All Who Go Do Not Return

by Deen, Shulem

  Soon it was time for the baby’s feeding, and Gitty sat down on the bed opposite me, covered her shoulder and chest with a small blanket, and undid the top buttons of her robe. As we chatted about breast-feeding and diapers and the relative merits of pacifiers of various kinds, I realized what it was that had changed.

  We had created love.

  Chapter Seven

  It was the year of the photo op, hundreds of moments that seemed perfectly staged, waiting for the click of a camera shutter.

  Here is Tziri dragging onions and potatoes out of kitchen cabinets.

  Here is Tziri on the floor, in each hand a tomato, pilfered from unpacked supermarket bags nearby, her face and nose smeared in red goo and tiny tomato seeds.

  Here is Tziri standing precariously with one hand on the trash can, peeking out from behind a small plastic bowl, nose, forehead, and cheeks smeared in chocolate pudding, eyes frozen wide with guilt.

  Here she is studiously ripping pages from books she’d emptied off the lower shelves of our dining-room bookcase; here she is on Gitty’s bed, reaching for the cordless telephone on the pillow or scribbling furiously with a fat red crayon over the “Instruction for Brides” pamphlet that Gitty kept on the nightstand.

  It was a blessed year. Gone was the angst that had accompanied me through my adolescence and the awkwardness of adjusting to married life. Yet to come were the full burdens of raising a family and its attendant anxieties, the pressures of health and finance, negotiating sibling disputes and wardrobe mutinies, overseeing school projects and homework assignments. Also yet to come were the torrents of doubt about my faith and the anxiety over how to deal with them. Even the nights passed unmemorably; a calm child, Tziri was sleeping through the night by the age of four months.

  There were occasional frustrations. When I held Tziri in my arms, I felt as though I’d borrowed her, as if Gitty, generous with the precious thing, was allowing me, under her careful observation, to be a vice-parent of sorts. Springtime came, and Gitty and I would sit on patio chairs outside our door with Tziri in our laps. Sometimes I’d notice tiny goose bumps on Tziri’s arms and say, “I think maybe she can use a sweater.” Gitty would look away, annoyed. It was she who determined whether the baby was too cold or too warm, whether she was hungry or gassy, or whether, as Gitty would sometimes say, “She’s just a bad baby today.” When I offered once to change Tziri’s diaper, Gitty looked at me as if the notion were too absurd for words. I, a young man barely out of yeshiva, still consumed with Torah study and prayer and all those things that were the opposite of domesticity, surely would know nothing of changing diapers.

  It stung, the notion that my child belonged more to her mother than to me, but I learned to accept it. I allowed the love for my daughter to wash over me and felt the indescribable, almost painful, joy over her existence. At times, I would not understand where those feelings came from; they were there when I watched her sleep, when I watched her feed, even when she cried, her face scrunched up with wrinkles so fine, her whimpers like a sweet melody.

  There would be more babies through the years, all of whom Gitty and I would love deeply, but what I felt with Tziri’s birth would not repeat itself with the others. It was as if Tziri had come to repair something broken, and then it was fixed and the others had lesser roles to play. With my marriage to Gitty, I felt as if I had embarked not on my own journey but someone else’s, living not my own passions but those assigned to me by a world and a community that wanted for me something I had not fully chosen but had broken my will for. In Tziri, I found my consolation. At the end of a day of study, I would return home, and Gitty and Tziri would be out together on the patio. Gitty would be feeding Tziri baby food, applesauce, or mashed-up peas and carrots, and they would both look at me, Gitty with a gentle smile and Tziri with a reflexive wave of her arms and a stream of excited babbles.

  I remember holding her at sixteen months, in January 1996, when I brought her home from Gitty’s parents to greet her new sibling, Freidy, our second child. I remember that she had something in her hand—in my memory it is an oblong object, vaguely threatening, like a soup ladle or a rolling pin, although it was more likely a toy of some sort—when she spotted the brand-new infant dozing in the portable crib between our beds. Still in my arms, Tziri looked at the bundle in the crib and then to me and Gitty, and then laughed a nervous adult-like laugh. Tell me this is a joke, she seemed to say, and she waved the object in Freidy’s direction, as if wanting to strike it, that thing that dared usurp her pride of place. Gitty and I laughed, nervous, but oh, so charmed.

  It was Freidy whose birth would make us realize how unprepared we were. Plump-cheeked and colicky, she screamed through her first twelve months. Gitty had her hands full while I was studying and praying and attending the rebbe’s tischen. Gitty and I were both now twenty-one, with two children; before long, we realized that we were into something we hadn’t prepared for.

  “Rent is due tomorrow,” Gitty reminded me one morning, and that same evening she waved a pile of bills in front of me. “FINAL TERMINATION NOTICE,” read a letter from O&R Utilities in oversize bold red letters. There was a bill from the phone company and another from a mail-order catalog from which we’d purchased a state-of-the-art toaster oven for three easy monthly payments of $39.99. We owed money at the supermarket, at the fish store, and at the butcher’s. “Mr. Greenberg said we need to pay off something on the account,” Gitty said, and I grew furious at Mr. Greenberg for not realizing that a three-hundred-dollar credit limit on groceries was not enough for a family of four whose head of household was studying Torah for a living.

  At first, raising and providing for a family had seemed simple enough. Everyone did it, more or less, and so I imagined there must be a formula, the specifics of which I would learn in due time. The important thing was to start the process. I assumed that the “system,” the birth-to-death cocoon of institutions and support networks available for every Hasidic person, would take care of the rest. There were parents and in-laws to provide a year of dinners and Sabbath meals and a first baby’s needs. There were Sabbath food pantries for the hungry, free loan societies for home buyers, free roadside assistance for car owners, cadres of Hasidic EMT personnel to tend to emergency medical needs. There were grants for marrying off children, a co-op grocery store with discounted prices for school employees and others with large families. Any man could take his meals free in the yeshiva dining room if he chose. There was free coffee in the shul each morning and a shower and bath in the mikveh, with a reasonably clean towel and a shard of flaky soap.

  For other expenses—rent and utilities and the odd pair of pants or the occasional wig styling—there was a stipend from the kollel, the rabbinical-studies institution that extended from the yeshiva system, in which every young married male, by community ordinance, was to spend the first two years of marriage. I had little budgetary sense of my own but was certain that the kollel had calculated the proper formula and provided accordingly.

  A week after our wedding, I headed to the kollel’s administrative offices to enroll. The main kollel building was a drab edifice with a gray-and-pink stucco facade that formed one side of a quad in the village center, between the main synagogue and the rebbe’s home and opposite the elongated, limestone-covered structure of the Great Yeshiva. The elderly kollel administrator handed me a pile of documents to sign as he entered my name and Social Security number into an ancient computer. He then rattled off the rules in a drawling unpunctuated monotone: “Four hundred thirty a month always be on time five minutes late one dollar penalty miss a session twenty dollars two exams per week fifty dollars penalty for missing an exam thank you and be well.”

  It seemed plenty: $430 a month. The ordinance required only two years of study, but I would stay for many years, I was certain. Oh, it will be challenging, my friends and I would say to one another, but that would only prove how worthy the endeavor. In the great hall of the kollel, at any given time, one could see men of all ages s
parring over nuances of the law: from just-married young men, with peachy wisps of facial hair, to wizened scholars who shuffled on their walkers and canes to the senior-citizens’ restroom just outside the main door.

  There were, of course, those disinclined toward a lifetime of study; the weak-willed, the impious, those lacking the passion or discipline for sacred ideals. Those unfortunate souls who, as soon as the two years were up, left the kollel to take jobs as supermarket cashiers, deliverymen for the butcher or the fish store, plumbers, electricians, do-it-all handymen. A few started businesses: selling children’s clothes out of converted basements or setting up child day-care centers in their living rooms. One enterprising friend started a small sandwich shop at the village’s tiny shopping mall, where men would stop for a bagel and egg salad after morning prayers. Another opened a craft store, only to close it several months later when he realized that, really, how many needlepoint and hook-rug kits did each family in the village need?

  If I had given any thought to what I would do past the kollel years, earning money was never part of it. My occupation would be of the klei kodesh sort, sacred vessels through which holiness passed: cantors, ritual slaughterers, scribes of sacred texts, teachers at the cheder or the yeshiva. I’d always assumed that I would end up among the last category, or perhaps teaching adults—the daily page of Talmud, or an evening lecture on Bible commentaries—perhaps even a scholar of note, teaching other learned men.

  Now I realized that something didn’t compute. After the babies arrived, there were new expenses I hadn’t considered. Our in-laws bought us a baby crib, but we also needed a buggy, a stroller, a bureau, baby clothes—never-ending streams of soft pink ruffles, Onesies embroidered with befuddled-looking teddy bears, stretchies with colorful ABC pyramids. There were plush cloth books with images of friendly-looking tigers and giraffes, intended to plant the seeds of literary appreciation. There were rattles and baby bottles and pacifiers and more rattles and all kinds of other noisemaking devices that mothers and grandmothers assured us were necessary for raising healthy babies.

  Baby diapers were being expended with alarming frequency. Gitty, blessedly frugal by nature, would purchase only no-name brands. “Look at this,” she would point with disdain at packages of Luvs stacked above the fruits and vegetables at Braun’s Supermarket. “Nine dollars a pack. Thievery.” She’d cluck her tongue and roll her eyes and turn the aisle to reach for one of the generic brands.

  “Maybe,” Gitty said one morning, as she stirred a pot of farina with Freidy on her arm, “you want to look for a job of some kind?”

  “A job?” The suggestion sounded offensively common.

  “It’s just a thought,” Gitty said.

  I knew she was right, though, and so when a notice appeared on the kollel door one day, I took note: EXCELLENT JOB OPPORTUNITIES. Office work in New Jersey. Training provided. No experience necessary. Suitable for kollel men seeking work for the first time.

  It seemed absurd that I would, overnight, go from kollel student to office worker. But as I mulled it over, I wondered what it would be like to have material comforts, a steady paycheck, a car someday, maybe even a home of our own. Perhaps those things would provide consolation for having abandoned my aspirations. I ripped off a hangtag and stuffed it into my pocket.

  “There will be a meeting in the kollel basement tomorrow at seven thirty,” a young woman said when I called the number.

  If I had been worried that forsaking the study hall was a betrayal of my pious aspirations, at least I was not alone. In the corridor between the administrative offices and the large library—the Vault of Sacred Books—a group of men stood around waiting. Bentzion Grunwald was there, a prodigy who had completed the entire Talmud before his marriage, finishing the very last page right before he was led to the chuppah. Chaim Yidel Gold was there, who would be seen in the yeshiva study hall until past midnight and back again at four in the morning. They all smiled sheepishly, trying in vain to make light of it all.

  “Office work, huh?” Chaim Yidel said, on his face a look of resignation.

  Gavriel Blum, said to be “the cleverest man in the shtetl,” soon came skipping down the stairs with a sprightly bop, winding and rewinding his sidelocks around his ears, which seemed squished and reddened and made him look anything but clever. He crooked his head toward the library door and we followed him, thirty or so men, and took seats around five long tables.

  Gavriel laid it out for us: A telecommunications company in New Jersey, owned by Orthodox Jews, was willing to hire Hasidic men just entering the job market. All we needed, Gavriel said, was to fill out these sheets—“rezemays,” he called them—and he tossed a pile of forms onto each of the tables. My friend Zundel, sitting next to me, looked at the sheets like a child studying a tax form: “What is this, rezemays?”

  Gavriel explained: In America, before you get a job, a company needs to know something about you. Rezemays, he said, save time for everyone involved. “The main thing,” Gavriel said, “is to write down your skills.” The English word “skills” bounced incongruously off his clipped Yiddish sentences, and the men stared back blankly.

  “Skills?” Zundel asked finally. “Don’t you need to go to college for that?”

  Gavriel shook his head noncommittally. “Not necessarily. You can write if you’ve ever worked with computers. Or if you’re good at math. Things like that.” He looked around the room as the men looked timidly at the forms in front of them. “Don’t be modest,” Gavriel said. “This is the place to brag.”

  And so we sat and wondered what we might brag about. We knew a lot about commerce in first-century Palestine. We could write contracts on property sales that would be legally binding in fifth-century Babylonia. A handful of us knew exactly how to slaughter an ox in Jerusalem’s ancient temple, skin it, clean it, and separate the priestly portions. But this was the first we’d heard of rezemays.

  Slowly, we began to fill in our names, our addresses, and phone numbers and then tried to think of what we might consider a skill.

  Excellent English reading and writing skills, I wrote down. That sentence alone looked skillful.

  “Excellent English?” Gavriel asked with a scoff when I handed him my sheet.

  “I’m from Borough Park,” I said.

  He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Tzaddik,” he said, “you might be better than these guys.” He cocked his head to the line of men behind me. “But compared to Yeshiva University boys, your English isn’t worth a half-eaten radish.”

  I walked home with my ego bruised, wondering what it would be like to get a job, to wake up each morning and catch a commuter bus and spend the day in an office. I imagined the whir of a fax machine, incessant phone calls, dealing with irritable customers, and, of course, other employees of both sexes.

  A few days later, I ran into Gavriel at the shul. He was rolling his gartel around his fingers after the conclusion of evening prayers.

  “Whatever happened to the job thing?”

  He looked away. “Plan fell through.” He finished winding his gartel and placed it in his coat pocket. “Not enough skills.”

  Several weeks later, there was another note on the kollel door.

  Substitute Teachers Needed. Call Mordche Goldhirsch.

  Mordche was one of the principals at the cheder, the elementary school for boys, and I called the number as soon as I got home for lunch.

  “Can you come in at two?” Mordche Goldhirsch asked. One of the sixth-grade teachers had a dentist appointment.

  The kitchen clock said 1:15. I would have to miss the afternoon study session at the kollel and incur the twenty-dollar penalty. The three-hour substituting job would pay thirty dollars.

  “I’ll be there,” I said to Mordche.

  On his office door was a nameplate: Rabbi Mordechai Goldhirsch, Principal, Grades 4, 5, & 6, and I walked in to find Mordche standing with a thin wooden rod over a boy holding his palm out for a thwacking. Mordche told the terrified boy to wai
t, and then escorted me down the hallway.

  “Look each of them in the eye. Don’t let them scare you,” he said, and I felt an instant flash of terror. I remembered how my friends and I had treated our own substitute teachers, how one of our teachers had said, right before he took his two-week summer vacation: “Substitutes are a time to take things easy.” For the next two weeks, we took things easy by sticking pins up the underside of the substitute teacher’s chair cushion, pouring salt into his coffee, and spilling bottles of Elmer’s glue onto the vinyl tiles under his desk, then watching as he struggled to wipe the sticky mess from the soles of his shoes.

  From a nearby classroom came the singsong of a Talmud lesson and from another the sound of boys reciting Bible verses. From a classroom at the end of the hall, I heard laughing and shouting and felt my heartbeat quicken. As Mordche’s hand went for the doorknob, he paused and peered through the small square window. Inside, boys stood on tables, tugged one another’s sidelocks, and chased one another around the room, until one boy noticed us and leaped into his seat, followed, like a set of dominoes, by the rest of the class. By the time Mordche turned the knob, every boy was in his place with his Bible reader open in front of him.

  Mordche said nothing to the class. He stepped aside to allow me to enter, nodded curtly, and closed the door.

  I sat down at the desk and looked around, my gaze lingering on each boy, as Mordche had instructed. I tried to mask the fear I felt as the two dozen pairs of eyes assessed me.

  The afternoon passed quickly enough, with few disturbances. I gave a lesson on the weekly Bible portion, told a story of an ancient saint, stepped out twice to get coffee from the teachers’ room down the hall, and three hours later it was over. In my pocket, as I walked home, I carried thirty dollars in school vouchers.