The Arrogant Years

by Lucette Lagnado

  To find what exactly?

  That was the question, and I was no longer as sure of the answer as I had been in my arrogant years.

  Now, I longed to know what happened to those who’d chosen the other path.

  One by one, I learned, the girls who had been with me behind the divider had settled down, most at a very young age.

  Gladys’s sister Fortuna, well over her crush on Elvis, became engaged shortly after high school, at the age of nineteen. She had a family, including two daughters who became lawyers. She stayed close with Gladys to the end: My cherished protector from the women’s section had died a few years earlier, I learned, as had her husband. Sweet Marlene married even younger, at eighteen, then surprised us all when she and her Israeli husband, Avi, helped found Bonjour, an international blue jeans empire. Marlene emerged as a woman of considerable influence and means, a pillar of her increasingly affluent community. Outgoing and chic, Marlene and her husband became walking billboards for the fashions their company marketed across the globe. She also assumed the role of matriarch, strong and purposeful. Her friends, siblings, and children turned to her exactly as we had as children behind the divider.

  Maurice, the object of my girlhood adoration, became a businessman and never left the community. He remained close to Marlene and like her, he was devout and faithful to its values. Pursued by any number of women, he settled for a lovely blonde, and together they had a loving family. I could never probe: The few times I encountered him over the years, I felt as shy as when I was a little girl, enamored of a striking older boy.

  Joseph Hannon, Maurice’s best friend, seatmate, and confidant in the men’s section, joined the Jewish Defense League, a radical organization that advocated violence as necessary to combat anti-Semitism as well as to counter the historical image of Jews as victims. Joseph became a devotee of JDL’s founder, Rabbi Meir Kahane, and was said to roam the streets of Brooklyn carrying a lead pipe inside his jacket.

  He eventually moved to Israel and became a religious scholar, a calling possibly more suited to his quiet, thoughtful nature. Now known as Rabbi Yosef, he roamed the streets of Jerusalem with his long beard and favored prayer books over lead pipes.

  Celia, my untamable Moroccan friend, was also eighteen when she became engaged. We didn’t know the boy, who came from outside the community. He had been raised by ultraorthodox Jews from Eastern Europe, and we weren’t sure what to make of him. We had been taught at an early age to marry only “our own”—other Jews from the Levant.

  At her wedding, on a bitter cold day in February 1973, Celia appeared in long sleeves, her face covered by her veil, and walked around her husband seven times, in keeping with his religious tradition (though not really our tradition). After some years, my friend—now the mother of four children—divorced her husband, an exceedingly rare occurrence in her world. She never spoke about the marriage or what had gone wrong. But she bravely reinvented herself as a professional woman. She ditched the hair coverings and long skirts of her former world and went to work. She held jobs at several airlines and began to travel widely; she even went back to visit her hometown of Tétouan, Morocco, which she had last seen as a little girl in the 1960s. When I found her, she had acquired a new identity; she was working as a massage therapist and looked striking in white slacks and sandals. We agreed she had come a long way from her strict House of Jacob upbringing.

  Madame Marie, her mother, left America for good. She and her husband moved to Israel and, in late middle age, began a new life close to their youngest son. They settled in Jerusalem near Moshe—Moses—who unlike his namesake had managed to reach the Promised Land.

  That shy, stammering child—who had loved to wander into the women’s section and longed to be included in our games—was now a towering figure in Israel’s religious circles, a distinguished and prominent Hasidic rabbi. The author of numerous religious texts, Moshe was so revered that he taught other rabbis. He also outgrew his awkward childhood and found true love. He married a pleasant, thoughtful woman and together they had eleven children.

  He and his family lived in a religious complex outside of Jerusalem, a community where even grocery stores were segregated by sex and women could only shop for supplies at certain times of the day, when there were no men around. His mother, always a voice of moderation, became more religious and began to cover her hair with a headscarf. She had never done that in all those years seated next to Mom and me in the women’s section.

  The Cohen sisters sold the house on Twentieth Avenue where I had whiled away so many Saturday afternoons and moved near Ocean Parkway. Rebecca Cohen was the first of the five sisters to find a husband. It wasn’t easy, of course, because of the two disabled siblings, Leah and Maggie In a community that thrived on gossip, it was whispered that the Cohen girls were cursed with bad genes, and I think that my friends themselves at times wondered whether anyone would marry them.

  Rebecca broke the curse. In her early twenties, she became engaged to an amiable Jew from Egypt named Eric Choueka, who fell in love with her and was willing to take a chance. She threw herself a lavish wedding and gleefully proclaimed herself “Rebecca Choueka.” Strengthened by her husband’s love, she proceeded to have several children, each one healthier and more promising than the next.

  Her older sister, Gracie—who now called herself “Grace”—followed suit some years later. She was a professional woman, a teacher in the New York City school system, when she went outside the community and wed a man who was Jewish but not Syrian. The Cohen sister I remembered most vividly and missed the most was Maggie. The sweet Down syndrome child, whose dearest companion was her father, had remained close to Abraham Cohen until one day while crossing the street he was hit by a motorcyclist and injured. In a surfeit of bad luck, gentle Mr. Cohen was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s and could no longer take care of his cherished and most helpless daughter, the child who had loved him unconditionally. The sisters rallied and looked after their dad until the day he died.

  Leah, the oldest, went into a group home with other young adults who suffered from disabilities. Later, I heard that Maggie had also been placed in a communal residence. But the Cohen sisters led fiercely private lives, and I never had news of any of them again.

  Marlene’s sister, Diana, my friend who had sat by my side every Saturday as we advanced step by step into the men’s section, left the community and became an accomplished journalist and foreign correspondent. She married, divorced, and married again; and I sometimes wondered if she ever missed the world her sister emblemized.

  Laurie, the princess of West 116th Street, who hadn’t been with me behind the divider, but had prayed very happily behind her own partition in Long Island’s Orthodox enclaves, decided to move to New York, to a grand apartment on Fifth Avenue. Now a mother of six and a grandmother of two infants, she welcomed me into her family in the same way she had so many years back when she’d invited me for weekends to North Woodmere and Hewlett Harbor. One night, as we were celebrating Passover together, Laurie suddenly stood up and began to dance. She danced around the long holiday table and she danced through the house and her four daughters danced behind her. They were all laughing and singing exuberantly and I had no idea why, but this demonstration of sheer joie reminded me of why I’d been drawn to Laurie so many years back when there was no joy within me and she had managed, miraculously, to restore a bit of it.

  After the Shield of Young David, Rabbi Ruben found another calling: He worked as a stockbroker. He proved to be a gifted and talented investor, but then he grew disillusioned with Wall Street and the world of finance. He and his wife moved to an ultrareligious corner of Jerusalem, and several of his daughters settled there as well and raised large families of their own. My childhood rabbi reinvented himself yet again as a Hasidic scholar and Cabbalist. He traveled constantly to Safed, the ancient city of mystics.

  For years and years, I had no news of my old nemesis, Mrs. Menachem. Yet she haunted me.

  I
could still hear her shouting, “You are a silly, silly little girl who’s trying to change the world.”

  I would find myself increasingly wondering if she’d had a point.

  Dalida, my mother’s favorite singer, the former Miss Egypt who became a star at the Olympia and whose songs so vividly brought back the life left behind, took her own life one day in Paris with an overdose of pills. “Life has become unbearable—forgive me,” she had scribbled in one final note.

  The Congregation of Love and Friendship, my father’s favorite synagogue, abandoned its modest home on Sixty-Sixth Street. It moved to grander digs in the heart of Ocean Parkway, and then, as Egyptian Jews prospered, moved again to an even more splendid sanctuary across the boulevard. The new temple of marble and gilt was so different from the simple structure Dad had loved. But the congregation did keep its original name, Ahaba ve Ahava, which conjured up both the old synagogue in Cairo as well as the little shul in Bensonhurst that had gathered everyone in from the cold.

  The Synagogue Without a Name disappeared without a trace. The Reform temple I had never dared to enter was destroyed in the 1980s in a mysterious fire started by an arsonist. Years later, I met a woman who told me she had worshipped there as a child and yes, it was true: The congregation never had a women’s section, exactly as we had suspected. But it did have a name—the Mapleton Park Hebrew Institute.

  Only the Big Shul on Sixty-Seventh Street, next to the Shield of Young David, survived. Even as its congregation aged and dwindled, it limped along, holding occasional Sabbath or holiday services in its magnificent sanctuary. But then it, too, was forced to make a new life for itself.

  It became a mortuary, where community members went to honor their dead. Whenever a Syrian or Egyptian Jew passed away, whether they were in a mansion on Ocean Parkway or in a medical center in Manhattan, they were transported back to Sixty-Seventh Street to prepare them for their reunion with God. The community had no use for traditional funeral homes, so popular in America, where death had become a business and burials were brisk and fast and impersonal. Not at the Big Shul.

  A tall elderly gentleman who always wore dark sunglasses, even indoors, and whose name I never knew, stayed at their side, ministered to them, and recited the Psalms because the dead could not be left alone even for a minute. He washed them thoroughly and then dressed them in fine white gowns so they would be clean and pure on their heavenly journey.

  For this tremendous mitzvah—good deed—the man with the black glasses was paid only a pittance, barely enough to support his family. He was also deeply feared. To his own eternal sadness, children ran away from him; and adults, even well-meaning adults, adults who should have known better, adults who did know better, shunned him as if he himself were the Angel of Death and rarely invited him to their happy occasions, the weddings and bar mitzvahs he so longed to attend.

  He was in fact a holy man, the dead’s most tender companion—the only friend they had as they marched off to meet their Maker.

  Come morning, the man with the dark glasses left, and the mourners arrived to take his place. They found their seats in the sanctuary and lingered and prayed, and you could see them occasionally staring up at the ceiling, at that delirious light blue painted sky above the altar, wondering whether their loved one had found their way to it safely.

  As I tracked down, one by one, these friends from my arrogant years, what did I learn? Marlene offered the most powerful, and perhaps the most searing, lesson: When I saw her, I realized that those of us who had sought to leave the women’s section had paid a price far beyond our reckoning.

  I found her in a stately home in Ocean Parkway, at the heart of the community she had chosen never to abandon. Now a mother of five and a grandmother of “more than” twenty—she was too superstitious to say exactly how many grandchildren she had—she spoke with her old fervor about the world I had left and the world I had embraced.

  In my absence, “the Community,” as she called it, had grown and flourished.

  Its members lived in elegant private homes and apartments all around the wide tree-lined boulevard that had filled my mother with such longing. Mom would always say so wistfully, “Oh, une maison sur Ocean Parkway”—A home on Ocean Parkway—as if it were the ultimate ideal.

  Families stuck together here, and children lived near their loved ones even when they were grown: that was the rule. Marlene pointed to her own married daughters—lovely brunette versions of her—who had settled all around her, in touch with her constantly. Her grandchildren were her love, including a few who were named “Marlene” because that was the Syrian tradition: to honor your mother and father by naming your children after them. One beautiful little girl with fair eyes was nicknamed “MarleneBlue.”

  Above all, the Community took care of its own, my friend reminded me. If someone was sick and infirm, there were armies of volunteers rushing to visit them and comfort them and bring them soup. A bride in need of a trousseau could count on getting the fine clothes and gowns she needed lest she be embarrassed on her wedding day. A young man about to be engaged would be helped in purchasing a ring for his intended.

  It was exactly as the Jews had functioned back in old Cairo and in long-ago Aleppo, as it had in the world of the pasha and his wife, when philanthropy was personal as well as communal and didn’t depend on welfare or bureaucracies or the United Jewish Appeal.

  And that outside world I had found so seductive?

  It was a wasteland, a lost and hopeless place, my friend clearly believed. While she loved America, it was such a lonely country—so many American families were broken, fractured beyond repair. Children lived hundreds, thousands of miles from their fathers and mothers. Grandchildren hardly ever saw their grandparents. Families came together once or twice a year—Thanksgiving, Christmas—on what had become requisite, almost forced reunions.

  But here on Ocean Parkway, where familial bonds still mattered above all, “We have Thanksgiving every week,” she said.

  It was the siren song Marlene had sung for years—every time I had run into her—a melody that filled me with yearning and where the lyrics consisted of only two words, come back come back come back come back.

  I had visited Israel many times, but I had never thought of finding Rabbi Ruben. For years, my life had been so removed from anyone who figured in my past. But suddenly I felt a deep need to see my childhood rabbi again. Invited to attend a professional conference in Jerusalem, I snuck out and traveled to his house in a religious enclave known as Ramot, the kind of area where families have large numbers of children and men are only seen in black coats and women always keep their hair and arms and legs covered and strangers are looked upon with suspicion.

  I remembered my rabbi as vibrant and modern—a man of his times in the way he spoke and dressed. I almost didn’t recognize the imposing figure with the flowing white beard who greeted me at the door. With him was his daughter Debbie, whom I’d known as a quiet little girl with fine blond hair. She, too, had been with me behind the divider, and like her older sister Miriam, she had shared her favorite books, including The Kiddush Cup That Cried. Debbie now wore a headscarf that hid nearly every strand of her hair, and she clearly lived a traditional, Hasidic lifestyle.

  Once inside the apartment, I noticed the portrait of David, the rabbi’s lost son, prominently on display in the dining room.

  It was in the place of honor, where he could always see him. Nearby were pictures of Mrs. Ruben, the rebbetzin: She, too, had died. Although his daughters and grandchildren were all around, I had the sense that my rabbi was terribly lonely.

  I wanted to know, how was Mrs. Menachem? I had heard she was living in Israel, though her children were in America.

  She was gravely ill with cancer, the rabbi told me quietly. We could only pray for her. He didn’t sound hopeful.

  I asked father and daughter if they remembered a book I’d once borrowed from their family library—a work attacking Charles Darwin. The mood in the room, subdued
and wary since I’d arrived, suddenly turned jovial. Oh, you mean by Rabbi Avigdor Miller? You mean Rejoice, O Youth? both said at once. They were clearly delighted by my inquiry. Debbie made a phone call, and within minutes, one of her daughters raced over with a copy of Rejoice, O Youth in hand. There it was, the book I’d last seen as a little girl, with page after page challenging the theory of evolution and demanding to know where was the missing link.

  I had joined Darwin’s world in those intervening years. I lived among people who’d never even dream of questioning his theory of evolution, who thought it was heresy—madness—to do so, and despised the so-called creationists. Yet here I was with important figures from my childhood who still clung to notions I had discarded one by one, that I had come to regard as hopelessly quaint. The Rubens were more fervent than ever in their beliefs, and I am sure they were contemptuous of Darwin and so much else that my world held as iconic.

  It had been more than forty years since I had flipped through the pages of Rabbi Miller’s primer. I had since come across hundreds of articles, often on the front page of major newspapers, announcing some great archaeological find, the discovery of some skeletal remains that were heralded as definitive proof of Darwin’s theory, and indeed said to be the “missing link.” Somehow, they never were at the end—there was always a disclaimer. And that is when I’d find myself thinking of that long-ago book and wondering—Where is the missing link? That is when I’d realize that a small piece of me was still secretly, privately, quietly cheering Avigdor Miller and his legion of followers on the other side of the divider.

  As I rose to leave, Rabbi Ruben motioned to me to wait: There was one more serious matter we needed to discuss. He pointed to my book, the memoir of my father I had sent him as a gift. He had only read the first several pages, but what he’d gleaned so far had disturbed him profoundly. Didn’t I know that the most important commandment in the Holy Bible was to honor your father and mother? He suggested that I had shamed my dad—he accused me of dishonoring Leon’s memory.