by Hopen, David
Dedication
For my mother and my father, on whose love my world stands
Epigraph
Our Rabbis have taught, four entered into The Orchard. They were Ben Azai, Ben Zoma, Aher, and Rabbi Akiba. Ben Azai gazed and died. Of him it is written, “Precious in the eyes of HaShem is the death of his pious ones.” Ben Zoma gazed, and went insane. Of him, it is written, “Have you found honey, eat your share lest you become full, and vomit it up.” Aher became an apostate. Rabbi Akiba entered, and exited in peace.
—Hagigah 14b
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
—Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
August
September
October
November
December
January
February
March
April
May
June
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Is tragedy dead?”
This is what I asked Mrs. Hartman at the end of it all, when I was still obsessed with every fatal flaw but my own.
She didn’t ask why I needed to know. Instead she asked me to define tragedy for her. I told her this was impossible: tragedy was a subphilosophy, something to be felt, not defined.
She shook her head. “Majestic sadness,” she told me. “That’s tragedy.”
I thought about that night, standing side by side with Evan and Amir in those waning moments before the policemen, the fire trucks, the body count. I thought about the look on Evan’s soot-washed face. “I wonder if Noah is seeing this,” he had said, his voice soft, sad. After everything that had happened our senior year, it was the way he said this that made me cry. If that was not majestic sadness, I decided, nothing was.
“Well, Mr. Eden?” She blinked at me. “Did it die with the Greeks?”
“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”
August
Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
—Tennyson, “Ulysses”
For the first seventeen years of my life I lived in Brooklyn. From nursery through the eleventh grade—blurred, prehistoric years—I attended a small yeshiva called Torah Temimah, the translation of which (“the Torah is perfect”) was our credo. School was single-sexed, with a black-and-white dress code, thirty boys per grade and a reputation for functioning as an academic travesty. Yiddish-speaking rabbis refused to teach anything vaguely related to evolution. Former hippies, plucked from the street, incapable of landing a job in the regular school system, ranted incoherently about civics. Freshman-year math was canceled abruptly after Mr. Alvarez, our lone competent teacher, decided he’d seen enough of our wondrous country and returned to Argentina. The Torah was perfect, our education was not.
None of this mattered much to our community. Never was there any pretense that this was anything but a yeshiva first and a school second, dedicated to “the uncompromising development of students into the leaders of modern-day Torah” and then, with whatever time was left in the day, to a secular education. Most graduates spent years floating aimlessly around the country, studying in a Beis Medresh here, a Beis Medresh there, where their fathers had once studied, where a second cousin once removed was a notable donor, wherever, really, they were offered a bed. No one had college on his mind. It took me all this time to realize that this amounted to a beautiful life.
My family wasn’t too different, at least back then. My father was an accountant for a small, local firm, which I suppose made us something of a minority in a community in which many fathers spent their days learning or teaching Torah. Still, my father fancied himself a learned man—his grandfather, he enjoyed reminding me, had been a fairly prominent rabbi in Williamsburg and descended from a line of middling Talmudic scholars—and spent his free time engrossed in study. His profession was infinitely boring, but he was satisfied with his lot and prone to pious overgeneralizations: “God-fearing specks in a vast universe do not require fancy careers.” He was, in short, eminently suited for our community: graying hair, worn smile, the simplest man I’ve ever known.
My mother—thin, elegant in the way receding youth clings to certain women—was more unusual. Her parents, third-generation Chicagoans, maintained a semi-traditional household: occasional Friday night gatherings, synagogue on the High Holidays, no pork, some lobster. As a freshman at Barnard, she partook in a Hillel-sponsored trip to Israel and, nearly overnight, became infatuated with the spiritual fulfillment, moral discipline and communal structure offered by Orthodox Judaism. She returned reborn, studying with a local rebbetzin, adopting increasingly complex mitzvoth and, by the end of her fall semester, transferring to Stern College. Soon after, a shidduch was arranged with my father.
I was deeply curious about my mother’s early life, but she said little on the subject. She insisted, in fact, that she hardly remembered her childhood in Chicago. I used to ask questions—what was it like eating nonkosher, having Saturdays free, attending public school—but instead of substantive answers received instructions, mostly from my father, to keep private my mother’s status as a Ba’alat Teshuva, a newly religious Jew. Her real life, she claimed, began with my father. After marrying, she earned her master’s at Teachers College, a rarity for the other mothers I knew. She taught fourth grade at Torah Temimah, which meant she witnessed firsthand its academic horrors.
“Aryeh,” she announced after it’d become apparent my fifth-grade teacher took personal offense to the concept of required reading, “enrichment is in order.”
And so every day after school we’d sit in the Borough Park Library, my mother and I, and read. She gave me books to devour—Tom Sawyer and To Kill a Mockingbird, Flowers for Algernon and A Wrinkle in Time. Soon, I was biking over after school and perching myself in the corner, where the librarian, Mrs. Sanders, with her cherubic-white hair and feline eyes, had grown accustomed to leaving me stacks of “mandatory” books. “Nobody reads these,” she’d say. Night. Death of a Salesman. “You’re going to make up for everyone else.” Dickinson once described her father as a man who read “lonely & rigorous books.” This was what I became: a contemplative boy surrounded always by lonely, rigorous books.
Such was the way I received some semblance of an education. I stood out in English classes, if only because an alarming number of my classmates flirted with illiteracy. Their parents were content with whatever the school managed to teach—astonishingly little—and actually preferred their children study Talmud exclusively.
“What’re you doing at the library?” my friend Shimon would probe. He had comically long payot wrapped twice around his ears, a kind, thin face typically covered with acne and was always sweating, his shirt a mosaic of ketchup from lunch and dirt from recess. “Is there a shiur there or something?”
“You’re asking if they offer Gemara classes at the public library?”
“Yeah.”
I shook m
y head.
“What do they have, then?”
“Books, Shimon.”
“Sefarim, you mean?”
“No,” I said. “Real books. Want to come?”
He frowned. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“My father says that stuff stains your neshama.”
* * *
THERE’S A POEM I LIKE by Jane Kenyon. It’s three stanzas, ten lines, rather somber. The poem’s called “In the Nursing Home”; it likens aging to a wild horse running tight circles that grow smaller, smaller, until eventually they cease. As a teenager, I felt this neatly encapsulated the suffocation of my childhood, the trackless wasteland of tightening circles I inhabited. I felt sometimes as if I existed alone, outside the external world, bearing no true relation to anyone or anything, as if the invisible harnesses that tethered humans to their surroundings had, in my case, come undone. I was accustomed to living unmoored, inured to rappelling through a shrinking reality with neither rope nor anchor. This was all I knew: gazing out at the coming night, alone, waiting diligently, like Kenyon’s horse, to be retrieved by some force—any force—that could reinsert me into my own life.
* * *
MY PARENTS BROKE THE NEWS in February, amid dull snow.
“Aryeh,” my father started, nervously setting down his utensils on the table, dabbing his napkin at the corner of his mouth. “Imma and I have something to discuss with you.”
We had quiet meals. I was an only child; my mother would serve and we three would dutifully attempt small talk before lapsing into silence. Most families we knew were overrun by hordes of children in small houses—Shimon, for instance, had seven siblings—and though mostly I enjoyed being on my own, I wondered on occasion whether living amid commotion could relieve my solitude.
My father cleared his throat. “I lost my job.”
Sadness washed over me, seeing his embarrassed look, the way my mother fixated on a spot of dirt on the floor, the snow falling gray and bleak through the windows. At first I said nothing, willing my silence to transmit commiseration, not apathy. “They fired you?” I asked, probably insensitively, when I thought of something to say.
“Not technically.” Again he cleared his throat, this time for momentum. “It’s folding, the firm, at the end of the summer.”
Four men in a cramped, poorly lit back office in Flatbush, I couldn’t help but think, did not a firm make. “The whole—operation?”
“These are difficult times, Ari, what with the state of the economy and all.” Sure, I nodded, the economy. “Mr. Weintraub says he can’t afford to keep us running anymore.”
“Dreadful,” my mother insisted, playing with the tablecloth, “isn’t it, Aryeh?”
“I’m sorry, Abba,” I said. And, truly, I was: my father was proud, decent, content to function on little sleep, resolved never to miss minyan, never to use a sick day, never to complain about the fact that a considerable percentage of the little money he scraped together went directly toward paying my tuition. He was not, in my view, someone deserving of humiliation.
“I’m sure you’ll find something soon?”
“The thing is, Aryeh,” he said, “there’s not much else around here.”
I played with the rim of my glass of water. “Maybe Mr. Weintraub can help find you something?”
“He’s out of a job, too, nebach. But I did get an offer through one of Uncle Norman’s business contacts.”
“Uncle Norman?” My father’s eldest brother was a heavy, balding figure known for peddling disastrous investments: a grimy kosher steakhouse that survived two months, a fledgling Laundromat in Queens, a company that sold malfunctioning vacuum cleaners. My father, like most sensible members of his family, made a habit of steering clear of Norman. “You trust anyone associated with Uncle Norman?”
“No Lashon Hara.” He paused. “But, not really, no. Mr. Weintraub, however, is an honorable man. And Mr. Weintraub vouches for this person.”
“Oh,” I said unsurely, glancing at my mother for some explanation of my father’s urgency, “wonderful, then.” My mother, in turn, smiled patiently.
“Nothing major, but a better pay grade, actually. Baruch Hashem.” A pause. “But it’s—well, there’s a catch.”
I raised my brows. “A catch?”
“The job isn’t in Brooklyn.”
“So it’s in New Jersey?”
He shook his head. “South Florida. A city called Zion Hills.”
“Florida?”
“Huge Jewish community. More affordable living, Uncle Norman tells me, plus better real estate. And Imma has already been offered an interview with a local elementary school.”
“At a school that believes in little luxuries like, I don’t know, literacy and staff bathrooms, can you imagine?” My mother made a face of intense satisfaction. “And there’s supposed to be a very elite yeshiva high school there. It seems to have a really excellent reputation.”
I was overcome suddenly by the silence of my house: heavy, toneless. I looked back to my father and then resumed eating. “Okay, then.”
Maybe the way I said this, the fact that this monumental decision failed to elicit emotion, was disconcerting, a red flag that something within me was off. I didn’t watch many movies, being that this was Borough Park, where we were wary of spiritual disease, but I did know that the cinematic version of this scene would have been marked by dramatic angst. Yet I felt nothing of the sort: no sadness, no heartache over life’s sudden changes. Indeed, the thought of being freed from the unremitting monotony of my current existence gave me an exhilarating sense of escape. I was sick of enduring relentless, Chekhovian boredom, sitting alone in libraries, mourning what I’d never know: torturous love, great voyages, nostos. Far away from my present reality, I suspected, unfolded some higher life, one sustained not by mere echoes but by the sound of happiness. Each person, Bacon claimed, worships “idols of the cave,” those peculiar beliefs that constitute our character and, at least in my case, our ruin. My own idols, I know now, are these: a fundamental disdain for the gray on gray, an intolerance for what Freud recognized as life’s ordinary unhappiness.
My parents gave baffled looks. “Okay?”
“It’s okay with me, I mean,” I said.
“Maybe you’d like to mull it over,” my father said.
“The last thing we want, of course, is to uproot you,” my mother said.
“We’d understand,” my father said. “If I needed to, I could find other work just for the year, until you finish school. Things might be tighter, yes, but we believe in hashgochoh protis, don’t we? Hashem has a funny way of making things work out.”
My mother took my hand. “Your entire life is here, we realize.”
I shook my head. “I want to leave.” I looked back at my plate and continued eating. Outside, everything was now white and brilliant with ice.
* * *
I DIDN’T TELL THEM UNTIL June, on our final day of eleventh grade. We were sitting in the jungle gym behind the school. From the swing set, Shimon, Mordechai and Reuven debated the Gemara we were learning: the conditions for violating Shabbat to save a life.
“You can break it to save a one-day-old baby,” Shimon said heatedly. “Rav Shimon ben Gamliel says so.”
“Yeah, ’cause it’s like being a doctor,” Mordechai said. “Cut off the leg to save the body. Break one Shabbat to observe many. It’s pashut. Easy.”
Shimon clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Don’t just steal the Rambam’s words. That’s plaguing.”
“Plagiarizing,” Mordechai corrected.
“Whatever. Shtus.”
“Nu.” Reuven rocked higher into the air, the chains suspending him above us groaning. “Here’s another one.” He was tall, lanky and had horrible teeth. He claimed his parents objected to braces on religious grounds. (“Do not alter thy body,” he’d repeat pedantically. “It’s right there in Vayikra!”)
Shimon coughed, wiped his hands on his shirt. “Ye
s?”
“What if there’s doubt?” These questions often lent Reuven a gelid look in his eyes.
“Doubt?” Mordechai asked. “What’s a case of doubt?”
“Like, you can’t be sure someone will actually die.”
“No one here remembers Gemara Yoma?” Shimon stroked his right payot for comfort, as if to calm himself. “If there’s even a question of emergency, of pikuach nefesh, but you still have to ask a rabbi? The Gemara says you’re like a murderer.”
Mordechai nodded along. “Too much piety can cost a life.”
“So you’re calling me a murderer?” Reuven was now only half-smiling.
“Not only that,” Shimon said, “but if I was your rabbi then I’d be a disgrace, too, rules the Gemara.”
Reuven picked at his front incisors, tracing the staggering distance between them. “Why?”
“For letting you even think there’s a havah minah here,” Shimon said. “For letting you delay saving a life by asking stupid questions.”
“Okay, okay, now I got it,” Reuven announced, snapping his fingers. “What if it’s a goy? Goyim can’t keep Shabbos!”
Mordechai snorted. “So? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“So the initial reasoning is out,” Reuven said. “You’re not saving future mitzvoth.”
“Remember Gemara Sanhedrin?” Mordechai rolled his eyes. “If your neighbor’s drowning, you’re obligated to save him.”
“Yeah, but still,” Reuven said, “does that include a goy? You know, necessarily speaking?”
Mordechai shook his head. “You don’t believe that?”
“Well, no,” Reuven conceded.
Shimon went quiet for a moment. “But for the sake of argument . . .”
“Aryeh,” Mordechai said, his voice rising, “Aryeh, talk sense into them, will you? Someone drowns—Jew, Gentile, animal, anyone, anything—you save them, yeah?”
I’d been swinging in silence, mind adrift, until quite suddenly I realized the news I’d been avoiding since February could, at long last, be avoided no longer. “I’m leaving.”
Shimon gave me a look, annoyed I’d interrupted the counterargument he was preparing. “What?”
