Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  “Go ahead,” she urged, “dip it in some cocktail sauce. You’ll see; it’s delicious.” Her eyes were wide in anticipation, and she leaned in to get a good look at my first bite. The other ladies edged ever so slightly toward me, and there was a dramatic pause in the conversation as they watched for my reaction. I slowly brought the speared shrimp toward my mouth, feeling uneasy as the cold, wet sea-bug loomed before me, and lurched forward for a quick bite, just a small one off the tip. There was a spontaneous cheering and clapping as I chewed slowly, trying to get past the spiny and rubbery texture to some sort of pleasantness underneath. The faces around me were so hopeful that I couldn’t help but smile sheepishly and nod. “It’s good,” I said, but it came out more like a question than a statement. Satisfied, the crowd dispersed. A few attacked the baked brie and strawberries nearby, while others headed for the champagne. It started to feel like a party.

  At some point, when I was drunk enough not to remember people’s names anymore, one of the women came over to me and whispered in my ear. “Darlin’, do you know,” she crooned, “I mean, do you know, that Jesus has opened a door for you? Isn’t it amazing that a young woman like you, coming from where you’re from, ends up all the way over here? Honey, all you have to do is walk on through. You just walk on through that door to Jesus.”

  All I could see were her enormous fake eyelashes, caked with mascara. Her face was very close to mine, and I felt at a loss for words, so I did my usual routine of smile and nod.

  Heather drove us home in her father’s pickup truck, and I passed out happily in a king-sized bed. I didn’t dream, and this seemed the most striking thing about being away from home for the first time. It was as if the massive canvas of the desert had wiped my subconscious into a blank slate.

  Before leaving for the airport, we went to visit Leann’s friend Patsy, who distributed a line of women’s clothing from her home. Heather needed a spring wardrobe to take back with her to New York.

  Patsy’s husband, Mark, was a lawyer working in tandem with several thriving local industries and clearly supported his family quite comfortably, but there was a marked difference in the couple’s lifestyle compared with that of Heather’s family. Their house was much smaller and less ornate, with cheaper terra-cotta floors and tacky Southwestern decor. Heather’s mother had decorated their large and opulent house with the best of designer furnishings and fabrics, and I guess I had expected similar decor to be the standard for the rest of the local homes. But Patsy’s lawn was dry and had brown patches on it, and the trees sagged tragically, seeming near death. It must take a lot of water to keep a garden healthy in this dry, scalding region, and I assumed most people couldn’t afford the extra expense.

  Still, Patsy had the manner I was coming to expect from a Southern woman—incredibly bubbly and sociable, with an indefatigably cheerful attitude toward life. She also reminded me of the yenta stereotype; she was curious to the point of being nosy, and her eyes roved shamelessly over your face, as if trying to guess your thoughts. She insisted that I try on clothes even though I said I had no money to spend, and then asked me which was my favorite item.

  “The green shorts?” I said.

  She turned to her computer and typed something quickly. “Done,” she announced. “Green shorts, size six, shipped to Heather’s address in New York. She can give them to you when they arrive.”

  I was at a loss for words. I thanked her shyly and wandered out to explore the house while Heather finished selecting her wardrobe. In the kitchen I met Mark, who had come out of his office in search of a snack. He was a quiet, mellow man, in sharp contrast to his blond, bubble gum–popping wife, and a welcome relief from the constant chattiness I had been overwhelmed by since my arrival. However, like so many of his neighbors, he asked me the now-familiar question: “Have you accepted Jesus into your heart?”

  They don’t prepare you, in politically liberal environments, for the possibility of meeting a devout Christian who’s not ignorant, sexist, racist, and the usual host of other insults I was accustomed to hearing lobbed. They don’t tell you how to make sense of a man with a kind face and an earnest manner who’s clearly concerned for your emotional and spiritual well-being and can’t bear the thought that you could be missing out on the peace he’s feeling, the peace he claims is right in front of you.

  I was learning that Christians who smell a potential inductee have a universal method of seduction. They look at you like they’re reading a crystal ball and say, “You’re clearly chosen by God.” Man, you sure are special, they say. Why, it would be the greatest shame ever if someone as special as you had to miss out on salvation.

  I listened patiently to Mark, until he started to sound eerily similar to the people I had heard preaching the prosperity gospel. He believed he was taken care of financially simply because he believed in Jesus. Look around, he said, this is a wealthy community, and we all believe. Coincidence? he seemed to be asking. I was more than a little horrified. Heather had driven me through the other side of town; poor Hispanic neighborhoods abounded in this region. Did Mark mean to say that they just didn’t believe in Jesus as heartily as those who lived in rich white neighborhoods?

  I didn’t vocalize my thoughts, but I was disturbed. Just then, Heather came out of the other room with a satisfied smile on her face.

  “Found everything you needed?” I asked.

  She nodded happily.

  As we prepared to leave, Patsy pulled me aside with an urgent whisper. “Listen,” she said, “I hate to bother you, but—well, you’re from New York City, and you’re Jewish, so I just figured—I need you to find someone for me.”

  I was incredulous.

  “My best friend’s son gone and done converted to Judaism—and she being the pastor of their church and everything. He hasn’t spoken to his family since, and they’re so worried.”

  “Patsy, New York is a really big place. And Jews don’t all know each other!”

  “Would you just try? Please?”

  “Sure,” I heard myself say, without confidence.

  It would have been very funny except that I did find him, easily. He had picked one of the most generic Jewish names in the book: Jacob Weissman. Of all the Jacob Weissmans I found on Facebook, this Jacob Weissman’s profile picture was a dead giveaway—none of the others had the homebred good looks of a small-town superstar. It may be possible to erase a name like Colt Cayson, but it’s more difficult to blot out the linebacker shoulders that come with it, the Gallic cheekbones and strong jaw. For an instant, looking at his picture, I felt sorry for him. That would never be a Jewish nose, I thought. Then I clicked the blue button and requested his friendship.

  My message was innocent. We had a mutual acquaintance. I was fascinated by his story, and as I was newly transformed myself, I thought our paths should intersect. He wrote back immediately, eagerly, and we arranged to meet.

  Colt’s parents are prominent clergy members in the Baptist community. They live in the deepest part of the Deep South, and they have never been to New York City. I think this is why I wanted to meet Colt, because he had lived a life that I had once romanticized as exotic and foreign. But somewhere along the way, he had broken from his life, as painfully and completely as I had mine, and chosen the world I came from instead. Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect.

  Any preconceptions I might have had, however, disappeared the moment I looked up from my perch on a stoop in front of a vegetarian café in East Harlem, feeling a shadow loom over me. Jacob was so tall and broad that he literally blocked out the sun. He had a deep, crooked dimple in his left cheek, but otherwise I had never seen so many square angles in one person. It was like you could fold him in half and everything would line up perfectly.

  I was twenty-three years old, but in many ways still thirteen. I saw a Prince Charming with an inconvenient yarmulke. A knight in Jewish, if not shining, armor.

  So nat
urally I craved the old Colt, the man I would have gotten to meet had I been around five years earlier. While Jacob offered me a brief biography, he was more excited to talk about who he was now. He was clearly exhilarated by his own Jewishness and even more excited about my own, because my Jewishness felt more real to him than his. There was nothing more real than the Satmar brand of Judaism, he thought, because they were the most intense version of Jewishness around in the present-day era.

  “That’s not true! The Satmars are a fundamentalist group that broke off from the rest of the Jewish world, isolating themselves,” I argued. “In the process, they became extremist, and their original views were distorted. Yet people still continue to romanticize the Hasidic community as a nostalgic preservation of times long gone! In some ways, I think the Satmars encourage this. It certainly portrays them sympathetically.”

  If Jacob had had the option, he might have become a Satmar, he speculated. I realized that I often made my own mistaken assumptions about different brands of Christianity, so I tried to be understanding, but we both knew that the Satmars did not accept converts. They didn’t even accept repentant Jews. So in a way, Jacob had only settled for ultra-Orthodoxy, because it was the highest of echelons in which he could earn acceptance. I tried to warn him that even there he might never be considered one of the gang, but his eyes were still starry and he waved off my concerns. He believed he was a full part of the community.

  When I was growing up, I often heard people talk about converts in disparaging ways. Converts were considered dangerous, because although they may have been pious at the time, their past still tethered them to the world outside, one they might still be able to join. Those born inside had no such option, and were thus considered less of a flight risk. In addition, the fervent ardor and enthusiasm of the typical convert was mistrusted. Much like a woman who has an affair with a married man and later distrusts him because he cheated with her, a convert was distrusted by Hasids, who are leery of those who stray from their origins, even if those origins are judged deserving of abandonment.

  “Aren’t you past marriageable age?” I asked Jacob. In the Hasidic community, marriages were arranged at a very young age, and I was confident that the ultra-Orthodox followed the same standard, if a bit more flexibly.

  “I am a little older than would be desirable,” he admitted.

  “But you converted when you were still young, twenty-two right? Couldn’t you have married then?”

  Jacob’s shoulders drooped ever so slightly. “It’s harder, you know, when you’re a convert.”

  I did know. I was only feigning naïveté. I knew Jacob couldn’t ignore the fact that he was being blatantly discriminated against in the world of shidduchim, or arranged marriages. He may have convinced himself that he was being fully accepted as the real deal by his peers, but he couldn’t deny that his status as a convert made him a very unattractive prospect for marriage.

  Ultra-Orthodox Jewish fathers do not want to consign their pure and precious daughters to marriages with converts. People would whisper about the family, wonder what was wrong with the daughter that she had to settle for someone who hadn’t been born or raised Jewish. There was always the danger of the convert changing his mind and dragging his wife with him, or even worse, becoming too extreme and enslaving his wife in an unnecessarily stifling lifestyle.

  “But don’t they set you up with other converts, or maybe ba’al teshuvas?” I asked. A ba’al teshuva, better known as a BT, is someone who was born a nonpracticing Jew but became religious later in life. It’s not as bad as being a convert, certainly, but subject to a similar level of mistrust.

  “They do,” he said. “I’ve dated a lot of them, but . . .” and here he trailed off. Something in his manner told me that he had swallowed the party line and harbored a mistrust of others like him.

  “That’s a form of self-hate,” I cried.

  “It isn’t that,” Jacob insisted. “It’s just that I know my commitment to Judaism is rock solid, whereas other converts and BTs just don’t give me the same impression!”

  So Jacob yearned for his own pure Jewish princess much in the same way that I yearned for the WASP knight played by Robert Redford in The Way We Were (obviously, I am so Barbra Streisand in that movie). Cultural differences may or may not prevent me from shacking up with a Hubble, but Jacob’s dreams were even more impractical. I couldn’t see how he could ever land the girl of his desires. The circumstances would have to be extraordinary.

  “Are you dating anyone right now?” I asked.

  “Yes, actually. She’s a BT from Los Angeles.”

  “What’s she like?”

  His description made her sound like every blond California girl I’ve ever met. Tan, tall, athletic—and Jewish. He didn’t sound especially inspired by her, but not bored either.

  We spent the evening walking around the Upper East Side. The more he discussed his Judaism, the more I felt the niggling sense of loss that I had not been able to meet him in his former incarnation, and was instead stuck with his overzealous new character who disdained all the things I had recently discovered I loved.

  He called the next day to invite me to his friend’s birthday, which was being held at a bar in the Lower East Side that boasted a mechanical bull. These were his non-Jewish friends, and I suppose that was why he felt comfortable bringing me. At the party, he drank some Maker’s Mark and got on the bull. I watched him handle it deftly, and it occurred to me that he really was made for that life, riding bulls and taming wild things, and that maybe the wild thing in this case was himself, and he thought he needed taming.

  I was there with him because I still had faith in the person he had once been, and apparently he felt the same. “I came into your life so that you could come back to your Jewish roots,” he assured me as we walked to the subway. He wanted me to be the Hasidic woman of his fantasies, not the stubborn and independent person I was now. Our desires to be with each other’s ghost selves lined up perfectly and miserably.

  On our next outing, we went to Brother Jimmy’s BBQ on Third Avenue. I invited Heather, thinking her Southern roots would help Colt/Jacob feel more at home, maybe bring out the Southern boy in him. Indeed, as Heather’s drawl came out, so did Jacob’s, longer and thicker and much more redneck. I was entranced all over again, just listening to him.

  Heather had always been a bit of a Jewish fetishist, one of those people who hail from the land of Christian conformity to whom Jews are mysterious and mythical creatures. She found Jacob’s new self charming, but she thought he had taken her own natural curiosity too far by converting, and alienating his family in the process.

  When she went home, I was left with the task of seeing a drunken Jacob safely back to his apartment near Yeshiva University in Washington Heights. I had to steer him three blocks to where my car was parked, surprised at my own capability in handling a man easily three times my size.

  During the ride uptown, I tried to engage him in a seemingly innocuous conversation. Having never been as drunk as he was, I didn’t quite understand what it was like to answer questions without being aware of doing so, but my gut told me that if ever I wanted to extract a truthful response from Jacob, now would be the time.

  “So, when was the last time you had sex?” I asked. I expected an impressive answer, an amount of time as long as the years he had spent as an official Jew. The ultra-Orthodox are firmly against all premarital touching, and he had already told me that he was fully committed to that way of life, despite the seemingly impossible restrictions (such as no masturbating). I had started to feel a little awe at his commitment at that point, and a willingness to respect him and his choices as a result of that integrity. I was going to forget about the old Colt and embrace the new Jacob, for the sake of our friendship, which was certainly eccentric and therefore worth preserving.

  And then Jacob answered my question, and it all went to hell. “I had se
x on Saturday with that BT girl I’m dating. She asked me to come over, and I couldn’t help myself.”

  The next day he called to apologize for being so drunk. He remembered that much.

  “Do you remember what you said to me?” I asked.

  “No.” A pause. “What?”

  “You told me you had sex on Saturday with your girlfriend.”

  He was shocked. He couldn’t believe he had released that information. There was a long pause, some hemming and hawing, and then a surge of justification and righteousness.

  “You don’t understand,” he finally said haughtily. “The point is, I try. And I’ll keep trying. No, I’m not perfect. But I know it’s the right way to live and I’m going to work on myself.” He was rightly angry at me for tricking him into his admission of guilt.

  I tried to understand how it could still be okay, but I was struck by the futility of adopting a set of rules for oneself that were impossible to live by. It seemed self-punishing, self-defeating. Could that experience in itself make him feel good?

  I met Jacob one more time after that. It was a Friday in July, and the summer heat had settled into a low, oppressive haze of malignant odors and breezes. We were standing at the intersection of two streets in Washington Heights, and it was a Friday, so young Jewish men were rushing by us on their way to preparations for the Sabbath.

  Jacob, who somewhere along the way had managed to attain an excellent education and was still, underneath his beautiful form and passionate religious ideas, one of those very smart, learned men I had come to admire and curate in college, was going to lend me a book by the philosopher Peter van Inwagen. We had tacitly agreed to stop talking about religion and focus on the shared intellectual ground between us. He had always wanted to be a great American novelist, and he admired my success and my ambitions as a writer. And of course he wanted to send me this novel he had written about racism in the Deep South.