Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  Those books I now dove into indiscriminately, veering wildly from one to the other and back again. Now their voices began to compete with one another in this new and isolated mental space that was my mind in winter. I sometimes read without really understanding the effect the words were having on me, only to have the stories and images come to life again in disturbing contortions in my dreams. I knew deep down that I was experiencing more than just a winter crisis, and although this became clearer with time, I could not find a solution to this conundrum, for I still felt as trapped in this world I was at odds with as before.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the meantime, Eli had begun to change his lifestyle drastically as well, perhaps as a result of the woman he was now dating, who was from a nonreligious background. Suddenly Isaac began to deliver reports of his dad eating non-kosher or violating the Sabbath. By the end of the year, Eli’s beard and payos had completely disappeared, and he had moved away from the Orthodox community. Now we did not fight over Jewish holidays anymore, or that Isaac celebrated Christmas, and I did not have to worry about the gap in our lifestyles and the emotional effect it might have on our son. As so often happens, Eli’s new love interest was a distraction that meant visitations were now far fewer, and I began to nurse the hope that someday this arbitrary limit around our lives would be lifted, simply by his willingness to free us given his own contented state.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually the winter in New England came to an end. It passed the way it always had, seeming incredibly slow moving in its day-to-day progress, but then suddenly gone, replaced by a riotous spring. Then it was Easter, and with it came its Jewish equivalent, Passover. Though I participated in the egg hunts with Isaac and ate lamb at a table in the sunshine with other parents at Isaac’s school, I did not make plans to celebrate the Jewish holiday on my own.

  I believed now that Passover was about liberation, and I was not feeling the spirit of liberation at the moment. When my divorce judgment had arrived on the eve of Passover in 2012, I had reflected on the irony of celebrating my freedom from an arranged marriage while celebrating the deliverance of the Jewish people. I had thought Passover would always be a time when I could look back at how far I had come since I left my ill-fitting life behind. But the halo of this triumph had faded with time.

  As a child I had viewed Passover itself as an ordeal. I was required to stay awake until the very end, which often coincided with the sunrise, and it was rare that food was served before midnight. Like the other women and children at the table, I was expected to mutely follow the progress of the men as they conducted one painstaking ritual after another, up until the moment when my grandfather paused to catch the attention of the children nodding into their empty plates. We watched as he made a show of folding pieces of homemade matzoh into a white damask napkin, tying the ends together before throwing the bundle over his shoulder, at which point all of us children rose sleepily from our chairs to hold hands and follow him in a slow shuffle around the dining room. This reenactment of the exodus was an annual tradition, and the only time I ever witnessed my grandfather taking the time to interact with small children. The central tenet of Passover is to relate the story of the exodus to the young, and so not even the sleeping newborns were exempt; they followed him in the arms of their mothers.

  After my grandfather finished his march, he resumed his place at the head of the table, looking resplendent in his white kittel, and held the matzoh in his hand. He spoke of the thin potato gruel that had sustained him during his stint of forced labor in the Hungarian army. But although he repeated this story each year, in my fatigue and hunger I must have missed the point. I thought he was drawing a comparison between the story of Passover and his own liberation from enslavement, but rather, he was reflecting on those early years, when he had struggled to rebuild his life from ruins, when God had led him, through the miracles of stolen passports and false credentials, across the Atlantic Ocean to the new world waiting on the other side. It was here, after years of uncertainty, where he also found a sense of consolation and promise in the words of the Satmar rebbe and joined in the effort to build a new home for the surviving Jews of Hungary. My grandfather insisted that because of his experiences, he could especially identify with the Jewish slaves who made it to the Promised Land, and that through our connection to him we could do the same. He conceded that the God who had liberated our ancestors with great showmanship had not ushered them via express route to Canaan, but though he dragged them through the desert for fifty years, he performed miracles to sustain them along the way, in the hope that their faith in him would strengthen over time and their new identity would inform a consciousness still heavily influenced by an oppressive past. And he did deliver on his promise, my grandfather told us; while we might never understand the reason for the delay, all that mattered was the happy ending. The wandering, he was implying, was more important than the arrival.

  I had not expected to wander for too long after leaving the world I grew up in; I had been determined to emerge as quickly as possible from those feelings of loss and homelessness as if from an obsolete cocoon, discarding the useless sheath and stretching my new, unblemished self as if reborn. Now it seemed clear that the life I had dreamed of was, if not unattainable, then still very far away.

  * * *

  • • •

  On the first night of Passover I found myself once again at a table in Paris with Richard and his many patrons, digging into plates of “le cheeseburger” and red wine. Bruno, the patron of Richard whose mop of white hair now hung loosely over his eyes as if released by his inebriation, leaned in to share with me an observation that I found somewhat unnerving at first.

  “You know, Deborah, I’ve always felt that the religious laws of kosher and halal are a form of violence,” he said, “however passive they may seem, for there is a basic violence inherent in separating people from your table. La table,” he insisted, as most Frenchmen will, “is the common ground for all humans. To bar others from it is to violate your own humanity.”

  I was surprised by how comfortable Bruno felt about expressing such a brazen, not to mention politically incorrect, opinion, but I couldn’t offer an easy response. Instead, I looked around at the vibrant, epicurean group seated at the table, and although there was no ritual to mark the occasion, I felt suddenly that there was a ceremonial significance in the meal we shared. It was Passover, and I was here, and perhaps my grandfather had had a point, that the holiday was not so much about the moment in which we break our bonds, but about what follows: the long, slow haul toward a new future.

  I had glimpsed that future in my son, who had told the Passover story to his classmates at the point at which African American slavery had been taught in his second-grade history class. His teacher told me that he seemed so proud to share his own perspective; it was the first time some of his peers had heard about the holiday. When the children were asked to talk about people in their families who had exhibited bravery under difficult circumstances, my son told the story I’ve told him so many times, of how my grandparents survived the war, and how their grief trickled down through two generations. “I think my mom is brave because she learned how to be happy,” he said. “Even when everyone around her was sad all the time.”

  Did he really believe that? Had I succeeded in pretending? To me the miracle of Passover lay in my son’s joyous disposition, in his fearless curiosity and uncomplicated affections. It amazed me that I was the link between him and my past, for the two were irreconcilable in my mind.

  It was my fifth Passover outside of the Hasidic community. I thought about the Haggadah, the text we had read aloud from each Passover in my community, and remembered the section containing instructions on how to educate four potentially different sons on the story of the exodus. They are respectively referred to as the wise, the simple, the ignorant, and the wicked sons. The wicked son is quoted a
s phrasing his question to his father using the pronoun “you.” This is interpreted as meaning he excludes himself from the question; he assumes the answer does not apply to him. It is his self-selected exclusion that is equated with wickedness here. It denies a basic principle of Judaism, which is conformity and joining; that is, we are redeemed through enduring unity—with individuality comes the threat of breakage, of fragmentation. What is the only acceptable answer to this wicked son? The Haggadah says to knock out his teeth, implying that to reason with him is hopeless, since individuality, once it takes root, cannot be excised, and the only way to defeat it is to disable its means of expression. If the wicked son had been in Egypt, the father is supposed to say, then he would not have been redeemed.

  * * *

  • • •

  I too am a wicked son—or rather, daughter—I realized now, looking around the table as the others talked and laughed as if they hadn’t a care in the world. (Interestingly, the Haggadah wastes no time instructing fathers how to answer their daughters.)

  I was first and foremost the wicked daughter because I had left the Hasidic Jewish community and had written a memoir about what life was like in that world, an act of self-selected exclusion in that it violated the unspoken rule of speaking publicly about the problem of fundamentalism within the Jewish community. I was most viciously attacked because I dared to discuss the laws of marital purity—which is the very foundation of the patriarchal oppression of women that plagues Jewish history. Then, in an attempt at rebuilding my life from scratch once outside the Hasidic world, I had embarked on a journey to discover my own version of Jewishness that felt honest, compassionate, and real. But this form of Jewishness that I had been in search of didn’t comfortably fit into any mainstream or acceptable idea, and so my critics could now claim my Jewishness wasn’t real. The possibility that authentic Jewishness can exist outside of their narrow spectrum is anathema to them, as it was to the authorities who expelled Spinoza from their midst so many centuries ago. And yet, I am nothing else if not a Jew; a banned Jew is still a Jew, alone within his own sphere, counted only to be rejected. The double exclusion marks them like a lesion.

  * * *

  —

  But the truth I had to acknowledge now, if ever I was to liberate myself not only from tangible bonds, but from the shackles we are often programmed to place on ourselves, was that I was running from Jewishness itself. I resented having a group identity and the politics that came with it imposed upon me like some burdensome inheritance; I was fighting an impossible battle to be released from the ranks I had been born into and to embrace the simultaneous singularity and absolutism of being nothing more than human.

  The old hope that remained was the possibility to at the very least live among people who would accept this about me as something natural and conclusive, instead of imposing a modern-day cherem, or ban of excommunication. Would I ever find myself among my veritable peers, in a world whose emotional language I understood, a place where I would not be brought to buckle under the pressure to conform to fashion and dictates? Did this world even exist? I sensed it was out there, but I knew I would have to research its cartography, for even if I had to wait until my son was an adult, it was undeniable that I would one day claim my place in that realm.

  6

  ENTDECKUNG

  DISCOVERY

  I had emerged from the doldrums of winter and all its existential questioning to face a season so bright and blinding it threatened to erase all meaning completely. I had always been flabbergasted by the strange and artificial pace of summer and the way time seemed to be freewheeling in every direction for those months, and this summer was no exception. Eli had become engaged to his new girlfriend and was busily planning their wedding, and we agreed that Isaac’s visitation would be postponed to the end of the summer vacation that year, when the celebration was to take place. So from the start of June it was just Isaac and me for ten long, lazy summer weeks.

  You could say I was not surprised when the opportunity fell into my lap to travel once more for those last two weeks of summer 2014—to participate in a film project I had casually signed up for more than a year earlier, one that I had not expected to get financed—and now that it had suddenly been cleared for takeoff, I felt as if I myself had conjured this event in advance to save me from a future I had sensed approaching. It was as if there were many selves operating within me simultaneously, with no linear relationship to one another, with no fixed point in time. There was the past, constantly flickering at my haunches, and here was this sort of future self, which I felt had reached back in time to pluck me from my referenceless state.

  I would be traveling again to Europe, the only continent I had any real interest in at that time, and this time there would be another first visit, to Holland, both its countryside and its capital. But Berlin was also on the list of film locations. This time I did not go to Berlin as a classic tourist, staying in a generic hotel in the city center. This time I stayed with a crew in an apartment in a barely renovated residential neighborhood in the old eastern part. My days were spent researching and working and interacting with others as a consequence, but I am convinced this is not enough to explain why this time it was as if Berlin was a completely new and different city than the one I had passed through exactly a year earlier. Part of this effect had to be attributed to the changes I had gone through in the time between the two visits; most assuredly it was not Berlin that had changed, but the person now disembarking once more into its irrepressible urban wilderness.

  During this trip, when I was not working I sat in cafés on busy streets and observed the wildlife, so to speak. I began to notice certain identifying characteristics about the city’s denizens, which I had not had the opportunity to do last time among the tourists milling about the landmarks. What I noticed over and over was that Berlin was not a city like New York, Paris, or Rome—it did not seem to participate in the endless race toward money or status, or at least this was not evident in the way people dressed or behaved toward one another.

  I walked around the city in overlapping circles and zigzag routes, this time daring to decipher the complicated map, struggling to understand how Berlin could be divided up into so many disparate sections that seemed to relate very little to one another and were poorly connected by public transport. Every tram I boarded stopped at the old Berlin border; to go farther I had to find another route. Yet during my walks through leafy Charlottenburg and graffiti-splashed Friedrichshain and all those neighborhoods in between with their unique atmospheres and encapsulated communities, which I learned were called Kiez, I began to notice one delightful common factor in all of them: bookstores. It felt as if there was one on every corner; everywhere I turned I came across shop windows packed with books, carts outside advertising used volumes for less, some stores even specializing in a specific genre, others in a foreign language. Even the coffee shop where the crew ate breakfast in the morning sold used books for one euro each in an adjoining room.

  Berlin emerged as some kind of secret paradise to me for these two principal factors: money did not seem to be a primary driving force but books were a flagrantly shared passion, and in light of this, it was easy for a moment to forget about my last trip, to imagine one could set aside the history that had overshadowed every prior moment I had spent in Germany. There were so many languages spoken all around me, and so many different-looking people, that I surmised that Berlin was after all like no other place in this country. And sure, I knew then and know now that it is impossible to know a city in a week, or a month, or a year, or perhaps even a decade. Since then I have continued to make surprising discoveries about Berlin, as if peeling away its surface layer by layer. Quite possibly I will continue to do so for some time, but it is important to explain that these two revelations, should they be accurate or not, first roused in me the recognition that there might be a place in the world with a value system that could indeed attract even someone lik
e me, who had always expected to feel lost and rootless all over the world, just as I had been warned. This theory I was developing would soon be confirmed by the people I would meet during filming, who one after another seemed to have their own individual stories of flight and reinvention; it soon became clear that these people I saw as Berliners were in truth always from somewhere else, and most often with no option of return to that place of origin. I met people fleeing oppression both political and religious, but also people who had overcome the smaller-scale hardship of judgmental small towns, toxic relationships, controlling families. Persecution, discrimination, poverty, war, dictatorships, sects—in fact, anything any human being ever deemed worth escaping—in Berlin you could find multiple persons who had broken away from each category. This created a kind of unique solidarity among people of very diverse backgrounds. Without having to field questions about yourself or provide any additional information whatsoever, you were simply accepted into the society as a fellow “runner.” Here, for the first time, no one made me feel like a freak for my background; like everything else, it was simply something I had abandoned, and what mattered was the here and now. In America, I had felt like the only person with my problem; here, I met people who saw it as the most natural and commonplace thing in the world.