All Who Go Do Not Return (40 page)

I promised Gitty that I would never allow it again, that it was a momentary lapse in judgment, and that she was right: I should have been more careful, but they had watched for no longer than a minute.

“I can no longer trust you,” she said simply. And with that, she ended the conversation.

Several weeks later, the children got into the car and Freidy handed me a note, in Gitty’s familiar script.
I am sorry
, it read.
I can no longer be in contact with you.

All messages were to be passed through a third party. She listed the name of one of her relatives.

I called her immediately. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“I can no longer speak to you,” she said.

I asked if I’d upset her in some way, if there was something I could do to make it better.

She remained silent.

“We’ve been doing so well!” I had been grateful for her willingness to keep in touch. If I was not there to see my children each night when they came home from school, to have dinners with them and do homework and take them shopping and work on school assignments, I could at least get regular updates from her. How would I be a parent to them now?

Gitty would not explain more, and when I pleaded for us to have a reasonable conversation, she said flatly, “I can’t speak to you. This is final. Please don’t call again.”

I had a strange feeling of loss, a kind I hadn’t felt all these months. Gitty and I had had our difficult times, but we had also grown close over the years. We hadn’t fought bitterly the way other divorced couples did. We cared for each other, and we both wanted what was best for the children.

I called the relative she’d indicated in her note. The man’s name was Shragi Green, a real estate developer in New Square with a reputation for shrewdness, although I also knew him to be barely literate. We had been friends in the past; on occasion, he would ask me to edit some of his business correspondence, which often reminded me of scam e-mails from Nigeria, written in substandard English with a thinly veiled duplicitous quality.

“Do you know anything about this?” I asked.

I could hear him breathing through the phone, like a long series of deep sighs, as if he had been bracing for the call but hadn’t prepared himself fully. Finally, Shragi said, “The rabbis have advised her on this. You’ve made your choice. Now she’s made hers.”

I began to protest. The rabbis had no business interfering. This was a private family matter. Shragi interrupted me, his tone steely. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “You’ve tried to influence her and the children in the past, but those days are over. She is now getting guidance from the right people.”

I tried to object, but he raised his voice to speak over me.

“I know it’s hard to accept. You’re angry now—that’s normal.” His voice softened. “Don’t worry, it’ll get easier. You’ll get used to it.”

Within weeks of Gitty’s note, Tziri, as if in solidarity with her mother, stopped speaking to me. She would come along with the others, eat her dinner, and then curl up on the sofa with a book until it was time to go home. I would ask about school, about her friends, about what she was reading, and she would ignore me. Something or someone had gotten to her, and I could not budge her out of her resolve. Now thirteen and ferociously bright, she showed the stubbornness of an ox and the indifference of an alley cat.

Weeks, then months, passed. Tziri remained silent. Gitty refused to take my calls. I ached for news of report cards, parent-teacher meetings, doctors’ visits. I had to plead with the children for information. I knew only what they told me, and they weren’t offering much.

One day, Chaya Suri mentioned a car accident involving Hershy.

“What car accident?”

“The one where the car ran over his foot.”

When did that happen? Where? How come I hadn’t heard?

They didn’t remember the details. Some guy in a car, right in front of the apartment. Two weeks ago, maybe three. An ambulance came. Was he taken to the hospital? Freidy said no, and Chaya Suri said yes. Was anything broken? Were X-rays taken? What did the doctor say?

“Does it look like anything’s wrong with him?” Freidy snapped, looking up from a bag of chips. Hershy was on the kitchen floor several feet away, Game Boy in hand, oblivious. Clearly, he hadn’t been badly hurt, but I was furious that no one had bothered to call me.

The suddenness with which I was consigned to irrelevance left me stunned. For fourteen years, I had imagined myself integral to my children’s lives. All at once, it appeared that I was not.

When I called Shragi to inquire about the children, he would not give me much.

“They’re being well taken care of. There’s no need for you to worry.” Then he turned the call into a conversation about my wicked ways. “The Gates of Repentance are never closed. Return, and all of this can be fixed.” Gitty and I could remarry. All would be as before. “’There is no greater mitzvah than taking back an abandoned wife,’” he would remind me, quoting the Talmud.

In the interest of amicability, Gitty and I hadn’t bothered with legal agreements from the secular courts. They seemed unnecessary. We knew very few divorced couples and imagined that family courts were only for those divorces one heard about in the news, between couples who bore such relentless grudges toward each other that they turned their acrimony into sport while their children were left irreparably scarred. Trusting in the goodwill of all involved, I had imagined we’d work it all out between ourselves. Even when Gitty refused to speak to me, when I knew that she was being advised by those with less than noble intentions, I still hoped we could find a way back to the open hearts we’d had just months earlier.

The surprising thing about the final unraveling was that it was precisely the thing I had feared; yet when it came, I was neither prepared for it nor could I have imagined the psychic devastation I would experience in its wake.

Gitty brought our matter in front of a family court judge, where her attorney explained the many ways in which I was unfit to be a father to my children. Shragi sat behind Gitty’s attorney, whispering into his ear.

“Mr. Deen has changed his beliefs,” the attorney told the court, and laid out the many ways in which my new ways were damaging to the children’s well-being:

My clothes were the wrong kind.

My haircut was offensive.

My yarmulke was too small.

I had a television and the Internet in my home.

“And,” the attorney concluded, “he has become an atheist.”

And so they wanted me out of the children’s lives.

“Is your client an atheist?” the judge asked my attorney.

“No, he is not,” my attorney said, without missing a beat, and the judge looked relieved. I was stunned that my personal beliefs were relevant to the case, but my attorney clearly knew that they were.

When I asked for the court’s permission to take my children on a daytime trip during the intermediate days of the Sukkos holiday, as I had done every year for the past decade, Gitty could no longer contain herself.

“He’ll take them to atheist places!” she cried, and Shragi nodded vigorously behind her. I could only surmise that she meant a natural history museum or public library.

At first, I wasn’t very concerned. A family court judge could not rule on the basis of religion, I imagined. But when the judge ordered overnight and weekend visitation rescinded and reduced visits from twice weekly to once a week, I grew alarmed.

“It’s only temporary,” my attorney explained. Until it went to trial and a permanent arrangement was decided.

“How long until the trial?” I asked my attorney.

“Hopefully, within the year.”

In the meantime, there would be no more weekend visits, no more long meals and lazy Shabbos afternoons during which we would sing songs and tell jokes and stroll to the pond and watch the geese and the turtles, or, on rainy days, play Scrabble or broken telephone and sit around resolving arguments about who stole whose toys and who was hogging the Calvin and Hobbes comics.

I would still have two hours with the children each Sunday evening. It wasn’t a lot of time, not when there were five of them—and I did the math: after subtracting the ten minutes’ driving time each way, I was left with exactly twenty minutes per child. But we could have dinner together and play a game or two, and maybe have some time for homework. Within a year, I would get our old arrangement back, I was certain. We would be a family again.

I could not make any sense of Gitty’s sudden change. The answer I came up with eventually was that something had snapped. The seeds of her resentment were not religious but personal. “You’re living the good life while I’m stuck here,” she had said bitterly, several weeks before cutting off contact. “You’re out having fun, partying with your goyish friends, living without restrictions. You probably have a million girlfriends by now.”

It was an odd accusation, not only because it was so far from reality but also because it betrayed what I had long suspected: a glimmer of envy. As if underneath it all, those who begrudge the godless their godlessness do so not because the godless are sinners but because sinners have more fun—and how dare they?

The months dragged on, with complaint after complaint filed in court on minor matters of Hasidic custom. I had fed the children machine matzah. I was wearing jeans. They were traumatized by the television in my home. I could not be trusted to abide by the laws of kosher food. My very appearance was having a negative influence on them.

I thought that these issues would be declared irrelevant by the judge and that a secular court could not be swayed by such concerns, but my attorney assured me that it was not so.
Everything
was relevant in family court, especially in a county like ours, where judges were beholden to powerful constituencies with very special interests.

The complaints were formally filed by Gitty, but I knew that, aside from Shragi, other community “experts” were involved. I heard through friends that thousands of dollars were being raised to pay for the legal costs necessary to keep me away. I knew how these things worked. I had seen the flyers over the years, on lampposts and synagogue doors in New Square and Williamsburg and Monsey, calling on people to “save the children from a parent gone astray.” Common tropes were used to stir hearts—most often, the image of a young Hasidic boy, scissors Photoshopped menacingly over his sidecurls.

My brother Mendy came by one day, and told me something Shragi had said to him when he ran into him in shul one morning. “We may not have a legal case,” Shragi said. “But we can beat him down emotionally and financially. He’ll have to give up eventually.”

I remember laughing when I heard it. It sounded ludicrous. I was unaware that even with a strong case, custody battles could cost tens of thousands of dollars. I was unaware that, when held in Rockland County, custody battles in our community required rabbis, community leaders, and Orthodox family therapists on your side. I was unaware that family courts were also part of the local political machinery and that elections were never far from a judge’s mind. I was unaware that my relatively meager resources were no match for a powerfully resourceful community with an ideological stake in the future of my children. Most of all, I was naive about the power of religious extremists to control even the minds of children.

I did not lose in court. Instead, I lost my children’s hearts, and with them, very nearly, my sanity.

Soon after the court proceedings began, the children changed markedly. They grew withdrawn in my presence, eating dinner in silence and showing no interest in their favorite games and books. They began to speak to one another in hushed tones, their manner subdued, looking at one another awkwardly and at me barely at all. They began to inspect the labels on food products and picked at their dinners reluctantly. When I asked what was wrong, they looked at the clock, anxious to leave.

“Has anyone been saying bad things about me?”

Akiva shook his head vigorously, while Chaya Suri’s lids turned red around her large glassy eyes. Only Hershy looked me in the eye, and said, “Mommy says you want to turn us into goyim.”

I turned to several rabbis for help, but few were sympathetic. “Don’t you agree that your children are better off without you?” one rabbi asked, eyeing my too-small yarmulke and my shaved beard.

When I turned to the local, Hasidic-run mental health clinic for assistance with getting the children counseling, I learned that I was too late. Gitty had already come by, I was informed. The clinic had assigned one of its staff psychologists, a young Orthodox woman, to issue a letter to the court with its advisement. The letter, I would later learn, urged the court to forbid me to bring my children into my home. It also urged that my visits be reduced to once a month, and that they be supervised by a member of the Hasidic community.

“Shouldn’t you have met with me first?” I asked the young psychologist, when she finally agreed to see me. Her supervisor, a Hasid whose stomach bulged over his trousers, passed by in the hallway. She glanced at him through the half-open door and looked back at me. She appeared lost, both contrite and defensive.

“You’re right,” she said, her voice faint. “I didn’t think of it.” Her supervisor passed by again and looked through the open door. The woman rose from her chair. “I hope things work out,” she said.

“My children will never reject me,” I had said to my brother Mendy when he told me what Shragi had said. My children adored me, but I soon realized that it was more complicated than that. When a child is taught that a parent is wicked, the child’s love for the parent does not subside immediately. What the child feels instead is shame. Shame over her own feelings of affection for someone she has been told is a bad person. Shame over her biological association with that bad person. Embarrassment over what people would say, were they to observe or think about her association with this bad person. It is only natural that the child then wants nothing but to withdraw from the source of all that shame.