All Who Go Do Not Return (10 page)

My father would rummage through his pockets and withdraw a crumpled bill, and then walk to the door and hand it to her. He would ask how she was doing, and she would moan about her miseries and my father would wish her the best and say that he hoped she felt better.

“Dovid!” my mother would cry. “Why?”

My father would say only, “She says she needs food. It isn’t for me to question her.” And my brother Avrumi would say, “But she’s a goy.” And my father would simply say, “So she is.”

My father’s generosity frustrated my mother, but I thought of him as a tzaddik, his manner reminiscent of the saintly men one heard about in legends. When he prayed, my father would stand for hours on end, often with his eyes half-closed, only the whites visible, as if in a deep meditative trance. I had seen him pray in that same way as far back as I could remember, and still it was mystifying to watch him. For most of my childhood, I had assumed that when he prayed, he, or some essential part of him, went elsewhere, traveling through some exalted and spiritual realm. I have a vivid image of myself at age four, standing next to him in the empty synagogue after prayers, looking up to him and pleading with him to recognize a truth that appeared to have failed him: “Tatti!” I would cry. “All the people have gone home!”

I remember wondering why his erect but still body made no effort to respond as I pulled on the tassels of his gartel, attempting to awaken him from whatever unconscious state he was in.

Over time, I came to realize that our family was different. While my brothers and I spoke to one another in Yiddish, picked up at the schools we attended as far back as our memories reached, our parents spoke to us mostly in English. They showed odd interest in matters no one we knew cared for, their values acquired elsewhere. Unlike my friends, whose homes were elegantly furnished, crystal chandeliers gleaming above their dining-room tables, Persian rugs in their living rooms, late-model cars in their driveways, our family lived modestly. As I grew older, I became aware that my clothes were often a size too small, that our dining-room chairs were mismatched and rickety. I felt embarrassed to have friends over, worried they might notice that we lacked the piece of furniture that existed in every Hasidic home: a china closet, which was a glass-enclosed polished-wood breakfront that typically held a family’s collection of silver—menorahs,
ethrog
cases, cylindrical megilla containers, kiddush goblets. We had little silver, no china or heirlooms or other precious objects, and so we had no need for a china closet.

Once a week, my parents would take the subway to a place they called “the Village,” where my mother claimed that no Jews lived. They went there to buy organic fruits and vegetables, which were unavailable in Borough Park. I remember frustrating visits to our local supermarket, where I would gaze at blood-red tomatoes and football-shaped green grapes, and my mother would wave her hand dismissively: “If you only knew the chemicals they put in those things.” As if
those things
were clever plastic imitations. Sugared cereals and candy bars and sweet soda drinks never entered our home. My mother’s notion of American food manufacturers was of fat, cigar-chomping men who put toxic ingredients into their food products to make children want more, more, more, and rot their teeth and poison their bodies while the fat evil men laughed and laughed and raked in the profits. Her attitude was unusual in Borough Park, where middle-class comforts and consumerist attitudes were as entrenched as any other place in America.

It wouldn’t be until late adolescence that I would understand what set our family apart. My parents had spent their youths not in the ultra-religious word of the Hasidim but in secular environments, where they were raised not with fur hats and flowing caftans and floral kerchiefs but with movies and boyfriends and secular educations. They spoke little about their pasts, preferring to shelter us from the knowledge that they had not always been Hasidic, to keep us from knowing that my mother, as a teenager in Queens, was a Beatles fan, and that my father, raised in Baltimore, had spent his twenties in San Francisco participating in civil rights protests and getting high on psychedelics. Both of my parents had spent several years as hippies, and their choices—my mother in her late teens and my father in his twenties—to join the Hasidic community came with high-minded idealism. They retained their disdain for societal conventions.

“Is it true your father is a
baal teshuvah?
” my friend Yochanan Fried whispered to me in the school bathroom when I was ten. We were standing at the urinals when he said it, and I looked at him in horror over the partition.
Baal teshuvahs
, or “returnees,” were those raised as secular Jews who later joined the Orthodox. They were given lip service for their courage, but it was no secret that
baal teshuvahs
were odd for giving up the temptations of their former lives and joining a world of endless rules and restriction. They must suffer a psychological ailment of some sort, it was assumed. Or they were those who couldn’t make it among the goyim and came to try their luck among the Hasidim.

I denied it to Yochanan Fried. I had not learned the truth yet. I knew that my parents were different, and my father’s behavior was unorthodox in a world in which piety and righteousness were to be lived within the parameters of convention. I thought only that he was a man who lived in a world unto himself, extending himself for a few hours a week to interact with the world—to attend shul, to teach his classes, and grant audiences for those who sought his counsel—but soon withdrawing back into his little study with his many shelves of sacred texts and his hours of prayer.

I would realize later that my parents had joined the Hasidic world with knowledge of only its pious exterior. They found its teachings profound. So much love. So much joy. Such inner peace. In their idealism, they overlooked its harsher realities. They hadn’t grown up in this world, hadn’t seen the gruff attitudes with which children were raised, hadn’t been subject to schoolteachers who routinely beat students for not knowing the meaning of an Aramaic word in their Talmuds, or for removing their fingers from the tiny text of the Rashi script in the margins.

“Ich bin a chusid fun aybershten,”
my father said one day, when I asked what sect he belonged to. “I am a Hasid of God.”

The boys in my class at the Krasna cheder in Borough Park were from families that belonged to small Hasidic communities—Kasho, Sighet, Tzelem—groups that had no bona fide rebbes of their own but were, by their shared Hungarian and Romanian origin, loosely affiliated with Satmar. And so, at the age of ten or eleven, I wondered: What were we? Being a Hasid of God was all right between my father and God, but it wouldn’t do if the question of our
belonging
was raised by a friend, a teacher, or an acquaintance.

“Where does your father belong?” Reb Shimon Mauskopf asked one day during lunchtime, as he poured warm cocoa into a row of plastic cups on his desk.

I made a snap decision. “My father is a Breslover,” I said.

My father studied the teachings of both Breslov and Satmar, and those, I thought, were the plausible options.

In truth, though, I wasn’t happy with my father being a Breslover, even if, as the case was, he was not one. Breslovers were the eccentrics of the Hasidic world.
The dead Hasidim
, some called them. They’d never chosen a rebbe after their first, Reb Nachman, died in the early nineteenth century. They were the misfits within our world and were known for attracting the misfits from without: former hippies, druggies, ex-convicts, and other social outcasts, all of them drawn to the intensity of the Breslover message, the psychological insight of its long-dead leader and his whimsical tales of beggars and forest dwellers and its New Agey embrace of meditative practices.

It would’ve been better to be Satmar. The Satmars were arrogant and superior and bombastic and proud and entirely scornful of all but their own. They were disdainful of other sects, even friendly ones, and fiercely hostile toward those who opposed them. They were the winners, and it was good to be a winner. Better to be a bully than to be bullied.

But I couldn’t plausibly say that my father was Satmar. Unlike the Breslovers, the Satmars had a rebbe who was very much alive, Reb Moshe, the late Reb Yoel’s nephew and successor. To declare oneself Satmar would require a nod to Reb Moshe’s leadership. Unlike my friends’ fathers and grandfathers, who took occasional pilgrimages to the Satmar rebbe’s shul on Rodney Street in Williamsburg, my father never visited him. It would be too contrived to declare him Satmar. It was more plausible to turn my father into a Breslover, even if at the same time, I would resent it.

I knew little about the Skverers back then. The Krasna school I attended was around the corner from the Skverer school, our backyards back to back, with occasional exchanges of water balloons hurled over the barbed-wire fence between us. “Skverer
chenyokes
,” we shouted. “Krasna bums,” they shouted back. And then our bells would ring and recess would be over, and we’d all go back to the same volumes of Talmud, the same rods and switches and rubber-wire casings in the hands of our rebbes.

Word on the street was that Skverers burned Breslov books in annual conflagrations along with the pre-Passover burning of the
chometz.
It was said that Skverers refused even to utter the word “Breslov,” hissing instead the phrase
yene chevre
, “that notorious group.” No one really knew the reason for the centuries-old hostilities but only that they had been passed down from generation to generation and were now a matter of tradition.

It was this animosity that would cause me some consternation later, when I thought I might attend the Skverer yeshiva. Given that my father had Breslov sympathies, he might not approve. But my father, calling the Skverers
“ehrlich,”
had no objections.

The Skverers, I would learn, were
ehrlich
but also idiosyncratic, with a kind of provincial piety that was uncommon among American Hasidim. Once, during my first few days at the Skverer yeshiva, I stood in the hallway speaking to my friend Chaim Elya when our first-year instructor passed, then stopped in his tracks and looked me up and down.

“Why are you dressed like a
shaygetz?
” he asked.

I stared at him, frozen. To dress like a shaygetz was to dress like a goy: blue jeans, T-shirts, bare head. But I was dressed in my beaver hat and long coat, the same as everyone else.

Our instructor shook his head, annoyed. “Where’s your gartel?” he asked, and I realized that my coat was unbuttoned and my gartel, the thin waistband worn during prayer, was in my pocket instead of around my waist. Skverers, I would later learn, wore their gartels at all times; to be gartel-less was to be vulgar, and to be vulgar was to be a shaygetz, which was only one step away from being a goy.

The afternoon after we issued our warnings to our friends and ransacked Mendy Klein’s room, an assembly of all the students was called. The dean condemned our actions. “Students should not take such matters into their own hands,” he said.

“He had to say that,” Avremel would tell us later, emphasizing that we’d done the right thing. We’d suffered no consequences, no suspensions, nothing even like the fifty-dollar penalty for failing an exam or the twenty-dollar penalty for missing a study session.

Still I felt shame, although I was not sure why. As the weeks and months passed, I tried to erase the memory of that day. I had been part of it, had volunteered to speak before those we had summoned, had taken part in the smashing and the stomping and the ransacking. I had felt during those moments like an insignificant part of a larger unit, my individuality swallowed by the collective. For the first time, I understood the power of a mob.

Nuta Margulis had been a good friend. Yossi Rosen had been my study partner. Mendy Klein had been my roommate. Each Friday afternoon, I would come by the dormitory with a pan of kugel for Mendy; it was common practice for married students to drop off homemade food for their former roommates until the latter, too, were married and would bring food to those who remained after them. The Friday after the incident, I brought the usual pan of potato kugel, and handed it to a resident outside the door to pass to Mendy. As I left, I wondered what Mendy would think of me, ransacking his room on Sunday and bringing him kugel on Friday. But Mendy said nothing about the event in the days and weeks that followed, and no one else spoke of it. If our friends bore us any grudges, they never expressed it. Yet, in the silence, in the unspokenness of it all, lay shame, thick as the densely woven prayer shawls over our backs, heavy as the braided silver adornments over our heads.

Six months had passed since we were married. “Is there any news yet?” the rebbe would ask when Gitty and I went for one of the sixty-second audiences granted village residents in the days before Rosh Hashanah and during the nights of Chanukah. Gitty would watch from the far wall as I would shake my head, no news, and the rebbe would say, “Nu, may God help, it should be soon.”