All Who Go Do Not Return (6 page)

The last part was directed to God Himself, as if our restraint had dissolved, the passion of our cry warranting the bypass of heavenly bureaucracy:

There were more songs, slow tunes and lively ones, some set to words and others only a steady stream of
ya di da di dai.
I found myself swept up in the energy, joining hands with the boys beside me, lifting my feet with them and stomping on the floorboards, sharing in their exuberance, smelling the sweat of their bodies and tasting the
sherayim
of their rebbe’s food.

For the first time, I understood the tisch, not as something a teacher or parent declared important but as something experiential and inexpressible. It was some combination of the people, the food, the bodies pressed tightly together swaying in unison, the Hasidim’s warm smiles that inexplicably captivated me. For the very first time, it occurred to me that being a Hasid allowed for more than the daily grind of studying Talmud and adhering to the minutiae of our religious laws.

Here was the ecstasy and the joy. Here was all that I had been told that we Hasidim once had and lost. “The teachings of the Baal Shem Tov have been forgotten,” the old rebbe of Satmar had famously said, but here among the Skverers, they appeared not to be forgotten at all.

It was soon after that evening that, if anyone asked, I would say, “I am a Skverer.”

Other Hasidim, those I had grown up among in Brooklyn, were different. They cared a great deal about their crystal chandeliers and Persian rugs, their summer bungalows in the Catskill Mountains and and the prestige of their children’s marital arrangements. On Sabbath afternoons, the men paraded through Borough Park in their finest clothes, the tassels of their silk, handwoven gartels flapping at their sides, their gleaming fur
shtreimels
tall on their heads, with the outer edges shooting up in circles of tiny spires. But they did not cry as they stomped their feet: “Grant us! Grant us! The good inclination!” as the Skverers did. Hasidim in Borough Park remodeled their kitchens frequently and got the best deals on late-model cars, but never had I seen them squeeze together to allow another Hasid to experience the song and dance of a rebbe’s tisch. “Animals!” my friend Shloime Samet’s father screamed when he discovered a light scratch along the side of his brand-new tawny Oldsmobile, and I stood stunned that a scratch on a car could enrage a man so. “Don’t ruin my furniture,” my friend Nuchem Zinger’s father growled as I brushed lightly against the mahogany china cabinet in their dining room. In Borough Park, I had been told tales of men who embraced asceticism and poverty and want, who did not go to bed until they had given their last coin to the poor, and yet we lived as if those tales had taught us nothing. But the Skverers were different; they appeared to live exactly like the pious and modest folk of the old European shtetl, and now I longed to be one of them.

Several months later, my parents sent me for a year of study at a yeshiva in Montreal. The dean was a Satmar Hasid, as were most of the students, but there were also Belzers and Vizhnitzers, and Bobovers, and even one Lubavitcher. I, along with only two others, was a Skverer. A year later, at fourteen, I would return to study with the Skverers, first in Williamsburg, and later, at sixteen, in the Great Yeshiva in New Square. But it was during that year in Montreal, among Hasidim of so many different sects, that my new identity took firm hold.

On the Sabbath, at the third meal, as evening blended into night, we would gather around the tables in the dining room over pickled herring and cooked chickpeas, and I would think of New Square, where the same meal was held in the rebbe’s great synagogue, the lights extinguished, as if it were a Ukrainian town a century earlier, when the candles of the previous evening were burned out and new ones could not be lit until nightfall.

“The sons of the inner chamber, who yearn to gaze at the countenance of Ze’er Anpin,”
the boys in my Montreal yeshiva would sing, while I would not sing with them but only chant mournfully, as I had among the Skverers in their shtetl, where hundreds of men and boys would stand pressed together, the blackness of our coats and hats blending with the blackness of the dark hall, creating an eerie otherworldliness, at once melancholic and strangely joyful.
“Rejoice! There is goodwill in this hour, no anger or fury,”
the rebbe would cry, his sobs reverberating through the pitch-black chamber. A chill would go up my spine until I felt the hair along my temples go straight.
“Come near to me, behold my strength, for there are no harsh judgments.”

“Hey, Skverer, where are your boots?” one of my Satmar classmates would taunt me. Skverer men, once married, wore tall peasant boots on the Sabbath instead of the knickers and white stockings of other Hasidim. But I felt not taunted but proud. I would wear those boots, too, when the time came, when I found a girl from a Skverer family to marry, and raise our children as Skverers.

A dozen of us attended each of Avremel Shayevitz’s sessions of “groom instruction.” Beneath the harsh white light of two long, naked fluorescent bulbs, we sat around a brown Formica table in Avremel’s dining room. Through the closed door to the kitchen came the sounds of children playing, crying, laughing, bursts of raised voices followed by a woman’s scolding: “Shh, Tatti is studying with the
bucherim.
”

“‘Respect her more than your own self!’”
Avremel would cry during those sessions, quoting the Talmud, his jerky arms and fists slicing and pounding the air. “But how do we
understand
this passage? What does it
mean
to respect a woman?” Avremel would twist a hair from his scraggly black beard around his finger, pull it out, and drop it absentmindedly on the table between us. “What it
really
means, esteemed young men, is that we must be vigilant! Respect what
she
, a
woman
, can do to a man if he does not remain careful.” He would wag an index finger over his head, “Let down your guard, and she will lead you into
sheol tachtis
—the abyss of sinful temptation!”

There were other “groom instructors,” too.

There was Reb Noach, with his mangy blond beard and his springy step and ever-present smirk, who would teach me about the female body and the many laws related to its function. There was Reb Shraga Feivish, who would, on the afternoon of the wedding, teach me the mechanics of how to perform “the mitzvah.” There was Reb Srulik, with whom I would consult after the wedding on various questions—embarrassing ones, mostly, about body fluids, and shades of red and brown and ocher, anything that might interrupt our “family cleanliness.”

But before, after, and in between all the others, there was Avremel, the facilitator and clarifier of all that information, casting it in its appropriate light, ensuring that it was properly understood and acted upon.

Avremel’s mentorship had begun nearly three years earlier, in our first year at the Great Yeshiva, not to prepare us for marriage but as a general counselor. He was a thin man, with hollow cheeks and dark eyes that opened wide to reveal the whites and narrowed to slits so intense that they were frightening. Avremel was one of a cadre of men chosen by the rebbe to serve as special mentors. In later years, I would see Avremel as a caricature of religious fanaticism, a Savonarola of the Hasidic world; but at the time, I idolized him. His speeches were masterful: he was able, in a single breath, to weave talmudic passages about hell and the afterlife into a scathing comedic rant against one sort of wickedness or another, scorning the sheer idiocy of those who could not resist temptations of the flesh, who veered from “holiness and purity.”

Once a month, for the New Moon feast, scores of young men would squeeze into Avremel’s small dining room and sit around his table or on the battered divan by the wall or cross-legged on the floor. We would dip chunks of challah into bowls of
yishke
—a concoction of overripe tomatoes, diced onions, and bits of schmaltz herring, drenched in vegetable oil—and wash it down with flat seltzer while Avremel spoke of the evils of gluttony and earthly temptations, sinful thoughts in our sleep, insufficient devotion in prayer or to the rebbe. We would enter through a rear door, to avoid glimpses of Avremel’s wife or his young daughters, but we’d hear their disembodied voices from other parts of the small apartment. Occasionally, one of Avremel’s young sons would join us, and even the youngest knew to close the door behind him quickly. It was the perfect Hasidic home, and Avremel, clearly, was a paragon of Hasidic manhood.

The groom instruction sessions were different: intimate and secretive. Only the soon-to-be-married were invited, and we were instructed to speak with no one about them. These were sensitive matters, and we would slip away from the study hall in the evening, aware of the furtive glances in our direction.

The first session took place two months before my wedding, which was to be held in early June. When the session was over, I waited until the others left, and then asked Avremel if I might speak with him. We sat on opposite sides of the table, and I remember struggling for words. What came out was a croak, a lame attempt at verbalizing my tempestuous swings from anger to melancholy to resignation during the last four months. “I am not happy.”

Avremel’s eyes went wide in response, fiery, almost scolding. “Why?” he asked.

Again, as in the rebbe’s chamber, there was a question and I had to come up with an answer. I thought that with Avremel it would be easier, but now I realized that here, too, I couldn’t speak my thoughts. They felt inappropriate, almost sinful. I was thinking the wrong thoughts, feeling the wrong things.

“I don’t know why,” I said. And then I felt an explosion of despair, my face suddenly awash with tears. I did not want to marry this girl. The day, the hour, the moment was approaching, and I could not stop it. I wished I could escape, take off to some unknown place, where I could start a new life and be spared the shame of what I really wanted, but where would I go? Overwhelmed, I buried my face in my arm, unable to contain my sobs.

When I raised my head again, Avremel was staring at me, his eyebrows narrowed, his brow creased, as if he now realized that, yes, we had a problem. But he needed more information, he said. “Perhaps you can think on it some more.”

“I don’t know,” I remember muttering. “Maybe—I just don’t think she and I have anything in common.”

Avremel nodded slowly, then looked at the table for a long time. Finally, he said, “You were hoping for a friend.” He stroked his beard, beads of spit trapped in the edges of his unkempt mustache.

I shrugged with a half nod. Perhaps that was it.

“A wife isn’t a friend.” Avremel shook his head emphatically.
“Eizer kenegdo,”
he said, quoting Genesis. “A wife is to be a helpmate. Your friends will still be your fellow students.”

Avremel looked at me while I stared at the faux wood-grain patterns in the Formica tabletop and I thought about his words. After several minutes of silence, he began to speak again, more assuredly this time. I had misunderstood the whole marriage thing, he said. A wife is not a friend. A wife is not something to think about excessively. To take a wife is a biblical commandment, and so we do God’s will by taking one. A wife is there to assist with one’s service to God, nothing more.

In later years, I would have words for that which I could not articulate to the rebbe or to Avremel, words from beyond our cloistered world of tischen and Talmud study and groom instruction: Attraction. Chemistry. Compatibility. I would later learn other words—passion, romance, arousal, desire—that I wanted as well, but to want those was an unquestionable sin; those feelings and thoughts and behaviors that passed between sexes outside of our world were anathema to us and our sacred ways.

I remember when I first became aware of a world filled with forbidden passions. I was nearing fourteen, during my year of study in Montreal, and I had a curious thought.

“Have you noticed,” I said one day to my friend Avrum Yida, a Satmar boy from Williamsburg, “that here in Montreal, wherever you turn, there is a man and woman walking together?”

Avrum Yida didn’t understand what I meant, and I tried to point out what was to me unmistakably apparent. In our world, fathers walked with sons and mothers with daughters, but here, everywhere, were men and women in pairs—strolling down leafy Avenue Saint Viateur, past the many shuttered Roman Catholic churches; sitting on the benches in Outremont Park, resting hands, heads, legs in each other’s laps; eyeing the jewelry store displays in the small row of shops along Avenue Bernard, eyes glittering toward each other through the fog of their breath in the frigid January air.

It must be a French thing
, I remember thinking. I had learned that Quebecois were French, and the French, I had heard once, were the most decadent of all people. Paris was the source of all
shmutz
, our teachers had told us. It was the place from which immodest women’s fashions were conceived and sent to the rest of the world, to tempt men to sin. This uncouth display of intersex courtship must have something to do with that.

Avrum Yida, when he finally understood my observation, dismissed it. “It’s just how goyim are,” he said. “You can see it in Manhattan, too.” Avrum Yida thought himself wise and worldly, and I was inclined to take his word for it. Not a French thing but a goyish thing.

French or goyish, however, it was sinful to gaze at. Yet I could not look away. From the second-floor window of our yeshiva, I would watch as they passed, hand in hand or with their arms on each other’s backs, heads leaning on shoulders, pecking at each other’s lips and nuzzling noses. My jaw would go slack as I observed them, until I would catch myself and turn to check that no one was watching me.