“It’s not going to be traumatic for you to go back there?”
“No, not at all. I didn’t have to grow up there the way you did. I don’t have any trauma associated with the place.”
“Well, that’s good. I guess.” They both laughed. “Wait till I tell Jesse. He won’t believe you’re going with Klapper to New Walden.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Pretty well, I think. He’s got a job at the library. And he’s enrolled as a non-matric at Fairleigh Dickinson. I think the quiet time might be doing him some good. I’m hoping he’s reflecting.”
Jesse was living at home for the year, on a forced leave of absence from NYU for having been involved in a ring that sold term papers to other students.
“That’s good. Is he around now?”
“No, he’s out. I never ask him where. After all, if he were still at school, I wouldn’t know.”
“That seems right,” Cass said, though sometimes he wondered. His mother had strong scruples in regard to autonomy and self-determination. She had had to overcome so much external pressure—her parents, her community, the Valdener Rebbe—in choosing her own way through life that she was loath to exert pressure on anyone else. When it came to Jesse, pressure probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.
“I’ll give you a report on New Walden when I get back.”
“It won’t have changed much, that’s for sure. It’s a point of pride that if the Besht were resurrected and he made his way to New Walden …”
“Because, let’s face it, what else would he want to do with himself?”
“That goes without saying. Anyway, he’d get to New Walden and he’d speak to the Valdeners, ask them what they thought, what they knew, and he wouldn’t realize that a day had gone by since he’d walked the earth in the early eighteenth century. Nothing would have changed.”
“Better sanitation, though.”
“Marginally.”
His mother hated the place. But not Cass. As soon as they got across the bridge, he started looking out for landmarks.
They turned onto the Palisades Parkway toward Bear Mountain.
“This is it, this is the exit,” Cass said when he saw the sign for New Town.
They drove through New Town, down Main Street, and when they got to the T-junction where it ended, Cass surprised himself by knowing exactly which way to turn, the left—the other left, and then the right that brought the Lincoln Continental right there to the parking lot with the heap of buses that marked the entrance to New Walden.
The buses were the property of the New Walden Kosher Bus Company, owned by a Valdener Hasid who lived in New Walden. The bus company was the town’s biggest business, and the man who owned the company, Alter Luckstein, was New Walden’s richest man. None of the buses matched any of the others. They were different models, different sizes. Alter read the classified ads in the trade papers for any bus that had been in an accident or had caught fire. Then he bought it, fixed it up, and put it back on the road. Luckstein’s buses not only took the Valdeners back and forth between New Walden and Brooklyn or Manhattan, where many of them worked in the Diamond District or the large electronics-and-camera stores, but also were rented out across the wider metropolitan area by Orthodox Jewish day schools and other Jewish organizations. They even had some regular public routes from New York to nearby towns, competing well with Greyhound.
Just past the buses there was a sign: “Welcome to New Walden, America’s only shtetl. Please observe the custom of our ways and dress modestly. No women in shorts or pants or sleeveless tops.”
Otherwise, the place looked extraordinarily ordinary, at least at first blush, a nondescript tract of roads, little more than wending country lanes, that were lined with modest two-story houses, their front lawns strewn with plastic tricycles, slides, and toys.
They had an appointment to meet with the Grand Rabbi at four o’clock, and they were early.
“Let’s park and walk,” Roz suggested from the backseat. “Mingle with the natives, find some informants. You can’t do fieldwork from a car.”
“We are not here to do your fieldwork, young lady. If you want to get out and walk, please don’t restrain yourself. Mr. Seltzer and I shall console ourselves over the loss of your company.”
“Come on, don’t you want to stretch your legs after that long ride? And, Cass, you must want to check out your old haunts. Do you remember where your grandmother lived?”
“No, I do not wish to, as you say, ‘stretch my legs.’ ” Jonas Elijah Klapper shuddered.
It was too cold for children to be outside playing with the toys. They passed a few women pushing baby carriages, shepherding very young children, almost all of them seemingly girls, with long hair escaping from their hooded coats.
“The older kids are in school,” Cass said, as he drove around the neighborhood. “Sunday’s just a regular day for them.”
“So they go to school six days a week?” Roz asked.
“They get out early on Fridays. Especially in the winter, when the days are short, so the Sabbath, which starts at sundown, comes early. The Sabbath, Shabbes, is something to see. That’s when the men deck themselves out in these amazing fur hats called shtreimels and these long satin caftans, called kaputas. And they all wear high leather boots, almost like jackboots, with their pants tucked in.”
“Do the women get to wear amazing fur hats?” Roz asked.
“No, the women just dress dowdy, in a way guaranteed to call no attention to themselves.”
“I wonder if I’ll pass,” Roz said. She was wearing the same long crushed-velvet skirt that she’d been wearing when Cass had first met her. He’d warned her about the laws of modesty. She didn’t have to wear her hair covered, since she wasn’t married, but Cass and she had decided that the dreadlocks had best be concealed, so she’d bought a peacock-blue kerchief, and in a restroom at their last pit stop had looped her hair up in it in a sort of turban. For their part, Cass and Klapper had come supplied with white satin skullcaps in their pockets that Jonas Elijah Klapper had supplied, “Ronald’s Bar Mitzvah June 12 1977” embossed in gold on the inside.
“I think the goal is just not to offend them. At best, they’ll think you’re a stray that the Lubavitchers have converted.”
“The Lubavitchers. They’re the ones with the mitzvah-mobile, right? They used to come to Frankfurter when I was an undergraduate, lassoing boys to put on phylacteries and girls to light the Sabbath candles.”
Cass had driven past his bubbe’s house without announcing it, slowing down slightly—they were going less than fifteen miles an hour anyway— and trying to take it in. He’d always known it as his bubbe’s house. His grandfather had died before he was born. It was a modest tract house, and it made him happy to see the number of toys crammed into its front yard now. He hoped the children who owned these toys were enjoying better childhoods than his mother had in that house. He felt a stab of love for that unhappy woman, his bubbe, who had had such a fine eye for discerning the flaws in others, the slights to herself, reacting with gleeful contempt for the former and unstanchable rage toward the latter, but who had, for some mysterious reason, loved and always forgiven her little Chaim. One of his earliest memories—it might have been his first— was his bubbe’s collapsing at the sight of him when they’d come for a visit after he’d had his first haircut. She had shrieked as if slashed by an assassin’s blade, clutching at her chest, berating his mother. He’d never forget it, it had scared him so badly.
“Something else I remember from when I used to visit here as a kid is that they don’t cut the boys’ hair until a certain age, I think maybe three or four.”
“Is that a Samson-and-Delilah thing?”
“No,” said Klapper. “The ceremony of the first haircut is called an upshneering, and it is celebrated when the male child turns three, as one of life’s passages, like the Bar Mitzvah, which is celebrated almost universally among Jews, even the most secular, though its m
aterialistic trappings have made it a parodical spectacle far from its original intent of signaling the Jewish male’s full attainment of selfhood, with all of its attending moral and spiritual responsibilities.”
An interlude of silence followed. Jonas was recalling his own modest Bar Mitzvah on the Lower East Side. His father had deserted them that year. The man had been so insignificant that it had taken Jonas several days to realize what was different in the household and to ask, “Where’s Pop?” Jonas’s Bar Mitzvah had been celebrated with a bottle of schnapps in their shul on Eldridge Street, a plate of his mother’s delectable sponge cake, and some store-bought eier kichel—egg cookies. But Jonas had sung his haftorah faultlessly from memory. His d’var Torah, the traditional Shabbes speech in which moral lessons are drawn from the weekly portion of the Torah, had also been delivered without notes, and, according to his mother and older sisters, grown men had wept.
“According to Yehuda Ickel, the leading secular authority on Kabbala, with whom I have often discussed such matters, the Hasidic custom can be traced back to the sixteenth-century Kabbalists who inhabited the mystical city of Safed, in northern Palestine, or S’fat, as it is called in Hebrew, long one of the spiritual hot zones, receiving a disproportionate radiation of the Elevated Mysteries from the Seminar from On High. The dominant figures were Moses Cordovero, the tireless taxonomizer of Kabbala, and his student Isaac Luria, known also as the Ari, meaning literally ‘the Lion’ and derived from the acronym for ‘Ashkenazi Rabbi Isaac.’ You will also see him referred to as Arizal. Arizal was the most fecund visionary to appear in Jewish mysticism, with all that would emerge from the inspired city of S’fat forever after bearing his imprimatur, though he had written, in his lifetime, but a few poems, and his oral teachings were …”
“What are all those signs?” Roz cut him off.
Nobody answered her. Though Cass was grateful to Roz for choking back her laughter at Professor Klapper’s mistaking her for a Rastafarian—he knew her well enough to know that that was the only explanation for her silence—he hated the casual tone she had adopted toward him. She was treating him as if he were anyone else. She was even addressing him by his first name. Cass could feel Professor Klapper, in the passenger seat in front, bristling. But, remarkably, he kept his temper, which might have been due to the exaggerated respect he seemed to have developed for Cass recently, taking delight in calling him Reb Chaim when they were alone. Or maybe he didn’t want to mess with a Rastafarian.
Professor Klapper had, however, lectured Roz briefly but sternly on their way here on restraining herself in their audience with the Valdener Rebbe.
“Try to make yourself as inconspicuous as you possibly can, young lady. The Hasidim have a refined sensibility regarding the desirable trait of modesty, or tzniyus, in a woman. Recall the Bard’s words regarding the virtuous Cordelia: ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.’”
“Don’t you guys see?” Roz was saying now. “Every few feet there are signs nailed onto the trees. Cass, park the car a minute. I want to see what it says.”
“Indeed, do park the vehicle, Mr. Seltzer, and let the young lady alight and investigate to her heart’s content. We shall go straight to the Rebbe. We shall find you soon enough, or you us, of that I am certain.”
Roz climbed out onto the sidewalk, and the Lincoln Continental pulled away. Roz gave way to laughter, and it wasn’t soft, gentle, and low.
A woman walked by pushing a carriage, with two toddlers clinging to her skirt on either side of her; she was trying to maneuver her charges to make as wide a circle as possible around the woman staring at a tree.
“Hello,” Roz said to her, turning with a smile.
“Hello.” She didn’t smile back, but she didn’t turn tail and run either. Compared with the typical first contact with an unknown tribe, this was like being visited by a Welcome Wagon lady giving out free coupons to local businesses.
“I’m new in town, and I’m trying to figure out what these signs mean.”
“Menner seit. Froyen seit. Men’s side, women’s side. Men and women don’t walk on the same side of the street.” She had a slight European intonation, more a suggestion of foreign birth than a genuine accent.
“At least I ended up on the right side,” Roz said, with a small demure smile.
“Yes. There is the menner seit.” She pointed across the street. “Not for you,” she added, just in case there could still be any remaining question.
“Well, thanks. Those are beautiful children you have.”
The woman’s response was to turn her head slightly away from Roz. Was it forbidden to compliment the kids here? The mother was delicate-featured and little more than a girl herself. Roz thought, trying to peer beneath the rigid expression, that she was probably eighteen or nineteen. Her pale, delicate skin was not touched by makeup, and it was hard to believe it ever had been. She was a natural redhead, too, judging by her pale-reddish eyelashes and eyebrows. Her hair was hidden beneath a scarf, tied with less pizzazz than Roz’s.
“I have an appointment with the Rebbe.”
“Yes.” This babe was impossible to impress. She had a teenager’s sullenness mixed with a matron’s severity.
“Could you tell me the best way to get to his office?”
“His office is in his home. If you keep going straight down this street, you’ll see the shul, the synagogue. The shul you won’t be able to miss. Across the street from the shul, there is the Rebbe’s house.”
“Hello, sweetie.” Roz squatted down before the redheaded child nearer her. “And what’s your name?”
The child—Roz couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy—spun around and burrowed into its mother’s brown woolen coat. Roz had observed that this was common behavior for children, though not universal. The Onuma children weren’t timid or bashful. They’d march right up to you and start to explore your clothes, your hair, the contents of your pockets, just as their parents did. Roz stood back up.
“Shy, huh?”
“With outsiders.”
“Probably doesn’t get to see them that often?”
“No, we’re lucky that way.”
Roz wandered around for a while. The only people she saw were women hurrying with small children. The menner seit was deserted. It reminded her of an Onuma village when the men were off on a raid to replenish their supply of brides.
She walked down the road that led to the synagogue. Her informant had been right: there was no missing it. It was a huge rectangular white stucco mess of a building, with arches and castellated cornices. Despite the grandiose architectural touches, the sheer bulk of the building gave it the look of one of those giant stores where people wheel out a year’s supply of pet food and toilet paper. It was like a Costco that had found God. All of its windows, including two big ones in the front, were arched in a shape that Roz knew had some sort of religious significance. Oh yeah. Those tablets Moses schlepped down from the mountain.
Roz’s family was the assimilated sort, New York City vintage. For her family, one of the ten commandments might as well have been to eat at a Chinese restaurant on Friday nights. She’d had a college boyfriend, Len Solo, who sometimes used to spend vacations with Roz’s family. Once, Roz’s mother, Alicia, had been talking with Len, and he’d pronounced some Yiddish word wrong—“kibbitz” with the accent on the second syllable, like “the bits”—and Roz’s mother had corrected him, saying, “You sound like a goy.” To which Len had responded, “Alicia, I am a goy!” And Alicia had burst into laughter—Roz had inherited her mother’s laugh— saying, “I don’t know why I’d assumed you were Jewish!” That was where Roz’s family stood when it came to their own tribe. It was a curiosity to them that sophisticated people could continue to care, most especially when it came to dating and marriage.
Roz had given a lot of work to figuring out the kinship relations of the various Onuma villages. Kinship was at the center of their social organization, determining the
two most important aspects of their social relations—namely, which men they went to war with and which women they could marry. There were complicated incest prohibitions, as there would have to be in villages in which just about everybody was related to everybody else, though sometimes the men would do some fancy kinship reclassifying so that they could get women they wanted for themselves or their sons. This could lead to big fights between the reclassifier and others who had also wanted the women for themselves or their own sons.
Cass had told Roz about how his mother had blamed inbreeding— what anthropologists called endogamy—for a host of the Valdeners’ problems. Deb jokingly told her sons—only Cass wasn’t so sure whether it was a joke—to marry women from as far away from their own group as possible—what anthropologists call exogamy—to “dilute those concentrated Valdener genes.”
Finding the synagogue, and the Rebbe’s house, had solved one mystery. The streets of New Walden were emptied of men because all of them were here, dressed identically in long black wool coats and large-brimmed black felt hats. The young boys were wearing these hats, too. Almost all of the men had beards, and all of them, young and old, had magnificent side locks, shaped like corkscrews and reaching down to their shoulders. There were a lot of blonds and redheads. You could see it with the men, since they didn’t cover their hair the way women did.
Wait a minute. Hadn’t Cass told her that in this sect the women actually shaved off their hair right after their weddings, and that any hair you saw on their heads, peeking out from their kerchiefs, was a wig? That rated right up there on the bizarro scale with almost anything she’d seen among the Onuma. It made the large families the Hasidim produced a minor miracle. These men were bedding bald women.
36 Arguments for the Existence of God Page 17
