Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  Well, nothing except the standard requirement that I live within an approximately two-hour radius of my ex-husband’s stated address, as Isaac’s father still had his usual visitation rights, as before. We had meticulously agreed to weekends and vacations, and that Isaac should not have to face an arduous commute between the two of us.

  Nonetheless I would take what I could get. I drew a circle on the map, with Eli’s home at the center, and looked at all the possible locations within the two-hour limit in every direction. To the southwest there was New Jersey, a state I was familiar with and had no desire to live in, full as it was with Orthodox Jewish communities where I would be easily recognized. Up north were the Catskill Mountains, where I had spent my summers as a child and to which Hasidic Jews flocked in the hotter months; I remembered my time in the boggy summer camps, flies swirling in tornado-like clusters over puddles that never evaporated in the wet and humid heat. In the southeasterly direction there was Brooklyn, full of hipsters and artists now, but also the place from whence I had come, and I could not bring myself to go back. And directly east lay Westchester County, that rich enclave where I had attended university; that could hardly be an improvement on Manhattan. I traced my finger farther up, northeast past Westchester and Duchess Counties, cutting diagonally across the Hudson Valley up to the Appalachian ridge, the old mountain range flattened and softened by time, and stopped at a little triangle of country on the borders of Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut. It lay at the very edge of my permissible radius, nestled at the foot of the Berkshire Mountains. I knew this place; in fact, I had been there once before, on a brief visit to one of my only college friends, Lauren—well, actually, to her parents, who were lawyers in New York, Jewish in name only, and kept a house in the woods to escape to on weekends and vacations.

  * * *

  • • •

  I remembered Lauren’s family quite distinctly, for I had asked her father what caused him to identify as Jewish, since he didn’t seem to observe or practice any of the usual rituals, nor did he seem to have any connection to Jewish culture. Yet when asked, he insisted he was.

  “That’s simple,” he had answered me. “I guess I’ve just always known if Hitler were to come around, he’d be knocking on my door too.” That was enough for him, and enough for most of the Jews I had encountered since then, just a basic knowledge that what was binding them all together was this shared hypothetical vulnerability, this giant what-if. It was the ultimate equalizer, the thread that could bind someone like me with someone like his daughter, despite the differences in class, income, and education.

  I now recalled their sixties split-level on the peak of a thickly wooded hill, the way the front of the house was in the perpetual shade of the birch forest, while the rear with its wraparound veranda boasted sweeping views of the valleys toward the west. On particularly clear days, the Catskills appeared like thick smears of bluish paint on the distant horizon. I recalled that fleeting trip to the area, and my longer visit to Justine’s house in California, and since it was clear that my choices still were relatively limited and likely to remain so, why shouldn’t I at the very least take a drastic step and leave civilization behind me? I could find a cheap year-round rental in the northwestern corner of Connecticut. I would have my peace and quiet, and Isaac would go to a great school. He only had one month left at preschool; one more month in Manhattan, and then it was good-bye and good riddance.

  I went with Eli to the Beth Din of America to perform the get ceremony as promised. When we arrived, I was surprised to discover that the sofer, the scribe, was Hasidic. I realized then that among the Modern Orthodox there was clearly no one qualified to serve in that role; the Hebrew script required to make religious documents official and binding was a complex calligraphy that took decades to learn. Should a mistake be made, I knew, the scribe would have to start from the beginning.

  The sofer asked me for my maiden name, and when I gave it, he nodded his head sagely. “I’m from Williamsburg too,” he said in Yiddish, speaking over the head of the court officiant, or rav, who wore a small, inconspicuous yarmulke but clearly did not understand a word we were saying. “You were married to this guy?” the scribe inquired with raised eyebrows, looking at my uncovered hair and jeans and then at Eli’s large black kippah. “I can’t believe it. A girl from Williamsburg?”

  The rav interrupted him, reminding him that we only had thirty minutes to complete the process before the next appointment. The scribe bent over his work, scribbling furiously as the rav dictated the details. We were required to confirm our identities; this entailed giving our full Hebrew names as well as those of our parents. The rest was communicated in Hebrew between the rav and Eli, while I stood off to the side and waited to play my small role in the process. When the documents had been completed, the rav folded them and presented them to Eli, instructing him to repeat the words he was saying. I then had to hold out my hands while Eli dropped the get into them, saying to me in Hebrew, “I now pronounce you free for any other man.”

  I bristled at those words and laughed sarcastically. “Now walk away,” the rav instructed sternly, pointing to me. I took a few steps backward. “Now bring the get to me.” I placed it on his desk.

  “You can go,” the rav announced, waving us away with nary a glance in our direction. “You’ll each get confirmation proof in the mail.” And that was that.

  Eli moved to shake my hand once we were in front of the building. “Did you forget?” I asked. “We’re divorced now; we can’t touch.” He chuckled uncomfortably and put his hand in his pocket, instead nodding to me. We said our awkward good-byes and parted ways, he walking up Broadway toward Penn Station to catch the train out of the city, and I walking south to the subway. The marriage was now over in all respects. Perhaps this was the beginning of something for both of us. I hoped he would find happiness too, I thought, for I understood that anything I achieved in my life could be seen as coming at his expense in some way, and the only way for me to feel truly free, in the sense of mental and emotional ties, was to know that he too had moved on and found his own path.

  * * *

  —

  It didn’t take long for me to find a house in Salisbury, Connecticut. I chose an old converted barn situated on one of the many lakes in the area, ringed with wilderness.

  I made an appointment at the small private school in the area so that Isaac could interview for a chance to attend first grade there. In June I drove upstate with him, and it was evident that he too relaxed as soon as we arrived in the calmer countryside. At the interview I had to let him see the principal alone. After it was finished, she told me that everything seemed fine and that Isaac would be welcome to attend, but there was one strange thing. Apparently he had been forced to learn to write with his right hand, even though he was clearly left-handed. As a result he had developed a less-than-productive and improper approach to penmanship, which would have to be corrected by slowly training him to return to his lefty instincts, as well as teaching him the left-handed technique. It was important, the principal impressed upon me, that Isaac use the summer to practice as much as possible, so that he would be on the same level as the other children when he started school.

  Left-handedness had always been viewed with suspicion in our community; I remember my grandfather saying, “A Jew does everything with his right hand.” In all the laws that governed our daily life, from how we washed our hands to how we tied our shoes, everything began with the right hand. This had powerful spiritual significance; left-side orientation was associated with the devil.

  Of course, I had not dreamed that such practices would also be instituted in Modern Orthodox schools, certainly not to the extent that a left-handed child would be forced to write with the right. After all, it was nothing but a silly superstition. I felt so relieved that Isaac would be attending elementary school in an environment free of such arbitrary stupidities. He was about to have the educatio
n I had always dreamed of. The school was a charming gabled country house on an enormous sunny meadow; it even had its own golden retriever, who greeted each child with a paw shake every morning. It was small and cozy and everything that Manhattan was not.

  While Isaac went to his father for his share of the summer vacation, I prepared for the move, closing out my current rental contract and signing the new one, packing up the few things I owned and acquiring the things I did not, and by August I was settled, just in time to pick up Isaac and show him his new home.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was a glorious month. Isaac, then six years old, swam in the lake that abutted our property every day. We lay on the dock and peered over the edge to see the sunfish and perch sheltering beneath. He collected snail shells; he tried to skip rocks but rarely succeeded; he spied on rabbits making short work of leafy plants. Every evening the sun would set in magnificent colors over the water, the lake would seem stiller somehow, and the world would get very quiet. I watched, pretzel-legged on the grass, as the last of the pink glow faded and the crickets assumed their nightly routine. The madness of Manhattan seemed very far away.

  I was finally living life actively, I thought, the way I had dreamed, and I knew just how lucky I was, but in some ways my brain was still stuck in the past. I was having bad dreams every night, waking up each morning enveloped by feelings of dread, and I panicked secretly when in groups or crowded spaces. None of this was consistent with the calm and fulfilling existence I had begun living. When I finally went to a psychiatrist that fall, to receive a formal diagnosis on the list of mental illnesses I was so sure I suffered from, the verdict of posttraumatic stress disorder seemed almost anticlimactic. The Hasidic sect I grew up in was a community living with a pooled inheritance of residual trauma. Although I was reminded of that every time I thought to feel resentful or deprived, I came away from childhood with the knowledge that nothing would ever be as bad as it could really get. I learned that even at my lowest point, I could still have a lot. At the very core of my character, underneath the self-doubt that came later, is the legacy I inherited from the people who raised me. As sure as if it were etched in stone, I know I am a survivor. This is the primary identity I inherited from my war-ravaged grandparents, from my ancestors who survived centuries of persecution in Europe, from my people who wandered in exile for millennia. This is how I think of myself, first and foremost. Yet how was I to access that reserve of strength? How was I to be more than just a survivor and learn to actually live? I wanted desperately to enter the next phase, the space beyond survival, but I felt stuck, as if survival was the only mode in which I was capable of functioning.

  The fact that I failed to find contentment at that point in my life was a source of great shame and anxiety for me. I thought to myself one night as I lay awake yet again at three a.m. that I had always felt that niggling fear that my birth was a mistake, like a computer glitch that left me permanently disconnected, with no ability to form real and lasting connections. The system that everyone else used had always seemed unreachable, but perhaps, instead of bringing me closer, leaving had rendered that system permanently out of reach.

  I remembered one of the articles the New York Post had printed about me, when the scandal around my book had erupted, in which members of my family had been interviewed. My uncle, the same one who regularly sent me poorly spelled death threats and insults, said to the reporter that, in essence, all of this had always been my problem, because I had simply “lacked happiness.” This, despite all my family had done for me, he said. They had arranged a marriage to a good man, he said, spent thousands on a wedding. Clearly I was abnormal if, even after all that, I lacked happiness. Certainly this attack was less vicious than the ones my uncle lobbed at me in assumed privacy. Phrases like “ugly horse-face” should have stung more, but it was the “lacked happiness” comment that had eventually led me to my first real therapist; it had hit that deep and sensitive nerve in me that had always throbbed with the fear that in some undeniable way I was marked for unhappiness from the beginning.

  If only I could understand why. Although I lived in a nice house surrounded by beautiful nature, and Isaac was as happy as I could have ever imagined in his new school, and we finally had financial security, my body still quivered with the same fear as before, as if any moment now all of this would prove a dream. My days became efforts in distracting myself.

  * * *

  • • •

  My first friend while I lived in New England was Richard. He had just moved into his new studio when I met him in the early autumn of 2012. Tall and slender, with red hair, freckled skin, and a high forehead, he wore linen pants, aviator sunglasses, and wide-brimmed straw hats. He was a contemporary figurative artist, he told me; the work that hung on the walls of his atelier seemed to have been transported from some mysterious and magical castle. A crucified man, a baby suspended in a cold fireplace, a woman drowning in a bathtub, smoke rising from candles that had just been extinguished.

  Richard and I had something in common; we had both left something behind us, for he had grown up dirt-poor in a trailer park in Georgia and had reinvented himself over the years into this elegant, well-read painter veiled in the mystique of having recently returned from Europe. He had nourished himself, like me, by reaching for the realms of poetry and literature. But even now, in this new incarnation with its impressive résumé, he felt mismatched, he explained, when he contrasted his work with the mainstream values of the art world. I had read Émile Durkheim recently, and the word “anomie” came to mind immediately when he said this. Perhaps I impressed him with this knowledge, with my recently acquired ability to drop words like that, for it was the beginning of a close and unusual friendship. Both of us had broken irreparably from something and were in pursuit of some kind of true self, but instead we both felt farther than ever from this goal. We comforted each other in our shared state of exile and alienation, made tangible by the fact that although both of us had finally become financially independent artists, neither of us could compare our lifestyles with the extravagant opulence that lay all around us, in this rarefied region where our neighbors were Kevin Bacon and Meryl Streep.

  What was wonderful during that time, a truly blissful distraction, was being able to learn more about the art world, about which I was insatiably curious. Richard was my particular escape at that time; a non-Jew hampered only by a past steeped in poverty, he had scrambled his way up the social ladder and had experienced access to the very top rungs, which I knew by then were not necessarily defined by money but by a kind of access to deeper, more valuable riches that took a lifetime to attain. I could not reinvent myself the way he had, for even if I changed the way I spoke or the way I dressed, I did not have the basic genetic traits required to project the kind of sophisticated waspy eccentricity that he did. I would always be seen as a Jew trying to camouflage myself.

  Although this divide existed between us, and in our own way, we were each aware of it, our commonalities seemed to supersede it, and over time I began to see him as a brother, if not in blood then in spirit. I spent hours sitting on the sun-warmed wooden floors of his studio, leafing through the thick, glossy pages of his many art books, marveling at the high-quality prints, while he sat at his easel and dabbed light onto dark canvases. I was introduced to the full oeuvre of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hammershøi, but also names I did not know, as diverse as Eugène Carrière, Gabriël Metsu, Andrew Wyeth, and Caspar David Friedrich. As he worked with a practiced hand at a sketch, he told me about Klimt and Schiele, about Rodin and his mistress Camille Claudel, about Renoir and his muses. He had learned everything there was to know about the history of art, and I soaked up his stored knowledge. He talked about his time spent studying at the New York Academy of Art, which he had attended on scholarship, and immediately I recognized the phenomenon he described, of being patronized as the poor, uneducated student, tolerated only in name, to preserve
the image of the arts as accessible to all. His attempts at creating something outside that acceptable frame were ridiculed at best, rebutted at worst. After a period of frustration, he had written a letter to a controversial Norwegian painter named Odd Nerdrum, known for bucking contemporary art values in a similar fashion, asking if he could study with him. To Richard’s surprise, Odd had accepted him as a student.

  Richard showed me Odd’s work then, and it surprised me that the techniques I had just learned about, characteristic of the Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque, could still be used by a living artist and not seem derivative or recycled. The images in those paintings, despite the way they were created with lush layers of thick oil paint, looked nothing so much as futuristic and primeval to me at the same time. It was as if a caveman had collaborated with a painter from an unknown era still to come. I listened to Richard tell me stories of his adventures at Odd’s with a touch of jealousy, although it was still wonderful to live vicariously through him. He used his unparalleled photographic recall and his gift for visual description not only in his paintings, but also in the way he told stories, waxing eloquent about people and places in the way I had become accustomed to experiencing solely in nineteenth-century literature.

  He told me about taking that trip to go study with Odd, how it had been his first time out of the country and how overwhelmed and ignorant he had felt at the beginning. But once installed at Odd’s giant house in France, with its tremendous fireplaces and French doors—details I could actually envision because he had integrated them into his many paintings—he had realized that there was a whole community of people already there who felt exactly the way he did, in the sense that their aesthetic ideals did not match up with what was accepted in society. Odd had called it the Kitsch movement; it was supposed to be some kind of protest against postmodern art philosophy in that it embodied an aesthetically humanist position in what Odd saw as an anti-humanist technological society. Artists who were acutely sensitive to this experience were drawn to Odd and his ideas, finding a home among people who similarly identified as pariahs in the art world.