While structured learning would often prove to be a mixed blessing, college would provide me with the inestimable privilege of coming into contact with thoughtful and intuitive mentors. As a result, I began to ask myself questions about my identity, about my true self. It began when a much-revered professor of literature called me into her office on a glorious spring day in 2009, when the first pale green leaves were emerging from the branches of the many carefully tended trees on campus, and pulled a book off her shelf, a collection of personal essays edited by Philip Larkin, which she slammed down in front of me, saying: Read this. Then write your own. It was clear that this was no official assignment, that there would be no formal grade, that this woman was not in any way obligated to take the time—or indeed recompensed for it—to offer me this experience, which would turn out to be a life-changing one.
I opened the book under the white-blossomed canopy of a pear tree just outside the building and read the essay entitled “Split at the Root,” by Adrienne Rich, and my subconscious stirred to life; memories rumbled forth from their depths like boulders, and I began to write furiously, as if it were the only thing preventing me from being crushed by their oncoming force.
Once I started writing, it was as if I could not stop. I gave vent to the fury and grief of the preceding years; not in a diary, but in an anonymous blog, which I composed via proxy server in the college library, so as to prevent anyone from tracing those entries back to me. What had started as a single essay, that independent assignment from a shrewd professor, had snowballed into a kind of literary reckoning. For years everyone in my life had held the narrative reins and dictated my own story to me; now I was determined to wrench those reins back and assert my own narrative power, with my own arsenal of words. To my surprise the blog did not just serve as a personal therapeutic process but attracted a large audience, a significant part of which seemed to be composed of people in situations similar to mine. So online I communicated and interacted with other undercover dissidents as a secretly discontented Hasidic housewife, but in my real, day-to-day life I was desperately trying to become something more than that.
Two years after my enrollment in Sarah Lawrence I had managed to slowly shed pieces of my old self like scales, first in little ways, such as changing my appearance, improving my language proficiency, working on my accent so that it sounded more American, and learning new social mechanisms. I imitated those around me. I tried on the Americanness now available to me, and although the fit wasn’t perfect, I thought it would have to do, as I didn’t see any other options. I rationalized that someone like me could never wear another identity without feeling it pull or pinch somewhere. I would have to learn to live with the feeling of discomfort. After all, what was a pinch or two compared to the corset I had been wearing all my life?
The second part of my plan involved putting the money I had saved working odd copywriting jobs into a bank account of my own, leasing a car, and renting my own apartment, where my then nearly three-year-old son and I would officially start our new life. In search of something affordable, I had found a two-room alcove under a gabled roof on the banks of the Hudson River for fifteen hundred dollars a month. I bought a mattress for one room; in the other room I put a cheap sofa, two chairs, and a table.
The apartment came with a view of the Hudson River and the Palisades Cliffs towering on the other side, behind which lay my former marital home, as well as my husband, who continued to move in and out of it as if nothing had changed, as if his wife had only just popped out to get groceries and would be back at some point to cook him dinner.
I hadn’t really said good-bye before I left. My lawyer had advised me to leave the situation open-ended, as her intention was to slow down the process as much as possible, not only in order to establish a custodial precedent but also to buy me some time to get my book published, which she felt was our only real shot at coming out of this with even a small win. The legal situation for Hasidic women was so precarious and the only thing my community truly shrank back from was the harsh spotlight of sustained public attention. Yet the situation didn’t feel open-ended to me, in fact it had already been a closed book for a while. Eli and I had been married for five years, but for the last two we had barely talked. Our lives had intersected only at brief points, such as Sabbath meals, and even then there had been other people around to serve as distractions. Having never truly gotten to know each other, perhaps we did not realize that we had been drifting apart. The new separation did not feel very different from the life we had led before.
When Eli asked me where I was, why I wasn’t home, I was careful not to make statements about the future. I said I needed space, and since he did not understand this concept but was reluctant to ask questions, he simply accepted the explanation as if it made sense. He was convinced the separation was temporary; perhaps that was why he made no attempt to prevent me from taking our son with me. In his world, women could not survive without men, so why should I be any different?
It was in my interest, the lawyer had advised me, to create a lengthy separation period in which I was allowed to retain my child. To do so, I had to pretend that I did not yet have a clear intention to divorce, that I was open to other options. And of course, I could not reveal my intention to become irreligious. Instead, I had to slowly introduce small changes in my lifestyle while still remaining in the realm of what was acceptable. This meant still keeping a kosher kitchen, covering my hair when I went to meet Eli for his parental visits, keeping our son in a Jewish day-care center, and so on. Only later, when I had the security of this precedent, could I then truly relax and live the way I wanted to.
Yet even small changes felt momentous in the beginning. I was excited to be on my own. I celebrated my freedom in little ways. I arranged cheeses on a plate, the names of which were unfamiliar to me, invited a few classmates over for a small cocktail party, and felt like a sophisticated host. I went to the big library in town with its floor-to-ceiling view of the river and enjoyed being able to read unselfconsciously on the screened-in veranda. I took home enormous piles of books and stacked them proudly near the entryway for visitors to see. I was determined to catch up on all the titles I’d missed, titles that were an integral part of the secular canon. When I picked up a worn copy of The Art of Happiness by Epicurus, I recalled immediately a similar sounding word in Yiddish, apikores, and understood quite suddenly that the derogatory term for “heretic” that my grandfather had used to denigrate only the lowliest of characters must have been inspired by this author. By reading his guide to a happy life, I would be receiving an education directly opposed to the one I had received as a child, for happiness had certainly not been the goal in my community. By rejecting religion, I assumed, I must be choosing happiness instead, as if to reject night is to choose day. I read the text with eagerness, realizing, though, that a faint sensation of guilt and caution still accompanied the act of reading certain books, even then.
In addition to stocking up on taboo tomes, I also celebrated the everyday ways in which I now felt normal. Normalcy, as I had come to understand it then, was a life without proscription. The path to fulfillment of one’s desires was direct, without any arbitrary obstacle blocking the way. All I needed was the vehicle of willpower.
But where was this vehicle, this inner resource, which seemed to come and go at random like a driverless train? At times I thought I possessed this force and it could never leave me; at others I felt as if it had never been there at all, that I had woken up from a sweet dream into harsh reality. The fluctuations between these two emotional states were so sudden, so frequent, and so intense that I soon realized in order to survive this period, I would have to enter a different emotional state entirely: that of numbness. Of course, I was lucky, since I had memories of similar times in which I had used this self-shutdown mechanism in order to survive, and now I slowly coaxed that memory to the surface again, understanding that the current challenges called for an unparallel
ed reserve of emotional control.
The nights were the most difficult, because nighttime is when one forgets who one is, reminded only in the morning. In those dark hours all is muddled and ungovernable. This is still true for me at times, even today. At night nothing is certain. Time is not fixed. One’s life is not a concrete, linear thing, but a murky body of water about which nothing is known. No matter the mental exercise, this conviction, that all has been lost, cannot be chased away. How I feared those predawn hours! Isaac and I slept together on the single mattress, and when I awoke in that familiar panic it was only his steady, gentle breathing next to me that reminded me of the one thing that was still certain: that I was his mother. This meant something. I had a task; I could orient myself around it. This was the only thing that gave my life a sense of form.
Yet on those nights when I awoke to see the darkness stretched across the window, I looked over at my son, and though I was comforted by his presence I was also frightened by it. I was so young myself, and completely alone in this world I was struggling to be a part of. Already there was someone even more vulnerable beside me. I was responsible for the two of us; what sort of hope could there be for us, with both of us relying on my meager reserves? Although the middle hours of the night yawned like gaping chasms, I knew I just had to hold on until morning, because gradually, as the sun rose, this dreadful conviction of a hopeless future would inevitably dissipate, to be replaced by an enthusiasm toward all the day had to offer. The fear receded; it became something like background noise that I would eventually accustom myself to. I’d find distraction in the rituals of our daily life, in coffee, breakfast, and leisurely walks to the kindergarten up the hill. There would be things to do in this new world, with its new kind of time that I had to shape on my own, without the strict religious schedule that had once defined every hour, that broke up my existence into manageable fragments. Now time was an endless loop that I painstakingly cut into pieces with my own freely chosen schedule: food, kindergarten drop-off, college, kindergarten pickup, dinner, bath, work, bed. But the days would never again feel as angular and defined as they had before. The days behind me faded into nothingness; the ones ahead blurred into one another like a desert horizon. For Isaac, who had found friends at kindergarten immediately and had switched from Yiddish to English in a matter of weeks, this was not an issue. That old world had not yet managed to engrave itself onto his spirit. I felt a great rush in my heart when I observed him playing. I thought to myself, You’ve saved him! You’ve done it in time and now he will never feel the way you feel now. He won’t know this pain. And even if you manage to do nothing more in your lifetime, you’ve already done enough just by accomplishing that. This revelation was a great comfort to me.
I didn’t realize then how many lessons from my past I had unconsciously taken with me, or just how deep a mark the belief system of my childhood had left on me. Although I had abandoned the rules and traditions, I was still looking instinctively for God, searching for signs where there were only natural occurrences, wanting to believe that the raccoon that sidled out from under my front stairs in broad daylight was a coded message, left for me so that I could feel less alone. I didn’t even know how to live without God. I had such an aching emptiness in my heart, and the great irony lay in how much more room there was for him now, in comparison to before, when he had had to take a back seat to all the rules and regulations. Before, God had been confined to the territories of prayer and ritual, now I searched for him in the ecstatic crescendos of poems and the gripping spasms in classical music. Often when I found something that looked or felt like perfection in an art form, it felt like I had found him. I would feel the recognition like an epiphany in my body, a powerful feeling that moved me to tears. I thought that the perfection that humans could create must be proof of the existence of God. After all, hadn’t my teachers always said that within each of us was God, in the form of a spark he had given us that we had to nurture into a fire? The challenge was how to find that spark within myself, and what to make of it.
But there was also no certainty anymore, not the kind I had felt as a child. God had been distorted into something beyond comprehension. In this way, my old yearning for God battled with this new voice in me that urged me to reject him, to free myself of him. I remembered Epicurus, who in his list of preconditions to happiness had said, “The irreligious man is not the person who destroys the gods of the masses but the person who imposes the ideas of the masses on the gods. . . . The masses, by assimilating the gods in every respect to their own moral qualities, accept deities similar to themselves and regard anything not of this sort as alien.”
* * *
• • •
At Sarah Lawrence I met so many atheists. There was a kind of irony in how passionately they tried to convert me. I was the perfect candidate for enlightenment. There were many earnest conversations over coffee in the canteen, debates over cigarettes on the lawn, in which they tried to pass their wisdom on to me, a wisdom I often perceived as cold comfort. One atheist with horn-rimmed glasses and greasy hair said to me once in an offhand way that the argument for the existence of God was like the argument for a false reality. Sure, it was possible we were all living in a computer-simulated video game, he posited, but until any evidence to that effect was presented, it was more sensible to concur that such a reality was highly unlikely and therefore not a viable part of the argument. To him, whether or not God existed was irrelevant; the fact that doubt presented itself rendered the answer moot: he didn’t need God, so why bother?
I remembered feeling my own derealization as a child, when I feared that I was the only person with real, absorbing desires. How frightening it had felt. What if you lived in a video game and you knew it? How could he hide himself so effectively from that possibility?
* * *
• • •
Earlier that year I had enrolled in a yearlong workshop for creative nonfiction, planning to patch together in that class most of my memoir, the first payment for which was now financing a large part of my existence. Deep down, I was afraid of the gargantuan task of writing a whole book. I had written so few things in my life. What did I really know about writing? A voice of self-reproach created a running commentary in my head as I attended each class, and I struggled to concentrate amid the internal clamor.
As part of the writing workshop we were required to print fourteen copies of a story we had written and distribute them to the other students at the beginning of each week. They would read them and give a thorough written critique. At the end of every week, the professor would choose one story in particular for an oral discussion. One week the professor notified me that my story had been chosen. On the day of judgment I sat in a sort of permanent cringe; I could hardly imagine what would be said about the glorified personal recollections from my childhood, peppered with transliterated Yiddish. This week I had sought to spare the readers the work of cultural translation and submitted something comparatively neutral. I hadn’t wanted them to undergo the ordeal of trying to pronounce those foreign words out loud.
At first the students approached my material tentatively, perhaps reluctant to hurt my feelings. But then one of the star students in the class, a pale-skinned goth from Ohio, opened her comments to me by exclaiming, with great exuberance, “Deborah, I’m so glad you finally un-Jewed your work! All the pieces you submitted until now were really confusing, but this one I could actually understand.” Her tone of voice was positively congratulatory, much like she was encouraging a preschooler for a colorful drawing.
The other students laughed uncomfortably, clearly sensing the loaded nature of the comment, but the teacher waved it away and swept the discussion onward. It was as if those words had never been said, but I sat there in shock, feeling as if I had been slapped.
I was gripped with the panic that all the experiences I had in me to share were the wrong ones. They weren’t “universal,” as my professor always said; they w
ere little oddities existing at the very margins of society. I thought of all those great Yiddish poets and writers I had recently been unearthing from dusty stacks in the library that had long since been forgotten. The people capable of understanding them were mostly dead; those still alive had chosen a life without art, without culture—they blamed the ruin of their people precisely on those indulgences.
I didn’t submit personal pieces for the rest of that year. A few times I met with my professor, who tried to gently encourage me to move away from what she termed my “young adult” voice, most likely her euphemism for simple language and a direct style. I did not bother to tell her that it was precisely those young adult books that had fortified my childhood and planted my best qualities within me. More than a decade later we would meet at a café under a cluster of bright green linden trees in a Berlin square and I would discover that our memories of this time were very different, that my professor only remembered how encouraging she was toward me, how she always knew that I was on the right track somehow. I thought of Lauren, the only student in that workshop who would later befriend me, and the gossip she described taking place behind my back, all those snipes about the inaccessibility not of my style, but of my content, and I wondered if all those young women now also remembered that scene differently. After all, the zeitgeist had taken a dramatic turn since then: the marginal had become central; the central had become redundant. If we would not say certain things today, did we still say them in the past?
* * *
• • •
At the end of the semester, when it was time to choose next year’s classes, I skipped over the section on writing workshops in the course catalog. I made a point not to talk about my private life anymore, and I didn’t socialize very much, but most probably I didn’t fool anyone. I was afraid that when I talked, I would reveal the fact that I didn’t have a real self. I desperately sought out the person I could become. I tried reflecting the expressions of those around me, parroting accents, mannerisms, and social behaviors. I took up smoking briefly because all the cool people at Sarah Lawrence seemed to be doing it. I would stand outside the library with Sharon, a friend from the masters program, watching her inhale the smoke effortlessly, and feel enormously aware of how the cigarette was tilted between my fingers, wondering if I looked natural holding it, wondering if I looked just like everybody else. I eyed Sharon’s long blond hair and tanned skin with awe. Would I ever look that normal, that American? This self-consciousness accompanied my every move in public. Only when I was back in my state of complete aloneness did it slip off me, for there was no one to see me in my raw, skinless state except my child, and he already knew me in all my states, and always would.
Exodus, Revisited Page 4
