Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots

by Deborah Feldman

Bubby never asks how I’m doing in school. She doesn’t concern herself with my activities. It’s almost as if she doesn’t really want to get to know me for who I truly am. She’s like that with everyone. I think it’s because her whole family was murdered in the concentration camps, and she no longer has the energy to connect emotionally with people.

Zeidy often reminds me that when he is delivering a harsh lecture to a particular grandchild, it is only out of a sense of obligation. Real anger is forbidden, he says, but one must fake it for the sake of chinuch. In this family, we do not hug and kiss. We do not compliment each other. Instead, we watch each other closely, ever ready to point out someone’s spiritual or physical failing. This, says Chaya, is compassion—compassion for someone’s spiritual welfare.

There is always a happy ending in children’s books. Because I have not yet begun to read adult books, I have come to accept this convention as a fact of life as well. In the physics of imagination, this is the rule: a child can only accept a just world. I waited for a long time for someone to come along and rescue me, just like in the stories. It was a bitter pill to swallow when I realized that no one would ever pick up the glass slipper I left behind.

“Why did the rebbe decide that the women have to shave their heads,” I always ask, “if nobody did that in Europe?” Bubby hesitates for a moment before answering. “Zeidy tells me that the rebbe wants us to be more ehrlich, more devout, than any Jew ever was. He says that if we go to extreme lengths to make God proud of us, he’ll never hurt us again, like he did in the war.” And here she always falls silent, sinking into reminiscent misery.

King David is the yardstick, they say, against whom we are all measured in heaven. Really, how bad can my small stash of English books be, next to concubines? I am not aware at this moment that I have lost my innocence. I will realize it many years later. One day I will look back and understand that just as there was a moment in my life when I realized where my power lay, there was also a specific moment when I stopped believing in authority just for its own sake and started coming to my own conclusions about the world I lived in. At the time, the problem with losing my innocence was that it made it difficult to keep pretending. Inside me a conflict was brewing madly between my own thoughts and the teachings I was absorbing. Occasionally this tension would boil over my smooth facade, and others would try to remove me from the flames of curiosity before I went too far.

This is why I need God on my side; I have no one else to stick up for me.

“Don’t you see, girls,” Mrs. Meizlish proclaims, “how easy it is to fall into that category of choteh umachteh es harabim, the sinner who makes others sin, the worst sinner of all, simply by failing to uphold the highest standards of modesty? Every time a man catches a glimpse of any part of your body that the Torah says should be covered, he is sinning. But worse, you have caused him to sin. It is you who will bear the responsibility of his sin on Judgment Day.”

pogroms

I look over at Bubby. I can see she feels the same way I do now. She’s covered the side of her face that’s facing Zeidy with a calloused hand, and although she’s looking down at the table, I can see her shaking her head in exasperation. She’s heard this story many more times than I have. It’s Bubby’s story that rarely gets heard. Bubby, who lost everyone in the war, whose every relation was brutally murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz while she labored in the factories of Bergen-Belsen. Bubby, who was near death from typhus by the time liberation came. It’s Bubby who lights a yahrzeit candle for every one of them, from little baby Mindel to fourteen-year-old Chaim. But she almost never talks about it. Zeidy knows he was lucky to get away with army service, even if he got his beard and payos cut off.

When the plate of horseradish is passed around, Bubby takes a generous helping. I pretend to spoon a heap onto my plate, but I purposely end up with only a couple of shreds. It smells awful. I stick my tongue out tentatively, slowly initiating contact with the white threads on my spoon. At the first touch I can almost hear a hissing sound, as the herb burns my tongue. I feel my eyes welling up. Looking over at Bubby, I can see her chewing dutifully on her portion. I wonder how Bubby is so ready to remember the bitterness of captivity without really being able to celebrate freedom from that bitterness. I don’t know if her work will ever really be over. After the Haggadah she’ll have to serve the meal, then wait until the men finally finish the ceremony at dawn, at which point she’ll have to clean up the entire mess before going to bed.

I can never go to college, I know. They censor the word out of our textbooks. Education, they say, leads to nothing good. This is because education—and college—is the first step out of Williamsburg, the first on the path to promiscuity that Zeidy always promised me was an endless loop of missteps that distanced a Jew so far from God as to put the soul into a spiritual coma. Yes, education could kill my soul, I know that, but where did Francie go, I wonder, after college, and did she ever come back? Can you ever really leave the place you come from? Isn’t it best to stay where you belong, rather than risk trying to insert yourself somewhere else and failing?

“At eight forty-six this morning, a plane crashed into the first tower . . .” “They’ll blame it on the Jews,” Zeidy says, shaking his head. “They always do.” “Not the Jews,” says Bubby. “Israel, but not the Jews.” “No, Fraida, don’t you understand?” Zeidy says slowly. “They think it’s the same thing.”

I too want to be such a woman, who works her own miracles instead of waiting for God to perform them. Although I mumble the words of the Yom Kippur prayers along with everyone else, I don’t think about what they mean, and I certainly don’t want to ask for mercy. If God thinks I’m so evil, then let him punish me, I think spitefully, wondering what kind of response my provocative claim might elicit in heaven. Bring it on, I think, angry now. Show me what you’ve got. With a world that suffers so indiscriminately, God cannot possibly be a rational being. What use is there appealing to a madman? Better to play his game, dare him to mess with me.

You have to inspect yourself twice a day, once in the morning when you wake up, and once before the shkiyah, the sunset. If you miss one, you have to call a rabbi and ask if it’s okay or if you have to start over from the beginning. If you inspect yourself one day and there’s no blood but there’s a stain, you have to take it to the rabbi so he can say whether it’s kosher or not. If your underwear is dirty, you have to take that to him too. Or you can send your husband. At the end, when you have fourteen clean cloths to show for your efforts, then you can go to the mikvah and get all clean and pure and fresh for your husband. Every time you come home from the mikvah, it’s like you are a bride all over again. My kallah teacher beams when she says this, her eyes widening in exaggerated joy.

I feel a little twinge when I remember that day. I want to be the woman who knows herself, her body, her power, but that moment divided my life in two. Before I visited the marriage teacher, I was just a girl, and then I was a girl with a mekor. I had made the sudden and shocking discovery that my body had been designed for sex. Someone had fashioned a place in my body specifically for sexual activity.

I’m flabbergasted. My mouth is probably hanging wide open. How exactly do you rupture a colon? “You know,” she hurries to explain, “they tell them in marriage classes to go really fast, before they lose their nerve, before we get too scared. So he just pushed, you know? But in the wrong spot. How was he to know? Even I wasn’t really sure where the right spot was.”

It feels like a form of psychological torment for Eli to alternate between wanting to be next to me and wanting me as far away as possible. I cannot understand what his true feelings for me must be if it is so easy for him to snap back and forth, shut off and turn on. Why can’t I exhibit the same self-discipline? Eli lives by the letter of the law; it seems that God’s commandments are his one true love. He only wants me when I fit into the parameters of his pious devotion to halacha. My feelings are such fragile, scared creatures; they must be coaxed out slowly, and by the time they get comfortable, they are sent into hiding again. Soon I cannot bring myself to reach out to my husband at all, because I dread the day when he will once again reject me. I find that I’ve become very cold; each day that passes, people recede further and further away from me until they feel like specks in the distance. My own body becomes detached from me as well, and I can make it do things without feeling as if I am present.

I thumb my well-worn copy of Anne of Green Gables before placing it in the bag along with Watership Down and Jane Eyre. Anne was plagued like all the beloved female characters of my youth, but she was my favorite, because for all her spunk and mischief, she earned the undying love of those around her the way I always wished to. I thought it would be Eli, finally, who would love me despite my inability to be ordinary, the way he promised to when we first met and I warned him I would be a handful. But perhaps what he meant by being able to handle me was not love but the power to make me bend to his wishes and conform to his world.

I look down at my own plate, feeling my cheeks redden self—consciously. Eli always reprimands me for getting too heated at the Shabbos table. Why do you have to be so angry about everything? he always whines. Other women don’t behave like you. Can’t you just relax? But I worry. I worry that if no one around me takes anything seriously, who will? The Talmud says, “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?” If I should follow the advice of our rabbis in everything I do, shouldn’t I follow this particular verse as well?

I communicate wordlessly with the burblings in my womb. I don’t want to bring you into a world where silence is a cover for the worst crimes, I tell him. Not if I can’t protect you from it. I won’t keep quiet forever, baby, I promise. One day I will open my mouth and I will never shut it again.

At the end of the movie as I watch the credits roll, I recognize my mother’s name in the list of contributing voices. Rachel Levy. And sure enough, as I rewind the film, there she is, seen for a brief moment stepping off a curb, saying, “I left Williamsburg because I was gay.”

Surely an ordinary person like me has no real future. If I do leave, and shed the visible parts of my Hasidic identity, what life will I have as a gentile? A single mother, struggling to raise a son in the most expensive city in the world, without a family to help, without a husband to take out the trash, without a dollar in a savings account or food stamps in my pocket. Because I promise myself now that if and when I leave, I won’t just become another family on welfare, as in the world I left behind, where mothers who give birth to more mouths than they can feed trade WIC coupons for cash at the Jewish Financial Exchange.

That something like this should happen to me, only a few days before I’m supposed to leave my past behind for good, only makes sense if it were meant to stop me from doing so. Is it meant to scare me into obedience? I look down at my body and marvel at its ability to survive something so frightening, and I gaze lingeringly at my limbs as if there were magic blood coursing in my veins. How extraordinary it is, to be alive when one should be dead. The accident happened as the clock struck midnight, when the date changed to 09/09/09. Nine, that’s what the Kabbalist told me; nine, the number of death and rebirth, endings and beginnings, is the sign I was supposed to look out for. I may always look back on this day as the one that divided my life in two.

At twenty-five years old, three years after I left, two years after I finished writing my memoir, I was finally free.

I’ve since learned that there is no adequate preparation for writing except the act itself.