All Who Go Do Not Return (42 page)

The last time I saw my father, he was in the middle of morning prayers. It was spring 1988. He was home from the hospital but still in a weakened condition, so he prayed at home instead of going to shul. I had been home then for Shavuos, the celebration of the giving of the Torah, and was heading back to Montreal that morning. The bus was to leave very soon, and I was running late. My father was wrapped in his prayer shawl and his tefillin, reciting the portion between the Shema and the Shmoneh Esreh.

God, your Lord, is Truth.

I stood near the doorway and watched as he enunciated each word, stressing each syllable, as he always did.
One must pray the way one counts precious gems
, the Talmud says, and I had never seen a more exemplary demonstration of it.

Fortunate is the man who hearkens to Your command, who places Your Torah upon his heart.

I had to say good-bye because the bus would be leaving shortly; but for some reason, I stood and watched my father. He was turned slightly away, the edges of his tallis partly obscuring his face, and I wasn’t sure if he saw me.

You have redeemed us from Egypt, God, our Lord. You split the sea, drowned the wicked, led Your beloved across, and let the waters bedeck their foes.

I had to go. In only a few seconds, my father would rise for the Shmoneh Esreh, the silent portion of the prayer, during which his eyes would close and his mind would go elsewhere. I didn’t want to interrupt him, but I had to go.

Rock of Israel, rise to the aid of Israel…. Our redeemer, the Lord of Hosts is His name, the Holy One of Israel.

“Tatti,” I said softly. “I have to go.”

He paused, startled. He did not turn his head, but when I came close, I could tell he was giving me his attention. He did not speak or even offer a hug or a handshake, but he smiled and nodded faintly. As I shut the door behind me, I heard the concluding verse go faint as he rose for the Shmoneh Esreh.

Blessed are You, God, deliverer of Israel.

Two months later, when my mother told me that my father was dead, after the first spell of tears and the sinking realization that his death was forever, I could not get one thought out of my head: he never said good-bye. Yet in the weeks and months after my father’s death, I didn’t think I missed him. I remember making all the right gestures and saying the right things because I knew it was expected of me.

“It is very sad, but God has a plan for all of us,” I said to the adults who looked at me, and then at one another, at once charmed and bewildered. “We don’t understand God’s ways, but we cannot question Him,” I would say, not meaning a word of it. “My father’s time had come. He must have accomplished all that was destined for him.”

The adults nodded and smiled and patted my shoulder and told me how impressed they were, that I was so strong, that I would’ve made him proud, that I’d be the rock of our family, being the eldest son. They didn’t realize I was saying what I knew they wanted to hear. It wasn’t difficult.

Perhaps it is hard to truly miss a parent when you’re a child—or at least to have the awareness of it, to understand it as such. During childhood, parents are resources. They give and withhold, and you come to tolerate what seem like arbitrary decisions and you can’t wait to be out from under their rule. You don’t quite understand what it means to love them and to miss them when they’re not around, but you might be old enough to understand the language of it and to speak as if you grasp it like an adult. You have feelings about it, but the feelings don’t match the words people use, and you wonder if something might be wrong with you because maybe you’re not feeling the right things.

And then came the dreams.

A rabbi who was close to our family asked me once, several months after my father’s death, “Does your father appear to you in dreams?”

I understood his question in the context of Jewish folklore. There were many tales of deceased loved ones appearing in dreams, bringing precious messages.

Go to the bridge in Kraków, and find the treasure.

My soul wanders in the heavens with no rest. Recite kaddish for me.

Don’t let Tzeitel marry the butcher.

So many stories. The dead returning to reveal secrets or provide valuable guidance. Especially the saintly—they were the ones who knew the most. This rabbi wanted to know if my father, too, had appeared to me. Did I know any otherworldly secrets?

“Yes,” I told the rabbi. “He comes to me.”

“And what has he told you?” the rabbi asked.

I pretended to be too shy to offer the details, and the rabbi did not press for more. He only shook his head and said, “Pssh. Such a holy thing. He comes in the dream, eh?”

My father, however, did not appear to me in dreams. Or at least not in the way the rabbi meant it, as an apparition at my bedside with secrets from another world. Rather, I would dream that my father was alive again. In my dreams, which would recur for years, my father would be in the kitchen of our home, getting a cup of yogurt from the refrigerator, or sitting on our back porch with a glass of tea and speaking to one of his students, or praying at the shul in his usual spot in the last row, carefully enunciating each syllable. I would see him and smile and say, “Oh, you’re here! I thought you were dead.” And he’d say, “Oh, no. I was just traveling. I’m back now.” In my dream, I would feel an unusual sort of happiness, the kind that comes after hearing terrible news and then hearing that no, a mistake was made, that terrible thing did not happen, it was all an unfortunate miscommunication.

Then I would wake and realize it was a dream. There was no mistake. My father really was dead. I would lie in bed for a long time, trying to go back to that place, where my strange and erratic and brilliant and loving father was back, perhaps even scolding me, or just being impatient because he was busy and had to get somewhere and I was getting in his way.

And that’s when I knew that I really, truly missed my father.

On a Tuesday in September 2009, I rented a U-Haul truck and packed up my things. I left my long dark coats and beaver-fur hats to gather dust in a friend’s basement, along with my small collection of religious texts and audiocassettes of old Talmud lectures. I took my tallis and tefillin and my shtreimel with me, too sentimental to part from them, and moved to an apartment in Bushwick—Brooklyn’s newest bastion of hipster faux bohemianism. I moved to be closer to friends, many of whom I had made over the past year, collecting them like seashells, one leading to another and then another, cherishing each one, after having spent my first year out in near solitude.

It was an odd thing, to live suddenly among secular people, Jews and non-Jews, where there were few synagogues and no kosher supermarkets or large families with boys in yarmulkes and sidelocks, girls in long skirts and long-sleeved blouses. Instead, there was a colorful variety of types: young postcollege hipsters and settled yuppies living side by side with Dominicans and West Indians.

I tried to forget the events of the previous year. I met more people. I hosted parties. I smoked pot and tried MDMA, and, once, a spot of cocaine. I learned how to ask women on dates, and fell in and out of love. I took a trip to Spain and Greece, traveling on my own for the first time. For a while, in an attempt to try on a new persona, I went by a new name: Sean. I soon realized that an ex-Hasid with an Irish name does not an Irishman make, and reverted back to Shulem.

Schooling now seemed a luxury I could no longer afford. During my one semester in college, I had paid my own tuition, but now, with my job security gone, all I could focus on were my child-support obligations and my own basic living expenses. Over time, I found sporadic freelance programming work, and soon I would return to writing as well, publishing articles and essays relating to Hasidic life and the journey away from it.

My mother and my siblings had not rejected me, and I remained grateful for their acceptance. My brother Mendy and his wife would invite me to their Monsey home for Shabbos meals, without asking questions about how I got there, even as they knew that I now drove on the Sabbath and probably parked my car only a short walk from their home. My sister, Chani, too, would invite me to spend time at her home with her family, and insist that I take part when her own daughters celebrated their marriages and the births of their own children.

My brother Avrumi, who had followed me to the Skverers when we were teenagers, would call frequently, and ask whether and where I had prayed that morning. When I would remind him that I no longer prayed, he’d say, good-naturedly, “Eh, I’m sure you do when no one’s looking,” and then he’d inform me of all the births, marriages, and deaths among the people of New Square, where he was still a member in good standing.

My mother, who had moved to Jerusalem a decade earlier, was pained by the path I had taken but even more so by the fact that Gitty would no longer allow the children to see or speak to her. Gitty, I would learn, sought to punish my mother for not having raised me right, even as my mother remained as devout as anyone Gitty had ever known.

In January 2010, I started an online journal with some friends. We called it
Unpious
, a play on the Yiddish phrase
uhn-payess
—“no sidecurls”—and we published stories and essays related to the fringes of ultra-Orthodox society. Slowly, a community rose from the many who had made the journey out, the numbers exploding in recent years—mostly because of the Internet and the existence of Footsteps, which provided an anchor for hundreds who might otherwise have drifted into a strange world with few resources. Every few months, there would be a new crop, finding one another through interconnected networks: blogs, Facebook groups, or underground gatherings around Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Within our fledgling community, there were those who would undertake projects around issues related to both the world we came from and the community to which we now belonged. Ex-Orthodox activists set up new organizations to advocate for education reform in Hasidic schools, for Orthodox victims of child sexual abuse, for women trapped in forced marriages, for gay and lesbian members of the Orthodox community who loved their communities and traditions but were not accepted for who they were. We would write articles and appear in TV and radio interviews, speaking out about our journeys and our experiences, what we had learned and what we could share with others.

Malky, too, had made it out. We had first met in April 2008, and, finally, nearly two years later, I heard that she had left—and had taken her daughters with her. Her father and her then husband’s threats had turned out to be empty. A group of us were gathering for Friday night dinner, and our host had invited Malky to join us and spend the weekend in Brooklyn.

When I walked in and saw her again, for the first time in two years, it was my turn to be stunned. Her hair had grown in and she now sported a short bob. Gone was her tight kerchief and her skirts and long-sleeved blouses, and in their place were slim jeans and a fashionable sleeveless top. “You look like a regular shiksa!” I said, as we hugged and laughed.

Soon we were sitting for dinner, a dozen friends, men and women, all of us former Hasidim who’d finally made it out. “Let’s drink to this!” someone said.

“Let’s do picklebacks!” someone else said. He’d learned it from hipster friends. We were in Williamsburg, America’s capital of hipsterdom, and so we were often the beneficiaries of its concoctions. The rest of us had never heard of picklebacks, though, and our friend explained. “A shot of Jack Daniel’s chased by a shot of pickle juice.”

“Pickle juice?” The strangeness of the outside world still took us by surprise.

“Regular store-bought pickle juice. The stuff that’s left in the jar after you eat all the pickles.”

We filled shot glasses of whiskey and shot glasses of pickle juice, and held them up. To freedom! To choice! To opportunity! To friendship! We did one round and then another, and the cheer in the room rose. Soon we were singing, banging fists on our host’s table in time to Hasidic songs from our youth, from Chabad and Belz and Vizhnitz, about the God we did not believe in and the Torah we did not follow. The songs were still beautiful, and we rose and rested our hands on one another’s shoulders and swayed to old favorites, as if we were still in the synagogue or at the rebbe’s tisch.

We’d made our choices and were proud of them and, despite the challenges, lived with few regrets.

The hours passed, and Malky and I found ourselves talking on the sofa. We had so much to catch up on. In a flash, it was six in the morning, and Malky walked me to the door as I prepared to leave. From the kitchen came the smell of chulent, stewing in a Crock-Pot—or what was left of it, after we’d raided the pot hours earlier. In the next room, Malky’s daughters, aged three and five, were fast asleep.

At the doorway, Malky pulled me toward her, and put her arms around me. “Shulem,” she said. “Now I can hug you again.”

And yet, through it all, I could not forget what I had lost.

“Don’t you miss your children?” some friends would ask.

I would shrug and say, “It is what it is.”

“I suppose you get used to it,” they’d say, and I’d say, “Yeah, pretty much.” I wouldn’t tell them that, no, in fact, you don’t get used to it at all, at least not for a very long time. So many memories were sparked by sights and sounds around me—a mother and daughter on a movie screen, a father and son playing catch in the park, parents and children on the subway. These small moments would evoke feelings I did not know were possible, a kind of grief that would, at times, strike me with such force that it would impair my daily function, throwing me for hours, days, into a nearly catatonic depression.