All Who Go Do Not Return (14 page)

Now I realized that something didn’t compute. After the babies arrived, there were new expenses I hadn’t considered. Our in-laws bought us a baby crib, but we also needed a buggy, a stroller, a bureau, baby clothes—never-ending streams of soft pink ruffles, Onesies embroidered with befuddled-looking teddy bears, stretchies with colorful ABC pyramids. There were plush cloth books with images of friendly-looking tigers and giraffes, intended to plant the seeds of literary appreciation. There were rattles and baby bottles and pacifiers and more rattles and all kinds of other noisemaking devices that mothers and grandmothers assured us were necessary for raising healthy babies.

Baby diapers were being expended with alarming frequency. Gitty, blessedly frugal by nature, would purchase only no-name brands. “Look at this,” she would point with disdain at packages of Luvs stacked above the fruits and vegetables at Braun’s Supermarket. “Nine dollars a pack. Thievery.” She’d cluck her tongue and roll her eyes and turn the aisle to reach for one of the generic brands.

“Maybe,” Gitty said one morning, as she stirred a pot of farina with Freidy on her arm, “you want to look for a job of some kind?”

“A job?” The suggestion sounded offensively common.

“It’s just a thought,” Gitty said.

I knew she was right, though, and so when a notice appeared on the kollel door one day, I took note:
EXCELLENT JOB OPPORTUNITIES. Office work in New Jersey. Training provided. No experience necessary. Suitable for kollel men seeking work for the first time.

It seemed absurd that I would, overnight, go from kollel student to office worker. But as I mulled it over, I wondered what it would be like to have material comforts, a steady paycheck, a car someday, maybe even a home of our own. Perhaps those things would provide consolation for having abandoned my aspirations. I ripped off a hangtag and stuffed it into my pocket.

“There will be a meeting in the kollel basement tomorrow at seven thirty,” a young woman said when I called the number.

If I had been worried that forsaking the study hall was a betrayal of my pious aspirations, at least I was not alone. In the corridor between the administrative offices and the large library—the Vault of Sacred Books—a group of men stood around waiting. Bentzion Grunwald was there, a prodigy who had completed the entire Talmud before his marriage, finishing the very last page right before he was led to the chuppah. Chaim Yidel Gold was there, who would be seen in the yeshiva study hall until past midnight and back again at four in the morning. They all smiled sheepishly, trying in vain to make light of it all.

“Office work, huh?” Chaim Yidel said, on his face a look of resignation.

Gavriel Blum, said to be “the cleverest man in the shtetl,” soon came skipping down the stairs with a sprightly bop, winding and rewinding his sidelocks around his ears, which seemed squished and reddened and made him look anything but clever. He crooked his head toward the library door and we followed him, thirty or so men, and took seats around five long tables.

Gavriel laid it out for us: A telecommunications company in New Jersey, owned by Orthodox Jews, was willing to hire Hasidic men just entering the job market. All we needed, Gavriel said, was to fill out these sheets—
“rezemays,”
he called them—and he tossed a pile of forms onto each of the tables. My friend Zundel, sitting next to me, looked at the sheets like a child studying a tax form: “What is this,
rezemays?
”

Gavriel explained: In America, before you get a job, a company needs to know something about you.
Rezemays
, he said, save time for everyone involved. “The main thing,” Gavriel said, “is to write down your skills.” The English word “skills” bounced incongruously off his clipped Yiddish sentences, and the men stared back blankly.

“Skills?” Zundel asked finally. “Don’t you need to go to college for that?”

Gavriel shook his head noncommittally. “Not necessarily. You can write if you’ve ever worked with computers. Or if you’re good at math. Things like that.” He looked around the room as the men looked timidly at the forms in front of them. “Don’t be modest,” Gavriel said. “This is the place to brag.”

And so we sat and wondered what we might brag about. We knew a lot about commerce in first-century Palestine. We could write contracts on property sales that would be legally binding in fifth-century Babylonia. A handful of us knew exactly how to slaughter an ox in Jerusalem’s ancient temple, skin it, clean it, and separate the priestly portions. But this was the first we’d heard of
rezemays.

Slowly, we began to fill in our names, our addresses, and phone numbers and then tried to think of what we might consider a
skill.

Excellent English reading and writing skills
, I wrote down. That sentence alone looked skillful.

“Excellent English?” Gavriel asked with a scoff when I handed him my sheet.

“I’m from Borough Park,” I said.

He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Tzaddik,” he said, “you might be better than these guys.” He cocked his head to the line of men behind me. “But compared to Yeshiva University boys, your English isn’t worth a half-eaten radish.”

I walked home with my ego bruised, wondering what it would be like to get a job, to wake up each morning and catch a commuter bus and spend the day in an office. I imagined the whir of a fax machine, incessant phone calls, dealing with irritable customers, and, of course, other employees of both sexes.

A few days later, I ran into Gavriel at the shul. He was rolling his gartel around his fingers after the conclusion of evening prayers.

“Whatever happened to the job thing?”

He looked away. “Plan fell through.” He finished winding his gartel and placed it in his coat pocket. “Not enough skills.”

Several weeks later, there was another note on the kollel door.

Substitute Teachers Needed. Call Mordche Goldhirsch.

Mordche was one of the principals at the cheder, the elementary school for boys, and I called the number as soon as I got home for lunch.

“Can you come in at two?” Mordche Goldhirsch asked. One of the sixth-grade teachers had a dentist appointment.

The kitchen clock said 1:15. I would have to miss the afternoon study session at the kollel and incur the twenty-dollar penalty. The three-hour substituting job would pay thirty dollars.

“I’ll be there,” I said to Mordche.

On his office door was a nameplate:
Rabbi Mordechai Goldhirsch, Principal, Grades 4, 5, & 6
, and I walked in to find Mordche standing with a thin wooden rod over a boy holding his palm out for a thwacking. Mordche told the terrified boy to wait, and then escorted me down the hallway.

“Look each of them in the eye. Don’t let them scare you,” he said, and I felt an instant flash of terror. I remembered how my friends and I had treated our own substitute teachers, how one of our teachers had said, right before he took his two-week summer vacation: “Substitutes are a time to take things easy.” For the next two weeks, we took things easy by sticking pins up the underside of the substitute teacher’s chair cushion, pouring salt into his coffee, and spilling bottles of Elmer’s glue onto the vinyl tiles under his desk, then watching as he struggled to wipe the sticky mess from the soles of his shoes.

From a nearby classroom came the singsong of a Talmud lesson and from another the sound of boys reciting Bible verses. From a classroom at the end of the hall, I heard laughing and shouting and felt my heartbeat quicken. As Mordche’s hand went for the doorknob, he paused and peered through the small square window. Inside, boys stood on tables, tugged one another’s sidelocks, and chased one another around the room, until one boy noticed us and leaped into his seat, followed, like a set of dominoes, by the rest of the class. By the time Mordche turned the knob, every boy was in his place with his Bible reader open in front of him.

Mordche said nothing to the class. He stepped aside to allow me to enter, nodded curtly, and closed the door.

I sat down at the desk and looked around, my gaze lingering on each boy, as Mordche had instructed. I tried to mask the fear I felt as the two dozen pairs of eyes assessed me.

The afternoon passed quickly enough, with few disturbances. I gave a lesson on the weekly Bible portion, told a story of an ancient saint, stepped out twice to get coffee from the teachers’ room down the hall, and three hours later it was over. In my pocket, as I walked home, I carried thirty dollars in school vouchers.

“Vouchers!”
Gitty sputtered in disbelief when I walked into the house and waved them in front of her. “What are we going to do with
vouchers?”

Vouchers were the local currency, printed by the school system, with which it paid the bulk of its employee salaries. Everyone in the village seemed to have a surplus of them. The vouchers were redeemable at local shops, whose owners were then paid in dollars by the school, at a steep discount.

There had been a time when schoolteachers had to wait weeks, sometimes months, for their pay. But that was no longer the case. The school had a makeshift treasury, a small office on the ground floor of the boys’ school with a computer and an old inkjet printer, and could print all the vouchers it needed. Denominations of fives, tens, twenties, still wet from the sputtering wheel of the inkjet were packed into cabinets by a young female secretary.

The vouchers were a source of constant aggravation. Every day, it seemed, one store or another changed its voucher policy. When Pollack’s Dry Goods Store announced that it would accept vouchers, there was a run for the small basement store on Lincoln Avenue, and its supplies of underwear, socks, and baby outfits quickly cleared off the shelves. Einhorn’s Basics and Beyond was forced to follow suit, while Grossman’s Books & Judaica announced that it would no longer accept vouchers.

I thought Gitty was overreacting. There was a lot we could do with vouchers. “We might be able to exchange them for food stamps,” I said.

If vouchers were like a Third World currency, food stamps were as good as the U.S. dollar. Grossman’s Books & Judaica accepted food stamps without question, as did both dry goods stores and the small silver shop in the Winklers’ basement on Jackson Avenue. At the annual yeshiva fund-raising dinner, one man after another counted out food stamp checks for donations and received appreciative nods. Even the elderly itinerant vendor, who stood in the shul foyer every Wednesday evening with his refurbished Walkmans and alarm clocks, accepted food stamps gladly. Unlike the vouchers, a strictly local currency, food stamps could be taken to Monsey and Williamsburg and passed on further.

Soon I had other substituting jobs, often for several weeks, as the regular rebbes took their two-week summer vacations. The vouchers piled up in an envelope in a kitchen drawer, right next to the dairy cutlery. We could buy all the groceries we wanted, or another bundle of pink and yellow baby outfits, but we still had no way to pay our rent or the electric bill.

Teaching felt strange to me, vaguely fraudulent. It hadn’t been long since my own days as a cheder boy, and it felt as if I was not old enough, wise enough, learned enough to be teaching my own group of cheder boys. Mostly, though, I was reliving the memories of my youth, this time from the other side of the rebbe’s desk.

As a child, I had been a daydreamer—one of the worst offenses, to have your mind wander from your rebbe’s lesson and your finger drift away from the text in front of you.

“SHULEM,
VIE HALT MEN?”

It was the most common question of my childhood, always, when it came, jarring me out of a sweet daydream. From first grade through ninth, each rebbe in his own gruff voice, angry, impatient, or sighing in resignation: “SHULEM, WHERE ARE WE HOLDING?”

Where we were “holding” was the specific passage, line, and word in the text of our Talmuds, which we were to know at all times by keeping our forefingers pressed against the small square letters, moving along as the rebbe led us through the jungle of dense, unpunctuated Aramaic text, the digest of rabbinic discourse in the ancient Babylonian cities of Sura and Pumbeditha.

Whenever the question came, my mind, in a frenzy, would spin through the haze of my daydream as I tried to recall a passage, a phrase, or even a word. I would hear the faint echoes of fragmented clauses,
This passage is not according to Rav Sheshes
, or
Ravina put the query to Rav Ashi
, and I would search frantically through the text, until—wait, was the phrase in the Gemara or the Rashi? Or I would find not one but two instances—and which was it? Often I could not find the phrase at all and would wonder, gripped with panic: Was I even on the right page?

If I failed to know where we were holding, the rebbe would beckon silently with his forefinger. I would rise, arms and legs quivering, and head to his desk, where, at his nod toward my arm, I would extend my right hand. The rebbe would grab hold of my fingers, then reach for his rod—the dowel of an old wooden coat hanger—raise it high in the air, and bring it down on my palm. Whoosh. Thwack. At his signal, I would extend my other hand, and the thwacking would be repeated until, by some arbitrary measure, the rebbe was satisfied. With each thwack, my palm would burn and I’d pray for it all to end, for the rod to break, for my rebbe to have a heart attack.

The thwacking happened often, and it happened to each of us, but still there was the shame, walking back to my chair, rubbing my bright red palms against my blue or brown corduroy trousers. I never questioned the justice of it, though. If the shape of a fluffy white cloud outside the open window, or the tooting of an angry cabdriver’s horn, or the passing siren of a fire engine induced a daydream, it only followed that I was to be punished for it. If Ravina had a query to Rav Ashi, it would behoove me to pay attention. Because Ravina had important questions, as did all the rabbis of the Talmud, and to be a pious Hasidic boy, to grow up to be a pious Hasidic man, a boy must pay attention to the questions posed by the rabbis, and so not have any questions of his own.