Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  When I was fourteen and attending the ninth grade in my religious all-girls school, the project of the year was composing and presenting your own family tree. When the announcement was made during the first week of school, it unleashed a wave of raw panic in me. I raced home that day struggling to hold back the tears until I finally arrived in my grandmother’s kitchen. This project spelled out my doom. I knew I was due for yet another humiliation as the girls in my class presented their illustrious, intact, and well-fleshed family trees. I would be forced to put all the brokenness in my family on display.

  Bubby took one look at me and immediately dropped the ball of chopped meat she was shaping into fasirt. She washed her hands clean and pulled out a paper bag from its hiding place on top of a kitchen cabinet. There was a stash of chocolate-covered orange peels inside that she kept for emergencies like this one. Wordlessly, she handed me one to munch on and bit into one herself. I watched her chew thoughtfully, waiting for the solution she was surely concocting.

  “Well, technically everyone has a little bit of yichus,” she said. “If you look hard enough into anyone’s family tree, how can you not stumble upon a small rabbi, a low-level saint? I bet if we search back far enough we can put together enough rabbis to make even Mime-Gitl Rokeach look small in comparison.” She joked to make me feel better. We both knew there was no beating Mime-Gitl, whose popularity should by all laws of logic have suffered for her unusually low hairline but would always represent the prestige that came with her rabbinical “connections.”

  Bubby observed my panic coolly, able to empathize but at the same time not afflicted by the same fear of non-acceptance. She didn’t need acceptance, because her world ended with the walls of our property; as long as she had her kitchen and garden, she didn’t need anything or anyone else. I was out there every day desperate to prove myself worthy; I was still young and naïve enough to think that this would bring me the inner peace I so craved.

  “I’ll write to the uncle who helped arrange your parents’ marriage,” Bubby said, still chewing on a strand of orange peel. “He’ll be able to help you fill out your mother’s side of the tree.”

  I wanted to hug her in that moment, but of course I didn’t dare. I had never hugged her, and I never would. It simply wasn’t done in our world. If I had broken the unwritten rule and put my arms around her, I can only imagine that it would have made her deeply uncomfortable, almost afraid. Outpourings of affection were so dangerous in our world. If you made a point of showing how important someone was to you, didn’t it just make it more likely that the universe would take them from you when it was time for punishment?

  But I loved her very much on that day, and I would always remember it, because she had cared enough to want to help me fill the gaping hole in me that begged for roots, as many of them as possible, so that I could feel them burrowing into the ground and know that even a strong wind couldn’t come and shake me from my perch.

  Months of careful research followed. I took to following my grandfather around with a notebook and pen, asking him questions about a past he had mostly lost, having been too young and naïve to ask the important questions of the right people when they had still been alive. Because when people are alive we take them for granted, I knew. I had learned that lesson vicariously through the losses of that generation, and I was studiously determined not to waste any of the time that I still had with the people who would one day be gone, one day when it would be too late to ask questions. I was impatiently directed to the neglected, yellowing paper archives in my grandfather’s ground-floor office, where entire rooms had been dedicated to the storage of a past that no one had any desire to revisit. I combed through boxes of faded letters and brittle documents with water stains; from these I was able to formulate new questions, based upon which I wrote letters in cramped Yiddish script to newly discovered distant relatives and former neighbors, who all seemed to have put an incredible distance between themselves and everything from back then. As the answers trickled politely and reluctantly back, a tree began to take shape. And Bubby was right: every tree bears a perfect fruit at some point. Seven generations back on the side of my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandfather, I found the lamed-vav’nik.

  This discovery was perhaps the highlight of my research, although other low-level saints popped up as Bubby had promised, such as the Talmudist sage Amram Chasida, the war hero Michoel Ber Weissmandl on my grandfather’s side, and other small-town rabbis who had written brief volumes of liturgical text that could be found only in the libraries of the most avid collectors. Bubby had mentioned to me the possibility of there being a lamed-vav’nik in her family before; stories had been told to her as a child that she had oft repeated to me. But she was never sure if he had really existed, and if he had, whether he was really her ancestor. So I set about reconstructing the forgotten linkages in the chain that connected them.

  A lamed-vav’nik was the greatest discovery I could have possibly made. It was like a joker card; it trounced everything else. The pedigrees of the most esteemed rabbinical families were rendered impotent by the most meager tree if it had at some point produced one of the thirty-six hidden saints in each generation.

  My grandmother had remembered him as Reb Leibele Oshvari, unable to recall a genuine surname because he was five generations removed on her great-grandmother’s side, and because lamed-vav’niks were often remembered in this way after their deaths, having arranged for anonymity prior to the event. He had requested that on his grave it should simply say Leibel from the town of Oshvar. You knew it was his tomb from afar, my grandmother had been told, because they had to put a special fence around it after bad things started happening to people who went too close. You had to be free of sin to touch the grave of a lamed-vav’nik, and since it was rare that anyone could be such a thing, they put a fence up to protect people from the danger of the holy energy that hovered above his burial site. That’s how they knew, she said, that he was a zadik nistar, hidden saint. They found out after he died, when all the widows and orphans he had secretly been supporting suddenly found themselves without recourse, and then it became clear who had been performing all that charity for all those years. Such a development was a classic indicator of lamed-vav’nik presence.

  “There are lamed-vav zadikim nistarim,” my grandfather had often told me: there were thirty-six hidden saints born into every generation. This was a great mystical legend central to Hasidic beliefs. These thirty-six holy men were nicknamed “the pillars of the world” because it was believed that they were especially pure souls on whose merit the world remained standing, in spite of the ravages of sin. So long as they existed, God would keep the world turning no matter how deeply mankind disappointed him. If only one should go missing, the world would immediately come to an end, as the tolerance of God was then expected to reach its threshold.

  Zeidi said the lamed-vav existed to remind God that he was doing something good when he created man. They represented the best that a human being could achieve. They were known for their extreme humility and altruism, performing good deeds all their lives without ever enjoying recognition. They forfeited all the usual comforts of life in order to assist others. No one was too low to be deserving of their benevolence. What distinguished the hidden saints from the regular saints was precisely their self-effacement. Standard Hasidic saints were worshipped like royals, living lifestyles that befitted people with an avid following. But a lamed-vav’nik sought to forgo every benefit of his spiritual superiority; he kept his saintliness a secret and often suffered ridicule and rejection because of a deceptive outer appearance of poverty and ignorance, thereby achieving the highest level of holiness. A public zadik, when confronted with a zadik nistar, had no choice but to bow his head in shame, for the trappings he enjoyed kept him bound to the earthly plane. He could never be as close to God as the hidden saint. However, even the holiest zadik was likely to remain unaware of the presence of a lamed-vav’nik in his mi
dst. The integrity of the system depended on the hidden saint remaining hidden. It was only after their death that their saintliness could be revealed, that their memory could be worshipped. Only then could they benefit their descendants, even such distant and pitiful descendants like myself. After all, wasn’t I the perfect candidate for the lamed-vav’nik’s blessing? When the time came to present my family tree in class, pointing to a lamed-vav’nik buried deep in the roots of my tree would silence any potential critic.

  Whatever else my research might still yield, my problem was essentially solved. Leibel from Oshvar would shine at the very center of my presentation, and every single one of my peers would be compelled into a respectful silence. Perhaps they too would speculate about me, wondering if I had inherited those genetics, and whether my unfortunate circumstances simply served as a clever disguise to keep my saintliness from being discovered.

  With a new sense of calm and confidence, I continued my efforts at filling out the extended branches of my family tree, knowing that the bulk of my task had been spectacularly accomplished. When the last letter arrived from Uncle Menachem, the youngest brother of my mother’s mother, postmarked Bnei Brak, Israel, I did not rip at it with my fingers. Instead I retrieved my grandfather’s silver letter opener and slit the envelope carefully at its side. Inside were carefully labeled photographs and a scrupulously drawn diagram of familial connections, which I regarded with only mild curiosity. Having known nothing about my mother’s ancestry prior to that letter, I was surprised to learn of this new complex network of branches, of limbs that reached back into so many distant corners of Europe. But I was most astonished to learn that the branch that had produced my mother had originated in Germany, a piece of information I could not afford to put on display.

  Of all things my mother could have been, she had to have been a Yekke. That was the disparaging term we used for German Jews, whom we had always perceived as having abandoned their Jewishness and replaced it with an appropriated cultural identity out of shame and self-loathing. Yekkes were known for expressing extreme versions of stereotypical German characteristics, for being more annoyingly on time than the Germans themselves, for being obsessed with precise calculations, with regulation and order. It was said that they lacked heart, that their homes were deficient in the warmth other Ashkenazi Jewish communities were known for. Yekkes spoke Daytshmerish, a dolled-up, uppity dialect of Yiddish that would never sound quite like the Hochdeutsch they tried to imitate. They kept their payos short and tucked them behind their ears, trimmed their beards, wore suits, all to avoid making their Jewishness conspicuous. And yet the term for them came from the German word Jacke, a term the Germans had invented to evoke the long black Jacke the Jews had worn before they secularized and discarded the coat in favor of modern fashion. It was a reminder that their costume was only a disguise, that the Germans would never forget their true origins. Yekkes had tried to fit into a society that in the end would never have them; therefore, to be a Yekke was shameful; it was the mark of the wannabe who had experienced the ultimate rejection. Such was my ancestry. I would have to account for this gross mark on my history. What story could I invent? Better to gloss over it entirely.

  Of course it made sense that my family had sought out a Yekke for my father. They had had to make compromises, so desperate were they to marry him off. My mother was the perfect candidate, poor and from a broken home. Aside from her grandparents and a sprinkling of aunts and uncles, the entire family tree had been erased by the war, and with it the memory of anything that might have been deemed unpleasant. When she crossed the Atlantic Ocean to join my father’s family, her background was forgotten. She simply assumed the familial and communal identities the way one does a loose-fitting dress. There was enough fabric to cover a host of sins.

  I was puzzled by the fact that although Uncle Menachem offered me a host of trivial details about the lives of long-since-passed second cousins, there was surprisingly little information offered about his parents, who had fled Germany in 1939. I had the names of his mother’s parents, and some documents supporting their existence, but about the parents of his father, my great-grandfather, there was next to nothing. The line on his birth certificate where his father’s name should have stood was empty. No matter, I thought. A bureaucratic failure, and perhaps, in the year 1897, a product of the time.

  When I finally presented my project in school months later, I had created a glorious map that at some points went back as far as nine generations, but in the space above my mother’s grandparents there was a conspicuous void. At the time I distracted myself and my audience with all the new information I had gleaned about the illustrious history of the paternal side of my family. I would end up using all the information that I painstakingly gathered and saved as a fourteen-year-old many years later, when I traveled to Europe as an adult in search of a new identity and, in some ways, a new history. It was only when I made the decision to become a citizen of Europe that I reached back toward that void, looking for proof that would help me make my case to a German bureaucracy seemingly intent on shutting me out.

  I will never forget how the blood thrummed through my veins the day I received that phone call from my immigration lawyer. It brought me straight back to my eight-year-old self, who had asked that question of my grandmother for the first time, as if deep down I already knew the discoveries I would make in my future.

  * * *

  • • •

  But I have gotten ahead of myself. Let me tell this story from the very beginning.

  * * *

  —

  After five years in an unhappy arranged marriage, made all the more miserable by a radical set of religious proscriptions that had only been revealed to me during my engagement, I knew I needed to flee the world that had always been a prison of varying sizes for me. I was loath to condemn a child to the same fate. I had begun to formulate a concrete escape plan as soon as my son was born. I gave myself three years, the time I had until he was to be drafted into the religious school system. My plan would entail many practical measures, but the ultimate priority was figuring out a way to belong in an outside world I knew very little about. It is therefore the case that quite a few years went by before I felt compelled to revisit those carefully gathered documents about my ancestry, which I had the good sense to take with me on the day of my departure. I would later discover that therein lay my only remaining hope for the reconstruction of my identity, but in those early days after leaving I dismissed the importance of far-flung familial origins, trying instead to find myself in America, which was then so unfamiliar to me as to be a foreign land.

  I had taken my first step toward “assimilation” by secretly enrolling in Sarah Lawrence College in 2007, at the age of twenty, two years prior to my departure. This was the most crucial phase of my escape plan. Education was the ticket to the American dream of self-reinvention; this much I had learned in my surreptitious glimpses of that society when my world had existed as if in an air bubble, invisible tensions pushing from both without and within to keep those seemingly insubstantial walls intact. The religious school I had attended as a child naturally failed to meet the government standards for accreditation, but despite having no diploma or transcripts to show for myself, I managed to obtain entrance to the prestigious college on the basis of three essays, which I had written in correct and formal English acquired from years of reading the prewar literature stashed under my mattress like contraband. Soon I was pulling over on suburban roads to change into jeans in the back seat of my car and comb out my hair after removing my burdensome wig, before stepping fleetingly into the outside world, all the while trying hard not to give myself away. And yet my wide-eyed gaze must have betrayed me: a classmate handed me a frayed copy of Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers one day, and as I read about the young Jewish woman from an immigrant family who overcame a seemingly endless series of challenges in order to attend college nearly a century ago, I was comforted by
the similarities between us, but also deeply ashamed that these parallels had proved so obvious to my peers.

  I read that book in stolen moments in supermarket or drugstore parking lots, since I was too frightened to bring it home with me, lest its contents reveal my own true motives. At that time I was not yet what one would call a writer. Certainly I had never written anything before, except my childhood diaries, which I had been forced to give up so as not to render myself vulnerable in my efforts to free myself. Writing had become a kind of Achilles’ heel; it had not yet occurred to me that it could also be my salvation.

  My brief and infrequent visits to the campus were all the more enchanting for their transience; I was like a tourist on a new continent, trying to pack as much as I could into each moment of experience. I took note of every casual sentence I heard, every offhand bodily movement I observed. I wanted, primarily, to learn what it would require to blend in.

  The likes of me had never before been admitted to such a school, an old American institution with sloping eaves and undulating lawns, preparing to gently shake coddled children out of the strangely rarefied, encapsulated realities they had always inhabited. College was the place in which Americans were made, I knew, churned out as if from factories with prepackaged beliefs and values, with the language and behavior signature of whichever institution they chose to attend. The experience formed one’s position in society, solidified each individual’s future like so many clay pots in a kiln. Young Americans flocked to university campuses to find themselves, yet I came to find the world. I could not immediately afford the question of a self. I was still in the in-between place, standing at the gateway to something bigger and also more frightening, hesitating before taking my first small step toward the unknown.