by Rebecca Dana
“All yours!”
She came out in full shabbas getup, and for the first time, I found myself face-to-face with one of those women. Poor Stephanie, I thought. A doctor, and she’s still been brainwashed by this nonsense.
She and Michael were attending different shabbas dinners, and he would be sleeping on our couch that night. He prepared by putting a sports coat over his black fleece and stringing a spare copy of our house keys on an elastic band, which he then stepped into and pulled up around his waist, like a belt. It is against Jewish law to carry anything on shabbas, and this is one of the infinite ways the Orthodox cheat the system: around the waist instead of in the pocket is A-OK with God.
THAT NIGHT, Cosmo had invited me to accompany him to shabbas dinner at the home of his friends, Shlomo and Hadassah Goldfarb, a prominent young married couple in the neighborhood. Shlomo, who was twenty-eight, was in the diamond business and ran a shop on Eastern Parkway called Gold Jewelers. Hadassah, twenty-seven, was a homemaker, Shlomo’s part-time secretary and, in Cosmo’s estimation, “at least the second-best cook in Crown Heights.”
The tsnius conventions hold that all females over the age of three should wear modest clothing. A married woman must also cover her hair, so that no one but her husband sees it. Some keep their hair but wear head scarves. I had one skirt that fell below the knee, so that made it easy to choose what to wear. Because a blizzard had just dumped ten inches of snow on New York, I paired my long skirt with two sweaters and heavy boots. It was the same switcheroo as Stephanie, going from modernity back to eighteenth-century Russia. The whole thing made me feel itchy.
We were halfway there when Cosmo noticed I was carrying a handbag.
“A purse!” he exclaimed, pointing.
“What?”
“You cannot have a purse.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t carry anything.”
I trudged back to the apartment and dropped it off, stuffing my coat pockets with wallet, keys and a cell phone set to mute.
“You better not jingle,” Cosmo said when I caught up with him. “Have you taken everything jingly out?”
I told him I had.
Compared to Manhattan’s cramped, crowded streets—to the treeless tenements on the Lower East Side or even the cookie-cutter brownstones on the Upper West—Crown Heights is open and spacious, virtually pioneer country. Legendary New York landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the men who built Central Park, designed the neighborhood’s central artery, Eastern Parkway, as an old-style European boulevard. Towering elm trees line the wide street, the center of which has four lanes of traffic, two in either direction. Two wide brick pedestrian walkways flank the cars, and two more lanes of traffic flank those, meaning if your home is on Eastern Parkway, your neighbors across the street are a good fifty yards away. Which was a nice feature, especially during the holidays.
Ever since the 1991 Crown Heights Riots, spurred by a car accident in which a member of Rabbi Schneerson’s motorcade swerved and killed a seven-year-old black child, the neighborhood has operated under a kind of forced racial harmony, uneasy but upheld by a heavy police presence. The accident occurred on President Street, about twenty paces from what is now the Goldfarb home, where we were going.
There are rarely violent flare-ups anymore, but the tensions play out in other ways. Cosmo and I navigated sloppy piles of snow and slush on the four blocks that separated our apartment from Shlomo and Hadassah’s. Most of the houses in Crown Heights are brick, single-family homes set back from the street, with little porches and bay windows in their living rooms. Most are occupied by Lubavitchers, who have bought up the deeds to many neighborhood properties. The few houses occupied by black families all had elaborate Christmas decorations, flashing lights, giant trees in the windows or entire nativity scenes on their lawns. One apartment we passed had a whole speaker system lined up in the window, facing out, blasting Caribbean Christmas carols into the dark street below. This was the sound track playing as we walked to dinner.
The festive aggressions are hardly one-sided. Year-round, many Lubavitchers decorate their homes with yellow nylon flags embroidered with crowns and the words “Welcome, Moshiach!” Many keep cardboard signs in the windows reminding passersby that “He is coming!” The Goldfarbs didn’t go in for all that stuff. The couple lived with their three children, all under the age of ten, in around nine hundred square feet on the second floor of a weatherworn brownstone. They kept their simple iron gate unlocked. A few scattered plastic toys peeked out of the heaps of snow on the lawn.
Deborah, who came up to my hip, greeted us at the door by shrieking “I have a fish tank!” and running upstairs. She was the oldest and went by Debbie. Debbie and her sister Yael, a head smaller than her sister, wore identical full-length dark purple velvet dresses with ruffles at the shoulders and long-sleeve gray T-shirts underneath. They had gotten a fish tank, but no fish yet, for Hanukkah. They had also gotten a board game called Zingo and a host of other toys, which Shlomo and Hadassah were rolling out slowly, even though the holiday had already ended, to make the joy of the season last. Debbie grabbed me by the hand and dragged me in to show me the lifeless tank, which had a plastic castle and bubbling water inside, and which she could just barely reach on her tippy toes. It was up the stairs in the dining room, next to the giant bookshelves of leather-bound, gilded prayer books. A large portrait of Rabbi Schneerson hung in the hall and a more cinematic black-and-white photograph hung by the fish tank, showing the Grand Rebbe, surrounded by black-hatted admirers, raising a kiddush cup.
I had wanted to bring wine, but Cosmo said no. Jewish law forbids carrying anything on shabbas, so we would have had to bring it over earlier in the day. When we arrived, the table, set for sixteen, was already half-full. Shlomo, handsome and stoic, sat at the head. Tan and boyish, with a full brow and a thick head of black hair, he wore a black yarmulke, wool trousers and a tan V-neck merino wool sweater from J.Crew that Hadassah bought him a year ago, but which he’d only started wearing recently. She went over at one point to flip back the collar and show me the tag. He had a small paunch, the result of a weakness for junk food.
To Shlomo’s left was his friend Ezra, dark-haired and fat, who neither spoke nor ate. To Ezra’s left was another friend, Gil, fair-haired and fatter, who had two helpings of everything. At the near end of the table was Dinah, one of Hadassah’s sisters, who was slumped over a white plastic plate, eating vegetable sushi with her fingers. She wore Ugg boots, a long skirt and a poorly combed wig, and she held her face so close to the plate that she barely needed to rotate her wrist to move the cucumber rolls from table to mouth. Cosmo dropped his coat and hat on a couch in the sitting room, where a giant display of shabbas candles burned in ornate silver holders, and settled in next to Gil. He began to say kiddush, the blessing over the wine.
I said a quiet hello to the men, who nodded vaguely in my direction. Then I froze in the doorway, unsure of what to do. Should I sit? Should I make conversation? Normally under these circumstances, when surrounded by people I don’t know, I sidle up to someone and peck away at them pleasantly, the way I learned at countless cocktail parties, asking strangers about themselves. But are the women in this community even allowed to ask questions of the men? Every course of action I considered seemed potentially fraught. On the way over, I’d told Cosmo I was nervous about making a mistake and offending everyone, and he’d said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Just act like me.” I looked over and he was standing at the table, eyes closed, chanting in Hebrew. I decided the best solution was to find Hadassah in the kitchen, introduce myself, and see if there was anything I could do to help.
When I found her, Hadassah was spooning giant heaps of Hellmann’s mayonnaise into a large wooden bowl of iceberg lettuce.
“Welcome! Welcome!” she said when she saw me, dropping the spoon in the jar and enveloping me in a hug. Two kisses on the cheek, another hug, and we were ready to exchange names.
; Cosmo had finished the prayer and come in behind me. He nodded and went over to the sink, muttered a blessing under his breath, filled a carafe with cold water and dumped it on his hands, then motioned for me to do the same.
Hadassah returned to the mayonnaise and began her interrogation. Where was I from? What did I do? How did I like Crown Heights? There was hardly time to answer in between questions and autobiographical ephemera. She was from California, where her parents, now in their seventies, still ran a kosher restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. She and Shlomo had met eight years earlier, when they were introduced by his cousin, a friend of hers. They had married after a few months. “It’s nice,” she said. “You grow up together.” She wore loose-fitting clothes, a black skirt, black shirt and black Puma ankle socks. Covering her head was a lovely, shimmering silk scarf, dyed in pinks and yellows and overlaid with gold. It was the only touch of color she allowed herself, but it was bright against her tan skin. She still had her hair but kept it hidden. A few tufts peaking out of the scarf revealed that despite her youth, Hadassah was going gray. She smiled easily and spoke with a barely audible lisp. She was half a foot shorter than I, with wide hips and soft, rounded shoulders. Hugging her felt like a trip back into some storybook childhood where all women wear soft cotton dresses and smell like chicken soup.
“What do you do?” she said.
I told her I wrote about fashion.
“I love fashion!” she squealed and dried her hands on her skirt. She shopped at Bloomingdale’s, but her sister-in-law put her on a budget recently, so only the essentials. The kids each got one new outfit this fall for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. She got a warm coat, a new long skirt and a new shirt, all black. She handed me the bowl of salad and nudged me back into the dining room.
The men were gossiping about some petty scandal at 770, but even as they took turns speaking, no one heard a word of it. All attention inevitably drew back to the children, who took turns screaming about wanting dessert and chasing each other around the house. Hadassah shuffled around, tending to the kids, bringing them the harps they’d made at school out of rubber bands and paper plates, drying their tears when the harps broke and quizzing them on this week’s Torah portion, which had something to do with Joseph, the one with the dreamy coat. The table was covered in an ivory-colored cloth, stained with big drops of sauce and red wine. In addition to the salad, there were bowls of spicy lima beans, cold noodles with carrots and dill, potato salad, hummus and olives.
“This food is going to be much better than Thanksgiving,” Cosmo said.
There was no communal prayer. Everyone made their own contact with the divine and then dove in. The room quieted down for a moment until young Yehude, Shlomo’s son, commanded the spotlight. He had a full head of dark tight ringlets—not payess, since unlike other Hasidim, most Lubavitchers don’t wear long sidelocks. The curls came down to his chin, and a wide, guilty smile cut through cheeks, which were soft and round like rising dough. He wore blue pajama bottoms and a shirt that said I Love Daddy! Yehude climbed up on a chair, caught his breath. Throwing a fist into the air and summoning all the strength of his little lungs, he shouted, “Get off my property!”
“Yehudeleh!” Shlomo yelled. Hadassah raced to get him down. “Yehudeleh, honey, don’t fall! Come to tata.”
Yehudeleh wasn’t going anywhere. He threw both fists up in the air and jumped up and down in place.
“Put up your dukes!” he screamed. “Put up your dukes!”
“They’ve been watching I Love Lucy,” Hadassah explained apologetically. The Goldfarbs didn’t have a television in their house, but with twenty-one cousins scattered around the neighborhood, they found it difficult to keep a close enough eye. They sent the kids to an ultra-Orthodox school, where they studied religion in the morning and had secular lessons in the low-blood-sugar afternoon hours, but Hadassah worried that they weren’t learning enough about real life. “Sometimes I’m afraid it’s a little ghetto,” she said, meaning Russia, not Compton. Although she did see nascent signs of worldliness. The other day, Debbie, who had been given the choice of one new doll for Hanukkah, had picked a little girl with black skin, kinky hair and traditional African garb. “All we can do is try to show them a little more of the world than we saw,” Hadassah said.
The Goldfarbs casually managed the chaos of their home—singing songs, dishing out nondairy tofu-based ice cream, grabbing knives just moments before they were stabbed into young eyeballs—and evening passed easily into night. I sat in silence for the first few courses, terrified of saying or doing something in violation of the innumerable shabbas rules. At one point, Hadassah and I were in the kitchen together, and I asked if she was raised Lubavitch. She said yes, that her mother had become observant early in Hadassah’s life and passed that on to her children. She told a story about her mother in her Reform days, just as she was becoming more interested in a traditional way of life—right about where Stephanie was at the time. The family always went to see movies on Friday nights. The first shabbas after her mother decided to become more observant, she had a traditional meal and then, per family tradition, went to the movies. Only this time she watched The Ten Commandments.
I chuckled, and Hadassah looked at me, disappointed.
“A Jewish movie!” she said, clapping her hands to her thighs.
I laughed louder and nodded enthusiastically. Satisfied, Hadassah handed me two plastic bowls of chicken soup, and we carried them back to the men. When we arrived, Shlomo was complaining that he was getting fat.
“That’s because you don’t eat anything all day and then you come home at seven and you eat the whole house,” Hadassah said.
“Wait,” interrupted Gil. “You don’t make your husband lunch?”
Shlomo shook his head sadly.
“She doesn’t make breakfast either,” he said.
“I take care of three children, and I work for you part-time, and I have dinner on the table every night at seven fifteen,” Hadassah said, cheerful but defiant. “You want lunch, you go marry someone in my mother’s generation.”
“But you’re the woman,” Gil sputtered. “That’s what you do.”
“I do enough, thank you,” Hadassah said. She went to the kitchen and returned with enormous plates of chicken, rice and kugel. The men brought out a bottle of Smirnoff and took sips from clear plastic cups. A collegial midmeal buzz set in. They teased Shlomo for putting up with such a neglectful wife. He half listened to their nudzhing but spent most of the evening staring out the window at the street below, as his fellow Hasidim struggled through banks of snow. From that window, you could almost see the house Shlomo grew up in, at 880 Eastern Parkway. He knew the names of every person walking down the street and periodically told us about them, speculating on whose houses they were coming from or going to. Crown Heights was his living room—had been since childhood. The walls and lawns and banks of snow that separated house from house slipped away when he looked out at the sidewalk. He dreamed of moving to a warmer climate but almost certainly never would.
Here is a man who knows who he is, I thought, who can feel fairly certain about everything that will happen for the rest of his life. There will be births, deaths, a few surprises. But there will not be the persistent burden of choice. Hadassah will make dinner but not breakfast or lunch. More children would come, if it please God, or they wouldn’t. It would be a busy, pious life—exhausting and restrictive but filled with tiny joys. He would not be plagued with doubts about his lifestyle choices because he had barely made lifestyle choices. Long before Shlomo Goldfarb was even born, most of his decisions had already been made for him. His lot was hard work and selflessness before his family and God. By the age of twenty-nine, he would single-handedly support four children, his wife, his two sisters, his sister-in-law and his parents, with no hope of ever quitting his job or retiring. These were heavy burdens, and he bore them with pride.
“He takes after his grandmother,” Hadassah said, looking adoringly at
her husband. “You should have seen her. We’d say, ‘You have to buy new shoes, bubee.’ And she’d say, ‘Why buy shoes? I’m just going to die.’” Everyone laughed. “It’s true! You walk around her house and there were names taped under everything, for who was going to get it when she died. Under the lamp, ‘Yaysef.’ Under the piano, ‘Shlomo.’”
Gil told a story about his father, who had starved and sacrificed his entire life in the Ukraine to be able to move his family out. His parents had gone every weekend to the local market to sell off all their worldly possessions, had applied for visas in every country and, of all places, the United States came through.
“He gave up everything for my sis and me,” he said. “And when we finally got over here, we couldn’t even make him eat because he was so used to starving, he had no appetite anymore.”
It was getting late. Hadassah went into the kitchen and returned with dessert and a copy of People magazine. She flipped open to a feature titled “Worst Beards of the Year,” with side-by-side photos of celebrities who’d grown ungainly facial hair. I went to get my coat while the men studied the pictorial, comparing the actors’ beards to their own. Cosmo, who’d been quiet for most of dinner, zeroed in on one, jabbing his finger into the magazine.
“You know,” he said, “Brad Pitt does look like me!”
I walked Hadassah down the hall to say good night, and we ducked into the bedroom she shares with Shlomo. There were his-and-hers double beds with pink floral comforters, separated by a wide aisle. Pink carpeting covered the floor. White lacquer bedroom furniture hugged the wall. We could have been on the set of I Love Lucy. She opened a dresser drawer and pulled out two pieces of jewelry she and Shlomo had recently designed: a detailed gold bracelet with diamonds and a simple brushed gold ring. Both were beautiful. I told her so, and she gave me a hug.