by Leah Lax
Out in the summer sun, marching past a line of silent homes with curtained windows a row of closed eyes, I felt beads of sweat already lining my upper lip. I had bread, and the scholarship, but still I thought of myself as Abraham. God told Abraham to leave his birthplace and then didn’t tell him where to go and didn’t give him provisions for the way. Abraham set out aimless and unsure. But God did that to him for a good reason, so that every step Abraham took would be an act of faith. Or was it an act of self-sufficiency?
When Abraham found his new home, when he found the right place, he would know. I took a deep breath. Cello in hand, skirt already damp and clinging to my calves, I stepped high.
Eight
I walked across the Denton campus that late August day among happy, free, jean-clad kids carrying school-books and transistor radios, some of them in a marijuana haze, as disconnected from my new society as if I was in a moving glass box. Guys and girls in groups prodded and embraced one another, playful and casual and alive. Others zinged past on bicycles. There were two kissing on a bench outside Marquis Hall. In the student union, I put down the cello and suitcase, studied a corkboard covered with hand-written notes, and then plucked an index card, on it Roommate, near campus in a hasty penciled scrawl. I mentally counted up my meager financial aid.
It was a new apartment complex a grateful two blocks from campus: fresh paint, green shag carpeting, a strip of a kitchen off the den. I could get through the week on Campbell’s soup and canned tuna, five for a dollar. “I’ll take it,” I told my new roommate, Helen.
Helen had a brash manner, a West Texas accent—low-flat tone and whistling s’s—and green eyes. My room was furnished with her old bedroom furniture, early-American, driven up there in a U-Haul by her dad. The first night, the place filled with her friends. I was introduced and noted Stevo lounging on the sofa in sweatpants, his pelvis thrust forward, arm over the back of the sofa, a beer in his hand. Late at night after they left, Helen came in to chatter about them. “Did you see Stevo?” she said. “The way he sits?” Her green eyes danced. She moved her cupped hand in the air as if over the lump in his pants.
I ENROLLED IN EIGHTEEN hours of classes that semester and filled days and nights with lists, classes, study, always keeping Rivka’s pocket prayer book wrapped in gold cloth in my purse at my side. Sometimes I thought back to high school, friends, skipping school in gangs, parties, slow-dancing with some prop of a boy to Chicago, Three Dog Night, Joplin’s wail, our heads back, crooning along and laughing. One day, about a week into the semester, I shot shy smiles at the girl across from me in English class and tried to engage her in conversation before class. She was coolly polite, and I turned away, deflated, then caught her curious stare sliding over my uncool skirt and stockings, long sleeves in Texas heat, modest high neckline, and panty hose. In that moment, cut off from everyone I used to know, I doubted everything. In that moment, there was no way Noah took animals into an ark, no way Moses lifted a staff to split a sea on audible orders from some Hebrew-speaking God. I shifted in my seat, looked down. I felt stuck.
At home midday, I tried to study, but my mind jumped from one thing to another. I took a break and a shower and afterward stood for long, agonized minutes in front of the steamed shower, examining my naked body. My breasts were full and high, tight skin healthy and lean. What is missing? Something I couldn’t identify. What is wrong? I felt ineligible for love. Then I dressed and left for Life Drawing class, where I spent hours staring at the nude model, gently tracing her curves in delicate Conté line on smooth silk of paper.
In honors seminars, we read Descartes, Buber, Kafka, Hesse, then Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and I was astounded at the pull and beauty, the varieties and depth. Here’s where I could put my energy, my young lonely passion. In science, because so many had come to Denton for the celebrated music department, we studied the physics of trumpets. Then we went to see the world’s second Moog synthesizer, on campus, made by Robert Moog himself for his friend Merrill Ellis, director of the school’s new electronic-music division. The seminal device filled a room, tall bank of knobs and pulleys and screens. Dr. Ellis’s eyes were as lit as the machine as he pointed and explained, then turned it on and filled the room with new sound.
At night, I tossed in bed, haunted that I wasn’t really part of either university society or Hasidic society. There is no home for me. Not really. I dreamed of fiery angels outside of Eden turning back and forth, guarding the entry to paradise but never themselves allowed to enter.
One day in November, I simply stepped up to a vending machine in the English building, pulled out coins from my purse and dropped them into the slot, then waited until first a decidedly non-kosher Snickers bar and then a pack of Marlboros dropped into the bin. I rolled my sleeves up to an immodest length above my elbows, opened two then three buttons from the top of my blouse, then slipped into a bathroom and pulled off the hated stockings. But the skirt remained.
That night, I skipped prayers. Instead, I took a long walk in the night air, blowing smoke at the moon. I skipped prayers again the next morning, and many mornings after. I kept a spare candy bar and pack of cigarettes in my purse next to Rivka’s prayer book. Religious doubts boiled and churned in me.
After class one cloudy December day near the end of the first semester, I stepped out of one of the drawing studios in the art building and saw her. She stood at a distance, slim, stylish, poised. Her pressed collar was turned up to frame the curved line of her perfect jaw, black curls setting off red lipstick and smooth crimson slacks like a rose on velvet. She was holding a portfolio, standing with another woman, chatting with her. “Mom?” I called out. Then I was tripping and bumping and racing utterly graceless around students, rushing to her, surprised at the enormous relief of seeing her, this terrible unearned nostalgia, as if the sight of her had ever meant love, this teasing sense of home almost, finally, in reach. And yet, there was anger in my voice when I said, “What are you doing here?”
“Lisa!” she said.
I knew that false delight, that empty boast when she wanted to impress someone. She glanced sideways at the woman, then turned to me with brows raised above those heavy-lidded almond eyes that I’d gauged so carefully through childhood. In her days in bed watching television, her eyes had been flat and shallow, a place I couldn’t enter, but they always came alive anywhere there was art. Then my mother’s gaze slid from my head to my toes like the girl in my English class, and I thought, She’s ashamed of me. Recent churning doubts, fears, and old yearning for her all welled up in a crushing wave. “What am I doing here?” she said. She sounded annoyed, as if stating the obvious to someone who was slow. She gave a little grimace. “I’m taking a painting class!”
“I called,” I said. “I tried to call.”
“You did?” she said.
Yes. Every week. Sometimes every day. “I know we’re just an hour away, but I don’t have a car. Do you … do you want my telephone number? The semester’s almost over….”
“I know,” she said.
“You’ve been coming here every week since the beginning of the semester?”
“Of course,” she said, again annoyed.
“Did you look for me?”
But she was taking the manila pad from my hand. “Is that your sketchbook?” she said. She tilted it to share with her friend. I thought, As if it’s hers, and suddenly I was the tagalong kid following her to painting classes she taught, waiting like one of her students for her approval. She flipped over to an unfinished sketch of a pile of dolls. My instructor had walked in that day with a garbage bag full of them, dumped the dolls on a bench, and left. In the drawing, little bodies hung limp, buried in the pile, so enmeshed it was nearly impossible to discern their forms, to know any one of them separate from the others. Or for any one of them to know herself. Lumpy stuffed bodies half buried, empty plastic heads, overwhelmed, caught in a web and unable to extract themselves. All were cold to the touch, no warmth. Yellow and orange yarn hair.
Stitched implacable faces. Black button eyes.
“Oh my,” her friend said.
“She’s quite talented,” my mother said.
“Mom, I have an idea!” I said. I still had enough kosher bread at home for two sandwiches, after a long bus ride into Dallas to the kosher bakery, and a whole tomato in the refrigerator. “You could come see my apartment. We can have lunch.”
She shut the pad.
Look at me. Hold me.
“We’re going to be late for that critique,” she said to her friend, and then I was standing as the two walked off. Her figure receded, across an open space beneath skylights and down a dimmer hall. There was the shape of her back with the large square portfolio and the rhythm of her walk. The crimson slacks. Her silhouette. The clang of a heavy studio door.
Don’t. Cry.
“I’M HOME!” I CALLED OUT, LAUGHING, as I stepped into the Rakovsky house on the next Friday afternoon, just before finals, to find myself instantly wrapped in the smells of baking chicken and warm cake, clang of a pot, family bustle of Sabbath preparations. Seema appeared with a dish towel in her hand, headscarf pulled low on her forehead, her floral housedress limp from kitchen steam. “Gut Shabbos!” she said with a big smile and tired eyes, and I threw my arms around her. “Thanks for inviting me,” I said.
“You could come every week,” she said.
“I’d like that!”
But someone else was also there, at the kitchenette, an old Hasidic man with an old-world look, his beard white, soft, and long, in a long black coat, even though it was not yet Sabbath, and worn black shoes. “Zie iz an eigener,” Seema told him, nodding at me, a Yiddish phrase I now understood: She’s an insider. One of us. Then Seema laughed. Seema laughed, and I blushed at my recent hypocrisy. I was in stockings for the first time in weeks, sleeves rolled back down to proper length, buttons on my blouse closed back up.
“Shalom aleichem,” the man said. He had an authentic Russian Yiddish accent, unlike Seema’s English-inflected Yiddish with its rounded r’s. Hello and welcome.
AFTER THE MEN LEFT for the maariv service at the synagogue was women’s time, after dark on Friday night. Scrubbed and dressed for the Sabbath, we females gathered in the living room, I sat with Seema, her daughters Luba and Rina, and little Shimmy, who was still too small to go to the synagogue at night with the men. Shimmy climbed onto the sofa, put his head on his mother’s lap, his feet on mine, and grew sleepy as we spoke in murmurs. Nearby, the girls whispered Sabbath prayers. One lamp had been left on for the Sabbath, corners in shadow, the area in a pooled, quiet glow. Soon we would have to rise and prepare for the men’s return. When a man comes home from the synagogue on the Sabbath to find the table set and laden with gleaming dishes of Sabbath food, angels bless the household that it may ever be so.
“Tell me about that man,” I said. “The visitor.” Shimmy was asleep. Rina got up and came over, picked him up with a motherly whisper in his ear and a grunt as she lifted him to her slight frame. She was fourteen. She lowered his head onto her shoulder, took his shoes from me, and walked slowly up the stairs. Then Seema told me the man was a hero of the Lubavitch movement. His name was Avram Ayor, and he was in Dallas on a stopover on a trip to see his son in California. The rebbes had a secret network of Hasidim in Soviet Russia. They ran underground yeshivas and transported ritual mezuzahs, Torahs, matzohs, for Jewish spiritual survival, although the Soviet punishment for such things was severe. Old Avram Ayor had helped to establish the network back during Stalin’s time and after. Most of his colleagues had been caught and died in prison camps in Siberia, but he had escaped. “He’s a real hero for God,” Seema said.
I imagined myself as one of those young men sneaking through the dangerous religion-hating Soviet Union to clandestine yeshivas in basements and abandoned buildings, always poor and hungry, ever alert for evil authorities, feeling noble and driven by the Cause. How small my current discomfort with the Law was in light of that, how pathetic my recent rebellions. I thought, I can’t even sacrifice candy bars.
The next morning, I found the old man standing at the window. Apparently, Rabbi Rakovsky and the boys had gone to the synagogue. As Seema went upstairs with a heavy tread, Avram Ayor took out a worn talit shawl from a velvet bag and shook it open. I sat down nearby, took up a book, and pretended to read.
Avram Ayor closed his eyes and draped the wide woolen cloth with its two black stripes over his head and shoulders. The shawl fell front and back so low that the corner fringes brushed the floor. Then he sat down beneath the photo of the Rebbe and pulled the cloth forward over his head until his eyes shone deep in a tunnel and his face receded in time. He picked up the prayer book and held it but chanted from memory, gazing away at some distant point. His Yiddish-inflected chant was steady, easy, foreign, but it was clear he understood and took in every word. There was no mindless rush through meaningless syllables, no proud empty performance. Instead, he glanced at times into the worn prayer book in his hands, then stopped for long minutes of quiet thought. When he began again, his voice was low and deep and calm, like a bow pulled steady across the lowest cello string. He swayed slightly as he sang, a turned page, quiet breath, a low minor phrase, and again the undercurrent of chant.
From behind my book, that ribbon of sound that was his voice, alternating with deep quiet, seeped into me. His praying was calm, personal. I was in awe at the depth of his peace. Watching him quieted the clamor in me. It muted old self-doubt and new religious doubt. I thought, This is real prayer.
I thought, My mother’s father was Russian, as were my father’s parents with their old Jewish ways. Maybe I am an eigener, an insider. Maybe I do belong. Avram put a hand over his eyes for the shema prayer. He knows who he is.
Then I was back in Temple EmanuEl, waiting outside Rabbi Goldenberg’s office as an old, white-bearded man in black garb treaded across my line of sight. I had been utterly embarrassed that day confronting what my family had spent two generations trying to distance themselves from. I had turned away. But maybe Avram Ayor was that man.
Near the close of the Sabbath, I asked Rabbi Rakovsky to speak to Avram Ayor in Yiddish for me. I told the rabbi about the sighting, about who I thought Avram Ayor might be.
“Impossible,” Rabbi Rakovsky said. “A Hasid wouldn’t walk into such a place.” A Reform temple, an ostensibly Jewish place that defies God’s Law.
“But I think … Please ask,” I said. I waited outside the wall of Yiddish until Avram Ayor protruded his lower lip in a thoughtful way and nodded as if admitting something. “S’iz emes,” he said. It’s true. He had gone to the temple and met with the rabbi there. He said that he made a point to walk into only the administrative wing. He said, Appearances aren’t important when it is necessary to help someone.
He had bent a rule to do a kindness. He went there to help someone. There is a difference between bending and breaking a rule. “Tell him,” I said, “please tell him the shock that seeing him gave me at the time.”
I didn’t even hint at how seeing him had made me feel inescapably different and ashamed. But I felt myself an impostor hiding this. “I had never seen a Hasid before,” I said. “I couldn’t breathe.”
The old man answered me directly this time, even though he knew I couldn’t understand, bushy white eyebrows, lines around deep-set eyes. “He said,” Rabbi Rakovsky translated, “that when a Jew sees Truth, it wakes up the soul.”
To me, Avram Ayor’s face in that moment was one of deep sincerity and old wisdom, a gift of light. I glowed with new resolve, new faith.
BACK IN DENTON, I was dumping clothes from the weekend into a laundry basket when Helen came in. “We had a party Saturday night and I kinda let a couple use your bed,” she said. She pointed to a stain in the middle of the sheet, picked up the rumpled top sheet, and smelled it. Wrinkled her nose and grinned.
“Ick,” I said. “I’m not gonna …”
“You might want to change those sheets,” she said, and laughed.
>
SPRING. I had been away from my family seven months. My one contact with the world was the campus newspaper, the North Texas Daily, screaming headlines in kelly green, that I grabbed each day from stacks left out for students in various buildings. Student protests, Vietnam grinding on, Nixon’s now-hated face, brewing radicalism. In February, the nineteen-year-old daughter of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst was abducted by some fringe group fighting for a new world order that called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The country was riveted. Over the next weeks, Patty Hearst’s name was often on the front page. But she only really captured my imagination two months later, after her father gave up on negotiating with her captors and their impossible demands, when she announced to the world that she had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, become one of them, and taken a new name: Tania.
How strange, I thought. Tanya was the name of the founding book of Lubavitch Hasidic thought, the heart of it all. But her parents abandoned her. She has a new life. No wonder she changed her name. Two weeks later, Hearst was photographed holding an M1 carbine in camo fatigues, in a Hibernia Bank lobby during a bank heist, and it hit the front page of every newspaper in this shocked country. She stood with feet apart, shoulders back, at ease with her weapon. She was lean, defiant. She had a purpose. Transformed.
IN PLACE OF SNICKERS and cigarettes in my purse, I now carried pamphlets with titles like “On the Teachings of Hassidus” that I often pulled out to study. I worked hard to change myself into what the teachings said I should be. Turn the mind aside from all but the right thoughts and feelings. Squelch impulse and physical attraction. Forget my family. Forget irreligious and non-Jewish friends.
The ancients were evil, illiterate idolaters. Their error: they turned the infinity of the cosmos, the divine feminine, and the life force in nature all into separate gods, when our single, masculine, personal God embodies them all. The Lord is One. Our Father our king! Find Him in His Written Word.
