Unorthodox

by Deborah Feldman

What else does she think we could possibly have done? I wonder. I rack my brain trying to figure out what she is accusing us of.

  Golda looks just as perplexed. We’re both scared.

  I start to cry, forcing tears out of my eyes, which is a mean feat in this weather. I’m very good at crying on demand, and I progress to wailing very soon. Both their faces soften visibly as my sincere regret becomes obvious.

  “Look,” Mrs. Halberstam says, “if you want to talk, go sit by the picnic tables near the dining room. What’s wrong with talking there? Go like good girls and don’t let us catch you alone in the gan yehudah again.”

  Golda and I leave as fast as we can and sit down at one of the picnic tables, looking back to see if they are still watching us. When they turn up a different path, we breathe a simultaneous sigh of relief. I sit across from Golda, wringing my hands in my lap. We don’t talk. Our friendship seems tainted now. We both know we have been accused of something, but we aren’t sure what. We know it’s something truly awful, but how can we defend ourselves against a charge we don’t understand? The joyful mood we were in earlier has disappeared.

  Golda goes home that afternoon with the rest of the girls, and I don’t hear from her all summer. But the next time someone asks me to go to the gan yehudah with her, I politely decline, and I start to wonder if there are girls who go there for other reasons than simply wanting peace and quiet. After all, it is the only place on the campgrounds that offers privacy.

  Layala begs me to switch back to my old bunk. We can be special friends, she says, and she will look out for me, because she is a big girl and everyone is afraid of her brute strength. Even her voice is hoarse with power, thick with threats.

  Two weeks before camp is over, upstate New York becomes infested with clouds of tiny flies, a result of the heavy rains accumulating in the valleys. The grounds are besieged; the swarms of tiny flies descend upon us like a plague. They are in our mouths, our noses; we breathe them. One flies into my eye, and then I get an infection. I wake up with my eyes glued shut and have to wipe green matter with a warm washcloth to get them open again. In the mirror my eye stares back at me, swollen and red, wanting to slink away into its socket to sulk.

  I think of the ten plagues that Moses brought upon the Egyptians. In school we learned that even though Pharaoh was willing to let the Jews go after the first plague, the plague of blood, God hardened his heart on purpose each time. This way, Moses would bring down ten plagues, each more miraculous and brutal than the last, to show the true extent of Hashem’s might.

  I can’t decide if this is more like the third or the eighth plague: lice or locusts. The flies are everywhere, just like they were in Egypt. Girls stumble blindly around the campus, eyes squeezed shut and lips pursed to avoid an invasion. The flies crawl up our noses anyway, like the gnat in Titus’s brain, and I am terrified that they will bore holes through my skull and descend upon my brain like maggots, until all the matter is devoured and I am left a hollow body, devoid of meaning.

  Is my soul in my brain? If my brain is gone, does that mean my soul disappears too? What am I if I can’t think or speak? But what about gentiles, who have no souls? How are they different? My teacher says Jews have a spark, a tzelem Elokim, that makes us irreversibly special. We all carry a tiny piece of the light that is God. That’s why Satan is always trying to seduce us; he wants to get at that light.

  I wonder, did he bring these flies, this eerie supernatural swarm? Or is it a punishment from God? I look at my white face in the mirror, the face of a Jewish girl, of a chosen one, and wonder just where it was that I went so wrong as to deserve such grand retribution.

  Camp is ruined. We are let out a week earlier than expected. The coach bus glides silently off the expressway and into Williamsburg, and I can see that the streets are choked by Hasids returning early from the Catskills. There are buses standing all along Lee Avenue, discharging dazed passengers and worn luggage. The young boys smooth their wrinkled black suit jackets and brush their hats with dampened fingertips before heading in the direction of home. The girls are met by their fathers, who help them load cardboard boxes wrapped in packing tape into the trunks of their minivans.

  The Catskills have expelled us, sent us prematurely back to the swollen, humid bowels of the state. Here the air is thick with dust and exhaust, blowing hotly around us like the breath of an angry animal. Standing on the overpass of the highway with my luggage tucked between my legs, I look up at the flimsy gray sky, just to see if it’s the same one that stared back at me in camp, indifferent and unassuming. Perhaps there are no plagues, only the fickleness of nature. Perhaps there are no consequences, just ugliness. Maybe punishment is something that only comes from people, not from God.

  In the week before school starts, I have time to pursue my own interests. In between shopping trips with Bubby to buy new shoes and stockings for the coming year, I board the bus to Borough Park, determined to sneak a few books home. I have not read anything all summer; bringing books to camp with me would have been too dangerous. It feels nice to have time to myself again, and enough privacy that I don’t have to be afraid my thoughts are being overheard.

  The library still has the school reading lists on display, and the carts are groaning with the weight of new paperbacks, their spines sparkling on the shelf. I grab the most recent Harry Potter book as well as the first in the popular Philip Pullman trilogy, and for good measure, a book recommended by the library: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I still remember the warm, cozy feeling I had when I read The Chosen, like slurping down Bubby’s chicken soup on a cold winter day. After all, am I not a girl growing up in Brooklyn, just like the heroine of this book claims to be? How different can she and I be, when we live on the same dust-choked streets?

  Literature was just as incongruous in Francie’s Williamsburg as it is in mine. Elegant words skip reluctantly off the page to join the impoverished heroine in her crowded, teeming environment. Her world was almost too full of suffering to make room for the innocent, flirtatious beauty of classic poetry and literature. I watch dreamily as Francie is elevated to positions of greater material comfort throughout the book, as she takes minuscule but steady steps away from the extreme poverty she starts out in, but always with a sinking feeling in my stomach that the happy ending I’m hoping for may very likely never come. And as I become more deeply entangled in Francie’s prospects, I take it more personally when she fails or is disappointed, because I feel somehow that if she can come out of it, then so can I, in some way—come out of this grimy world in which I’m stuck, seemingly, for good.

  In the end, Francie goes off to college, and I do not know if I must make of this a triumph. Is it a given, then, that all her dreams will come true? I can never go to college, I know. They censor the word out of our textbooks. Education, they say, leads to nothing good. This is because education—and college—is the first step out of Williamsburg, the first on the path to promiscuity that Zeidy always promised me was an endless loop of missteps that distanced a Jew so far from God as to put the soul into a spiritual coma. Yes, education could kill my soul, I know that, but where did Francie go, I wonder, after college, and did she ever come back? Can you ever really leave the place you come from? Isn’t it best to stay where you belong, rather than risk trying to insert yourself somewhere else and failing?

  High school starts on Monday. I have three more years left of school, of childhood. I resolve to leave Brooklyn one day. I cannot be one of those girls who fritters away her entire life in this small, stifling square of tenements, when there is an entire world out there waiting to be explored. I don’t know how, but maybe my escape will be accomplished in small, steady steps, like Francie’s. Maybe it will take years. But I know, with great certainty, that it will be.

  4

  The Inferiority of My Connections

  “Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly be
neath my own?”

  —From Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

  My right hand gripping an exposed ceiling beam, the left one leaning on the shoulder of the woman balanced precariously beside me, I struggle to maintain my high-heeled footing on the slender back of the synagogue pew. I have snagged a front-row spot in the Satmar synagogue on the night of Simchas Torah, and like everyone else in the shul, I am waiting for the Satmar Rebbe to make his entrance fifty feet below me. In the women’s section, a narrow gallery that surrounds the synagogue, I peer through tiny holes in the tightly slatted wooden partition to get a glimpse of the men dancing downstairs. I wonder what would happen if the flimsy panel gave way and all the women leaning on it were to tumble down into the abyss. What a scandal, for men and women to mingle in such a holy place, on such a holy night. I can’t stifle a giggle at the image, and the dour middle-aged woman crouching in front of me turns around to glare.

  It’s my first time attending the festivities, and I’m not sure I have a taste for it. The crush in the shallow gallery is overwhelming. Thousands of women have come from all over town, dressed in their holiday best, the married ones decked out in white silk kerchiefs, the young girls in freshly starched suits and perfectly styled bobs. All of them scramble madly over each other in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the rabbi’s dance. Being only fourteen, my friends and I have a hard time competing with the older married women for the best view, but dignity is less important to us, and so we don’t mind assuming the most awkward positions to seize a prime space.

  Only two minutes to midnight.

  How senseless it seems, as I watch my friends contort their limbs, craning their necks to get a better view; how utterly ridiculous to expend so much effort for a tiny peephole’s view of an old man swaying back and forth with a scroll. I am bored, and my neck hurts, and the rabbi hasn’t even arrived yet. Downstairs I see the men milling about in a sea of prayer shawls; they move in slow streams, their dance a side-to-side sway. The synagogue has long since exceeded its legal capacity, but the cops parked outside, perhaps greased into silence, sit comfortably behind their wheels in a show of security. Every ten minutes someone else faints from the heat, and a cry for Hatzolah is heard. I watch one of the men throw off his prayer shawl and call for a stretcher, and the victim is removed to one of the side rooms. Around me the women shift impatiently, still waiting for the rabbi. All this is just foreplay to them, a prelude to the exquisite moment when our rabbi will dance with his divine bride, the Torah.

  Even if I can’t muster the fervor of the crowd, I know I must appear to be engrossed in the proceedings; how else can I justify my pushing and shoving to get to the front if it’s not to soak up some measure of divine ecstasy? I need to be seen here. There isn’t a woman in Williamsburg who would pass up the chance to see the Satmar Rebbe’s annual dance.

  The men sing wordless songs. There are seven Simchas Torah tunes, and they are all primitive melodies strung together by meaningless syllables. But these sounds are classic Jewish sounds, expressions of pure, animal emotion that transcend any language. On this night, words aren’t needed. Thousands of men lift their hands to the heavens and stamp their feet rhythmically on the stone floor, singing, “Oy yoy yoy yoy, yei ti ri rei ti ri rei ti ri rei oy yoy!” and “Ay yay yay yay, ay di ri ra ra ay di ri ra ra . . .” I am almost swept away myself, by the power of all those voices blending together; for a moment it seems as if these men can blur the lines between heaven and earth with their rapturous singing. I can no longer see people; instead I am surrounded by saints; all sin is temporarily wiped clean. Only I remain mortal, fallible. Perhaps I am beginning to understand the glory of this event after all; maybe the only reason I scorned it is because I am truly ignorant, overlooked by the divine light that seems to shine on everyone else. I feel as if tonight may be the night when I finally understand my role, my common destiny, and shake off the cold threads of doubt that separate me from my people.

  I’ve come here with five friends, the most exclusive clique in our ninth-grade class. The queen bee is here as well, with her perfect two-name combination that ripples enviably off my tongue: Miriam-Malka, of the shiny auburn flip and deep dimples. I am convinced her regal status is a result of that wonderful name alone, that inimitable combination with the rare advantage of not being shared by hundreds of other girls in Williamsburg. (I am one of five girls named Devoiri in my ninth-grade class, and one of perhaps a hundred in my school; my ordinary name is hardly the stuff of nobility.) Watching her dangling effortlessly from the ceiling beams with one foot on the arm of a chair and the other leaning against the partition, peering through the highest peephole in the screen, I desire her certainty. Miriam-Malka belongs here; this is her natural habitat.

  Miriam-Malka, the big shot who kills with kindness, the girl everyone wants as an ally, is fickle when it comes to selecting her company, and I am lucky to be in her dazzling entourage, but to stay inside her circle I must constantly prove myself worthy. I’m here tonight not to see the rabbi but to show Miriam-Malka that I’m just like the other girls in our group, that I can think of nothing more exciting than a trip to the jam-packed synagogue on the night of Simchas Torah.

  “Shh, the rebbe is here,” a woman whispers excitedly, elbowing me in the ribs to quiet me down, even though I haven’t been talking. The women’s section hushes immediately. I try to peer through the partition again, but ten other women are pushing me to get to the same peephole, and so eventually I have to use my knee to insert myself back into the throng at the front. Downstairs, the sea of men has parted to make a path for the rabbi, and a little clearing has been created for him, with the whole crowd pushing and shoving behind the front row of gabbaim, the strong young yeshiva students who serve as the rabbi’s constant escort. The gabbaim link arms, creating a human fence around the rabbi to keep the crowd from surging forward. Everyone wants to touch Reb Moshe, shake his hand, kiss the fringes of the ivory prayer shawl that is draped over his head and body, or simply look into his holy eyes, glazed over with age. I can see him, frail and bent, holding the scroll close to his chest, swaying ever so slightly in the midst of the small clearing. From my vantage point, he is as tiny as an ant in the quivering mass of men, his stature bent, his aura so feeble as to seem almost insignificant. It is the tangible reverence vibrating throughout the synagogue that projects a halo of ethereal grace on this dainty, fragile old man. With the unquestioning faith of so many people focused directly on him, he can’t help but take on a divine quality, yet I am awed not so much by the rabbi himself as by the jubilant crowd he commands, and the magnitude of their devotion. It makes me almost want to worship with them, just so I can be one of them and feel what they feel, but that man down there is too ordinary-looking to stir in me that absolute, unquestioning zeal.

  I leave after the third dance, even though there are four more before the celebration ends at dawn. It is already 3:30 a.m., and I’ve never been good at functioning at this late hour. I’m tired of wrestling with the other women for a spot I don’t really want. I still need to find my way back home in the dark. I say good-bye to my friends, murmuring an excuse about meeting my grandmother outside, but they can’t hear me in all that noise anyway. I walk down the very stairs on which they say the first rabbi’s only daughter was pushed to her death, and in her womb the child who stood to inherit the coveted Satmar dynasty, which others already had their eye on, was killed only weeks before he was expected to be born. I hate taking those steps on my own. I can feel her, Roize, the rabbi’s only, precious daughter, standing there with her large pregnant stomach, watching me with those trademark Teitelbaum eyes. Her pain lives within me. Unlike the others, I cannot forget. That was when Satmar was still a young community, hardly worth fighting over. Now the current rabbi’s sons are squabbling like children over a plastic throne. Where, I wonder, is the brotherly love that God commanded Jews to feel for each other, now, in this community that calls itself holy? Back in Europe, Zeidy says, no one would drea
m of fighting to be called a rabbi. In fact, they often turned down the position when it was offered to them. A man truly worthy of being a rabbi is a humble one. He is not in search of power or recognition. But in this day and age, rabbis are chauffeured in black Cadillacs and have private ritual baths built into their opulent homes. They are the celebrities of Hasidic culture. Children trade rabbi cards and boast of having rabbinical connections. On Purim, the holiday of masquerades, they Scotch-tape long beards made of white cotton balls to their chins, drape themselves in faux-fur coats, and walk with the aid of a shiny wooden cane. What more does every child dream of than to grow up to be a rabbi, or at least a rabbi’s wife?

  I walk home quickly through the dark streets of Williamsburg, and aside from the occasional straggling Lubavitcher Hasid visiting from Crown Heights, I am alone, and by the time I reach my corner, the magic has faded, and the whole night seems to be just a temporary blip in what has become a pattern of disenchantment. My moment of ambivalence is but a triviality in the face of the hard grid of cynicism that has already mapped out my consciousness.

  I never want to be a rabbi’s wife. Not if it means being like my bubbe and always having to submit to my husband’s will. I am hungry for power, but not to lord over others; only to own myself.

  In school on Monday, everyone seems to have forgotten about Simchas Torah. We won’t catch a glimpse of the rebbe again for another year; neither will we visit the synagogue. Girls don’t go to shul. We pray at home, or in school; it doesn’t matter where or how. Only the men’s prayers are regimented; only theirs count. We begin the school day as usual, our first hour spent reciting the morning prayers from our siddurim, our Hebrew prayer books. For some reason I never learned to read or speak Hebrew fast enough to keep up with the class’s furious chant, so I move my lips and make sounds occasionally to look like I’m praying. When we were younger, we had special tunes for each prayer, and that would help me remember the words. Now that we are past the age of twelve, singing is forbidden to us at all times. The absence of melody drains all the joy out of prayer for me, and although I go through the motions for the sake of the watchful overseer, I have no feeling for it anymore.