Robinson Crusoe, on an adventure. She felt safe in the house during the day, at night each tap of a branch against a window sent ribbons of fear through her.  After a few days, the days got bad too.

By the time the grandmother arrived the house was strewn with trash.  They had eaten uncooked rice from a box and raw pasta.  They drank maple syrup.  The grandmother screamed the mother’s name through the house—“Aliza!” she yelled up the stairs and down into the basement.

* * *

The grandmother walked through the house like she was stepping over corpses. Then the grandmother scrubbed floors, walls, tiles.  She took big pruning shears and cut back branches.  She went out in calf-length dresses and big black rubber boots, pulling stalks of blue chickweeds and lamb’s-quarters, hacking at a half-dead hedge of privet shrubs.  Wearing a flowered kerchief over her head that Eastern Europeans never seem to notice, that screamed, “I am from the old country.” Mindel Berg stood in the middle of the street smoothing her dress and studied other front yards.  Then with a shovel bought at a hardware store and four bushes, two blue mop-head hydrangeas and two rhododendrons from a nursery, she made the front entrance approximate the neighbors’.

This was not the first scandal to hit the Town of Ramapo.  There had been the fallout about some suspect kosher chicken, another one about meat. There were scandals that unraveled from Forty-seventh Street all the way up the Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway.  Any number of businesses with irregularities on the books.  But this was different and there was no re-landscaping it.

The grandmother tried to position herself, just like getting the right leverage on the shovel. On the day the grandmother went to meet the principal, she aimed to be prepared.  She wore a sky blue dress with a belt that matched a hat with bright red plastic cherries and a blue band.  As support, her girlhood friend Rebbitzin Gruner accompanied her. She supplied school clothes and shoes, had some weight in the community, and also had, if needed, a checkbook and her husband’s word that tuition would be paid.   The grandmother came fully made-up, her mouth highlighted with a slash of red lipstick, her cheeks hit by high streaks of rouge.  She carried a wicker handbag with a bent bamboo handle and dressed not to plead and not to offer an explanation, because she had none, but rather to attempt to assure the girl a place.

At the school she had to pass through two anterooms, the walls lined with massive leather-bound gold embossed volumes of Talmud and various tractates.   Once seated in the inner office the first thing the principal said to the grandmother, from behind a past storm of loose paper, was that he knew for a fact Mrs. Leiber was in Canada under the care of professionals, resting and making a fine progress, and he had no reason not to expect her to return to her family soon. This was not merely a piece of information passed from one to another in casual conversation; it was an opportunity, a chance, a pole held out into the rushing waters that in fact she had no chance of grasping onto.  The grandmother understood this and felt forgiveness was a wave that hit the shore and quickly went back out to sea.  Finally, with no tone of regret, not the slightest hint of consolation, he said the truth was many people knew the story and he had other children to protect and donors to consider.  He then opened a folder lying on his desk, looked down and did not raise his eyes again.

The mother would call sometimes and demand things—her books, a silver sugar bowl, a worn carpet. “Aliza,” the grandmother would yell into the phone, “I can’t hear you; we have a bad connection, call back. No.  I don’t know, I have not seen it.”

“It is a chutzpah,” the grandmother said after she returned the white phone to the cradle on the wall. “She should be angry at us? What did we do?”

“Did she want to talk to me, is she going to call back?” the girl asked.  She was working on an intricate picture with a house and a rainbow and a horse and a girl.

The grandmother cleaned the house and parsed through the children.  The boy was sent to other relatives with money who could raise and educate a boy, and the girl and baby stayed with her.  They moved out of the house into a small apartment closer to stores and a new school that would become one of many.

The grandmother made friends with the neighbors in the new neighborhood. She graciously accepted their cooked dishes the week they moved in, the invitations that followed and even the shared duties of watching children play. Her willingness to converse in Yiddish and to hem a dress here and pants there were well appreciated. The women admired the grandmother’s eye for decorating, for adding small details to a room, a vase, a golden and blue throw pillow.  They admired her upright stance, the fact that each step was measured. The truth was they still eyed the girl at a distance, unsure what she knew, what she had seen, how much she understood.  And they, after all, had their own children to protect.  A girl laden with god knows what happened in that house, times ten. They had to protect their children.

Once the grandmother took the girl to visit the mother in a house on a lake and there was a small rowboat turned upside down next to a small dock.  They walked from the road where the taxi had left them off up a gravel and dirt path, the whole time the grandmother saying, “How to find such a place? Who could find such a place? It’s like a forest for Partisans and wolves.”

The girl sat on a lumpy torn couch with her feet dangling across from the mother in a black captain’s chair that she recognized.  She had dressed especially carefully with knee socks that matched her skirt.  The mother did not offer anything to eat or drink and did not ask her about school.  The mother just sat and gave the girl a long hard look.  She eyed the purple hair bows that the grandmother had put in as if they offended her. There was another woman there named Bobbie, older than the mother.  At first she stood behind the mother’s chair. Bobbie then moved through the room with a military swagger, a general inspecting the troops; her biceps straining under her tight T-shirt.  The girl thought it rude and mean but it was obvious that this was Bobbie’s territory. The grandmother stood with her back to them staring out a large window that looked onto the lake—she said something about the view.

When they left, the grandmother turned for just an instant outside the door and was about to say, “Please, Aliza, please.” But before she could speak the mother looked at her and said, “Don’t start,” and closed the door.

Invariably the daily demands of life eclipsed the real reason they were together. They settled into a routine—a poorly mended rag doll family, flopping awkwardly through town.  The grandmother would not be cowed, not by the greengrocer putting withered greens into the bag, not by the butcher with a thumb on the scale. “How many fingers of his did I pay for today?”

Those times when the girl offered that she had not been invited to yet another one of her classmates’ parties, and had been crossed off every possible list, real and imagined, and not counted in the tight social tally, the grandmother would nod.  In reality the girl was on a list—a blacklist, the mother’s word.  The Grandmother never offered comfort or compensation by way of an alternative treat, never said they would do something themselves that would be just as fun.   Except once the grandmother drew a long breath, a medical exam breath.  Just then the girl wanted to say she hated this town, these people, having to be alone, but she knew if she said that it would sound like her mother, whom they never mentioned by name.

“Her temper and her mouth,” the grandmother offered, even though no question had been posed.  “Here, in this place,” she said pointing to the floor—although the girl understood it to mean a larger expanse. “No anger, no temper.”

By this point she had seen enough to understand the pairings required in this life.  She could see the line of demarcation drawn, that outer distance, the tree line half way up the mountain, an off-limits boundary where nothing could grow, where her mother stood, both hands blowing mock kisses.

Nobody could see the whole, some are reactions expected, predictable, a constant; others a variable.  How far the tale traveled and how distorted it may have become and how crudely it may have been interpreted and internalized were random.  By the time the world had not changed the grandmother bought her a new outfit for the Yomim Tovim. They went to three stores, trying things on—walk, turn, walk, turn, walk, turn, the grandmother working three fingers into the top of the waist of skirts, looking for growth room, Mrs. Gruner standing off to the side and nodding with approval. Finally, it was a white skirt with orange and brown stripes and a matching brown button-down shirt with a collar.  The shoes were black patent leather, with a bow on the top and a slight heel.

The entire neighborhood smelled of ply-board, and all the sukkahs, wooden framed, branch-roofed dwellings, were decorated with plastic grapes and construction paper chains.  As always, the yeshiva across the street had the largest sukkah in town set up in the parking lot.

The girl never crossed the street to the school side except this once when two boys signaled to her and shouted in Yiddish,  “Vee koift men fish?”

An odd question.  In fact she knew where the fish market was and she crossed the street to point them in that direction.  The parking lot was empty, the school out for the holiday.  It seemed strange that boys would be sent to buy fish so late in the afternoon and in the middle of the vacation week.  This thought just skimmed across the surface of her mind.  She let it slide under because it struck her that this was the first time ever that anybody had spoken to her outside her home, the first time she was asked a question.  They both wore the identical uniform of black pants and white button shirts, with stiff black shoes. One had his shirttails out and bright red hair with loosening corkscrew side-locks.   When she came closer she saw that one was undoing his belt, and had his hand inside his white underwear and was pulling.  At first the girl thought he was like one of those very slow boys who trailed off behind all others in the family and got lost in parks.  She was about to tell him kindly but firmly that he can’t undress in public and to go home.  Before she could speak they pulled her behind the school.

What he was holding had a slightly different complexion than the boy’s very pale freckled face, a shade darker, closer to the shade of his lips.  One of them circled around her and somehow maneuvered her up against a heavy metal door. She could feel the bar of the door pressing painfully into her back.  The ground was dirty with cans and leaves and the kinds of things that collect in isolated unused doorways.  When they pushed on her shoulders she slumped to the pavement, with her head against the door.  The redheaded boy’s pants were around his ankles; he squatted at her feet completely exposed and then landed on top of her and pushed her new sweater up to clear a space on her stomach.

“Nisht tzvishen de bainer—not between the legs,” the other boy ordered. He spoke in imperatives, rapid speech words she never heard, except to know that he was firing off commands in a patois that caused her to wince and grab at the air.

The taller boy stood lookout a few feet away.  She watched him in his nervous furtive sway, not unlike the movements of prayer.  The redheaded one held her arms, pinning them to the ground.  He was on top of her, looking directly at her, his face less than an inch away from her own.  He never deflected his gaze.  Then he lunged back and forth again and again against her exposed stomach until she heard a faint grunt and a sigh.  Even though her mouth was open, no sound came out. Wedges of glass sparkled on the black top. On her stomach he left something of himself wet and milky and she imagined it was puss from a wound, a terrible disease, a sickness that was killing him and now her. Instinctively she covered her face with the back of her hand and with her other she reached out defensively. There in the secret hiss of boys, nobody screams when it happens or when it happens again.  There was a kind of silence, a white noise of leaves crushed underfoot, except for a slight grunt, like an old dog being pulled too hard on its leash, or the weakest kid on the field trying for an airborne ball, familiar sounds.

After he had his turn, the prayer boy stood up, looked straight at her, and said in perfect English, “Tell your mother.”

There were scratches on her back, and some blood.  She had been cut by shards of glass on the ground and had not even felt it. There was no hurry.  The new clothes were torn and worthless. All around her she could hear families begin to gather in their sukkahs.  In the twilight she saw a constellation of blue twinkle lights strung festively around the booths.

She would say nothing.  At that moment she was still miles and many boys away from the lives she would have, all the thin dresses that would tear away like tissue. What she learned was that even long after the boys grew into men they still wanted her—with their fingers digging deep into the wells of her clavicles.

By then, she knew to do what they wanted.   That’s what she would have told her mother, how she formed her lips into a perfect O each time.  A magician, she pulled bright silk handkerchiefs from her mouth, each time she moaned to the boy on top of her.

For another story by B.A. Newmark, from the POV of one character in this story 30 years later, check out “The Last Lion,” in The Montreal Review.

Credit: Flickr / Unhindered by Talent

“Chicago is here,” Moishy said.

Chicago was an American living in Jerusalem who had fallen on hard times, or, possibly, had always lived hard. He may have had family somewhere in another part of Jerusalem or somewhere not far, or not at all. Details of his life, such as where he was from and how he got here, were mysterious, but the one thing he couldn’t hide was his thick American accent. Hence the nickname: “Chicago.”

Now he was here again, on one of his twice-weekly rounds, going from table to table, jiggling the coins in his hand. For some reason or other I had taken to disliking Chicago. He was cheerful, usually, never insisted that you give him something, the way most beggars did, and he never cursed when you shrugged your shoulders to indicate, “Sorry, don’t have.” But there was something about him that irritated me, his round belly, his accent, scruffy beard, the way he looked away when I made eye contact, or maybe it was his aversion to small talk. To this day I can’t figure it out.

“I can make sure he never comes around again,” I said to the bucherim at my table.

They all turned to me, curious. Beri, at the corner, continued shokelling so the mashgiach wouldn’t notice that he’s chatting instead of studying – his every move calculated for its effect on his eventual shidduch (although, quite strangely, if I’m not mistaken, he ended up getting divorced).
I collected a pile of coins from my table-mates. The boys looked on from the corners of their eyes lest the mashgiach on duty notice the commotion. I piled the coins up neatly, borrowed a cigarette lighter from one of the more eager faces around me and heated up the stack. Chicago was only a few steps away, inching slowly towards us. There were too many eyes on me – a point of no return if ever there was one. I knew I was doing something terrible before he reached for the neat and very hot stack. I was overcome with guilt even before I heard him scream.
The whole shul heard him scream.

“I don’t know, I just don’t know,” I told the menahel. I really didn’t know why I did it. I couldn’t explain it to myself, let alone to someone else.

“I have to kick you out,” the menahel said. For once I agreed . I deserved to be suspended. But I wasn’t. He must have sensed my guilt and in his infinite wickedness he probably wanted it to simmer and stew inside of me.

Chicago never came by again. I often saw him sitting in the coffee room of a neighborhood shul that had minyanim until late morning. I started avoiding that shul, which back then meant waking up early to catch the yeshiva minyan. On days that I awoke too late and had no choice but to attend that shul, I tried entering through the back , or I hurried through the main doors, eyes downcast, hoping to pass unnoticed. Lucky for me, Chicago never looked up from what he was doing. He always sat facing the crowd, his eyes on the floor or on people’s shoes, his hands at the ready for spare change.

Word of my callous act didn’t reach far, it appears, for within a year I was engaged to a wonderful girl. I knew, however, that I couldn’t get married before I asked Chicago for forgiveness. I did not want to have shalom bayis problems, deformed kids, a life of poverty, to become inflicted with a nasty illness, or a host of other things I begged God daily that he spare me. Chicago was still there in the coffee room. I walked in there one day, tried to make eye contact but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. I gave the man a 20-dollar bill. He looked up for a moment to see if I wanted change. I just smiled and said, “It’s for you.” “Thank you,” he said. If he recognized me he hid it very well. But I still hadn’t asked for forgiveness, I just didn’t know how to.

Purim came around, and I decided to collect whatever I could and give it to Chicago. I ended up with over 1,000 shekel, which I gave him in a little plastic bag. Chicago opened it, looked at it, looked at me, smiled, then looked down and thanked me, or the floor. I was leaving Israel in a few weeks, and getting married soon after. I was desperate and out of ideas.

My last Shabbos in Israel, I woke up terribly late. I went to daven at the local minyan factory, then went to another shul where bucherim knew to go after late prayers, where they served extra-spicy chulent and Yerushalmi kugel, even for latecomers. But I was late for that too. The shul was empty save for one man: Chicago. He was holding a couple of disposable aluminum pans filled with cholent and dried out pieces of chicken. He was happy to see me. I was happy too.

“Rabbi Chicago” I said, not knowing how else to address him, “I’m so glad to see you here.”

“I have to bring it home, my family is waiting for the food,” he said. He didn’t seem bothered or curious that I’d called him “Rabbi Chicago.” Maybe that was indeed his name.

“I’ll help you carry them,” I offered.

“It’s far,” he said. “And hot”. The address he gave me was far, and the weather was kind of hot for an Israeli day in spring.

Half an hour later I was still walking, panting, and schlepping both pans. Chicago didn’t utter a word the whole time. We walked slowly, mostly uphill as fate would have it. The pans that hadn’t seemed so hot at the beginning were now scalding my palms and the edges of my fingers. I shuffled the weight from arm to arm, trying to disperse the heat evenly, when I suddenly realized that I was being dealt a punishment so apt, so perfect that I could only embrace the pain.

I walked up the three floors to his apartment and laid the pans on the floor outside his doorway, exactly as he instructed. I didn’t get to see his family, but I got to see his eyes when he thanked me.

By the time I walked to my chuppah I no longer had burn marks or blisters, but I knew I had been redeemed.

Regarding the accuracy of claims made in the book, I’m not qualified to comment. However, I do find it troubling, and will follow the situation as it develops. As Ms. Feldman writes in the prologue: “[...] publishing my life story calls for scrupulous honesty, and not just my own.” Hella Winston is a fine reporter, but I doubt it taxed her excessively to find out the truth behind the story of the alleged murder. Why couldn’t Simon & Schuster have done the same? The most valuable aspect of the story—that people within the community find a covered-up child murder somewhat plausible—is a much sharper point than a factually incorrect claim of a killing, and the distraction saps the point’s punch.

Unorthodox is not a terrible book, but it is a deeply flawed book. It sorely lacks the maturity of years and is often transparently poor in insight. The book would have been far more valuable with a few more years distance from her break with the community, giving more time for reflection on the past and more content of her life post-break.

The lack of maturity manifests in many ways. Williamsburg is invariably described as dirty, smelly, filthy, etc. That may be how it’s colored in her memory, but a more mature and nuanced view of the Brooklyn neighborhood would surely be more insightful. The book is also tainted with myths, mistakes, and poor editing. The very first sentence contains a myth about Satmar (that it’s named after Saint Mary; it isn’t). The timing of events don’t fit with external evidence. Many of these are excusable as things that she believed; it is a memoir after all. But clarifying such things and identifying what was (understandable) incorrect belief is what separates a good book from a poor one.

Critically, the author makes no distinction between the things that were peculiar to her circumstances and what is common in Satmar in general. Many things she describes (maybe even accurately) as her experience in her family are definitely not typical of Satmar life. Her indiscriminate mixing of aberrations with things that are common in Satmar damages the book’s flow and accuracy, even as a memoir. The book is riddled with it: that a Satmar woman would expect to never fly on a plane (pg. 9), that compliments and physical affection to kids is frowned upon (pg. 18), and on throughout the book. This flaw is particularly tragic for the book since it’s so unnecessary. The parts of her story that are common within Satmar are often moving and interesting, as they should be. The conflation leaves the reader with a mistaken impression about Satmar, surely not something a book with this one’s subtitle should aspire to.

More time and distance would have also benefited the characterization of some of her family members. Her Aunt Chaya in particular bears the brunt of this heavy-handed, thick-lined drawing. Surely she deserves a more shaded portrayal than the Disney villain she’s made out to be. Chaya’s story is not one that is undeserving of sympathy. She was given the thankless task of finding a place and future for a girl with awful prospects in a community where reputation is second to Godliness. Many will find fault with her actions, but the book’s moral authority was weakened by a lack of any sympathy for a woman in a tough position through no fault of her own and trying to make the best of it. The only allowance Ms. Feldman grants Chaya is a single sentence at the end of the prologue, one that is immediately repudiated by the rest of the book.

Her husband, Eli, also falls victim to this lack of sympathy. Ms. Feldman never credits his feelings as a young man stymied by vaginismus and, later, a wife who is uninterested in sex or even foreplay. Ms. Feldman writes that they fight, but not about what. He was thrown into a loveless arranged marriage as much as she was, but only she is portrayed as victimized by it. I did find curious how quickly she glossed over the implication that he gave her an STD, but the brevity was too cryptic to read into.

More distance would have also improved her insight into what she left behind. The end of the book makes pretty clear that she claims no loss, and definitely no regret, from what she left behind. But life is rarely that neat, and the Satmar community for all its flaws is more than a conglomeration of horrors. Most telling in this regard is her comment quoted in The Forward’s Sisterhood blog: “‘Everything I miss I can have,’ she said. ‘If I want cholent, I make cholent. I have it all now.’” Religion didn’t become a near-universal aspect of human culture due to its connection to ethnic food. If she she thinks cholent is what she left behind then she needs to ruminate a bit longer.

The book succeeds best when it connects emotionally with the reader, as it did many times with me. I twisted with pained horror at her having to sneak out to the library, and I had to put the book down for a breather when she’s forced to gather her beloved books to be sent to the dumpster. Libraries have been a big and happy part of my life for decades; my library card is rubbed smooth from active use. The thought of hiding library visits and then losing one’s books is particularly painful for me. Her pain is shared by other members of Unpious. I had the same moving experience reading Shulem Deen’s post Raising Rebels: Pt II, wherein he describes having to bring his children into the conspiracy of their library attendance. My kids each got a library card not long after receiving their birth certificate, and almost never miss the Friday pre-Shabbos library trip to restock for the week. Ms. Feldman’s experience was affecting and deeply troubling.

Her experience of leaving Chasidism so as to gain access to wished-for things is not unique. At several points in the book I was struck by the similarity of her feelings to the feeling expressed in the video, made by members of the Unpious.com community, titled It Gets Besser. A play on the gay It Gets Better campaign, it shows before and after pictures of people who left Chasidism. The after pictures show them swimming with dolphins, boating, biking, camping, etc. When I first saw that video, what came to mind is that I, as a member (in good standing!) of a Modern Orthodox community, do all those things—and with my shul friends, definitely not in secret. Lest you think I mean that as a judgment against them for leaving Orthodoxy to get access to those things, allow me to disabuse you of that notion: I mean the opposite. That video and Ms. Feldman’s book are a more damning indictment of the Chasidic world than any gleefuly prurient exposé of hilchot niddah could ever be. When the book is at its most effective is when it is expressing how ill-suited the lifestyle is for people who will not be happy within its narrow confines. The Satmar lifestyle documented in the book can and does make some people joyously happy—but woe is to you if you’re not one of those people. You needn’t be far from the prescribed and proscribed norm to suffer; there’s precious little allowance for personal quirks. The only Chasidim I see at triathlons are Lubavitch, and thus books like Ms. Feldman’s ring more forcefully.

Inevitably when this point about her book is raised, some jump in to denounce her for not remaining observant in a Modern Orthodox environment. But her book contains the answer to that: why should she? The community spent decades drilling into her the illegitimacy of any other stream of Judaism; it’s hypocritical of them to then turn and demand she disregard it. You can’t fully legitimate a Modern Orthodox lifestyle as an acceptable alternative and still manage to keep people as Satmar. A sense of being the One and Only Right Way to God is a necessary ingredient, and she imbibed it.

Furthermore, what good would it have done her? Would she have maintained a healthy, meaningful relationship with her family? Of course not. As per above, that option would scarcely have left her better off. She’d still be alienated, divorced, and tossed into a different culture. Two years ago I spent some time with a young man who was a Modern Orthodox ex-Chasid. The guy was 100% frum. He had done exactly what those people suggest when he found the Chasidic lifestyle too stifling: became MO. I spent a whole 24 hours in a car with him, so I got to know him: great guy, amazingly upbeat. But his family virtually disowned him and are ashamed of him. When he got married, his father refused to attend unless he wore a shtreimel to his own wedding. You understand: the shame. He told his father that he can choose to not come, but he himself will do as he wants. His father folded his bluff. Still, he suffers constantly from being distant with his family despite being totally frum, a nicer guy than I am, and having a bunch of cute kids. The book doesn’t spell it out, but the lessons she was taught make this clear enough.

The book is undermined by Feldman’s lack of maturity in other ways. She has a tendency to lump all non-Chasidic lifestyles together, failing to draw important distinctions within the broader world. In this manner, she refers to her desire to not be Chasidic as a desire to be “normal.” (Pg. 2141: “I’m going to be normal, so normal no one will ever know.”) On pg. 230 she writes that she doesn’t “own any normal clothing” so she buys jeans. But normal depends on context, and even wearing jeans can be a sign of conformity to a sub-sect (just ask the skinny jeans-wearing hipsters that share her maligned Williamsburg). It’s common among people leaving an insular world to be too blinded by the glare of The Outside World in their adjusting eyes to make out the gradients of other lifestyle and cultures. What is “normal,” and does a black community where basketball star Grant Hill is called an Uncle Tom for being educated qualify? Chasidim aren’t the only ones that view education with suspicion and as cultural betrayal. Only in the epilogue is there a glimmer of awareness of this when she makes an insightful comparison between the community from which she departed and the New Orleans community she’s visiting. What’s normal in NOLA?

In the same vein, she shares with many ex-fundamentalists the trait of being too easily impressed. The teachers she meets are all paragons of brilliance, and her friends are all living lives worthy of jealousy. I could only cringe when she writes about meeting a poetry professor (pg 223), “I feel privileged just speaking to him.” Time would have left the admiration intact but put the fawning in perspective.

The lack of time also makes for a very rushed ending. From the time she decides to finally make a break for it to the end of the book is a breathless three pages. In those few pages she has enough time to assure us that everything is wonderful now, all her dreams came true (really!), and she regrets nothing. Lost in the haste to end on a saccharine note are some fascinating opportunities for reflection. Also inexplicable is the missed opportunity to see through her eyes how outsiders view Chasidim, something she gives only a tantalizing hint of (“people described them to my face as pushy, offensive, and unhygienic”). That glimpse of trouble in paradise begs for a more thorough exploration.

I’ve read many OTD-related books (heck, nearly all of them). Many are great books, some are insightful, and most had value. My critique of Unorthodox has nothing to do with her decision to leave Chasidism, or even observance. She left a shitty life, as she had every right to. Her personal circumstances were even more stifling and just plain atrocious than the average Satmar woman. Ms. Feldman’s book is, as I said, deeply flawed on its own merits.

Discussion participants are: Leah Vincent, Zelda Deutsch, Shpitzle Shtrimpkind, and Baal Devarim. Moderated by: Shulem Deen. (More detailed participant bios below.)

It should be noted that this discussion is not about the contents of the book, but only about certain issues related to its pre-release publicity. Most of the participants in this discussion have not yet had a chance to read the book, and comments should not be taken as judgment of the book itself.

Regardless of any of the issues raised below, we extend our heartfelt congratulations to Deborah for what is surely a great accomplishment and we wish her the most outstanding success in this and future endeavors.

Click here to purchase “Unorthodox” on Amazon.com

* * *

Shulem Deen: Let’s begin with the basics.

Many have argued that Feldman, in interviews and articles about the book’s release, has cited practices in the Hasidic community that are either non-existent or in terms too broad to be deemed truthful. (Examples: Hasidim don’t wear seatbelts and don’t take their children to doctors.) Others, on the other hand, have argued that Feldman tells only of her own experiences, and despite the fact that these practices are unrecognizable to many members of these communities, they’re valid parts of her own story.

Do you believe there’s a problem with how she’s presented her story to the media, and if so, why? More specifically, if we recognize that many of her descriptions of Hasidic life are indeed truthful, does it matter that some of her descriptions are exaggerated and/or distorted?

Leah Vincent: I’m thrilled to be a part of this conversation.

I think the issue of exaggeration matters very much. Many of us are very concerned with issues in the ultra-Orthodox community. Because Deborah now has such a public platform, if she does indeed exaggerate, she risks discrediting her peers who are advocating for change.

But I do think there is a fierce backlash against her that is only masked by accusations of exaggeration. My sense is there is a lot of (understandable) fear. Those who leave the ultra-Orthodox community are so reviled by their communities of origin, that many of us struggle with a strong sense of insecurity. We set high standards of success for ourselves, or are extraordinarily respectful of the ultra-Orthodox community, as if desperate to prove that those who leave the ultra-Orthodox community are not “losers” or “liars” or “bitter,” which is what we are often accused of being. And then, there may also be some envy about her literary success.

Personally, though, I’m more concerned with supporting our peers, building our community and exposing the abuses of ultra-Orhodoxy, than protecting our image – although I recognize a minimal amount of the latter is necessary to effectively do the former. If some among us exaggerate – or engage in any other behavior we have been accused of by the ultra-Orthodox – we must take responsibility, but we should be careful not to let the conversation be dominated with small quibbles regarding the character of the ‘accuser’ when there are significantly larger misdeeds of the ‘accused’ that need to be addressed.

Zelda Deutsch: Shulem, thanks for inviting me to be a part of this.

When I first read the Post interview, I was shocked and disappointed. Much of what she said was not familiar to me, even though we grew up in the exact same community. I will give her the benefit of the doubt, though. Two people living in the same household, even more so in the same community, can perceive their environments and experience things very differently. This is her story and how she experienced it. Her experiences and her view of things are as valid as any of ours. I believe she has a right to tell her story as long as she tells the truth, even if it’s with a bit of an angry twist. On the other hand, though, if she is greatly exaggerating or seriously veering from the truth, it makes the rest of us who have gone through this journey look bad.

Growing up in the community and the journey of leaving is already filled with intense experiences and emotions. I don’t understand the need to exaggerate or embellish. There is going to be a backlash against the book regardless of whether she tells the truth or not. Why give them ammunition? Why give them the opportunity to find inconsistencies? I’m hoping that the book is a more accurate portrayal of this journey than the media coverage of it suggests. Notice that I’m not using the word “balanced.” If she feels that her life in the community was filled with more hurt than happiness, I don’t think she is obligated to sugarcoat it.

Baal Devarim: Does it matter if her descriptions are exaggerated/distorted? Of course it matters! Exaggerations and distortions and outright lies serve no-one save perhaps the author (and her publisher). Although it is supposed to be a memoir, the book is clearly marketed as uncovering the dirty little secrets of the Hasidic lifestyle and culture. But, oh, how I wish it does that! Heaven knows, we can use some of that. It would do the Hasidic culture some good to shine a bright spotlight on the rotten aspects (combined with the beautiful aspects) of such a closed but highly visible society.

But so far, we are not getting any of that. Instead we get horrifying and salacious details of lesbian mikveh women and useless sexual organs and grisly murders — some of which may be outright lies (like the murder) and others, while perhaps they may be true in isolated cases, certainly cannot be said to be part of the experience of Hasidic life in general.

Truth matters, especially when you’re pretending to tell the truth. And while some degree of exaggeration and distortion is perhaps acceptable and expected in a popular book, a book with some degree of truth and the rest exaggeration and distortion is not. (Note that my impression of what is in the book is based on the points raised in interviews; so far I have not read the actual book.)

Shpitzle Shtrimpkind: (ehhem.) I would love to be thrilled to be part of this conversation. I’m at the gym and I’m getting more worked up and warmed up on this subject than on squats.

So…

Responding to Leah…

Very much like Leah, I feel there’s a need for change in the community. Abuses, injustice, and infringements on personal freedom are rampant in the community. The pain and trauma that is swept under the rug is unforgivable. However, I believe that change must come from both within and without, that it must come with respect to a culture that has a right to function and blossom as long as the abuses don’t. That change will come from bridging these two worlds, not from burning the bridges. So I wonder: can positive change come from a book that is shining a glaring, flashing media spotlight on the problems of the Hasidic world?

Sadly, from the way the articles were slinging cliched, exaggerated, and often-ridiculous accusations against the community, I don’t see a positive effect. On the contrary, I am afraid that this would inhibit change and only serve to prove the frum community’s attitude toward those who go off the derech. Chasidim in the community who are open to hearing our stories, who need to hear about their rights, who struggle to make sense of their world and the outside world, will not respond to a message that blatantly distorts their own experience of reality. Such an attempt will be perceived only as a transparent attempt at fame. Those living the double life or on the fence will find themselves trying to defend accusations against those who go OTD without a valid defense. I am certain that when I was a Hasidic mother in the community, the article in the New York Post would have strengthened my sense of solidarity with the community, this feeling that the outside world does not “get us,” doesn’t care to “get us,” is gullible and susceptible to buying into cliches with enthusiasm and unquestioning faith in its messenger.

If I would be convinced that a blasting exposé to secular readers would results in something more than balm on our own anger, something concrete and positive, I would be very grateful for the work Feldman has done. But I am not feeling optimistic, if this is only an exercise in beating away at the Hasidic community with a big stick of angry attacks.

Leah Vincent: There are two issues you mention here, Shpitzle, that I want to pick up on: First – who has the right to advocate for change, and second, whether or not Deborah’s advocacy is effective.

Regarding the first – if only insiders have the right, what should one do if insiders are not making use of that right? Do we – or any outsider, no matter how removed from that world – have any obligation to help clear victims* of that society? And doesn’t someone who was raised in that community have some right to be critical, some legitimacy to advocate for change?

And as to whether or not Deborah’s route is effective – without disagreeing with you, I’m curious – what alternative technique do you think would be effective for someone in Deborah’s position?

* Without going down the rabbit hole of cultural relativism, I think there are at least some abuses we can all agree are clearly wrong.

Shpitzle Shtrimpkind: Leah, [you wrote]: “There are two issues you mention here, Shpitzle, that I want to pick up on: who has a right to advocate for change, and whether or not Deborah’s advocacy is effective.”

Perhaps I wasn’t clear. The issues I raised were only in how change should be advocated and whether Deborah’s advocacy is effective.

Anyone can advocate for change. The way I think change should happen is in conjunction with the community, working with people from within, from the fringes, or from the outside. If the world knows, but the Chasidic world doesn’t, what changes? If we sling random insults in a race to garner as much media publicity as possible, you essentially lose all your sympathy from people from the community. Catchy phrases like “rolled up nightgown” and “curfews” bodes well for gaining an audience through the media, but it has no message whatsoever for those to whom this is a part of daily life.

Which brings me to your second question: I am certain she could have been effective if she had been honest, descriptive, and aimed for accuracy. There are important ideas that get lost in the sensationalized narrative.

Zelda Deutch: I think writing a book is a very effective way to advocate for change. Why are children encouraged to read books? Why do people read in general? To acquire knowledge. And with knowledge comes the power to make a difference. Whether Deborah is in a position to educate people and to promote change is a good question. My personal opinion is that the book may be too hurried, maybe she wrote it too soon after leaving. That said, she felt ready to write it, and it seems like she had a burning desire to get her story out there. I don’t question her right to write a book. My worry is more about the content. I have to agree with Shpitzle, when people in the community read a book that they feel portrays them inaccurately and has some clearly questionable statements, it only solidifies their belief that they are right and nothing needs to change. And those living on the fence might start doubting whether their issues with the Orthodox lifestyle are valid. I disagree, though, that change needs to come exclusively from within. I think after so many years of things being swept under the rug, it’s time to realize that change from within is minute to non-existent.

Leah, I think people who have left the community definitely have a right to tell their story, even if it is highly critical. Especially in cases of abuse, it can be helpful and spread a powerful message.

Shulem Deen: Zelda – Question for you – and others can chime in…

On the surface, all of us here should be on Feldman’s side; one would think we’re all fighting the same fight. But judging from many conversations I’ve had in recent days, there are many negative reactions to some of the articles/interviews. One almost gets the sense that many of us have suddenly forgotten that we too have spent years with all these restrictions and actively rebelled against them.

Leah raised the issue of envy, which I find interesting, but I wonder if that oversimplifies it. There have been articles about many, many who’ve left the fold, but few have generated anything near the heated reactions that Feldman’s has. Another person mentioned the fact that Feldman presents herself as a “trailblazer” when so many others have done it with equal or greater challenges, with even more harrowing stories, and have done so while extending enormous support to others.

So what do you think is driving the negative responses? Is it just the distortions? Is it it envy? Something else?

Zelda Deutch: I think most people are mature and smart enough to praise a good book. The zinger here, the feelings boiling up in people is frustration, I think. There are so many who have left that have interesting stories. As I mentioned before, growing up in Orthodox / ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and then stepping away from them leaves most of us with a suitcase full of stories involving love, tradition, pain, innocence, horror, the gamut of experiences and emotions. When people read these interviews, the hype, the exaggerations, it’s frustrating because most stories about leaving the community are seriously deep and moving. There is no need for embellishments.

Many of us have been out for a long time, have been to hell and back, and here comes someone straight off the boat who feels she is ready to write a book and is already an expert on all things OTD. I think that’s what bothers many people. At least that is what bothers me.

I’m not sure about anyone else, but I do feel it odd that Deborah considers herself a trailblazer. She’s not the first one to have done it. Many people I know have done it before her, and still others have done it before them.

But in the end, even with all the questions about the book, I do feel that we need to be on Deborah’s side. She may not have done it in the most graceful way, but I’m hoping her intentions are good.

Baal Devarim: What is driving the negative responses? I say: what does it matter? Complete objectivity is a myth in any case. As much as those of us who have made major changes in our life — to the great consternation of our friends and family — would like to think otherwise, we are no Mr. Spock. We may be driven mainly by cool-headed logic, but of course we also deal with emotions such as envy and jealousy and lust and empathy and anger and hate and love, besides for hurt pride and feelings of being violated and the need for our “true” struggles to be heard and the hell of uncertainty and the precariousness of our tenuous relationship to our (former) community. But again, so what? Why does it matter besides for the comforting ability to sling some ad hominem remarks at us that it may provide?

What matters is this: are the negative responses justified? Are the criticisms true and fair? And as far as I can judge the answer is: yes. For as far as I can tell not only does her telling of her experiences lack nuance, but the book would never countenance nuance even if it were the only lifeboat available aboard the sinking costa orthodoxia.

And that brings me to the next point. Many of us hope and wish for change in the Hasidic culture. We may still be – partially or completely – stuck in it, or we may have kids growing up there, or we may have family there, or we may have a feeling of nostalgia or of caring or of true concern for the people in our former lives. And for change to happen we need an honest and open discussion of the issues, which this book isn’t. The interviews so far read like someone telling a breathless story of human sacrifice and rape by pineapples and Hasidic baby-blood spilling in doctorless flophouses (while everyone knows we only spill Christian blood for the matzos!).

Unfortunately, distortions like these overshadow the very many truths that are undoubtedly in the book as well – truths that need to be told and discussed and argued about if we have any hope of affecting meaningful change. As it is, the book provides a too-easy target for ridicule and is very susceptible to simple hand-waving and to charges of vindictive mendaciousness – whether true in any particular instance or not.

If only we could uphold it as a standard bearer for the painful truth! For in reality the facts are much less bawdy but much sadder in the long term than these outrageous tales (again, even if these bawdy tales may, in fact, be true in some particular instances). The lack of preparedness for facing the outside world, the awfully, awfully inadequate education provided to our children, the way any attempt at individuality is cruelly and painfully crushed and rooted out, the way anyone with an above average need or aspiration or aptitude or curiosity for philosophy or science or the arts or for expressing themselves ultimately is in danger of finding themselves emotionally choked and silenced. All by the subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to conform and fit in the community mold.

And then there is the painful issue with the way children are often yielded as a weapon and as a vicious form of blackmail above the heads of those parents who dare not to conform to strict community norms – not to mention those who dare leave or even speak out about the desire to leave. This contributes to our stories pain and struggle and emotional (and sometimes physical) distress – stories that beg to be told honestly, with the nuance and the terrifying grayness of reality fully intact and without it being completely overshadowed by wildly excessive exaggerations and outright lies. For how else to explain the feelings we have, the suffering and happiness and disillusionment and life-long nostalgia of struggling to leave such a terribly terribly rotten and darkly and hauntingly beautiful culture?

Shulem Deen: As we know, the world of ex-Chasidim is fairly small, with many of us knowing each other to varying degrees. Many of us can imagine quite well what Feldman has been through, and I’m sure most of us can relate to her story when reflecting on our own experiences and our often-fraught journeys away from our roots. Should we, therefore, seek to protect Feldman as one of our own in order to “keep the peace in the family”? Should we suppress criticism, even if warranted, just so that we all get along?

Shpitzle Shtrimpkind: Being supportive and being critical are not mutually exclusive. The view that we can’t criticize what we support is the view I went to great pains to free myself from. It rings with deja vu of frum defenses. Honest conversation, a well formulated argument, an opposing opinion that isn’t dipped in the stew of ad hominems – these make up the very essence of the freedom we so prize.

I was supportive of Feldman. I was excited when she was signed for the book and I was always inspired by her vision, her ambition and her thick skin. I appreciate that her book is reigniting all of our appetites for Internet debate. But at the same time, I’m critical of her; for writing with lack of accuracy, for rejecting open conversation (she has bullied those who’ve criticized her), and for claiming herself the Messiah of frum women, while I have yet to see how she has helped the frum community beyond giving the women on ImAMother.com a dead horse to beat.

Is it always us versus them, the OTD versus the frum, and we now need to defend our own honor? Have I been boxed into a new loyalty, namely the OTD camp? I hope not. I cherish pluralism. I don’t divide my world into OTD vs. frum, placing myself militantly on the OTD side of the fence. I don’t automatically agree with everyone who is OTD. Besides, who is OTD? The line is unclear – there are so many sitting somewhere on the wide fence. Perhaps I’m also too sentimental and forgiving. I appreciate open-mindedness and personality, and I appreciate it regardless of whether I agree with anyone’s religious beliefs.

I would also like to add that I’ve since gotten to know Feldman’s ex-husband, who has, like her, left the community. Her harsh and mean-spirited depictions of him and their story don’t  match at all with what I know to be true. This leaves me very skeptical of many of her other bold claims.

Zelda Deutsch: I don’t think it’s fair to ask people to withhold their criticism and opinions in order for the ex-Orthodox community to be all kumbaya. After all, most of us come from a place in which criticism is frowned upon, we don’t want to recreate that in our current lives. However, while we are surely not obligated to do so, I do feel that there will probably be enough substance in the book for us to stand by her. At least I hope so. And by that I mean defending the essence of her experience; she did, after all, grow up in a Satmar community and left, and had the ability and right to publish a book. Even if it presents the community and her family in a bad light.

Shpitzle Shtrimpkind: Zelda, I agree with so much you say!

I do agree that we need to try to support each other, although we all know that we’re a critical bunch. We are unforgiving of our own mistakes, and we have a hard time with others’ shortcomings too. My experiences trying to do some writing in the past has left me hurt and frustrated by the lack of cushy support. The nitpicking and attacks often come from those on your side of the argument.

But that is who we are, in essence. We’re not a community who covers up for our own, we don’t hide and work on facades. We splash things out in the open. We don’t have big rugs or vacum cleaners or dining rooms. (Wait! Where was I?) We don’t sugarcoat. We debate, argue, disagree. But ultimately, despite the lack of support-group-style communication, we do create a really significant and supportive community. For all the ribbing, I have always felt a strong sense of belonging to a very present OTD community.

So perhaps we should abandon tiptoeing, put praise where praise is due, and criticism where criticism is due? Feldman deserves both. What’s more, her success doesn’t hinge on our support.

Zelda Deutsch: My gut reaction when I read the Post article was, why is this woman twisting the truth and making a mockery of those of us who have worked incredibly hard to leave the community and rebuild our lives. I felt in several of the articles that were written about her that she comes across very childlike and somewhat dishonest. There are a few reasons why I decided to cut her some slack. First, I realized that many people were attacking her simply on the basis of her writing a book and exposing her family and the community to shame. I feel very strongly that she has a right to publish a book about her life, and I felt the need to defend her on that. Second, she did write a book and somehow managed to get it published by a major publisher. Based on that I’m hoping that the interviews and promotions for the book don’t entirely reflect its contents. In order to get this far, wouldn’t her book need to have some serious substance, and at a minimum be well-written? Also, although some of us might feel that she is embellishing the truth – or even worse, lying – we all, as I mentioned before, experience our environments differently. Maybe some of what she’s saying is really as she experienced it.

Leah Vincent: I respect and agree with a lot of the other points made here by you all: a sense that Feldman is mismanaging a very intense and personal pain that we share with her, a fear about her exaggerations discrediting all of us, a disgust with what some might perceive as blatant self-interest that sullies the urgent social issues we are concerned with, a scorn for her apparent positioning as the only one who has been courageous and left, which seems almost to erase us and our stories.

Shulem Deen: Some in our community have sometimes remarked about a certain attitude on Feldman’s part, there being a sense that she’s snubbed the community of other former Hasidim by seeking to set herself apart. Do you think that’s a fair accusation, and do you think that might be one reason why even those who’ve made similar journeys are disdainful of her work?

I am reminded of something she wrote in an article published in The Guardian:

“Now there is an entire generation of young Hasids chafing against rules that are impossible to follow in an increasingly seductive wave of new modernity… I like to think that I am a little different from the others, who sneak out so they can partake in all that is sleazy and salacious. Strip clubs aren’t my scene and I don’t really like the idea of altering my reality with drugs. I prefer poetry slams and karaoke.”

Any comments on this?

Zelda Deutsch: There are people of all types leaving the Orthodox community. Yes, there are some looking to have a good time, hanging out at clubs and maybe experimenting with risky behavior such as drug use. Then there are the ones who dabble in the outside world trying to figure out what it’s all about, living the double life, unsure if it’s even possible for them to leave. Then there are those who choose to leave, want to live decent, happy lives according to their wants, needs and morals. Most of the people in the OTD community I associate with belong to the latter two. If she thinks she’s that different from others leaving the fold, maybe she needs to find a new crowd to hang out with.

Leah Vincent: I wonder if her attitude also springs from something else: as children we are all presented with a very strong message that all those who leave the religious community are “losers,” “druggies,” etc… I wonder if she is wrestling with that idea in her protestations.

Zelda Deutsch: Of course. We are told that most who leave are losers who are busy sleeping around, eating bacon, and shooting up drugs. It’s very likely that those are the things she’s basing her statements on. As someone who has already left the community I would think she would have figured out by now that it’s not the case.

Shulem Deen: So you think she has a need to portray all other ex-Hasidim that way in order to redeem herself?

Leah Vincent: Perhaps, or perhaps she simply hasn’t reexamined that fallacy. I know there are a lot of ideas that were tattooed into my brain by my community of origin that I found hard to shake, even when the evidence indicated the opposite.

Baal Devarim: Yes, her holding herself out as some sort of “candle in the dark” is ridiculous on its face. She is no trailblazer and no spokesperson – or at least I’d hope we can come up with a better one. Yes, it is grating and amusing (and sometimes infuriating) that she holds herself out as such.

However, Leah is right in her observations that many of us have internalized what we’ve heard countless times growing up – that those who leave are inevitably losers and bums and drug-addicts and prostitutes (or the eager clients of prostitutes). I’ve had this discussion many times with people who left or want to leave; their eager and earnest assurances that – unlike, they’re absolutely sure, most others – they have come to their decision honestly and not out of unquenchable lust for drugs and sex. After a while it gets tiring and absurdly tragicomic.

Given that, and combined with Deborah’s obviously finely-honed instinct for self-promotion, she can be forgiven for some of those ridiculous comments. If only she’d manage to do it without stepping on others, I’d be happy.

I’d like to add, though: my intention is not at all to minimize the undoubtedly very painful and brave journey she undertook and continues to travel. My beef is with the way the story is being told and marketed, not with the way it is being lived.

Shulem Deen: I want to bring into this discussion the murder story that BD mentioned in passing above.

Here’s a quote from a recent article in the Jewish Week:

What about the shocking allegation, late in the book, that a Rockland County emergency ambulance service covered up a grisly murder in which a father cut off his son’s penis and slit the boy’s throat with a jigsaw?

“I’m not a liar and would never make something up for the sake of sensationalizing… I put it in because I felt obligated.”

Even if we don’t have access to credible sources about the story, one has to wonder about her willingness to put out shockingly sensational stories for which there are – to the best of my knowledge – no credible ways to substantiate them. (My impression is that her knowledge does not come from a credible news source or from the results of a criminal investigation.)

Does this say anything about the tone of her book, and do you think this will/should put her credibility in question?

Baal Devarim: In this specific so-called “murder” case, I happen to have personal knowledge of the story and I know, beyond all reasonable doubt, that this was an unfortunate suicide by a very, very mentally disturbed individual. Claiming that this boy’s father cut off his son’s penis and then murdered him is an appalling libel, which will probably cause untold pain to an already hurting family – and why? It would fit nicely into some twisted horror novel banking on the prurient sensibilities of its readership; it should have no place in something pretending to be a serious memoir with pretensions to being even more than that.

So yes, of course it should put her credibility in question. But for me personally it actually answers the question of her credibility, not the other way around.

Leah Vincent: I haven’t read the book, so just going off of what I can put together. My sense is that this is her impression of the incident. She isn’t claiming to be an investigative journalist, she is telling the story of her life. Hell, if I believed that story to be true I’d put it out there! The frum world has definitely swept plenty of crimes under the carpet and personally, it fills me with such rage I understand the urge to scream out against the secret atrocities one knows about. Of course, if she is willfully lying, that’s unforgivable.

Zelda Deutsch: I’m very hesitant to comment on this. I hadn’t even heard about this story until yesterday, and have no other information besides for what she says. This is a very serious allegation. Does she provide any evidence in the book to support it? I’ve learned from experience that there are a thousand versions of every story, but usually only a handful of people who know the truth. I agree, there are way too many crimes being swept under the rug in the community. That still doesn’t make it acceptable for her to single out one particular family as an example. What if she is wrong? There are an incredible amount of unreported crimes in the community, for many of which the details are out in the open and fairly well known. There is no need to dig up stories that don’t hold up under scrutiny or to invent stories entirely. If she has strong proof to support her claim then I understand why she would put that out there. But judging from her questionable interview answers…..I guess we’ll have to wait until the book comes out.

Shulem Deen: Any final remarks?

Zelda Deutsch: Here’s to hoping that the press articles and interviews don’t reflect the contents of the book. Maybe the Post did twist her words, an assertion of hers that I have just read. Here’s to hoping her book is factual, thought-provoking, and an interesting read overall. I hope she proves those of us who have questions wrong. I hope her book is a success and sheds light on all the right issues plaguing that shtetl some of us used to call home.

Leah Vincent: I’m excited that a book exposing some of the ugly sides of ultra-Orthodox Jewish life is receiving so much attention. It would be an appalling shame if she has lied about important elements of her story, but I do respect Feldman’s right to be angry, critical, and even sensationalist in her book and in her efforts to promote it.

Shpitzle Shtrimpkind: I have no doubt that Deborah has experienced enormous pain and a lot of her anger is valid. We all feel that way, and we’ve all experienced it. I may not have sympathy for how she tells her story, but I do have a lot of sympathy for what she has been through.

Baal Devarim: I’d like to second both Zelda and Shpitzle. Here’s to hoping the book is different than the interviews so far. And what’s more, I do have sympathy for the hurt and pain of the journey she’s traveling – a pain I understand all too well. I can also empathize with the bitter, roiling anger many of us experience. But in the end I do not think anyone should be immune to fair criticism, and I think truth (and nothing but) is always paramount.

*

Zelda Deutch grew up in the Hasidic community of Satmar in Williamsburg. She left the Orthodox world about 10 years ago and now lives in South Jersey with her two children.

Baal Devarim was born and raised in one of the chasidishest communities but — barring any unfortunate or fortunate accidents — will absolutely not die there. He is the author of the blog The Other Side.

Shpitzle Shtrimpkind is the author of the Shpitzle Shtrimpkind blog and a cartoonist at Oy Vey Cartoons.

Leah Vincent is the fifth of eleven children from a yeshivish family. She has a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University and is Unpious.com’s Senior Editor.