Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  “Everyone was a Zionist then,” Leon had told me.

  What I couldn’t understand was, what happened to that strength that she had so bravely displayed then, completely on her own, in a mad world still reeling from chaos? I never knew her to speak her mind or advocate for her needs. Was this what ultimately marked one as a survivor—the drive to subsume one’s identity under the heavier mantle of martyrdom for the sake of the dead?

  Ed had asked me to look back in one of our sessions. I didn’t know what he meant at first, but he said to close my eyes and it would come. I did so with some skepticism.

  “What do you see?” he asked after a few moments.

  “I see a mourning dove,” I said, surprised that the image had popped into my mind. “It’s sitting in a window grate.” That’s odd, I thought. How did it squeeze through the grate?

  “What’s inside the window?”

  “Nothing. There’s just a lace curtain and it’s pulled shut across the window.” Those beautiful floor-length drapes had hung across the entire wall like curtains on a stage.

  “Try to see if you can push the curtain aside and look behind it.”

  Out of nowhere a breeze came and blew through the open window, lifting the curtain slightly. As it briefly fluttered aside, I did not see what I expected to, which was myself as a child, contemplating the view as I often did at that window. Instead I caught a momentary glimpse of fire and torment; a Goyaesque collage of burning bodies, flailing babies, limbs contorted in pain, mouths open in wide grimaces. I recoiled, and the curtain closed again.

  “That’s not my past I’m seeing,” I said. “I don’t even know what I’m looking at. It’s like they’re living through me.”

  A few years ago in New Orleans, a tall, brown-skinned man, half Cherokee, half something else, had approached me on the street. “You’ve got dead people all around you,” he’d said to me, his face stern and serious.

  “What?” I’d said, thinking he was joking.

  “Dead people. Everywhere. They’re following you. Probably your ancestors. That’s what they’re telling me.”

  “No, you’re making a mistake,” I told him, laughing nervously. “They can’t be my ancestors. My family disowned me. I’m cut off from my community. I doubt my ancestors haven’t caught on.”

  “You’re the one who’s mistaken,” he said, glaring, the tone of his voice impatient. “They know it all. But they’re still there, and they want you to know. Don’t neglect them.”

  I had looked around then, at the quiet street, darkening in the early evening. Which ancestors? What were they like? How could I get to know them?

  In Hungary, I’d asked myself who I could hope to be if I didn’t first know the person my grandmother had hoped to become. Now I wondered if I could have inherited her pain somehow, the burden she carried but refused to speak about, those gruesome deaths she related so woodenly to the police officers who took her testimony—as if it were normal, as if everyone lost every living relative in such a way. Was this why her story seemed embedded into my own sense of self, why I felt compelled to know her dreams through mine?

  I had searched all my life for a magic of my own, an answer to my grandmother’s inextinguishable essence. I had sought the location of my iron, unbending will, the source of my irreducible strength. In myself, I found only fallibility and fear, but what I now realized I had inherited from my grandmother was the knowledge that home is an internal space you could carry inside you, that it could never be violated, even if your whole world was turned upside down.

  My grandmother had unwittingly taught me that to be a whole person, you did not need the certainty of blood relations or confirmed origins; you needed only your convictions. She showed me, through her own story of heroic survival, that I did not need family to survive. Even today, she still models a true independence for me, the kind that renders you free even in the smallest prison, where your mind is a series of doors that open out. Even when ugliness abounded and it felt like the hate of the world was directed at her, she demonstrated that the integrity of the self could never be compromised.

  IV

  enlightenment

  Before I was compelled to go off in search of my grandmother’s origins, I tried to find my own place in the world, however temporary, starting with the country that I had grown up in but that was still so unfamiliar to me. I took my first step toward that by enrolling at Sarah Lawrence in 2007, at the age of twenty. I had managed to obtain entrance to this storied school on the basis of three essays, with neither a high school diploma nor a transcript, and nary a recommendation to my name. The religious school I had attended as a child did not meet government standards for accreditation. Yet there I was, changing into jeans in the car, combing my hair out after removing the burdensome wig I still wore, stepping briefly into the other world to mingle among these alien folk before retreating back into the community where I felt so confined. I was still married then, but I was dreaming of a day when I would be free.

  Sarah Lawrence was integral to my escape. It was there that I looked out into secular society and found it quite different from the descriptions of doom and gloom I had heard all my life. It was a world I wanted to be a part of, and eventually, I was able to act on that desire.

  And yet, never was there a time in my life during which I was so keenly and desperately aware of my own lack of selfhood than in those early years of being outside, having given up all the remaining shreds of my identity in exchange for the promise of something new and better. I became a sponge, reflecting the expressions and desires of those around me, parroting accents, mannerisms, and social behaviors in an effort to patch together a temporary identity that would see me through the next phase of my life.

  I took up smoking briefly because all the cool people at Sarah Lawrence seemed to be doing it. I would stand outside the library with my friend Heather, watching her inhale the smoke effortlessly, and feel enormously aware of how the cigarette was tilted between my fingers, wondering if I looked natural holding it, wondering if I was somehow part of the club. Was I normal? Was I really a Sarah Lawrence student, just like everybody else? I eyed Heather’s long auburn hair and tanned, freckled skin with awe. Would I ever look that American?

  Heather was getting her master’s degree in poetry. She was from a small town in the Bible Belt. We couldn’t have been more different from each other, at least on the surface. She wore cowboy boots and carried a black Prada purse. Her car was a brand-new silver convertible. Incredibly, what she and I ended up having in common was the feeling of being different, and having that experience highlighted at Sarah Lawrence. Neither of us quite fit the mold at a college that advertised itself as a haven for misfits. We agreed that most everyone attending was “different” in the same way. At Sarah Lawrence, a college that prided itself on being the most fiercely liberal college in the slew of fiercely liberal colleges lining the Northeast, everyone was scathingly secular and liberated. Religion was taboo; we had no Hillel house or chapel on campus—students insisted that no proselytizing should be allowed. That was tolerance for you. Heather got a fair amount of shit for wearing a sparkly diamond cross around her neck. She wasn’t a Jesus freak like people assumed, but like me, she was carrying around vestiges of her religious past for sentimental reasons, and it kept coming out in her work. Her poetry had a lot of God in it, and everyone took that literally, even though one of the most respected professors on campus had called her “the voice of our generation.” The other students smiled politely at her but talked jealously behind her back.

  She was a full-blooded Methodist who had once attended church services every Sunday. I often asked her about what it was like to grow up her kind of Christian in the Southwest. She’d tell me that Methodists were different from other Protestants, explaining that she was on the liberal end of the Methodist spectrum, which had some evangelical communities on the extreme end of it. She said she had b
een awkward and misunderstood in high school. This was hard for me to fathom, because she looked like she would have no problem fitting in, but I guess she felt so different on the inside that she couldn’t see that. She dated guys who bought her entrance into the popular crowd, and when she was seventeen, she fell in with Joel, whose family belonged to the Church of Christ. In her hometown, that was the most extreme you could get at the time. Joel’s family welcomed her into their church. They were not aware that their son, a devout Christian, was also having sex.

  In time, Joel’s family thought that Heather was acting strangely, so they invited her to a “Bible study.” It turned out to be a group of people who had gathered there specifically to exorcise her. They created a circle around her and chanted. They told her she would feel sick and vomit the evil out, and she did. They had a little bucket for her in the middle of the ring and she retched into it.

  Afterward, she was bleeding so much that she went to the hospital. She thought it was the devil, but it turned out to be a miscarriage.

  Still, she didn’t give up church. She went to a Christian university and swiped her college ID card into chapel every day, as was required. It was only in her last year that she realized she didn’t believe in it anymore, at least not in the old way. She didn’t want to end up like her friends, married at twenty-two with a husband working in the army and a brick house in the suburbs. She had to figure out a new way to reconcile her desire for faith with the reality of what she wanted from life. So she ran away to New York, which everyone in the South told her was the city of non-believers. They predicted that if she could stay faithful there, she was a true Christian. A part of her held on to that, and she said that was why she liked wearing the cross around campus. Because she wanted to believe that if she had been a true, by-the-book Christian, that’s not what would have led her astray—not her desire to blend in, but rather her intellect, her powers of perception.

  She went back south for spring break in March and told her family all about me. They insisted I fly out for the remainder of the school vacation. I was thrilled at the invitation, mostly because I hadn’t been anywhere yet, although it had been almost a year since I’d left at that point. I’d always dreamed of a well-traveled life, an antithetical concept in a community that valued the stable family unit above all else. Now I was free to go where I liked.

  I had to transfer at Dallas–Fort Worth airport, as there were no direct flights to Heather’s hometown. At my gate I encountered a handful of men with sun-leathered skin and more heft than I was used to seeing in New York. Some of them were returning from long stints on oil rigs, which seemed to put their overt cheer into perspective.

  I sat down between an oilman and an oil-supply man. On my left, the oilman, in a camouflage jacket, turned to me as I sat down and asked if I was Hispanic.

  “What?” I did not expect that.

  “Your hair is so dark,” he said. “I just figured . . . maybe Native American? You look so exotic.”

  I had never been called “exotic.” In New York, I looked just like every other Jewish girl. But camouflage jacket said he’d never been to New York, “and I ain’t got much interest in it either,” he drawled. I heard the guy on my right chuckle in agreement.

  “Do you think I look Hispanic?” I asked him.

  He smiled, shifted uncomfortably in pants that looked too tight. “Eh, you got a little something different there,” he said, pointing in the general direction of my face.

  I considered that my official welcome.

  “The South is like its own country,” oilman said to me as we made our way off the plane a half hour later. He’d discovered it was my first visit. “Hell, we might even secede one day if we get fed up enough.”

  Heather greeted me in front of the airport with a giant bear hug, almost lifting me off the ground. We drove off in her mom’s navy blue pickup truck, passing manicured desert gardens and clean, simple architecture. We pulled onto a two-lane highway, and all I could see for miles were shiny new pickups zooming through a vast expanse of beige. The dusty horizon seemed very far away, but the sky above us was bigger and bluer than any I’d seen, so bright my head throbbed just looking at it. As we zipped past the other pickups, I caught glimpses of tanned faces, broad hat brims, cigarettes held casually in sun-browned fingers.

  Heather kept up a running commentary, pointing out everything she loved about her hometown. Although she had come to Sarah Lawrence to escape, she was clearly happy to be back home, albeit temporarily. She knew the name of every cactus plant and desert tree and said that though it was barely March, this area was already in its late-spring season. I remember loving Heather very much at that moment, because underneath her Southern trappings, she was a true poet and saw beauty in everything. I’d never known people like her before, and it struck me then that one of the freedoms I had fought so hard for was this ability to make friends with just about anyone.

  Heather turned into a gray stone driveway and around to the rear entrance of a large red-brick house. A kidney-shape swimming pool shimmered silvery-blue to the left; a cactus garden was thriving modestly to the right. I saw a barbecue pit with a small pile of used charcoal at the bottom. There was an ashtray full of cigarette butts between two green deck chairs, and a border collie curled in a corner, soaking up the sun.

  Heather’s mother, Leann, was in the kitchen, frying bacon for breakfast. She agitated the skillet effortlessly, shaking the bacon back and forth while smoking a cigarette held in her other hand. The smell of Marlboros was etched into the walls, but I liked it. It brought to mind how, when I was a kid, I used to like the smell of other people’s laundry because it reminded me of them. Heather had this same natural perfume, a scent I recognized now that I was in her home: an aroma of cigarettes mixed with bacon and Jesus and swimming pools.

  We pulled stools up to the granite countertop, and Heather put the bacon and some scrambled eggs on plates for us while introducing me to Leann. A TV attached to the bottom of a cabinet was tuned to the 700 Club, and a preacher sermonized with a serious face. As I conversed politely with Leann, I could hear the words “Our Lord Jesus Christ” every few seconds, and I pretended not to think that was odd.

  A small green parrot flew into the room and landed on my glass of orange juice. I watched him inch around the rim of the glass and dip eagerly into little bacon bits that Leann had prepared for him. She cooed softly at him while he ate, inhaling another cigarette while stroking his feathers. Smoke curled around her fingers and floated upward. She had the finely crinkled skin that I’d noticed on some older women before, the kind that gets dark and mottled from years of sun damage, but it didn’t detract from her beautiful bone structure and big, bright eyes.

  There was a dinner planned for me later. Leann wanted to introduce me to all of her friends in town. They were dying to find out more about me; most of them had never heard of Hasidic Jews. As for me, I had never met an authentic Republican before until Leann, who was terrified that Obama would take away the money she earned off oil and gas royalties and leave her nothing to live on. She had recently joined the Tea Party and was planning to speak at their next convention. She scoffed at pro-choice politics. “They might as well be forcing abortions on these young women, telling them they’re too poor, or too young, or don’t have enough help. As if having children was a privilege, instead of a God-given right.”

  A buzzing beehive of people, mostly women, showed up to the dinner that Leann hosted for me in the local art museum. A stately, elegant building complete with columns and a spiral staircase, the museum showcased a large collection of photographs, mostly of desert landscapes.

  A petite matron wearing very high-heeled gold shoes, with her hair teased into a pompadour to compensate for her lack of height, confided in me that Sarah Palin was hosting another event nearby. “I would rather be here,” she said, looking up at me through thick false eyelashes. “We’re all so bored of hea
ring her talk anyway.” I felt flattered; I assumed if Sarah Palin had a devoted audience anywhere, it was certainly here.

  A woman named Melissa introduced herself to me, her voice a slow, melodic drawl. I looked at her face, which seemed unnatural, with permanently arched eyebrows, hard cheekbones, and a mouth that created no lines when it smiled. Her hair was a deep red color that only came out of an expensive bottle; it fell in fat, loose waves around her shoulders, which were draped in a pricey-looking silk scarf.

  After she had moved on to make small talk with the person on my right, Heather came over to me and whispered in my ear, “Twenty plastic surgeries at least,” and nodded toward Melissa. I shook my head in disbelief. “Nose, boobs . . .” Heather rattled off the cosmetically altered features on ten fingers. I felt sorry for the woman, who had clearly felt that everything about her had to be fixed. She was beautiful now, but in a way that left you convinced she had been even more gorgeous before she invited a surgeon to take a knife to her.

  After making the rounds of introductions, Heather facilitating excitedly at my side, I was steered to the buffet, at the center of which rested a gigantic platter of jumbo shrimp. In the middle of the tray was a deep dish filled with bright red cocktail sauce, bloodier in color and thicker in texture than ketchup, but reminding me of said condiment nonetheless. I’d never had shrimp before. Bacon was my big sin; after that I figured I had pretty much checked the whole nonkosher thing off my list. But shrimp was an equally enormous transgression, and I was curious.

  I heard myself admitting it out loud: “I’ve never tasted shrimp before.”

  The ladies gasped theatrically. A woman wearing her hair in a chignon speared a shrimp with a fork and handed it to me.