Unorthodox

by Deborah Feldman

  It is from children that you have the most nachas, the most pride, Zeidy always says, but also the most pain. Tzaar gidul bunim, the agony that comes with raising children, is the ultimate test of faith, he feels. God gives us children so that we may struggle all our lives to provide for them, protect them, and shape them into devout servants of Hashem.

  Zeidy comes from a legacy of oppression. His ancestors lived in Eastern Europe for generations, enduring pogroms that were not unlike the persecution during Hitler’s reign. I can’t comprehend how a person who comes from so much pain and loss can perpetuate his own oppression. In small ways Zeidy cages himself, depriving himself of harmless joys, and yet it seems the very deprivation fulfills him. Is it guilt that drives my grandparents to inflict continuous suffering upon themselves, bear laborious burdens, never once accepting the possibility of easement?

  I think pain makes Zeidy feel clean, purified. Every Friday night he places his palms on the east wall of the dining room and prays his own personal prayer to God, and when he prays, the tears cascade down his cheeks like rain, like I’ve never seen on any other man, and I think it makes him feel better, it allows him to live in his life without feeling repulsed by the abundance that surrounds him. Zeidy believes that souls come into this world to endure and be cleansed for the world to come, and the trials of life give him great comfort. Deprivation doesn’t make me feel that way at all. It makes me feel dirty and irritable, and crying chokes up my throat and nostrils until I can’t breathe past the pain. Still, I carry it too, just like all of Bubby and Zeidy’s children and grandchildren. We too are part of the legacy of loss.

  “I survived only so that you could be born,” Bubby reminds me every so often. Zeidy agrees. “So many times, I wondered why I was allowed to live,” he ruminates. “But with time it became clear to me that all of my children and grandchildren had to be born, and it is my responsibility to make sure they grow up to be good Jews, ehrliche Yidden, to give meaning to my survival. I can’t possibly imagine wasting this precious gift I was given, not when so many others were deprived of it.” He takes the leftovers out of the fridge and stirs them together in one pot for his dinner. He won’t let Bubby throw any kind of food away.

  Bubby cuts the moldy parts out of the vegetables and puts them back in the fridge. Freshly baked cakes and pies are stored in the freezer for special occasions, and after they have been cut up and enjoyed, Bubby wraps every leftover crumb and stores it again. I long for novelty snacks such as chocolate bars and potato chips, and now that I’m growing, I find myself eternally hungry, the space between mealtimes a yawning gap in my stomach.

  The hunger I feel is physical, but it is more than that too; it is a hole that needs to be filled indiscriminately, with food being the convenient option. How to explain my relationship with the food that Bubby puts on my plate? I build elaborate fantasies around each dish, making up stories of how each came into existence, feeding an appetite that feels bigger than the natural bellyache of hunger. There is a yawning chasm in me that threatens to grow wider if I don’t stuff the gap with as much as I can manage. Food is a temporary fix, but it’s better than staying with that emptiness.

  Lately I’ve found myself doing the strangest things. When Bubby and Zeidy go away and I am left alone in the house, I can’t stop thinking about the cakes in the freezer. Their presence calls to me so loudly I become distracted by it, unable to focus on even the most exciting book. Guiltily, I open the freezer, gazing at the stacked, foil-wrapped pans of apple pie, chocolate brownies, filbert fudge, and marble cake. Only a sliver, I tell myself, carefully sliding the uppermost pan out from the shelf. But once the cake is uncovered before me on the kitchen table, I can’t stop myself from cutting slabs of it, stuffing it into my mouth with my fingers and swallowing as fast as I can, spurred by the fear that I may be caught red-handed. As I cram hunks of frosting-laced brownie down my throat, I watch as fat crumbs fall all around me, and when I’m older I will remember the sense of desperation I felt, seeing myself reduced to such circumstances. Later I scrub the kitchen floor painstakingly, determined to remove every shred of evidence; I feel as guilty for eating as I do for reading. I am left with the constant feeling of having done something awful, and yet I am still hungry.

  When I grow up, I’m never going to be stingy when it comes to food, I resolve. Sometimes I crave the simple pleasure of a fresh tomato, with firm skin and tender flesh. I pinch quarters from the pushka, the box where Bubby puts the charity money, and buy rosy slabs of watermelon to eat on the porch, dripping juice and black seeds onto the flowerpots. Little seedlings push themselves out between the petunias weeks later and Bubby plucks them curiously, examining them before pronouncing them weeds.

  In the backyard, strawberry plants begin to bud along the limestone pathway, and the wild roses snake their way up the barbed-wire fence at the back. The loganberry tree hangs heavily over the porch. Bubby is worried it will prevent the sunshine from getting to her tulips, but Zeidy says we can’t cut it down because it’s a fruit tree and biblical law prohibits cutting down fruit trees. Even pruning is questionable.

  By the time Passover rolls around, the berries will be falling sloppily onto the porch, mushy splats of dark purple staining the fake grass carpet. More cleaning for Bubby.

  The Jewish bookstore in Borough Park sells books that Zeidy doesn’t approve of. He likes me to read in Yiddish, gaudily illustrated tales of legendary tzaddikim, who perform predictable miracles through prayer and exercises in faith, whose stories spill abruptly out over the length of twenty or so pages of monotonous language. He brings home Yiddish weeklies, periodicals depicting news mined from old journals and encyclopedias, outdated essays on midcentury politics or Jewish cantorial music. I know there are other works written in Yiddish, but they are banned. In fact there is a whole world of Yiddish literature I will never be allowed to read. Sholem Aleichem is forbidden in this house; he was an apikores, a so-called liberated Jew. Satmar people do not read anything written by liberated Jews, even if it is written in the holy language of Yiddish.

  Still, the Jewish bookstore sells everything that pertains to Jews, and I feel somehow less guilty bringing home a book from there than from the library. If I get caught, I assume it’s a lesser offense. I am shocked by the irreverent tone in Tevye the Milkman; who knew anything written in Yiddish could sound so crass and offensive? I’ve always thought of it as a formal language, but apparently there are many Yiddish words that have gone out of fashion, because the Yiddish of today’s Williamsburg is nothing like the earthy, naughty Yiddish of the nineteenth century. It makes my cheeks burn just to read it.

  By far the most exciting read is The Chosen. I opened it to the first page in the bookstore out of mild curiosity. I had assumed from its cover, a depiction of an earlocked Hasid clutching a prayer book, that it would be a boring story about a good Jewish boy. But to hear the familiar streets of Williamsburg described in the opening chapter as “cracked squares of cement . . . softened in the stifling summers,” juxtaposed with descriptions of the other ethnic forces that dominate my small, crowded district of Brooklyn, was like an immediate jolt to my literary sensibilities. A book about my home! Terms and references that, finally, felt familiar to me! What a wonderful new sensation, to delve into the pages of a book and realize that the familiar sense of alienation, of confusion, was gone. How easy it was to identify with the characters and story lines in The Chosen, for they were still going on around me right now, to this day. The Williamsburg of Chaim Potok had changed, surely, but its essence, its history, was still the same. I was certain that if Zeidy caught me with this book, it could hardly offend him. After all, this book was about us. If there was a book about us out there, then perhaps we weren’t so strange after all.

  Although I have heard many times the history of our little Satmar community, I do not know much about the history of the Hasidic movement itself, and The Chosen is my first jarring introduction to my past. I begin to understand the link betwee
n Sholem Aleichem’s bawdy characters and myself. I had once thought myself far removed from tales of the Diaspora, but there is, apparently, something of a connection between Hasidic Jews and a certain provincial naïveté, or even ignorance. It is an innocence that Hasids value, that they refer to as purity and righteousness, and it challenges the native scholar, who must struggle to maintain that innocence while still sharpening his mind over the Talmud. I suddenly see my grandfather through new eyes. I have always thought him to be possessed of a brilliant mind, but it is Talmudic genius that he is known for. Chaya often shakes her head and sighs about this, telling me Zeidy will never be able to apply his scholarly intelligence to practical matters. His street smarts, she says, are nonexistent. Still, what if he wants it this way? What if this is the way of life he has chosen, to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors who walked blindly into the traps the gentiles set for them, turning to God instead of their own wits for survival? Genius can only be put to good use in the study of the Torah. For all else, one must rely on faith.

  Because it is the first time I’m reading The Chosen, I side with Danny, the Hasidic boy, in almost everything. His father’s Talmudic arguments are what feel familiar to me, and Danny’s outlook strikes me as innately correct even before I’ve fully thought it through. For every Zionist and liberated attitude that Reuven’s character introduces, I have a counterargument ready. Later, in my adulthood, I will read the book again, even watch the movie, and understand that I wasn’t equipped, as a child, to make room for arguments that would undermine every single choice made for me, that would shatter the foundations of my very existence. I would see that I had to believe everything I was taught, if only to survive. For a long time I wouldn’t be ready to accept that my worldview could be wrong, but I do not look back with shame at my ignorance. It is that innocence that Zeidy strove to instill in me, the sweet, childlike naïveté of my ancestors that is supposed to last on into adulthood and even old age, and that I would eventually shed almost all of, except the very basic root of it at the heart of my nature. Years later, even when I gazed at the world with eyes wide open, I would still be innocent in my heart.

  Thwack. I love the sound the walnut shell makes when it finally gives way under my grip, cracking neatly along its own center. The nutcracker has already forced blisters out of my palm where my hand presses against its two sides, coaxing the hard nutshell into submission. I’m making charoses for the Passover seder, and Zeidy says on Passover it’s forbidden to use the ready-shelled walnuts, based on the tiniest chance that they might have come into contact with chametz, so we crack all the nuts ourselves. Or at least I crack them. Bubby’s grating the horseradish for the bitter marror, with her face turned away from the bowl to avoid the stinging fumes. Her eyes are red and teary. The bitter herbs will be eaten later to commemorate the slave labor Jews were forced to do in Egypt, but I think Bubby has already had her fair share of that reminder for today.

  Bubby wipes away another tear and takes a deep breath before attacking the stubborn tuber with renewed zeal. The horseradish is difficult to grate, and Bubby has only a small pile of shredded marror in the bowl. Small in stature, she hunches her shoulders as she puts all her strength into the task. I don’t think of Bubby as a physically strong woman, even though she’s borne eleven children and been through the worst hell imaginable in the concentration camps. She doesn’t sleep very well, and most days it seems as if her chores keep adding up even as she finishes the last of them. The homemade borscht, the pickles she sours on her own, even the nuts have to be cracked before they can be used to make charoses.

  I can’t take it anymore.

  “Bubby, stop! I have an idea. Don’t move, I’ll be right back.”

  I race to my bedroom and rummage through my bottom dresser drawer until I’ve found what I’m looking for. Back in the kitchen, Bubby laughs out loud when she sees me. I’m wearing my swim goggles and nose clip, remnants from last year’s summer exploits.

  “See?” I say in a high-pitched, nasal voice. “Now I can grate the marror without having to worry about the fumes.” The goggles are fogged at the edges, but I can see Bubby shaking with laughter as she hands me the grater.

  I slip on a pair of rubber gloves and rub the radish vigorously against the serrated plane of the grater. Sure enough, I’m barely affected by the sting. On the other side of the table, Bubby cracks the walnuts efficiently with one hand on the cracker, flicking them out, still whole, into the bowl of charoses. She shakes her head in both wonder and amusement as I work my way down to the very root of the horseradish. I’m so proud to prove myself useful in the kitchen, even if it is in a bizarre way.

  “See? Now you have all the marror you could possibly need.”

  Everyone starts arriving for the seder just after Bubby has wiped down the plastic-covered kitchen counters. All the food has been prepared in special Passover jars and stacked in the foil-lined fridge. Aunt Rachel arrives first, with her three daughters in tow.

  “Gut yontif, gut yontif,” Rachel announces loudly to no one in particular. She kisses Bubby on the cheek but her eyes are elsewhere, sweeping critically over the long dining table, which is groaning slightly in the middle where all the leaves have been inserted.

  “Mami, your tishtech isn’t long enough for the extension, you have to put a double. See, here, you can see the liner sticking out.” Rachel clucks her tongue in dismay.

  “I’ll get another tablecloth,” I volunteer. Rachel is already looking past me to the mirror, adjusting the front of her caramel-colored wig where the bangs dip into her left eye. Her long, slim-knuckled fingers smooth the heavily sprayed section expertly. Rachel is the only one in the family who wears one hundred percent human-hair wigs, not one synthetic hair in them, even though Zeidy is always warning us that one lenience leads to another. He warns us not to go down that treacherous path of pritzus, or promiscuity, where one misstep is all Satan needs to pull us into the abyss. Everyone knows Rachel is vain, that she buys her designer clothing at Saks and not at Daffy’s discounts, that she styles her wigs in the latest looks and packs on her makeup before Shabbos so that it lasts even to the next day. I even heard her sister Chavie whisper one day that she stopped shaving her head and that she now has about three inches’ growth already. Perhaps that is what Zeidy means about the path of pritzus: Rachel probably only thought about growing her hair in once she decided to push the leniency with wigs to the very limit. It’s hard to stop at just a little bit, I can understand that, but Zeidy’s solution to that problem is not exactly amenable to the average woman. He would have us renounce all vanity, but that would be unrealistic.

  Roiza and Baila have their hair in fat curls still bouncy from the hot rollers their mother used, held in place by identical velvet headbands. The daughters closest to me in age, they sit primly on the edge of the plastic-slipcovered sofa, arms folded neatly in their laps. I eye their matching houndstooth skirts and soft black cashmere sweaters enviously. I didn’t get new clothes for the holidays. I smooth the pleated velvet folds of my empire-waist dress, handed down from one of my aunt Faigy’s daughters. The hem is frayed slightly, so that the burgundy velvet looks pink at the edges.

  Baila is the pretty one, because she has blond hair. They say blond hair runs in the family, but I can barely coax a few summer highlights from my dishwater strands. Roiza is the dark one, but with big, pale blue eyes and luminous white skin. All of us have Bubby’s prominent apple-shaped cheekbones.

  I don’t look like either of them, really. They look like Weissmans, like their father’s side of the family, robust, with sneaky eyes that dart to and fro and a smile that’s more of a smirk. I look like Bubby. I’m the only one who looks a lot like her. Most everyone else has my grandfather’s genes, the Mendlowitz genes, the big nose, the blue eyes, and the fire-engine hair. I have Bubby’s eyes, gray, heavy-lidded, secretive; her hair, not blond, not brown, but thick and strong, like the hair on her passport photo; her smile, close-lipped, frugal. It’s just
Bubby and me that exhibit the Fisher genes.

  As I help Bubby with the second tablecloth, there’s a knock at the door, and without waiting for a response, my aunt Chavie enters, with her baby boy nestled against her shoulder. Roiza and Baila run to take the baby from her, cooing excitedly to his sleeping figure, while Chavie and Rachel exchange a sisterly kiss and retreat to the kitchen with Bubby to gossip in Hungarian.

  I watch the girls fuss over the baby. His tiny features curl up in annoyance as they stroke his cheek. His name is Shimon. He is a muzinka, an only child, born late. Chavie and Mordechai were married seventeen years before they had him. Everyone was so happy when he was born. Bubby cried at the circumcision ceremony. There is no greater curse than the curse of childlessness, Bubby said to me that day we were coming back from visiting Chavie at the hospital. Like with Auntie Sarah, a mercy on her soul, who died without ever having children.

  “A curse on that Mengele, son of the devil, who scorched her insides with acid,” she says, making a spitting sound and waving her hand to ward off the devil. When Shimon comes home from Maimonides Medical Center there is a thick red thread wrapped around his right wrist. No way the evil eye is touching this one.

  I think of wearing a red thread too sometimes, but really, what would the evil eye want with me, in my worn velvet dress, with my hair, straight and limp, that’s never seen a curler. I wonder what a velvet headband would look like in my hair.

  By 9:30 p.m. the men can be heard clomping up the stairs, the freshly laid taps in their new holiday shoes colliding loudly with the tin sliders fastening the linoleum. I go to open the door, and they all stream past me, first Zeidy, followed by my uncles and cousins.

  “Gut yontif, gut yontif!” A chorus of holiday greetings is heard all around. Bubby’s sons kiss her on the cheek; her sons-in-law merely nod their heads respectfully. I kiss Zeidy’s wrinkled hand and wish him a good yontif.