Exodus: A memoir (6 page)

When I’d fully recovered from the hernia surgery, I returned to Ed’s sunlit room. This time around, I chose a smooth white crystal with crimson veins.

“Maybe this time we can go inside and find something good?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ed said with confidence. “Let’s go looking in the underworld.”

I lay down, and Ed shook the rattle feverishly over my body, his eyes squinted tightly shut while he performed energy-clearing motions for about fifteen minutes. He told me to imagine myself going deep into the earth, to the still waters underneath, and having everything washed away. “Only the purest self is left behind,” he said.

I tried to visualize it.
I’m lying in a stream and the water is washing over me. I’m part of the earth, the flowers, the animals; it’s all one. I’m integrating.

“Step into the circle,” a woman whispers. “You need to care for everything around you in order for it to care for you in return. If you want to be included, just step in.”

I couldn’t decide whether the voice was a memory of someone who once spoke to me or a presence outside myself. As soon as it stopped, it was almost like I had never heard it.

Ed stopped shaking the rattle abruptly and told me to sit up.

“What did you find?”

I told him what I’d heard.

“That’s very good,” he said approvingly. “What you just learned is what we shamans call
ayni
, or ‘being in relationship.’ It’s about being aware of how everything is working around you and with you. You’re in the circle of life.”

“What were you doing while you were performing the ritual? What did you see?”

“I went looking for the parts of your soul that had chosen to leave for whatever reason. We all have that—the soul has four chambers, and one chamber is for the wound. That’s when a part of you can split off.”

“So what was the wound?”

“Well,” Ed said, hesitating for a moment before going on, “I saw something metallic, an object. At first I couldn’t quite tell if I was seeing it right. It was a bicycle. I think that’s what it was.”

“The wound is a bicycle?”

“That’s what I saw when I went looking for the thing that made your strongest, purest self peel away from you. There must have been a moment when you gave up and decided to just be a good girl and suppress your true self, and somehow it’s connected to a bicycle.”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I remember it vividly:
I’m sitting on the stoop, eyeing the neighborhood boys as they zoom by on their two-wheelers. I tentatively approach the bicycle when I think no one is looking. I put my feet on the pedals and the next thing I know, I feel like I’m flying . . . pedaling faster and faster until I’m almost around the block. And then I hear them come up behind me, a gang of boys on bikes. They knock me over to the ground, and their leader slaps me on the face, saying, “Girls don’t ride bikes.”

And I never did again, until this year.

“Well, there you have it,” Ed said. “That was the moment when you figured out it was safer if you buried the part of you that thought for yourself, that was unafraid. And eventually she gave up trying to come back.”

I started riding last summer, after we moved to the lake house. My college friend’s dad had patiently taught me to ride his wife’s bike. The first time I pushed down on the pedals and coasted on my own momentum felt like a miracle. I rode the trails and the roads, planning different routes for myself each time. Some days I’d struggle up a hill only to discover a whole new world on the other side, a stretch of mountainside, a lake collecting in a valley, horses meandering in a meadow.

In
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, Robert Pirsig describes the distinction between traveling by car versus by bike. The car window serves to frame the scene one is passing, he explains, making it similar to seeing it through a television or computer screen; the driver is removed and insulated from that which he is viewing. On a bike, however, the traveler is immersed in the world through which he traverses. There is no frame but the perimeters of his vision.

So it feels to be on a bike again for the first time since that childhood incident—fully immersed in the world, alive to its noises and colors, susceptible to its movements. How different it is from the sheltering of my childhood, the limits that were constantly placed on where I could go, and for how long, and with whom.

I had my first inevitable accident sometime in autumn, after a summer of triumphant journeys, of forty-mile days, of hills beaten and declines fearlessly embraced. They say a cyclist must fall, as soon as possible, if only to understand the physics of it. There is a right way to fall, and once you do it, the fear of falling no longer holds you in its grasp.

It was a beautiful, crisp day. The leaves were only just starting to curl at the ends; deciduous trees were lit up in fiery halos of red and orange. I climbed up a cracked, ill-maintained shoulder of a main road, and as I approached the crest, I heard the noise of an oncoming car behind me, a shrieking honk, and I panicked. I didn’t have time to look behind me to see the red Jeep barreling my way; I simply aimed my body away from the road and lost control as the bike spun in the gravelly ditch and toppled me to the ground.

I had the wind knocked out of me for what felt like a few minutes, and then I righted myself, preparing to get back on my bike and head for home. When I looked down, I noticed bright rivulets of red running down my legs, from holes in the flesh where the sharp scrape and gouge of pebbles had done their work.

I experienced what felt like a slow pulling away, a detachment from the scene. Somewhere outside my body, an eye winked and a voice said,
Good, that’s good. That’s what you deserve, isn’t it?
And the sound of that cruel statement echoing in my mind was so devastating to me that I started to cry, because who would say such a horrible thing about someone, and moreover, who would be generating that voice but myself, the lone traveler left on this road?

I limped home, rolling the bike along with me. I couldn’t feel the sting where it should have been, in the wounds in my legs and palms, only the horror of satisfaction at my own injury.

In my bathroom I scrubbed aggressively at the blood, remembering the moment when my friend Heather had shown me the bandage she used to cover the place where she cut herself. I shouldn’t have been feeling this frightening thrill, this enthusiastic response to the sight of bloody lacerations marking a trail on my legs.

I had never cut myself. I had heard that cutting was a practice in search of feeling, and feeling had never been an area in which I sensed a lack. To hurt oneself because one loathed oneself, that I understood, but surely I had grown up and past that terrible voice, the one that said my existence was a burden on everyone around me, and I should do them all a favor and die.

I am ten years old, looking at the full bottle of thyroid medication in my drawer and wondering what would happen if I stop taking the medication that had been prescribed to me since birth. It seems that I can no longer nurture any reasonable hope of gaining the approval of my family; will this, then, earn me the title of “good girl”?

I put the bottle back in its drawer without taking a pill, and don’t look at it again for months. In the spring I become flattened with a tremendous fatigue. I climb into bed and stay there for three weeks, floating in and out of wakefulness, but never once leaving the bed. It takes a long time for someone to notice how ill I am. The next thing I know, I’m eating farina my grandmother has prepared and wearing some new hand-me-downs for school. I am back on the medication. I feel thwarted. How can I cease to be a blight on my family and community if all my efforts are defeated?

I used to dream about being in the concentration camps with my grandmother. Always I awoke knowing with certainty that I had died, or was about to die, and that this was somehow proof that I still wasn’t strong enough, or special enough, to survive what my grandmother had endured. Compared with her, I was a whiny weakling.

I would stand in front of the gilded, oxidized mirror in my grandmother’s bedroom when she was away and stare at myself for hours, trying to imagine what I would have looked like on the brink of death, my skin clinging to my bones, my eyes sunken into my skull. What was different about her that she was able to emerge from the pit of human despair that surely would have swallowed me whole? Did she believe in her inalienable right to life in a way I could never hope to?

inheritance

Sometimes, when the house was empty and quiet, I would root through my grandmother’s drawers, looking for clues. It was difficult to learn anything about her otherwise. I asked many questions, but my grandmother was almost never in the mood to talk. Therefore I gathered frayed documents and sepia photographs obsessively, sneaking into my grandfather’s office to use the color copy machine before putting the found treasures back in their original hiding places. I kept a folder under my mattress stuffed with facsimiles of postcards, letters, and documents. I also kept detailed notes, jotting down names every time I heard them, documenting anecdotes whenever I was lucky enough to be in earshot. I was trying, surreptitiously, to put together a family tree of my ancestors, one as detailed as possible. I did not know why I felt so driven to color in the vague outlines of my past at the time, but I remember that the folder was one of the few items I took with me
when I eventually left my community. I abandoned years of diaries and journals and personal photographs, but for some reason I rescued that folder from the musty basement where it had lain untouched for years. Those documents were my only connection to my roots, not the shallow ones that had been planted in New York, but roots that went far back into the earth on the other side of the ocean. They were roots I could never really shake off, nor did I want to.

Was it the incessant secrecy, the silence that shrouded our household, that incited my insatiable curiosity to know more about my family’s past? The more my questions were met with dead air, the hungrier I became to fill up those spaces with images and words. Even though no one told me the story behind the photographs or explained the letters written in incomprehensible languages, I savored those mementos under my bed for years, feeling that my imagination told the best story anyway.

Once, I found an old brown envelope, tattered at the edges, reinforced with brown tape, tucked between the Hungarian down comforters my grandmother stacked in the old wooden crib that still sat in the corner of her bedroom, despite the fact that her youngest child was in his thirties. There was an old passport, with a photo of her as a young girl, thick, dark hair waving as if there were a breeze, pinned by a clip on the side where it was thickest. She had a tired smile on her face, like someone who had just completed a Herculean task, a long hike or swim. The date said 1947, so that task would have been an arduous recovery from typhus. She would have had to gain the weight lost in the concentration camp, grow back the hair, come to terms with the loss of everything.

My grandmother’s passport did not have a shiny leather cover like mine does now. It was a simple folded sheet of card stock. It
was temporary. It said STATELESS in bold black letters. It was the passport issued to her after the war, when Hungary didn’t want to recognize her as its citizen anymore, and no country wanted to step up in its place. Until her American naturalization, my grandmother used that declaration of categorical homelessness as her ticket across borders and oceans. She was, for many years, a displaced person who relied on the sporadic generosity of host countries and international relief organizations.

In the story of the Jews, we are technically all displaced persons. The last time we had a home was before the Second Temple was destroyed in AD 70. Then God punished us by sending us into exile, or
galus
, as we call it, and the diaspora happened. We were cursed with wandering; we moved from region to region, from country to country. Every time we settled into a comfortable routine, something would come along and shake the earth from beneath us. Crusades, Cossacks, Tatars, Nazis. The earth shook in 1944, and a few years later my grandmother came to America with her stateless passport.

Enclosed in the brown envelope was all the correspondence between her and the bureaucratic government agency in charge of her naturalization. She was addressed as DP3159057. At the time, she told me, she was working as a secretary in Williamsburg. She didn’t mention the company she worked for, or what she did exactly, as a secretary, but she did mention that she shared an apartment with roommates on Hooper Street and that at night she was awakened by the cries they emitted in their terrible dreams. Everybody around her was haunted in the same way. So she gave her information to a matchmaker.

“I’m ready to start a new life,” she had said. She wanted to have many children. She had just gotten her period for the first time at
twenty-four years old, and she was relieved. She had lost ten siblings in the war. She would ultimately give birth to eleven children.

She did not raise her kids with the same traditions with which her parents had raised her. It was a postwar generation, and if you hadn’t given up on God completely, you were well on your way to the other end of the spectrum. She had married an avid follower of what was beginning to be an extremist movement. My grandfather, while educated and successful at a young age, was the only man she had met who insisted on keeping his traditional beard in the New World. Later, their sons and daughters would grow up in a self-imposed ghetto led by rabbis who were trying to make sense of the Holocaust and appease the angry God that had razed the European Jewish population.

Over the years, my grandmother paid little notice to the winds of fanaticism blowing around her home. At times when the community was in its grips and my grandfather brought news of tightening restrictions into his home, my grandmother waved it away and sang a little tune as she carefully frosted a hazelnut torte. I remember that the little things made her very happy. She prepared such beautiful and tasty food, food the likes of which I found only when I traveled to Europe or ate in very old-style establishments. It was regal and classic in the way people rarely cook anymore in the United States.

To my grandmother I attached ineffable elegance. There was no elegance in Hasidic life, but there was elegance in her, in her origins, in her story, and in her inimitable cooking. My grandmother was European, and though I could not fully grasp what that meant, I imagined that it was something wonderful and otherworldly. I cherished the photos taken of her as a young woman in gorgeous hand-sewn dresses with rows of tiny cloth buttons. I
loved the way her slim ankles looked in delicate T-strap shoes. There was something spectacular about her loveliness and poise, which stood in sharp contrast to a photograph I had found in her drawer, one of her being carried out from Bergen-Belsen on a stretcher by the British Red Cross. To embody beauty after you had endured the ugliest of assaults, that was magic to me. I surmised that there was something very powerful at the core of my grandmother’s spirit.

My grandmother’s passport gave her name as Irenka, Hungarian for Irene. It was not a name I ever heard her called, but then no one called me by the name on my birth certificate either. It was custom to have a secular name, to make it easier for the outsiders to relate to us. Better that than they should resent us for having to break their teeth over our Hebrew names. My grandmother’s religious name was Pearl, a beautiful name that I thought I might give my daughter someday, except that, I reasoned, I would have a daughter too early for that. We didn’t name our children after the living, like Sephardic Jews do. It would have to be my granddaughter’s name.

Of all the passive and submissive women in the Bible I could have been named after, somehow Deborah ended up on my birth certificate. No one in my family had ever been named that, and Ashkenazi Jews never give their children random names. The custom is always to name a child after a dead relative.

Indeed, I was given two names at my Kiddish, the Jewish equivalent of a christening for girls: Sarah and Deborah. I was called Sarah growing up. There were plenty of dead Sarahs in my family.
Deborah was an afterthought, rarely mentioned. I never heard any tales told about an ancestor with that name. When I scoured the family tree I had managed to assemble through careful sleuthing, no one by that name showed up, even when I went back seven generations. Why Deborah?

In the book of Judges, Deborah is introduced with the words “
eshes lapidus
.” It’s common in the Bible for people to be tagged in such a way, with descriptions following their names. Wife of, son of—that’s how they were identified in those days. The weird thing is, if the words
eshes lapidus
, or “woman of Lapidus,” are to mean that Deborah is a wife, why is Lapidus never identified separately in the scripture? Why isn’t he given a patronym? In the Bible, all male figures are identified by the names of their fathers, sometimes even their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, too.

Lapidus
is a Hebrew word for torch, or fire. It is not the mundane term, but a literary word, a term with elevated connotations. It is an unlikely name for a person. Educated people infer that the description of Deborah therefore translates to “woman of the torch,” or “fiery woman,” as opposed to wife of anyone.

Woman of fire.

Nothing was beyond the scope of Deborah’s achievement. She is undoubtedly the most empowered woman in Jewish history. She was a judge, a leader, a military strategist and commander, a prophetess, and an icon. The Greeks later put her effigy on a coin. She was revered for her beauty, her wisdom, and most of all, her strength. Men tried to marry her, rabbis surmise, but she refused. So she was given the ambiguous affixation—
eshes lapidus.

When I first applied to college, needing a legal name for documents, I discovered that my birth certificate said only Deborah,
and from then on, the Sarah was dropped. To me, Sarah was my old name, a name for a passive girl. Deborah would be my future.

Deborah, woman of fire.

Centuries after Deborah’s rule, Jews were still talking about her, but not necessarily politely. The group of rabbis who sat around a table in a synagogue and argued with one another about every word in the Bible, and who had the minutes of their meetings transcribed into a collection of work that would become the Talmud, made a point of belittling, with a pernicious determination, the few women who had made it into biblical history. They focused on Deborah with unreserved vitriol, for of the paltry group of women who received positive mentions in scripture, she is truly the only threat. Not just a holy woman, neither a mother nor a wife, Deborah broke every rule in the book by occupying a position that had only ever been held by men and would never again be held by a woman. She died untamed, although surely there were those who wanted her retired into a convenient marriage to sink behind the name of her husband into obscurity.

There is a particularly memorable passage in the Talmud that records a conversation in which rabbis compete with one another to mock the names of the female prophets. By happenstance, some of the women were named after animals, names designed to denote industriousness, a cherished quality in a Jewish woman.
Deborah
is the Hebrew term for bee, a hardworking creature. The rabbis poke fun at Deborah by attacking her name as vulgar and unsophisticated.

But Hebrew, as a language, works in a particularly interesting way. Words are composed of three-letter roots, which have altered meanings based on suffixes, prefixes, and vowels stuck in between.
The root of
Deborah
consists of the Hebrew equivalents for
D
,
B
, and
R
. This is the root word for speech. The Hebrew version of
H
, tacked on to the end of an action word, usually denotes feminine gender. Therefore,
DeBoRaH
would literally deconstruct as “she speaks.”

These sorts of language gymnastics are a beloved sport of Talmudic rabbis. They spend countless pages indulging in a game called
gematria
, in which they use a code that assigns numerical values to Hebrew letters to draw connections between different words by showing their sums to be equal. The acrobatics involved to draw these complex conclusions are necessary because too frequently they are cited as the only evidence to support a rabbi’s claim. Hasidic Jews still donate to charity in multiples of eighteen because that is the numerical value for the word
chai
,
or life. In this way, they feel that their generosity will buy them life, because it is in the right numerical form.