by Naomi Ragen
Her own pregnancies and memories of giving birth came back to her, the shuffling through days and nights with no sleep, her nipples two spots of agony, bleeding and raw, competing with the ache and burning pain of the stitches lower down. And even when the baby slept, you lay there worrying. Would it stop breathing? Was it eating enough? You prayed for sleep, that your body and mind would slow down, stop torturing you, let you rest. You dreaded the sound of the baby’s cries. And finally, you dreaded the baby. You sat there in the dark as everyone slept, wondering why no one had ever told you it would be this hard. A bracha, a blessing, is what they called every birth. No one ever contradicted that.
But Zissele—her sweet, lovely daughter—had told her the truth. With the first birth, the depression had lasted a week. The second, two weeks, and with each birth the time had lengthened, the symptoms growing more and more severe, until with the fifth, it had been impossible to cope. She did not recognize her Zissele, her sweet child.
“It’s a mistake. A terrible mistake,” Zissele sobbed, rocking up and back in the chair that had been in their family for a hundred years, the nursing chair. “I can’t do this. I’m so tired, I can’t sleep.”
“Of course you’re tired, maideleh. You have a new baby. A blessing from God. It will get better, like always.”
But it didn’t. She started to shake and tremble. She complained she was freezing, even though it was an unusually warm September. Her clothes were soaked with sweat and milk, but she refused to change them, refused to shower. “How am I going to do this? I can’t, I can’t.” She wept, inconsolable over something no one could see or understand. “How am I going to go back to work? We will go bankrupt!”
All the reassurances, all the hugs and kisses from her, the children, Yaakov, this time, nothing helped.
“I am a rosha. I am weak, spoiled, lazy, ungrateful,” Zissele wept. “I don’t deserve my family, my husband. God will punish me for being a bad mother. For not being an eishes chayil. He will punish my family. Something terrible will happen to my children because of me. They will be better off without me.”
What could you say to such meshuganah behavior? She brought Zissele to the rabbis and the rebbitzens, who reassured her that God loved her and that being a tired new mother was not a sin. They exhorted her to have faith, to say tehillim. But she could see Zissele wasn’t listening.
Zissele became convinced her baby was going to die. She became a fanatic about boiling everything that came into contact with him: pacifiers, toys, towels. If anything fell on the floor or the counter, it had to be boiled again. She started to refuse to hold the baby because she didn’t want to give him her own germs, sure it would kill him. “He can’t get sick.” She wept. “If he gets sick, he will cry all through the night, and then I won’t get any sleep. I have to sleep!” She started to boil her own clothes and insisted on paper plates and plastic utensils that could be thrown away after she touched them. She opened doors with her elbows.
Zissele stopped taking care of herself so completely that Fruma and Yaakov took turns dressing and feeding her, although most of the time Zissele had been too tired to eat. Together, Fruma, Yaakov, and Shaindele took care of the baby, the laundry, the dishes, the cooking, the shopping, the other children. She made Yaakov return to yeshiva, and Shaindele to school, taking the whole burden on herself, day and night. At night, as Zissele dozed on the living room couch, she would sleep beside her in an armchair. “My heart is beating so fast. It is going to explode!” Zissele would cry out several times a night. And then Fruma would hold her Zissele in her arms and rock her like a baby. “Sha, Zissele. Sha, shtil, my Zissele. Try to sleep, my dear little shefele.”
By the end of the month, when it was clear Zissele was only getting worse, Fruma and Yaakov agreed they could do no more and that Zissele needed a doctor. He gave her medicine that helped her sleep, but then she began acting strangely. If they took her shopping, she would talk to herself so loudly people would turn around to look. She seemed confused and couldn’t talk straight, answer a simple question. She started to do crazy things: grab Chasya by the hair, chew up pieces of newspaper, stand by the window and bang her head against the glass.
For months, they consulted more rabbis, they spoke to healing women from the community who recommended herbal teas, meditation, massages, hot baths, long walks, acupuncture, Reiki, breathing exercises, and reciting certain psalms. Some of these things seemed to help Zissele for the moment, but they didn’t last.
Then one day, while they walked to the park with the baby in the carriage, Zissele suddenly got down on her knees and screamed. Then she rolled around on the sidewalk, sobbing, “No! How did this happen? What am I going to do?” On the way to the doctor, she tried to jump out of the taxi. And all the time, she wept—without reason, without control, without hope.
“I want to die. I have to die,” she would say. “I have to die before I kill the baby. Don’t ever leave me alone with him!”
That was the last straw. They took her back to the doctor, who said, “This is very serious. You must take her to a psychiatrist who specializes in this.” They made an appointment. The psychiatrist said she needed to be committed to a hospital for mental patients, that she was a danger to herself and to the baby. He reserved a room for her for that very night.
She remembered that night, sitting at Zissele’s bedside as her daughter stared at the walls and wept. “Zissele, they want you should go to the hospital.”
“No hospital!” Zissele begged. “Think of the shame. Think of the shidduchim for the children! Who will want to marry into a family with a crazy mother who is in a mental hospital! Please, Mameh. I will try harder. Give me another chance!”
She sounded so reasonable. So like her old, sweet self. “Yaakov, let’s try a little longer. I think she’s getting better,” she told her son-in-law that night. He hesitated, but she had insisted. “We must try, give her another chance, because once she is committed, there is no turning back. Everyone will know. It will taint the family name forever,” she pleaded.
Reluctantly, he agreed. “But if she isn’t better by the end of the week, she goes into the hospital,” he warned. And she agreed.
But they didn’t have another week. The very next day, the phone call she would never forget came from Shaindele first thing in the morning, during the one hour when she went home to change her clothes and Yaakov had already left for yeshiva. Shaindele said she couldn’t unlock the bathroom door and that her mother had been in there for almost an hour. She had knocked and knocked, she told her grandmother, weeping, but there had been no answer. Shaindele had been hysterical, calling the local ambulance service, hatzalah, who broke down the door. But it was too late. They found Zissele curled up on the floor, an empty bottle of aspirin beside her. Only a small flicker of life remained in her as they transported her to the emergency room, a spark that was soon extinguished.
Her dear, innocent, sweet child. And her poor, sweet granddaughter who had seen it all but understood nothing. They told Shaindele her mother had gotten sick, something to do with childbirth. But who knew what Shaindele really thought?
She rocked slowly now in that same rocking chair, the nursing chair, which she had brought home with her after the funeral. Her heart was so heavy. She, too, had seen everything but understood nothing. She had been blind.
For a moment, she sat there motionless, a great revelation breaking over her like a wave. That was it, her punishment for having failed her Zissele, for having failed Yaakov and Shaindele, Elchanon Yehoshua, Dovid Yitzchak, Chasya, and Mordechai Shalom. She had willed herself not to see what she didn’t want to see, and as a result, her daughter had died. And now, God in His great justice, was taking away her eyesight. It was measure for measure. God judged people, even His saints, to a hair’s breadth. But God was also merciful, and there was no sin for which a person could not repent. And what was true repentance? Being in the same situation and acting differently.
She thought about Leah Howard. What was real
ly her objection to this kind woman who had brought order and happiness back to her son-in-law and to her grandchildren? Her secular background? Was it not even more praiseworthy that coming from such a family she had found a sincere path back to God? The way she dressed? She was stylish, but not immodest. Her hair? It was the hair God had given her, without artifice, and it was beautiful.
No, it was none of those things but simply the fact that her friends and neighbors didn’t think any baal teshuva was good enough to marry into their families. It was the fact that their unfair and harsh judgment, dishonest as it was, would diminish her own family’s stature, ruin its reputation. But she had already made the most supreme and ultimate sacrifice for the sake of her family’s precious reputation. Now she realized, it had all been for nothing.
Pay no attention to outward things, God had chastised the prophet Samuel when he went to anoint the next king of Israel and was impressed by David’s tall, handsome older brothers. But it was the short, young, redheaded David that the Lord had chosen. For not as man sees does the Lord see, God told his prophet. A man sees only what is visible, but the Lord sees into the heart.
It was time to repent her sins. She did not want to be blind anymore.
30
“Can I come in?”
Rebbitzen Basha quickly buzzed in her old friend. She was surprised. Fruma Esther usually called before coming over. It was just a coincidence that she was at home, as Wednesday morning was her usual time to shop for her meat order for Shabbos.
She stood by the door, her brows knitting in anxiety. “Is everything all right, Fruma Esther? Your eye, it’s so red!”
“It’s not my eye that is red,” Fruma Esther wheezed, “it is my face. I am so ashamed.”
Rebbitzen Basha’s kind face was full of concern. “Come, sit. I’ll make tea.”
Fruma Esther sat down on the couch heavily, her feet almost giving way as an “Oy” escaped her. It was so good to get off her feet, such a relief not to have to worry about bumping into walls or tripping over cracks in the old sidewalks of Boro Park. She reached gratefully for the teacup and saucer offered her, looking greedily at the plate of rugelach drenched in chocolate and honey. She would take just one. But her stomach jiggled as she reached for it, reminding her of vague resolutions to eat less. Just one bite, a little bite, she negotiated with herself. What could it hurt? She needed something to sweeten her bitter soul.
“Yaakov is getting married.”
Rebbitzen Basha was happily surprised, her hearty “Mazel tov” resounding and pure. But studying her friend’s crestfallen face, she stopped. “Isn’t this what you prayed for? So why the long face?”
“It’s Leah. Leah Howard.”
Rebbitzen Basha leaned back, exhaling. Then a huge smile lit up her face. “God is good!”
Fruma Esther was taken aback. “You’re not surprised?”
“Very. And overjoyed. Baruch HaShem! Ever since I had that talk with her and convinced her not to go to the house for Shabbos, I’ve been eating my heart out. You shouldn’t know, she was so hurt, so upset. Better I should cut out my tongue than do such a thing ever again! But I did it for you, to help you. And she hasn’t come back to see me since. She didn’t even come to my Heshy’s vort. I can’t blame her. Such a lovely girl. Believe me, Fruma Esther, your family is getting a jewel. So, you’re here because you want me to make trouble again, to stop it? I’ll tell you right now, from me you won’t get such help again. Never.”
“I don’t want to make any trouble,” Fruma Esther said so softly her friend thought she’d misheard.
“You what? My hearing, you know, not so good.”
“I want to help. I want to do teshuva,” Fruma Esther said loudly. “But I don’t know how. Yaakov is mad at me. Shaindele is crying. There’s trouble between the child and her father. And I’m to blame.”
“You can fix it.”
“How?”
“First, you shmooze with Shaindele. Tell her the truth about what happened to her mother. It’s time for her to know, Fruma. Otherwise, she blames her father, she blames the world. She can’t move on with her own life.”
“How … do you … who told you?”
“You thought I didn’t know? You live here how long and you still dream you can keep secrets in Boro Park, Fruma Esther? You of all people should know what’s what. The rabbis had to decide the halacha after Zissele … when she … passed away, whether she could be buried in the Jewish cemetery. My husband was one of the rabbis they consulted.”
“They decided it was an accident. They let her be buried properly,” Fruma Esther said, trembling as she remembered the fear that, as a suicide, Zissele would be buried outside the community’s cemetery. It had been a tremendous chesed. “Who else knows?”
“Only my husband and the two other rabbis who were asked to decide. My husband never said a word, but they sat in my living room. I couldn’t help overhearing. I didn’t tell anyone, and I never will. But the child—Shaindele—she was there when it happened, no? When the ambulance came? She saw the whole thing with her own eyes. She must have questions. She should know the truth.”
“I wanted to spare her from the shame.”
“There is no shame in being sick, Fruma Esther,” Rebbitzen Basha told her. “I tried to tell you that years ago.”
“But a mental sickness, it’s not like cancer. People talk. It’s a shonda.”
“It’s a shonda that they should talk!”
“Yes, Basha, I know that now.” She sighed. “All right. I will talk to Shaindele. Then what?”
“And then you can do something nice for Yaakov and Leah. You can hold the vort at your house.”
She hadn’t thought of that. “My house? You want I should invite my friends, all the rabbis?”
Rebbitzen Basha nodded. “Maybe not at your house; there won’t be room. Hire out the big hall in shul. I’ll help you with the food and setting up. But yes, you should organize it. The widow of the great Admor Yitzchak Chaim Sonnenbaum, the sister of the late Rabbi Eliezer Ungvar, must invite everyone, all the most important rabbis. They can’t refuse you, you know that. They wouldn’t dare not come. Show them that you are 100 percent behind it. And at the vort, you need a big smile on your face, all the time. Talk to everyone. Tell them what a special person Leah is, how full of chesed, how much she has helped Yaakov and the children. Just the truth, Fruma Esther. Just the truth.” Rebbitzen Basha hesitated. “And if you can, you could say the shidduch was your idea. That would stop the rechilus for good.”
Fruma Esther’s eyebrows raised in surprise at the last idea, but then settled back into place. The two pious old women, grown wiser and sadder for the years they had lived and struggled to keep God’s word, looked at each other.
It was not a secret that for all the efforts of the community—its rabbis and institutions—to reach out to secular Jews and bring them into the fold, once they succeeded, there was no place to put them. The sad and ugly truth was that the frum community didn’t want these people. They didn’t want their frei parents and siblings showing up, giving bad ideas to the community’s own children about how to dress and behave. And deep down, there was the persistent idea that somehow, belief in God and Yiddishkeit was worn like a skin by those born into the life and was only a coat for the newly observant, easily taken off and discarded at any moment. And so despite their sincerity and years of learning Jewish law, the general consensus was that baale teshuva were not to be trusted as far as kashruth and observance were concerned. Somewhere in Boro Park, the child of two baale teshuva was sitting alone because her friends were forbidden by their frum parents to come over and play with her lest they be given a cookie with a less-than-stellar hechsher or hear music or see forbidden books left over from her parents’ previous lives. All these things lay in the background as Rebbitzen Basha and Fruma Esther looked at each other.
“We can’t change the world, Basha.”
“Yes, but we don’t need to, Fruma Esther. We just need
to make a little room in our world, in our community, our streets, our own homes, our own hearts for Leah Howard. She will be your grandchildren’s stepmother. You have to fight for her, Fruma Esther. You have to fight for your grandchildren and any children she and Yaakov will, God willing, have together.”
She blinked, her bad eye making the room go blurry. The future was unclear, frightening. So many places to stumble! All the things she feared most in the world would crash down on her and on her family if she followed her friend’s advice. She would be criticized. She would be talked about behind her back. But there was no choice. She couldn’t finish her life in blindness and sin. When she went to meet her Creator, her life would be an open book to Him. He would turn the pages and read not what people said about her but what she had actually done and what was in her heart. So many pages she wished she could erase. The Creator, in His kindness, gave man that great gift: to erase the bad by doing good. If you were in the same situation and behaved differently, then your sins faded on the page, like old ink gone dry, first becoming illegible and then disappearing altogether, leaving the page blank.
“Can you make those almond cookies, the ones you made for Heshy’s vort?”
Rebbitzen Basha smiled in relief. “As many as you like, my dear friend.”
“Help me get up. I have so many things to do. But first, I have to talk to Shaindele.”
* * *
Fruma Esther Sonnenbaum walked slowly, her footsteps still uncertain, yet somehow lighter, as if some cripplingly heavy bundle she had been forced to carry on her back had finally been delivered. She would go directly to Bais Yaakov, she thought, get permission from the principal to take Shaindele out of class. Oh, the child would be surprised. She would worry something happened, chas ve’shalom. But she would smile as she took her granddaughter’s soft little hands in hers, patting them reassuringly. They would have a talk, and then the heavy bundle would fall from her lovely granddaughter’s small shoulders as well.