Unorthodox

by Deborah Feldman

  Bubby says it can happen again anyway. She says people don’t realize it, but stuff like the Holocaust has been happening to Jews for centuries, every fifty or so years. We are right on schedule for another event, she says. Pogroms, Crusades, the Inquisition, it’s all the same. To think that we are in control is ridiculous, she says. But she doesn’t say this in front of Zeidy, who believes the Satmar Rebbe can save us from anything. After all, the Rebbe himself was miraculously rescued from the concentration camps, and now we celebrate that day as a holiday every year.

  Bubby says everyone hates Jews, even the ones who pretend not to. It’s the way God made the world, she says, they can’t help it. She warns me never to trust a goy, no matter how kind he appears to be.

  It’s strange to imagine a whole world of people I’ve never met hating me already, when I’m so young and I haven’t even done anything yet. My mother is a goy now. Does that mean she’s one of them? Does she hate me too?

  Bubby scoffs at my question. A Jew can never be a goy, she says, even if they try their hardest to become one. They may dress like one, speak like one, live like one, but Jewishness is something that can never be erased. Even Hitler knew that.

  At night I lie awake after the street traffic quiets down and I fold my pillow in half and press the tense edge into my stomach, bending my body around its crease. I ask God if he loves me. Will he send another sheid, another Hitler, to kill me too? Did he put the gnawing pain in my belly or did Satan?

  I feel unloved. By my parents, yes, and by the people who reject me for being their offspring, and by my aunts and cousins who look down at me because I’m evidence of a familial scandal, but mostly I feel unloved by God, who surely put me here and forgot about me. Without God’s love, what chance do I have at happiness?

  I fall asleep against a pillow damp with tears, the clatter of the elevated train punctuating fitful dreams. As hooded officers in SS uniforms race through Williamsburg on black stallions, I become swept up in the crowds of people trying to escape, but suddenly I hear the distinct whir of a helicopter, and looking up I can see a woman I know to be my mother, waiting to rescue me. As we zoom off into the nearing dawn, I look down at the panicked masses below us and feel, finally, safe from it all.

  I am awakened by the sound of shouting coming from the street. My alarm clock reads three a.m. Frightened, I tumble out of bed and race to the window. Bubby and Zeidy are awake in the next room as well, and my head turns in the window grate to see both of them looking out the window next to mine. On the street, men clad in white pajamas and bedroom slippers run madly through the road, screaming, “Chaptz’em! Chaptz’em!”

  Catch him, they are screaming, catch the interloper who invaded us in the night. As they scream to all the neighboring homes, more and more men bound down the stairs of brownstones in their pajamas to join the chase.

  “What happened?” I ask, looking toward Bubby in the next window over.

  “They broke into Mrs. Deutsch’s apartment next door, took all her silver,” she says, shaking her head in dismay. “Shvartzes, a group of young ones, they were; from Broadway they came.”

  She is referring to the African-American neighborhood on the other side of the tracks, where we are never allowed to wander. The el train has always acted as a barrier between us and the variety of ethnic people that populate this part of Brooklyn, like indigenous weeds springing up among the abandoned factories and warehouses. Williamsburg is so ugly, who else would want to live here, says Bubby, except the lower classes?

  Jews do well among the lower class, though. Bubby says it’s convenient for us to be presumed poor and unintelligent, so as not to spark the jealousy and resentment of the gentiles. In Europe, she says, the goyim were angry at Jews who forgot their place and became richer and more educated than their gentile peers.

  I see the shomrim, the community guardians, pull up at the house next door in their armored jackets with the neon logo on the back, stepping off motorized bikes. Three bearded men drag a young black teenager by his hands, and I can see he hangs heavily between them.

  “That boy can’t be older than fourteen!” says Bubby, looking down at the captured culprit. “For what does he have to steal, so he can be in a gang? Ach, so sad, from so young they are already trouble.”

  The shomrim members crowd around the quivering boy. I watch them kick him mercilessly until he is sobbing and wailing, “I din’t do nuttin’, I swear! I din’t do nuttin’!” He cries out his one defense, over and over, begging for mercy.

  The men beat him for what seems like forever. “You think you can come in here and do what you want? Impress your friends? Where are your friends now, huh?” they ask mockingly. “You think you can bring your filthy kind into this neighborhood? Oh no, not here. No, we won’t call the police, but we’ll take care of you like no one else can, you understand?”

  “Yes, yes, I understand . . .,” the boy wails. “Let me go, please, I din’t do nuttin’!”

  “If we catch one of you here ever again, we’ll kill you, you hear? We’ll kill you! You tell your little friends that, you tell them never to come near us again or we will rain hell down on their black souls.”

  They step back, and the young man lifts himself up and flees into the night. The shomrim get back on their bikes, brushing off their shiny jackets. Within fifteen minutes, the street is as silent as death again. I feel sick.

  Bubby pulls her head back in from the window. “Ah mazel,” she says, “so lucky we are to have our own police force, when the real police can’t catch a nut when it falls from a tree. We have no one to depend on, Devoraleh,” she says, looking at me, “except our own. Don’t forget that.”

  I chastise myself once again for feeling compassion at the inappropriate time. For the teenager I should not feel pity, because he is the enemy. I should feel bad for poor Mrs. Deutsch, who got the fright of her life and lost all her precious silver heirlooms. I know this, and yet I wipe shameful tears from my cheek. Luckily no one can see them in the dark.

  My father comes pounding up the steps and knocks loudly on the front door. “Mommy!” he calls, his voice breathy with excitement. “Did you see? Did you see what happened?”

  When Bubby opens the door, I can see my father standing in his creased, dirty pajamas, his body quivering strangely as he bounces on the balls of his naked feet.

  “I chased them!” he announces triumphantly. “I was there when they caught him.”

  Bubby sighs. “What were you doing running with no shoes, Shia?”

  Blood seeps from his toes onto the doormat, and my father is oblivious, his face alight with idiotic exuberance.

  “Go home, Shia,” Zeidy says sadly. “Go home and go to sleep.” He closes the door on my father’s face, gently, almost reverently, his palms lingering on the knob even after my father’s footsteps can be heard retreating down the hall.

  I try to avoid my father. Somehow I understand that the more I distance myself from him, the more I avoid the shame that is associated with his retardation and strange behavior. It’s hard for me when I walk on the street with my friends on Shabbos and we pass the cupcake lady on Hooper Street, who has hairs growing out of the warts on her chin, or Golly the Meshuggener, who smokes stinky cigarettes on the corner of Keap Street and Lee Avenue, a glazed look in his eye and confusion in his movements. The girls make a fuss about crossing the street to avoid them, and I wonder what they would do if they were to encounter my father rambling down Lee Avenue toward them. Perhaps they already have, without knowing who he was.

  I am mostly angry at how everything seems to be working against me in this life. Enough that I have to deal with divorced parents, with a mother who is a goy, but a crazy father too? It just feels hopeless, because no matter how hard I try to be perfect, no matter how much I fit in, I can never shake my ties to him.

  I don’t understand how I can be related to this man, whom I look nothing like, but mostly I don’t understand why no one in my family ever tries to help him, t
o get him treatment. They just let him wander around and fend for himself, embarrassing me in the process.

  Bubby says that a problem child is a punishment; Zeidy says it’s a test from God. To treat a problem is to evade the suffering that God felt you deserved. Also, Bubby says, when you start figuring out why a problem is a problem, and you start putting terrifying labels on it, then suddenly everyone knows there’s a problem, and tell me, says Bubby, tell me, who will then marry all your other children, when you have a son with a medically diagnosed problem? Better not to know, she says. Better just to accept God’s plan.

  They tried to make the best of the situation, in their own way. When my father turned twenty-four and still no matchmaker had been successful in finding him a wife, Bubby and Zeidy started looking overseas, hoping to find a young girl in unfortunate circumstances who would be willing to come to America for the promise of a life of comfort. An entire seven-room apartment they prepared, on the third floor of their brownstone home, with brand-new parquet floors and elegant wallpapers, outfitted with comfortable furnishings and luxurious rugs. Money was no obstacle; they would pay for the wedding, the travel expenses, anything the girl should desire. And it was my mother they found, child of an impoverished divorcée, living off the charity of her London benefactor as she attended the Jewish girls’ seminary. She jumped at the chance to leave, to go to a new country where all sorts of possibilities awaited.

  Bubby and Zeidy thought they were done raising their children before they took me in, but when my parents’ marriage began to fall apart soon after I was born, and my mother disappeared to follow her dreams of higher education in America, I was left in their care. Also a punishment, perhaps? I wonder if I am but another figment of the suffering that Zeidy takes such spiritual relish in, if to my grandparents I am but a test from God, one to be borne humbly, without complaint.

  In books I pick the perfect parents and imagine what it would be like to be born to them, living in a pink-walled room with a canopy bed, with a window overlooking a lush suburban lawn.

  My imaginary parents would get me braces to straighten my teeth and buy me nice clothes. I’d go to real schools and maybe even to college. I’d play tennis and ride a bike. They wouldn’t tell me to keep my head down and speak quietly.

  On Shabbos my lack of family stands out more sharply than it does during the week. After all, I have no younger siblings to take care of and no older ones to visit. Shabbos is a time meant to be spent with family, and I have no one to spend it with but my grandparents. Which is why I look forward especially to visitors; sometimes one of my married cousins will come by to pay their respects to Bubby and Zeidy, and I will get some respite from my boredom.

  However, as soon as my cousins start having babies, they can no longer visit, because it is forbidden to carry on Shabbos. Unable to use a stroller, they are stuck at home until Shabbos is over.

  This has been a heated topic at the Shabbos table these past few weeks, because recently a rabbi in Williamsburg decided it’s lawful to carry on Shabbos because of the new eiruv. Halacha, or Jewish law, forbids carrying anything on one’s person in public domain, but with an eiruv, a symbolic fence surrounding public property, the area is considered private, and carrying children, house keys, and other necessary items becomes legal.

  All the other rabbis say the new eiruv isn’t kosher. There’s no way, they claim, to create a “private domain” in a place like Brooklyn. The main issue, they say, is Bedford Avenue, which runs through Williamsburg and continues on for miles through different Brooklyn neighborhoods. I don’t understand the legal implications of the debate, but I do know that it’s all anyone is talking about these days.

  In the beginning no one was actually using the eiruv, because people were skeptical about its ability to remain intact in a neighborhood where graffiti pops up on freshly painted walls before they have a chance to dry. But slowly, as more rabbis are giving the eiruv their own personal stamp of approval, women have started showing up on the streets with their baby carriages on Shabbos afternoons, and every time there is a sighting, Zeidy comes home after shul with more reports of people using the eiruv. Groups of incensed young Hasids have taken to lying in wait on the main avenues to shout at these women as they walk past—women who, in their sincere opinion, are clearly flouting Shabbos law. Some are even throwing rocks, Zeidy says angrily. Again, he laments, these kids don’t care for halacha; all they care about is that they have something to shout about.

  Zeidy actually believes the eiruv is kosher, having studied the issue extensively on his own, and there’s no religious opinion I respect more than my grandfather’s. I admire his unique combination of Talmudic intelligence and open-mindedness. Zeidy never says no just for the sake of saying no, like some rabbis. A good rabbi, Zeidy says, is one who can find the heter, the loophole in the law that allows for flexibility. A rabbi who lacks sufficient knowledge of the Talmud will always lean toward the stricter side, because he is unsure of his own ability to find the loopholes.

  However, Zeidy warns me not to use the eiruv, even though he considers it perfectly kosher. If other people consider it an aveirah, a sin, then I could possibly violate the law of ma’aras eyin, where one appears to sin and so misleads others into judging them as having sinned. He worries about the crowds that gather to shout angrily at perceived violators, screaming “Shabbos, Shabbos, holy Shabbos!” over and over in furious tones. He doesn’t want to attract that kind of righteous anger to his family.

  I don’t mind much, since I don’t have a baby to carry around anyway.

  On Tuesday the eleventh of September, 2001, I am late to school. At a quarter past ten in the morning, I walk the three blocks to the high school building at a fast clip, but as I round the corner to Harrison Avenue, I notice something is different. The sky is an ominous shade of gray, hanging heavy and low on the rooftops. It doesn’t feel like the onset of rain, but the air is murky somehow, like it has too much construction dust floating in it. In school, the windows are open because there is no air-conditioning in the building and fall hasn’t really arrived yet. Normally the noise from the street overwhelms the sound of the teacher’s voice and we have to close the windows for sessions, but today the street is eerily quiet. No drilling, no honking, no sound of trucks bumping along the metal plates on the wide two-way street outside. All I can hear are the faint chirping sounds of sparrows.

  At one o’clock the PA system crackles faintly as the secretary struggles to work the ancient intercom. It is almost never used.

  “All girls are dismissed.” The voice is muffled but loud. There is a small shriek of feedback that makes us cover our ears, but then the secretary’s voice is back, clearer this time. “Please pack your things and file out the exits in a neat, organized line. There are buses waiting outside to transport those of you who live far away. We will notify you when school is back in session.”

  I look around at my classmates in confusion. The only time they ever cancel school is if there is a fire or some other emergency. It is in nobody’s interest to have a community full of idle young girls lolling around the streets. But there are no alarms going off. Why are they sending us home? Most of the girls are too grateful to be released to inquire. They zip up their briefcases and line up in the hallways, giggling excitedly. Only I am curious, it seems.

  I walk home pensively. Zeidy might not even believe me when I get home. He might think I’m just trying to skip school. What will I tell him, that we were suddenly dismissed? It sounds ridiculous.

  Zeidy is not in his office when I tiptoe quietly through the front hall. His door is wide open, but his desk is unoccupied. Upstairs, Bubby is kneading challah dough in the kitchen, her apron coated in sticky dough residue. The phone is cradled under her ear and she doesn’t say anything when I come in noisily, dropping my book bag on the chair. I listen to her conversation, but she’s not saying much, only nodding here and there and asking vague questions like “Why?” and “How?”

  Finally
I hear Zeidy’s heavy footsteps climb the stairs. He’s holding a folded newspaper in his hand. Zeidy never brings secular newspapers into his home, but sometimes he goes across Broadway to the Mexican bodega to read the business section of The Wall Street Journal, if he needs to know something about the stock market. I wonder why he’s bringing it into the house.

  He motions to Bubby to put down the phone. “Look at this,” he says, spreading the newspaper out on the floury tabletop. On the cover is a photo of the Twin Towers burning, it seems. I don’t understand why Zeidy is showing this to us.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  “It’s a terrorist attack. Happened this morning, would you believe it? A plane flew into the Twin Towers.”

  “This morning?” I ask in disbelief. “What time this morning?” It’s a quarter past two in the afternoon right now. If a plane crashed into a building in the morning, wouldn’t we have heard something before now?

  “Eight-something. I’m going to go buy a radio so we can listen to the news.”

  I’m shocked. Zeidy never lets us listen to the radio. This must be serious; this must be why we were dismissed early. We spend the rest of the afternoon huddled next to the tiny radio in the kitchen, listening to the same broadcast over and over again. “At eight forty-six this morning, a plane crashed into the first tower . . .”

  “They’ll blame it on the Jews,” Zeidy says, shaking his head. “They always do.”

  “Not the Jews,” says Bubby. “Israel, but not the Jews.”

  “No, Fraida, don’t you understand?” Zeidy says slowly. “They think it’s the same thing.”

  Bubby thinks there will be another Holocaust. She thinks there will be riots and Americans will want to kick out all the Jews. She says she always knew it would happen again.

  “Do teshuvah,” she begs me. “Repent in time for Yom Kippur. The world can turn upside down in the space of a moment.”