Hush (39 page)

I am so sorry, Devory. I am apologizing for all of them, for those who should have known but didn’t, for those who knew but ignored, and for those who put their reputations above their children’s lives.

I am sorry I am the only one visiting your grave. I am sorry you suffered so horribly. I am sorry because I love you and you are my friend, Devory Goldblatt. You didn’t have to die. But for our ignorance, for our deliberate blindness, for our unforgivable stupidity, you did. I hope this letter will stop others from sharing your fate.

Your best friend,

Gittel Geldbart

I read the letter again and again. He had changed some words, left out some—like sexually abused and raped—but still, my letter was there, inside, in the pages of the community paper. I could not understand what had happened. Why had he put it in?

I called up Mr. Glicksman. “How?” I asked. “How did they agree so fast?”

“They didn’t,” he said. “I put it in anyway.”

“Why?”

He answered tiredly. His voice sounded strained and hoarse. “We’ve made too many mistakes already.”

The letters came by the tens, then by the hundreds. They did not print them in the paper—the rabbis were furious enough—but Mr. Glicksman sent them to me from his office. Letters from brothers, from sisters, from friends, mostly anonymous; letters from a woman whose husband killed himself two years before, and only after did she find out why.… From a sister who watched her brother drinking bleach so he could go to the hospital and not to school, to be at his teacher’s mercy.… From a young woman who visits her good friend in the psychiatric ward every week. She has been in and out of there since she was sixteen and raped repeatedly by a cousin.… And from an anonymous woman, no longer religious, who wanted to know when the
rabbonim,
those rabbis, would ever apologize.

“When will they publicly apologize themselves for the crimes they helped commit? Will they ever ask forgiveness from the dead, from the walking wounded, from each and every child whose
Rebbe
allowed them to stay in the classroom, whose parents were kept ignorant and scared, for whom reputation was more important than anything else?”

I took these letters around with me. I showed them to everyone. I made copies and put them on my high school principal’s desk, on other principals’ desks. I would not stop talking of Devory.

My sister, Surie, wanted me to keep quiet. Her in-laws were furious with her. They said that their daughter now had questions, she had lost her innocence.

“How dare you go against the
rabbonim
?” Surie screamed at me. “Mommy aged ten years since you started with this! How can you do this to them? You have to learn to forgive. That is not the way an
Eishes Chayil
acts. A Woman of Valor does things quietly—at least anonymously. And how
dare
you talk about the
rabbonim
like that? How will your children ever get married? And don’t even try to go near my children with that garbage mouth of yours—” And she slammed down the phone.

Yankel listened on the other phone. He had picked up the cordless at the same time I did when the phone rang and Surie began to yell. I cried after she hung up. I wept by the wall, too tired to answer, to even sit down.

Yankel comforted me. “
You
are the
Eishes Chayil
,” he said. “
You
are the real one. You are the only one protecting the children, and that is what a real mother does.”

He held me tightly.

Those were long months. Months of fierce arguments with my mother, tear-filled ones with my father, who said that
progress
was a terrifying term in our world; it meant something had been wrong with the past, the place we chose to remain. I must be careful.

I wasn’t careful at all. I met with others who had been hurt, who watched others get hurt, who saw their children falling apart and did not know how or why or what to do. I met with social workers and therapists, and I handed out books on abuse to anyone who would take them and especially those who wouldn’t. It was the first painful attempts at coping with abuse within our own small world.

In September, my baby was born. We named her Devory. Devory was her name: fuzzy scalp, pint-sized fists, aimless dark eyes, swaddled in warm, cashmere pink.

Yankel announced it at the
shul
after the prayers on
Shabbos
. There were rainbow cakes and Venetian cookies proudly laid out on long tables pushed against the wall. There were small glass
L’chaim
cups, bottles of clear wine, men crowded closely to the podium when Yankel announced our little girl as Devory Geldbart. Devory, after the girl who died.

There was a shuffling of polished shoes, a shifting of prayer shawls, and whispering sounds like bewildered things floating through the air, settling on one surprised face, then another. Devory? Which Devory? The Devory who hanged?

They called me, bubbies, uncles, friends, the neighbor who happened to drop by just to ask, just to hear again what they said in the street, in homes, at the
Shabbos
table. My mother shook her head, half smiling, half crying, at the shock of knowing that her daughter had never been well behaved. They looked at me strangely, at Yankel sympathetically.

Tiny Devory, with her fuzzy scalp and innocent dark eyes—one small hand clenched around Yankel’s finger and one around mine—cried in her crib, and we soothed her to sleep humming an old Yiddish lullaby. On her dresser sat the silver frame with the picture of my friend Devory. And every time I looked at it, her laughter made me smile because now she would be here forever. We would visit her grave, put a pebble there, and give her a name…

a memory,

a tear.

Devory, Devory, Devory Goldblatt.
Mazel tov
. This is our daughter’s name.

Dear Devory,

You came to me last night. And when I opened the window you climbed into my room. You climbed into my bed and put out your hand. I took it. I held it forever.

We lay in my bed in the dark. We lay in the dark and giggled. It was a safe kind of dark, where no one could see us or get inside, because you said we were now in heaven, and the living were forbidden. This was a secret place.

We whispered and talked and giggled. We were only nine and everything was funny. We looked up at the ceiling of my room, and we could see straight up to the stars. You said we could talk for hours, for as long as we wanted, because there was no time in heaven, only one long forever.

Then we held hands and ran. We ran through the door of my room and into a sunny meadow. We played there, dancing and skipping over rolling green hills, across soft green grass, and falling into bushes that cushioned us like pillows. They can’t catch us, you said, because no one can tell us how to dream. This is our heaven.

Before dawn, we returned to my room. We lay in my bed. We stared up at the orange red sky and whispered and laughed. Then we drifted off to sleep together. When I woke up, you were gone.

It doesn’t matter. Now I know where you are. Now I know where your secret place is, and that you are there, still laughing.

Your best friend forever,

Gittel

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When I was twenty-three years old, I began writing
Hush
. It wasn’t a book back then; it was only a story.
My
story. It became my story when I first learned what the words
sexual abuse
meant. I had known of the words, had heard of them, but wasn’t quiet sure how to define them—except that they defined something that happened by the gentiles. By us, the ultra-Orthodox, the
Chassidic
, the chosen Jewish nation living in Brooklyn, New York, it wasn’t a term we needed to know.

Oh, there had been stories. As children and as teenagers, we heard them all the time—whispered rumors, murmured gossip, secret scandals—all made up by some desperate people who spread lies. People who, because of mental instability, hatred for our community, or perhaps the influence of Satan, were spreading blood libels—like the gentiles do—saying things that wouldn’t have dared happen by us.

But it could happen. I was a young girl when I watched my friend being molested, though I could not understand what I was seeing. I was a young girl when an eleven-year-old boy from the community hanged himself. They said he did it because he didn’t have any friends. Others killed themselves, ran away, fell apart, but we were young and ignorant and just ran outside with our friends, where we played and laughed and stared at passing gentiles, wondering at the evil they hid inside, wondering at the empty lives they led. Of this we were certain because that is what our teachers told us again and again—and that meant it was true, even if we couldn’t understand why.

Okay, we weren’t
completely
certain. After all, we did not have TV, did not listen to radio, watch movies, or read secular magazines; the
goyishe
media would contaminate our purity and stain our innocence. It would destroy the world they built for us, the insular, bubblelike existence that had been carefully cultivated over the generations to last until
Mashiach
, the Messiah, arrived. And we liked it that way. It was all we knew. It was all our parents knew, and their parents too—a way of life going back generations from the
shtetles
in Europe to the ones we built here, our holy enclaves tucked right in the middle of New York.

We didn’t need the outside world. We had our own. We published our own newspapers, wrote our own literature, and put on our own plays—separate for men and women, of course. We attended Orthodox
Chassidic
schools, spoke Yiddish first and English second, covered ourselves with modest clothing, and never ever talked or played with anyone but our own kind. We built walls, and built them high. The walls would keep the gentiles and their terrifying world far away. The walls would protect us and shelter us—and as we built them higher, thicker, wider, we forgot to look inside. We forgot that the greatest enemies always grow from within.

This story is important to me because of what I have learned since I was twenty-three. It is dear to me because of the tens and hundreds of children—now adults—I have met, some like walking dead, others still terrified, all wounded, carrying an anger that never goes away. Ever. Watching them learn to mouth the words, to say them out loud:
sexual abuse, sexual abuse, sexual abuse, I was sexually abused
; to scream it to the high heaven and wonder if G-d, any g-d, was listening. It is a story I wrote about life in the ultra-Orthodox
Chassidic
world—about our joy, about our warmth, and about our deep, deep denial of anything that did not follow tradition, law, or our deeply ingrained delusions. It is a story told through the eyes of children, those who need to learn to understand how and why it happened to them, and those who need to find a way to survive it. This is for all the children—past and present—who still suffer.

I have used a fictitious name, Yushive, for the main sect in
Hush
. I did this because I refuse to point a finger at one group, when the crime was endemic to all.

Eishes Chayil

GLOSSARY

Yiddish is an ancient language that uses a blend of Hebrew, German, Aramaic, and Slavic. It is written with the traditional Hebrew alphabet, but in this book the words have been spelled phonetically in our alphabet to make it more accessible to readers. Please keep in mind that certain sounds in Yiddish are unusual for native English speakers.

WARNING:
Do not pronounce CH as in
chimney
or
chase
in this book. Since there is no English equivalent for this sound, think about the sound you make when you’re clearing your congested throat—“yucccchhh”! That end sound in
yuch
is the sound you’re trying to make. Other similar words are the Scottish pronunciation of
loch
and the braided Jewish bread known as
challah
.