Exodus, Revisited
Page 2
Even though in our community we do not interact with gentiles unless there are exceptional circumstances, in which contact is strictly regulated, I know that Bubby had real relationships with non-Jewish people before she joined the Satmar sect. She’s mentioned the neighbors in the small village in which her parents ran a store, how they came to turn their water into seltzer by using the pump in the front yard and brought little gifts in exchange; how they traded eggs and milk and meat for the wares that Bubby’s parents sold. She remembers being sent off to live with her wealthy grandmother in the city when she was too old to sleep in the common bedroom with her ten siblings, and those elegant women with the fancy French hats and fur stoles her grandmother invited over for tea, tortes, and cards. She traveled with her grandmother to spa towns in Europe, where they stayed in resort hotels and socialized with people from all over the continent. But all that was before the war, and marrying my grandfather and joining Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum’s new community with him meant that the only people she was supposed to come into contact with were ones just like us.
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But then I think of how she picked up that cleaning lady a short while ago, as we chanced across that ritual that most housewives in Williamsburg participate in. Every morning, at the corner of Marcy and Division Avenues, the illegal immigrant women from Poland, or sometimes Lithuania, Slovakia, or Ukraine, line up for a black-market job at the place where the street forms a bridge over the expressway. Over the noise of honking horns and tires thumping over shoddy roads, the humiliating negotiations are conducted. A Hasidic housewife approaches, looks each woman over carefully as if to assess their physical condition, and beckons to the one deemed satisfactory with a crooked finger, indicating for her to step forward. An offer is made, usually low: five dollars an hour. If the woman is feeling bold that day, if the group waiting is small and it is still early and she thinks her chances are good, she will counter with eight, but probably concede at six. Then off they go, the two of them, the cleaning lady walking behind the housewife in a show of subservience, following her to the home where she will perform the lowliest of chores so the lady of the house will be spared such indignities.
It does not escape me even now that this theater of selection is a bizarre mirror of a collective memory. I see it as an unconsciously inherited vendetta playing itself out in miniature against the backdrop of a wire highway fence. The story of our community founders, of survivors who had once been “selected” by the gentiles for a future among the living, is perversely inverted each time a gentile cleaning woman is beckoned forward. A small satisfaction, but a palpable one nonetheless. And yet, my grandmother had never taken part in the performance until that day.
We had been accidentally walking by that street corner on the way home, carrying the bags of groceries my grandmother had acquired, and suddenly my grandmother stopped in her tracks, staring fixedly at a woman behind the group of others pushing forward and clamoring at the housewives, a woman with dull brown hair streaked with gray who was leaning back against the fence with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes looking down at the floor, waiting to be selected but perhaps too proud to ask for it. My grandmother seemed frozen as if in some reverie. I set my bags down on the ground, regarding the scene with curiosity. Bubby pointed her finger at the woman.
You, she said. The woman looked up.
Magyar vagy, Bubby said, in a way that sounded like a statement rather than a question.
The woman looked surprised; she nodded and stepped forward. She issued a gushing stream of Hungarian words, as if she had been holding them back for hours and now someone had given her permission to finally let them all out. She grasped Bubby’s sleeve, her body arched away from the group of others standing there; she bowed before my grandmother as if performing an obsequious curtsy, as if she was begging us to free her from the dread of waiting, the shame of being the last one standing there, the fear of having to go back home with no prospect of earnings for the day.
I don’t know how my grandmother knew that the woman was Hungarian. There were very seldom any Hungarian women on that street corner, which my grandmother cited as the reason she refused to hire a cleaning lady. She didn’t like the fact that she couldn’t communicate with the Polish women; she didn’t trust them in her home. Instead she did the grunt work herself, bent on her knees with a rag, a brush, and a wash bucket. But now there was a Hungarian, and indeed, someone from her very own region, not too much younger than herself. Did she recognize this person from her past? Or perhaps this woman was simply a representation to my grandmother of all those neighbors from her childhood, the ones who had counted as friends before the political temperature changed and they gleefully assumed the homes and lives wrested from others, all loyalties forgotten. Goyim were all like that, she had said. Waiting to benefit from your destruction. That’s how God made them. They are helpless to go against their inborn natures.
But still I could not decide if it was pity or the personal desire for vindication that drove Bubby to take that cleaning lady home with us. There seemed to be some kind of human connection between her and that woman, who walked at Bubby’s side and babbled in that secret language that I had only ever heard my grandparents speak, vibrating with joy at being chosen by someone who could understand her. Did Bubby actually feel loyal to someone who shared her origins, even though that person wasn’t Jewish? Or rather, did she feel a need to prove to her how the circumstances of the past had been upended, to show that woman everything she had achieved for herself here in America, with her four-story brownstone house, her chandeliers and carpets and floor-length lace curtains? To show her on which side of history the real triumph lay?
I watched as she brought the woman into the kitchen, gave her various cleaning tools, and set her up with the tasks she normally did herself or handed off to me, the daily routine of ironing, dusting, and polishing. I was perturbed by the fact that she did not ask the woman to wash the floor. That would have been obvious, I surmised: my grandmother watching as a gentile woman from her home region got down on her knees in this large and comfortable home that she now owned. I didn’t necessarily want to see this random woman degraded, but I did think that the experience could give my grandmother a kind of closure. I thought it might temper the bitterness of that old, lingering betrayal that she only ever sparsely referred to in my presence, but which I knew still burned in her deepest store of memories.
After a few hours of moderate to light housework, my grandmother called the woman to the kitchen table for a lunch break. To my surprise she received the woman at her table and sat down across from her like an equal. She even served her on real porcelain plates. I was confused, wondering if this was part of some clever and elaborate scheme or an attestation to the nobility of my grandmother’s character. Bubby had defrosted some stuffed cabbage, a traditional dish back home that had been established as a culinary staple in our community, and I watched the woman sit down eagerly to eat it, chatting excitedly in Hungarian the whole while. I caught bits and pieces; they were talking about variations in recipes, the way her mother had cooked those rolls. She complimented Bubby’s cooking effusively. I sensed she was trying to ingratiate herself; surely there was an incentive to do so, because of course it was the goal of all those cleaning women to get a regular posting, so they would not have to return to that street corner every day in hopes of being selected. A regular position meant security, perhaps even a raise, and referrals to other families if the work was good. Too many weeks spent waiting at the fence were a sure sign you were not a valuable choice; then your hourly wage went lower and lower until no offers came at all. It was the fear of all cleaning women; you could see it in the eyes of some of them in the late morning as you walked past the last stragglers, that panic as time went by and the crowd thinned, and police cars drove ominously past. I was irritated by what I suspected were this woman’s ulterior motives.
My grandmother did not say much as the woman prattled on; her chin rested in her palm, her other hand tracing patterns in the tablecloth. Every so often my grandmother nodded or threw in the equivalent of a “yes” or an “I see” in Hungarian. When the woman was finished eating, Bubby took the plate from her and washed it in the sink. She prepared a coffee and served it in a chipped white mug. Then she put a twenty-dollar bill on the tablecloth.
No more work today, she said firmly. Finished now.
The woman looked crestfallen. She eyed the bill on the table. Three hours of work plus tip.
I come back next week, yes? Her hands trembled around the coffee cup.
My grandmother said nothing; she simply shook her head no. Then, perhaps feeling sorry for her, she said, Don’t feel bad. I never hire anyone to help me. I prefer to do the work myself.
The woman tried to convince my grandmother to change her mind. She offered to get down on her knees and wash the floor right then and there, to prove her usefulness. She grasped my grandmother’s hands and kissed them. Her desperation made her previous effusiveness seem baldly false in comparison, and I sensed that my grandmother was embarrassed for her.
Bubby said she was sorry but she didn’t have any work for her. All her children were grown, she explained. There wasn’t so much left to do. If the woman left her phone number, perhaps she would pass it on to her daughters, see if they were interested. But she couldn’t promise anything.
This gave the cleaning lady something to hold on to. She carefully wrote down her information, using the pencil and paper Bubby gave her. I do very cheap, she assured her. Five dollar.
I closed the door gently behind her as she left, still tripping over her multiple farewells, looking back longingly at the woman who spoke her language, who remembered the same old country, from whom she might have expected solidarity, had it not been for the failure of her parents’ generation to show the same, I thought. For a while after the woman left, Bubby sat at the kitchen table sipping her coffee, a small smile playing at the corner of her mouth. I longed to know what she was thinking, but of course I could not ask.
I wondered then, as I folded dish towels on the counter while Bubby sat in silence on her little stool, who was more vindicated in such a scenario, my grandmother, who was kind to the goyte but deprived her of both the work and the abasement that came with it, or the neighboring women who happily oversaw the scrubbing of toilets and washing of staircases, taking perverse pleasure in the way circumstances had been upended by history. As a child I was convinced it was a question of effectiveness; I assumed my grandmother was meting out her own subtle version of justice.
Now I look back on this story very differently. I recognize in my grandmother the conflict between her yearning for grace and the frightening yet human impulses she struggled to suppress. To peg her actions that day as one or the other, as compassionate or vengeful, would be too simplistic. What was wonderful about Bubby was that she was so complex, so mysterious. All these forces were at work in her simultaneously, although some never noticed, because she was good at keeping the surface calm and smooth. But there were quiet dramas I witnessed her take part in as a child. Those annual meetings with Edith, for example, with whom she had survived the brutal war years in slave labor camps but who had chosen a secular life with a non-Jewish husband in Chicago and flew to New York solely for that clandestine encounter, meeting my grandmother in the same hotel lobby with a discretion bordering on espionage. Or her battle to maintain the only garden in Williamsburg by insisting to my grandfather that since it yielded the blooms necessary for the Pentecostal tradition of ornamenting one’s home with abundant flora, the plot of carefully tended land was no distraction from the work of spiritual dedication but rather an act of spiritual service in itself. All her struggles and secrets, they stayed with me like the fairy tales that other children grow up with. They are the stories I play over and over in my adult mind, looking for clues that might reveal the inner workings of this woman upon whom I have unconsciously modeled myself.
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My teachers said that being Jewish was about having within us a zelem Elohim, a particle of God. Yet Bubby insisted it was the presence of the other that confirmed our difference. She made it sound as if we would stop being Jewish as soon as others stopped hating us for it.
It wasn’t just about being Jewish in my community, though, but about what kind of Jew you were. Because there were endless variations; even if you were Ashkenazi, you could still be separated into minute and specific categories, and between each one and the next lay an enormous division. You could be a Galizianer, a Litvak, or a Yekke. And then there were the many Jews outside the Ashkenazi circle, the Sephardim, the Mizrachim, the Bucharians, the Yemenites, the Persians . . . all of them with distinctly more Jewish DNA than any of us possessed, but not to be mixed with nonetheless. We had some refugee families in our community in Williamsburg; they were from places like Kazakhstan, Yemen, Argentina, and Iran. But even the ones whose ancestors had still lived in Europe only two generations ago were not like us, for they had been distanced from tradition for two whole generations. This was a span of time they could never compensate for, because in those two generations the meaning of Jewishness had been redefined. The war had etched our divisions deeper. Now each sect only accepted members of the same pure ancestry, survivors who could trace their lineage back to a specific city or region. This lineage decided where you belonged. You would naturally marry someone from the same stock, so that when you produced children, they had a clearly delineated family tree. These children would keep the shtetl alive in their veins. In this way, cities like Bobov and Vizhnitz and Klausenburg and Sanz and Pupa and Gur still existed, because the descendants of the residents of those cities had not forgotten where they came from. They had re-created their genetic pools in segregated Brooklyn neighborhoods, the barriers of which, while not visibly marked, were nevertheless imprinted upon our collective consciousness, informing our orientation in time and space.
The shtetl we belonged to was Satmar, named for a village not far away from the childhood homes of my grandparents, a group to which they naturally belonged because of this historical proximity. The Satmars were now also fixated on keeping everything in the family. Uncles married nieces; cousins married cousins. Our gene pool went from small to smaller, the circle around us drawn ever tighter. Our neighbors next door, the Halberstams, were the son and daughter of two brothers, and when they had one child after another with cystic fibrosis, seven out of nine in fact, the powers that be seemed to take notice. Something would have to be done.
So they started the testing program, and when I was fifteen, doctors in white lab coats came to my school classroom and unpacked their boxes of equipment onto our shabby desks, while we lined up to fill their tubes with our blood. We took turns rolling up our sleeves, biting down when the needle punctured skin, trying not to show weakness in front of our peers. Next year our families would start marrying us off, but before they could do that, the doctors had to analyze our genetic profile. Dor Yeshorim the program was called: the Righteous Generation. To preserve the tradition of constant intermarriage, of always remaining isolated from the others, we needed to make sure we weren’t also breeding ill health. So before we were matched up to our future spouses, they would compare our genes, make sure we weren’t carriers of the same mutations—that our profiles were similar, but not too similar. We’d never find out, though, whatever it was they had discovered in our blood. It was kept in a bank, fully protected. We just received a number that we could reference against any other number. Then it was a matter of comparison and a simple yes or no.
Two years later I’d call the bank to give them my number and the number of my prospective husband. I’d wait breathlessly for the answer. There was still that old fear in me, that they’d find something there that didn’t belong, something that would explain why I was the way I was.
And that was all that mattered. If they saw something in my blood that didn’t add up, they didn’t breathe a word.
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There is a Yiddish word that I heard all too often during my childhood, a word that filled me with tension: yichus. This was such a loaded word for me, because although yichus was valuable in that it established one’s place in the hierarchy and its accorded status, it was frightening to me because I was reminded whenever I heard the word that I had only the most tenuous grip on any at all and therefore was doomed to a never-ending struggle to avoid sinking to the bottom of my society like sediment.
The word yichus stems from a common and harmless Hebrew term for “relations,” but in Yiddish, it meant something more like “noble lineage,” and it was a word that ascribed value to an individual based on who their ancestors were. In our community, families with yichus occupied enviable positions in society. They were our version of aristocrats. These families treasured their unpolluted genetic line and presented it as evidence to matchmakers that their sons and daughters deserved only those proposals befitting their pedigree. My own connection to whatever ancestry I might have claimed had been rent by the scandalous failed union of my parents and the resulting chaos that had spread over my family like a permanent stain, eating away at our communal fabric, the weave of which depended on unbroken unions and uninterrupted lines.