by Leah Lax
Still, I think I must have something wrong with me to be grieving that. But I was a child once. He was my father once.
In the end, I find the mourning ritual, the visitors’ concerned nods, casseroles, and fruit baskets, exhausting. In the end, I want to tell them how their scripted comfort feels staged and empty. I want to thank them and send them firmly away.
A WEEKDAY AT THE DAILY mincha and maariv prayers in the synagogue during the hour straddling nightfall. Men arrive, in work uniforms, or business suits, ties just now loosened. In this high-ceilinged solemn space, the talk is in low tones peppered with low laughs, a few handshakes, but the daily prayer is just another business duty before they go home to wives and children. After a minute or two of standing around until the quorum is met, one of the men shrugs and steps briskly up to lead the service. He wraps a black sash gartel around his waist, dividing head and heart from the unholy lower half, and ties the long sash in loose black knots at his hips. Then he begins a nimble monotone through pages of Hebrew. The words have no spaces between them, no breath. Happy are they who dwell in Your House. They continue to praise You. Selah.
Levi comes in late, looks rushed, tired, but then his shoulders relax under the steady weight of the standing amidah prayer when the tone turns to whispers. Tension spools out of him. His mouth barely moves as he reads on. The hazan leader repeats the silent prayer aloud, and the group concludes with “We must praise God that our lot is not that of other nations who worship vanity and nothingness.” When they say “vanity and nothingness,” they make a motion as if to spit on the ground, and follow with a bow to our God, the real God. Then a pause for Levi to sing out the kaddish mourner’s prayer that demands we praise God after having faced death. Each recitation elevates the soul of my father still more toward the throne of glory. The others answer “amen” after each section. “Sanctified and glorified is the One Above,” he sings. “God, grant satisfaction, help, comfort, refuge, healing, redemption, forgiveness, atonement, salvation.”
Salvation. From Levi’s view, my face is obscured through the partition screen, as Levi performs the mourner’s task for me, a husband’s duty during his wife’s year of mourning. I mouth the words silently along with him, for my father and for the life that he gave me in spite of himself. But the voice is Levi’s.
DURING MY YEAR OF MOURNING, Crown Heights is overtaken with a messianic fever that spreads through the web of Lubavitch Hasidim worldwide. It seems everyone I know is convinced that the Rebbe will soon reveal himself as the true Messiah, now so very imminent. I refuse to get caught up in that reach for blissful oblivion, that burning, infectious fervor, even as hundreds, thousands of my peers do so, intelligent people, people I once admired, educated people. The Messiah is coming! Devotion trumps all.
I DECIDE TO PULL Debbie’s story out of the wire cart and send it to Rosellen Brown, the Famous Author I met at the feminist conference. I thought I could continue just to write and hide what I wrote, but once I met her, well, now I can’t help but think of writing as a conversation, and I don’t want to continue speaking into a vacuum. So I look up her address at the University of Houston. But just before mailing it, I erase my name and leave no return address. I’m afraid if she sees who the manuscript is from and remembers my Hasidic garb, she’ll expect it’s all idealistic preaching and refuse to read. Then I wait, weeks, months. While I wait, I read my first published fiction as an adult, Brown’s Before and After. She seems to have some kind of X-ray vision for characters. I read her short stories, and then her poetry, and fall in love with Cora Fry.
“It’s my policy not to read unidentified work,” Rosellen tells me when, after months of waiting, I finally get the courage to call and manage to reach her.
“Oh,” I say. I let out the breath I’ve been holding all this time.
“But if I’d known it was yours, Leah, I would have read it.”
“I doubt that,” I say.
“No,” she says. “I mean it.”
I HAVE COME TO ROSELLEN’S GARDEN, full of the scent of roses and herbs, and the few miles I traveled to get here may as well be a hundred. The garden seems a shrine to creativity and beauty and the freedom to achieve them, or to try. Across the narrow street from this little home, Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk stands in a reflecting pool in front of the Rothko Chapel. It’s a broken totem, lone and tall and fragile. Nearby is the Menil Collection, full of more searingly honest artistic voices. Our metal seats are warm. A bee moves over one of the red roses in tiny arcs. There’s a slight breeze, a whiff of exhaust in the air.
I sip tea from the nonkosher kitchen and add that to my secrets. I am ill at ease in my Hasidic costume in this free place. It seems everything had to happen first before I could come here—the abortion, the feminist conference, Debbie’s disclosures about Daddy, writing my secret stories and poetry. I dare not change, and yet here I am—a changed person seeking a mentor outside my community.
Rosellen talks on about freeing fiction from the events that may have generated it, about how to convey a sense of reality, about the shape of narrative. She pulls out pages—I sent her over a hundred—and I see she has filled the margins with notes in her steady hand.
“Look at this,” Rosellen says. She points to one of her comments and reads the line. She launches into an explanation of why it doesn’t work and what I need to do.
I defend my story as if it were one of my children. Surely, she just doesn’t understand.
She doesn’t back down.
I swallow and try to listen.
In the end, Rosellen hands me a fiction craft guide. Inside the cover, I find it inscribed in her hand. I grow quiet, finally humbled, and grateful.
“Now tell me,” she says in a reasonable tone, and there’s that open-mouthed, sideways look she has. “You are a thinking person.”
“What are you asking?” I say.
Her gesture takes in my high neckline, long sleeves, the skirt, the wig. “I want to understand,” she says. “How can a thinking person reconcile all of that?”
I don’t answer. I tell myself that I need to think about what to say.
The next day, I write Rosellen the first of many letters. Somehow, if I can convince her that our Hasidic life is meaningful and real, I can convince myself and reconcile the growing rift in me, because she has made me ask myself: How can a thinking person reconcile all of that?
“We train ourselves to a keen awareness of God,” I write. “Our daily task is to find that day’s evidence of God’s goodwill, accept our limitations and God’s upper hand. Life is symbols.”
Life has to be symbols. If daily events aren’t primarily symbols from which we should learn, gifts from God for that purpose, if life is just … life—if I have to look at events and experience square-on and accept the raw, random present as my reality, with no promise of payoff—then I can’t face my life. I need meaning—that is, justification. Without that, my Hasidic life is a sham. I’d have to leave.
“I assert,” I write another day, “that the Jews, vestige of an ancient people, have survived intact because of an unchanging core of teachings, spirituality, morality, and ritual observance that injects those teachings into the most mundane parts of life.” This is the voice of the group. Love the Law. The Law has kept us alive. The Law makes life Godly.
I write another high-minded letter every few days. I don’t actually know that I’m trying to reconcile myself to my own life, just as I don’t recognize yet that the split in me is growing because of contact with Rosellen. I just know that this conversation with her feels like oxygen.
Another few days, and a manila envelope arrives in the mail—the rest of my manuscript. A generous cover letter offers to look at more. Rosellen’s marginal notes are on every page.
I go to the wire cart, swallow, and take out the abortion story. I send the story to Rosellen. Someone is going to know.
NOW, SABBATH QUIET—no electricity, car, phone, or computer. In the afternoon after the troop
s return from the synagogue, after a four-course meal, out-of-tune singing, and Levi’s ponderous lessons, the guests leave and Shalom goes down for his nap. Itzik, Sarah, Avrami, and Mendel spread books and toys through the den and playroom and get busy with their plans. I vaguely supervise from the old orange recliner, tired, leaning back. With the backdrop of bookshelves just behind me, I feel a restless nostalgia for our old texts come over me. It’s been a long time since I read the daily Bible passages with the Rashi commentary. I take a Hebrew and English Bible and turn to Genesis, which I used to teach.
I begin to read, but Rosellen is teaching me to read critically and I discover I can’t simply turn off that critical eye; a scrim of holiness that once softened and justified every biblical message has been pulled away. But the commentaries accumulated over centuries—Rashi, Ramban, Ibn Ezra, and the others—are the voice of the sages. They state our values. They say who we are. Remembered lines from the commentaries surge from the pages.
I page through, alarmed. I pause over the comment that charges Eve with responsibility for the great sin that taints mankind. I turn quickly to where they criticize Sarah for laughing at God’s blessing (but maybe it was joy!), denounce Leah for desiring her husband, blame Dinah for her own rape. I pull the next volume, Exodus, from the shelf, and page over to the place where they insist Miriam was punished with leprosy for speaking her mind. Do not speak overly with women, the sages say. Women are a source of inane prattle. Women steal a man’s time from Torah study. But we look to the rabbis’ image of those women as our role models. What does that do to us?
I sit up and drop the book on my lap. If their image of Sarah and their Leah and even their Dinah are our role models, and they are, if what the rabbis say about our foremothers is fed to us as holy and true, then we women should cover ourselves. That legacy makes us want to hide ourselves, as if, by obeying the rabbis’ injunctions about modesty, by covering up we redeem ourselves from Eve’s sin, Sarah’s laugh, Leah’s desire, Dinah’s beauty, Miriam’s mind.
As if, in a world that holds this book as the story of who we are, womankind needs redemption.
I look down at the long skirt and stockings. Why, we carry shame that isn’t ours. I close the book, shake my head. I can’t do it. I can’t humbly engage in study anymore, no matter how beloved it once was. I can’t go back to where I was.
I launch out of my seat, the kids still playing, head to my bedroom, and return in no time with the first secular book I’ve ever bought as an adult, by Adrienne Rich—a compendium of her writing. I was out shopping across town the other day and ducked into a bookstore, where I found people browsing without reservation, without censors. So I browsed, too, as if such freedom were nothing. Along a short stack featuring new work, I found this now-familiar name. This will be my Sabbath reading.
Itzik climbs into the recliner with me and puts his head in my lap. He was up late at the Sabbath table and still needs his naps. Hoping he’ll doze, I sit very still and stroke his shoulder, until my own eyes grow heavy. Sleepy-eyed, I turn pages, pick out a few lines at a time, scanning new territory without enough focus to delve into the essays. The poetry begins to seep into a half-conscious place like the slow, deep spread of spilled ink.
The rules break like a thermometer,
Quicksilver spills across the charted systems;
Avrami and Sarah haul in wooden blocks from the playroom.
A woman’s voice singing old songs …
plucked and fingered by women outside the law.
Is that what I’m doing? Singing old songs to Rosellen in my letters, even as women outside the Law pull me away from the rules?
The pile of blocks on the floor has grown. Avrami gets up to go get more. I point at the mound, my gaze on him. “You can bring them if you clean them,” I say. Itzik shifts on my lap and sighs. I read.
This is the law of volcanoes,
making them eternally and visibly female.
No height without depth, without a burning core
Something is waking me up, as if I’ve been cold and dead a long time.
Libby comes in the front door with a friend. The two head to her room.
I read on. There is a lot I don’t understand. But, I think, I can take years over this if I want. The book is mine. I turn the page.
your body
will haunt mine—tender, delicate
your lovemaking
I sit up then. Tender, delicate—I think she must be writing to a woman. I decide she’s writing about a woman. In my life, I have never heard anyone speak this picture openly. I grip the page. My face flushes.
Mendel dumps the bucket of Legos out on the carpet. The room is covered with toys, the playroom empty, children at my feet. “Clean up the blocks before you touch those Legos,” I say.
“No, Mommy!” Mendel says. “We’re doing something. We’ll clean up later. Promise!” Avrami and Sarah are nodding. Itzik is asleep in my lap.
Your traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come—
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there—
Levi walks in, his face puffy from his Sabbath nap. He goes into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.
Your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting years for you
in my rose-wet cave—
I slam the book closed. Shut my eyes and take a breath. Let out a breath. Take a breath. Forget to let it out. Sarah glances up, a second’s notice, then away.
Face hot, I stand with the closed book and lift sleeping Itzik, settling his head on my shoulder. I keep my expression impassive as I glide to his room to lower him into his bed. The last words of the poem stay with me as I move down the hall:
whatever happens, this is.
Eighteen
One by one as their eleven children enter adolescence, Rabbi Frumen and his wife have been sending them away to yeshivas, and of course the community is following their lead, at enormous financial strain. To be “exiled to a place of Torah,” goleh lemakom torah, and experience displacement and sacrifice for the sake of Torah knowledge, is important for building Hasidic character. Rabbi Frumen insists he will never make a Hasidic high school in Houston.
Libby has grown up expecting to go away, and now she is fourteen. Several of her best friends have already departed. She is eager to embark on this rite of passage. The yeshiva boarding school for girls will neatly skip her over that questioning, searching, rule-challenging age called adolescence. It will shave away the parts of her that don’t fit its mold, seal her on the proper path. It will keep her away from boys and fill her with Hasidic philosophy, Hebrew, Yiddish, Torah, and prophets. Her secular education will be kept to a censored minimum. The teachers will glorify marriage and childbearing and a covered life, assuring her that by humbly conforming, she will be granting the entire Jewish people a future.
“Let her go,” a Hasidic neighbor tells me, “so that she’ll come back to you.” I imagine today that this advice might apply better to a young adult than to a fourteen-year-old. But I don’t want to confuse my daughter. In the end, I don’t know how to do anything other than what we are supposed to do.
Teaching others to sin is a sin for which one cannot atone. I point the way for my daughter into a woman’s covered silence. I lay out the path of self-sacrifice and endless motherhood and send her on her way. This, then, is who she will be, who she will become. I send her. I do that.
DECEMBER, and I finally dive into Rosellen’s gift—Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, by Janet Burroway. But there is so much I can’t grasp.
“Conflict” seems to be a simple word, but when Burroway says one should write about conflict, she emphasizes unresolved conflict as most true-to-life. My sense of story was formed by Hasidic stories we tell at Sabbath tables and at rites of passage. In those, the hero stands up to forces against God, but in the course of the story, the conflict, inner or outer, i
s always resolved. Also in the texts we study, Truth is a clear, singular ideal that one must work to discover by wading through contradictory notions until each is proven right or wrong. All contradictions and conflicts then evaporate, and that moment of clarification is a revelation. Which means that in the fiction stories from the library that I’m now reading, when I come across Burroway’s type of conflict, I don’t get it. I tend to go back, assuming I must have read something wrong. I don’t understand unresolved conflict on the page. I don’t understand resolutions that aren’t really resolutions.
On Rosellen’s recommendation, I check out a book of stories by Alice Munro, only to find that every time I think I understand a character, he or she does the opposite of what I’ve come to expect. Her characters twist and turn, flip-flop with their feelings, and rarely resolve their conflicts. They just live through them, and, yes, change somehow and move on. And yet the stories captivate me. I think, But the people seem so real.
IT’S 1992, and the Rebbe has had a stroke. All of Lubavitch is shaken. He’s in a hospital in Manhattan with tubes and monitors and the sound of labored breathing. Groups of the faithful cluster on the sidewalk below his window, reciting psalms. I go to Crown Heights to visit Leibl.
The annual Lubavitch HasidicWomen’s Convention is going on. Remembering a similar convention I once attended in Chicago, I make my way over worn red carpeting into the main session in the Oholei Torah ballroom, studded with yellowed chandeliers, to find myself once again in an enormous crowd of bewigged and faithful women. I take my place inconspicuously among them, as one woman after another ascends the podium to exhort and inspire us. And then the keynote: Rabbi Bentzion Teitel. A murmur spreads across the room. Rabbi Teitel is a highly respected figure, a thunderous voice in the movement. As he stands above us, his sweeping gaze seems intent on exposing our every truth, every sin. His monologue gradually rises in pitch, and then suddenly he shouts into the microphone, “Anyone here …,” in a loud, accusing tone. He leaves the phrase hanging.
