Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  After the initial celebratory mood that had colored the early days after my flight, a paralyzing mixture of fear, loneliness, and self-doubt had been brewing underneath my numbness. Six months had gone by since my departure, and it had finally dawned on my family that I wasn’t coming back. To avoid their manipulations and threats I had changed my phone number and withdrawn even more into myself, afraid of being followed or discovered. But even though I knew I didn’t want to be pulled back into the past, I wasn’t very confident that there was a place for me anywhere else.

  I was in the outside world, but I wasn’t in it, not really. I felt like a displaced person, as if I was looking at a photograph of a scene I remembered being a part of, but I couldn’t find myself in it. In my dreams I was always searching for a spot on a map where I knew I lived, but I was unable to find the street. Somehow I had been erased.

  Since leaving, I had begun to see life as an enormous grid, a cross section of human connections. Every man and woman I encountered appeared as a plotted point on an intricate map, a map indiscernible to the eye but obvious to my sensitive perception. There were lines drawn between these people and their close family members, and longer lines rushing through open tunnels on the grid to anchor friends, neighbors, lovers, even acquaintances. Wherever I looked, I saw the invisible threads that connected people; every person seemed to have their grid firmly in place. I had been dislodged from my grid. I wondered how long I’d survive without one of my own, and whether it was even possible to rebuild one from scratch. What if I was doomed to forever linger in the no-man’s-land between points, feeling as if I was fading into nothingness with each passing hour? There were hardly any people in my new life; I had simply not had the time to get to know anyone yet. Filling the space around me with hearts and minds would take years, and even then, there was no guarantee I would ever be able to trust and rely on them like I would on family. The worst part about that was knowing that if something happened to me it would take a long time for that to be discovered. For some reason, this often worried me, the idea that I’d be lying somewhere decomposing someday.

  It’s not that I was lonely, not in that traditional sense in which I yearned for company. After all, if I really wanted to, I could have conjured a companion or two. I actually preferred to be alone. It meant I had to be less aware of my faults, of the ways in which my life was still lacking. Besides, I had occupied an enclosed mental space my entire life. In a world where neighbors reported on one another’s sins and friends betrayed one another to win the approval and accompanying benevolence of the authorities, trust was a luxury I had never been able to afford, not with my host of transgressions that needed to stay hidden. Perhaps I had subconsciously sought out this new, post-departure solitude, because it was, after all, the only condition that felt familiar to me, and therefore safe.

  * * *

  • • •

  Growing up we had a saying in Yiddish that essentially translates to “a cow out of the stall.” It was used to describe a Hasidic Jew who had left the community, likening the person’s behavior to that of a cow suddenly let loose after a lifetime of imprisonment. It was believed that such cows were most likely to charge madcap down a hill to their deaths. Hasidic rebels reportedly indulged in wild, drug-abusing lifestyles that inevitably ended in ruin, similar to the cow’s doomed trajectory. Freedom posed an especial danger, the adage emphasized, to those who had never previously experienced it. This saying, scornfully evoked when the conversation turned to the subject of the few known rebels in our society, irritated me greatly as a child. Didn’t the phrase do more to point out the failings of life in a stall than the dangers of freedom? Wasn’t it clear that the cow would have been better off grazing freely in the first place?

  One Sunday morning I drove to the anonymous parking lot near the Tappan Zee Bridge where I normally picked up Isaac from his father. We were still kind to each other then.

  “We weren’t like the other couples,” he said to me that morning. “They all fought like cats and dogs, but we didn’t.”

  I sighed. “That doesn’t mean we were happy.” I thought it meant we hadn’t cared enough, but I didn’t say it. “I want to be happy. Don’t you?” He looked at me with blank, quizzical eyes, as if he had never even considered the idea.

  “When will you come home?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you leave with me?” I asked. “You know we can’t really be happy there.”

  He looked at me as if he was considering it for a second, and then the look in his eyes said otherwise. There was that word again, they seemed to say.

  “What does it even mean to be happy?” he asked me.

  He had a point. What did we know about happiness? We didn’t even have a word for it in Yiddish. Menuchas hanefesh, my grandfather had said, or harchavos hada’as. Those terms meant happiness for him. A rest for the soul, a broadening for one’s mind. But that was not enough for me. I wanted the pure essence of joy in my life; I didn’t want to settle for the bit of peace or understanding that had satisfied him. I wanted to learn the art of happiness, and for that I had to become an apikores, a heretic or an epicurean, depending on which way you looked at the term.

  “Have you ever heard of Quine’s theory of the web of belief?” my professor had asked me during one of our thesis meetings. He explained that Quine was the first philosopher to challenge the idea that belief systems were built like pyramids. A pyramid, my professor said, would topple if sufficiently disrupted, but a web could adjust its margins without sustaining damage to its core. It was Quine who postulated that people could be exposed to ideas that challenged their web and simply adjust the web’s margins to go on believing in the same way. In the end, no matter how well informed we are, we choose what to believe, he said.

  There would be no more religion in my life, I knew. But neither could there be anything to fill the empty space it had left behind. I felt I would not be able to find anything in this world to hold on to. No matter how deeply those inculcated beliefs were engraved in me, no matter how deep the crevices left behind as I dug them out, I needed to learn to live with those empty spaces, because it was better to live in the truth than in the dangerous comfort of the lie.

  But even that was a naïve thought. After all, I was a human being. The needle of my inner compass quivered without pause in its search for something, the nature of which I would not be able to pinpoint for some time.

  2

  VERZWEIFLUNG

  DESPAIR

  With college classes behind me, I was now truly adrift. This was the absolute emptiness I had always known would arrive, one I had managed to postpone until that moment. I have not often attempted to revisit this phase in my memory, and now that I try, I discover how difficult it is to recover, perhaps because I knew while the experiences were still occurring that I would never actually want to remember them. Even then, when they were present realities, I was storing them deep in the forgotten reaches of my brain before they had the time to develop into stockpiled recollections. I was pushing my own life away from me as if each moment were a layer of dead skin that I could peel away and be rid of forever.

  It is troubling to me, when I try to go back there now, how I find my thoughts spinning in circles, uncertain where to land in that murky storage space. Intent on finding purchase somewhere, I fixate on a tree. This method has worked for me before. Many of the most vivid memories of my childhood seem to bloom around the presence of a particular tree, even though the neighborhood in which I grew up was not exactly overflowing with arborous specimens. This says something perhaps about how memory itself can function like a growth, with a root event that germinates into a network of subsidiary issue. The tree I recall now was a rather sickly locust, growing out of a small, sandy pit in a stone courtyard on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I suspect it is no longer alive today. I used to think that the death of that tree would spell my own doom, but now I sometimes wonder if pe
rhaps our fates unfolded at the expense of each other.

  The locust tree is the first thing I remember seeing from the window of my next apartment. It was a scrawny tree with leaves that had turned brittle by late August, which was when I moved into the third-floor walk-up apartment behind a Lutheran church on a Lexington Avenue corner. I spent hours in my new home just sitting at the kitchen window, which faced the courtyard between the church and the tenement building, staring at the dried pods dangling in clusters from its branches. It was the only growing thing left for me to look at now. From the windows in the other rooms I could glimpse chunks of high-rises in the patches of view that were not obscured by the neighboring buildings, a strange, geometric puzzle of gleaming metal silhouettes seen through a network of shafts and alleys. In every direction I looked my sight was arrested by walls. So I preferred to sit in the kitchen and stare inward at the frail and slender locust instead.

  The tree was only just tall enough to unfurl a small coronet of branches into the square patch of sunlight, which settled for a few hours each day into that small cleft in the row of Manhattan rooftops. Its dangling pods reminded me of the acacias my grandmother had occasionally pointed out to me during our Sabbath afternoon strolls through the quiet streets of Williamsburg. Though she loved all trees, acacias were her favorite species, and when I first visited Budapest so many years later I would indeed discover entire avenues completely cloaked in ancient rows of them, leaning toward one another to form a lacy canopy that filtered the sunlight into shifting patterns on the ground. On the few occasions we spotted one in our Brooklyn neighborhood, she seemed so overjoyed that the markers of the acacia remained embedded in my memory and I became adept at recognizing them even then. This is how I knew that they were easily confused with locust trees, an invasive species in New York; indeed, locusts were sometimes called false acacias. Now I couldn’t help but contrast this meager “false acacia” that was the central point of my vision to the conversely resplendent tree that had extended its copious branches into my childhood bedroom. Outside the Brooklyn brownstone in which I had grown up, a towering sycamore with a massive trunk and a wide radius of thick leafy branches had dominated the sidewalk, its limbs reaching through the bars that covered my window and scraping against the grainy stucco beneath, as if unaware of the limitations presented by its urban surroundings. The dense thicket of leaves obscuring my view had given me the romantic illusion that I lived in a tree house, its branches a buffer against the more grating noises of the city around me. Now this buffer was conspicuously and comparatively absent; my new home stood naked in a sea of towers, and my restless nights were punctuated by the whirl of sirens, endless honking, and the jarring thuds made by trucks rattling over potholes as they hurtled down Lexington Avenue to make their deliveries during the predawn hours. If anything, that tree in my courtyard represented the inverse; it had been cowed by the urban infrastructure around it. I became convinced, the more I looked at it, that it was a bad omen, that I too would be cowed and weakened by this ruthless milieu I now found myself in.

  Of all the ways in which I had dreamed and fantasized about a possible future “outside,” I had never imagined myself here. Of course, I had been aware as a child that Manhattan, although practically inaccessible, was geographically close. The skyline had glittered like an array of cut-glass shards behind the foreboding gray expanse of the East River, promising to be everything that my world was not, but also threatening, in its shimmering, shape-shifting glory, to be a mirage, an optical illusion that could transform into something more menacing up close. Now this cryptic vision had become the concrete maze in which I lived, an important legal address that I would use to secure my freedom. There was an irony in the fact that my freedom would come to me only by living in what felt like, on particularly bad days, a tightly packed open-air prison.

  I mean this in a quite practical sense, having experienced 9/11 and knowing of the consequences for the city: the closing of bridges and tunnels, the shutdown of public transport, the sold-out supermarkets, which as a result of delayed deliveries couldn’t restock fast enough, the breaking down of phone lines and jamming of cellular signals. And of course I would later see what havoc Hurricane Sandy wrought, when downtown Manhattan was without electricity and residents of skyscrapers found themselves trapped on high floors, as elevators ceased functioning and the stairways to be used in case of emergency had little to no illumination. It was always clear to me that the people living in New York City were particularly vulnerable, as it is a city that is hard to survive in on a good day, but nearly impossible to survive in during a catastrophe, be it man-made or by nature’s hand. It is precisely that knowledge that renders one a true New Yorker, I had learned, because testing fate by staying was what made one a local, as opposed to those who fled every time the situation threatened to worsen. Yet I had never before been so painfully aware of the treacherous nature of my current geographical positioning. Naturally my thinking was interwoven with the childhood belief that cities that hold God in contempt were slated for retribution, like the city of Babel, whose people tried to build a tower that reached all the way to the seventh heaven and God himself; as a punishment he fractured the people’s speech into a million different languages, so that none of them could understand the others, and their doomed efforts to coordinate resulted in the toppling of the tower and the destruction of all. Manhattan fit into that religious archetype of hedonistic, idol-worshipping cities that populate so many of the biblical narratives, and if I feared catastrophe, it is because I feared being swept up in that wave of divine fury, without access to a place on an arc as refuge, or even a hill from which to observe the apocalypse below. I felt trapped in a primal way, subconsciously fearing that when the hand of God came to sweep the sinners from their comfortable perch, I too was condemned to get caught up in the swell, simply by association.

  For some Manhattan will always remain the city of unlimited possibilities, of endlessly exercised freedoms, but for me the city was never able to live up to its more advantageous promises. Perhaps it was a question of timing, or perhaps, as I later came to suspect, it was that the clash in value systems between the spiritual empire of my childhood and the materialist kingdom I was so suddenly confronted with was so extreme as to be permanently irreconcilable.

  After all, I didn’t choose to move to Manhattan that summer of 2010. I had been advised by my lawyer to do so, shortly before my studies at Sarah Lawrence had drawn to a close. The next phase of our legal strategy was due, she had reminded me. The necessary separation period was on the official record, a custodial precedent had already been achieved, and it was time to try for an actual divorce, in the process of which I would have a chance to establish my parental rights. Whatever case there was, my lawyer had informed me, it would be tried in the county of the child’s residence, and since my son had been living with me, I wanted to be safe from the corrupt judges voted into place by the Hasidic community, notorious for repeatedly deciding against those who chose to go up against their primary constituents. However, after carefully considering the court system, and where exactly we might land in it, my lawyer had concluded that I needed to try to guarantee as much as possible the assignment of a liberal judge to my case, someone who wasn’t afraid to go against the community, someone whose decisions had been fair in the past. These judges, my lawyer said, primarily sat on the benches in Manhattan.

  Initially I perceived the news mostly as a blow to my budget. I had followed a very strict financial plan until that moment, using my book advance for Unorthodox, my memoir of growing up in the Hasidic community and my decision to leave it, to meet my basic monthly expenses, and covering unforeseen or extra expenditures with small side jobs. Moving to Manhattan would mean a drastic increase in my monthly overhead, no matter how much I downsized. Of course I knew of the difficulties in finding affordable housing in Manhattan, which was ludicrous when you considered what even passed for affordable there. Polly, a classmate
at Sarah Lawrence who lived in a cramped three-room apartment in a Tribeca high-rise with her husband and child, had told me about her neighbors paying four- or five-thousand-dollar monthly rents for smaller spaces. I remembered the words of a professor at Sarah Lawrence, who had asked me to reconsider my decision to leave. “Divorce is already the number one poverty predictor for women in America,” she had warned me. “How do you think you will manage, being so young and without family?”

  I hadn’t confided these fears to my lawyer, and I wasn’t planning on letting her see my apprehension. I already felt disproportionately guilty for being a pro bono recipient of her advice, normally prohibitively priced, but even more so I was worried that her small confidence in me would waver if she realized that my own poise was simply a thin pretense. As I was even then still a woman of some sort of faith, I left my lawyer’s office on that day convinced that I would indeed move to Manhattan and somehow it would all work out. Though I had despaired of finding God under the auspices of any religion, and similarly abandoned the search for a secular equivalent, I still thought of my life as a story then, and stories were the one thing I still believed in. Their structures seemed to me to reflect immovable natural laws, like the golden spiral, and although I knew stories to have moments of chaos and confusion, in the end things always seemed to tie together rather neatly, and probably it was only a matter of time, I felt, until I would begin to see the threads in my own narrative come together and feel the fabric fit snugly around me once again. One could say I had a spiritual faith in the unstoppable momentum of narrative evolution.