by Deen, Shulem
I knew little about the Skverers back then. The Krasna school I attended was around the corner from the Skverer school, our backyards back to back, with occasional exchanges of water balloons hurled over the barbed-wire fence between us. “Skverer chenyokes,” we shouted. “Krasna bums,” they shouted back. And then our bells would ring and recess would be over, and we’d all go back to the same volumes of Talmud, the same rods and switches and rubber-wire casings in the hands of our rebbes.
Word on the street was that Skverers burned Breslov books in annual conflagrations along with the pre-Passover burning of the chometz. It was said that Skverers refused even to utter the word “Breslov,” hissing instead the phrase yene chevre, “that notorious group.” No one really knew the reason for the centuries-old hostilities but only that they had been passed down from generation to generation and were now a matter of tradition.
It was this animosity that would cause me some consternation later, when I thought I might attend the Skverer yeshiva. Given that my father had Breslov sympathies, he might not approve. But my father, calling the Skverers “ehrlich,” had no objections.
The Skverers, I would learn, were ehrlich but also idiosyncratic, with a kind of provincial piety that was uncommon among American Hasidim. Once, during my first few days at the Skverer yeshiva, I stood in the hallway speaking to my friend Chaim Elya when our first-year instructor passed, then stopped in his tracks and looked me up and down.
“Why are you dressed like a shaygetz?” he asked.
I stared at him, frozen. To dress like a shaygetz was to dress like a goy: blue jeans, T-shirts, bare head. But I was dressed in my beaver hat and long coat, the same as everyone else.
Our instructor shook his head, annoyed. “Where’s your gartel?” he asked, and I realized that my coat was unbuttoned and my gartel, the thin waistband worn during prayer, was in my pocket instead of around my waist. Skverers, I would later learn, wore their gartels at all times; to be gartel-less was to be vulgar, and to be vulgar was to be a shaygetz, which was only one step away from being a goy.
The afternoon after we issued our warnings to our friends and ransacked Mendy Klein’s room, an assembly of all the students was called. The dean condemned our actions. “Students should not take such matters into their own hands,” he said.
“He had to say that,” Avremel would tell us later, emphasizing that we’d done the right thing. We’d suffered no consequences, no suspensions, nothing even like the fifty-dollar penalty for failing an exam or the twenty-dollar penalty for missing a study session.
Still I felt shame, although I was not sure why. As the weeks and months passed, I tried to erase the memory of that day. I had been part of it, had volunteered to speak before those we had summoned, had taken part in the smashing and the stomping and the ransacking. I had felt during those moments like an insignificant part of a larger unit, my individuality swallowed by the collective. For the first time, I understood the power of a mob.
Nuta Margulis had been a good friend. Yossi Rosen had been my study partner. Mendy Klein had been my roommate. Each Friday afternoon, I would come by the dormitory with a pan of kugel for Mendy; it was common practice for married students to drop off homemade food for their former roommates until the latter, too, were married and would bring food to those who remained after them. The Friday after the incident, I brought the usual pan of potato kugel, and handed it to a resident outside the door to pass to Mendy. As I left, I wondered what Mendy would think of me, ransacking his room on Sunday and bringing him kugel on Friday. But Mendy said nothing about the event in the days and weeks that followed, and no one else spoke of it. If our friends bore us any grudges, they never expressed it. Yet, in the silence, in the unspokenness of it all, lay shame, thick as the densely woven prayer shawls over our backs, heavy as the braided silver adornments over our heads.
Chapter Six
Six months had passed since we were married. “Is there any news yet?” the rebbe would ask when Gitty and I went for one of the sixty-second audiences granted village residents in the days before Rosh Hashanah and during the nights of Chanukah. Gitty would watch from the far wall as I would shake my head, no news, and the rebbe would say, “Nu, may God help, it should be soon.”
We had settled into a routine. In the mornings, I would go off to the yeshiva and Gitty to her job at the offices of the Monsey Trails bus company, where her father was the general manager. From a window in her office, above the bustling garage at the entrance to the village, Gitty could see down to where mechanics worked on buses raised onto enormous lifts. I didn’t think it an appropriate place for a woman to work, with exhaust fumes and grime everywhere, a male world. But Gitty enjoyed being out of the house, along with the light secretarial work she was given.
Over dinner, we would sit mostly in silence, punctuated with polite inquiries about each other’s day. I did most of the talking, with Gitty listening carefully and only very occasionally offering words of her own. When she did, it came first in a whisper, and then, after clearing her throat, a croak. Her face would flush, and I would look away as she battled her anxiety within the strangeness of this new relationship.
Our interactions felt dictated, most of all, by the laws of family purity, the fear of forbidden contact hovering over us at all times. Once every month, I would come home to find that Gitty had moved the small bouquet of silk flowers from the kitchen counter to the table—this was the agreed-upon sign: it was that time of the month. During the two weeks that followed, the small space of our home would be overwhelmed by the presence of something invisible to me yet mysterious and forbidding, a spiritual bacterium more noxious than any physical substance. A single moment of carelessness could lead not only to great sin but generations of tainted souls.
“Can you take something to the dayan?” Gitty would ask at times during the Seven Clean Days, during which she did her twice-daily inspections. The blood would rise to her face as our eyes met, her expression at once determined and tortured, and as much as I hated these requests, I had no doubt that she hated them more. On the bedroom dresser she would lay a small plastic bag, inside of which was a two-inch square of inspection cloth, or occasionally an undergarment, which I would place inside my coat pocket and hope to find the dayan in his office on the first try.
“Let’s take a look at this, shall we?” the dayan would say, always too loudly, clearly audible to passersby behind me. At the window, he would hold up the item for examination by sunlight, while I looked away, anxious to be done with it all before the next man came knocking. Would his ruling be “kosher,” or “not kosher”? For those extended seconds, I felt like a patient dreading a physician’s diagnosis. If “not kosher,” I would have to tell Gitty to begin counting her seven days all over again, which she would accept in silence, although her expression of dismay would be hard not to notice.
A woman’s hair is nakedness, says the Talmud, and so, once married, she must never expose any of it. According to the Zohar, the primary text of the kabbalists, this applies even in her own home. During the last of her seven clean days, Gitty would take the set of electric clippers from above our bathroom sink and shear her entire head, leaving only several millimeters of growth, though even I, her husband, would rarely see those; a head-covering was required at all times. Indoors, or for casual visits and quick errands, a turban, green or blue or purple on weekdays and pristine white on the Sabbath. Outdoors, a short wig of synthetic hair covered with a hat—a pillbox during those early years of our marriage, though this would change with the fashions of the times.
After the seven clean days, Gitty would head to the ritual bath at the edge of the village, and return with her face glowing and her manner unusally serene. It was in those hours, between her return and the stroke of midnight, when we would retire for the special mitzvah of that night, that I would feel the first charges of eroticism, and an occasional spark of passion, so very distinct from the primal lust of previous years, though not yet fully recognizab
le. Over the next weeks, Gitty would be considered clean, and slowly we would get to know each other, though these early progressions felt infinitesimal.
Sometimes, Gitty would withdraw into herself for reasons I could not discern. “Are you upset about something?” I would ask, stiffly, and she would look away and say nothing.
“It is improper to call your wife by her name,” Avremel had warned during one of his sessions, and I was careful to follow his guidance. To get Gitty’s attention, I would clear my throat and say, “Um,” or “You hear?” Among friends, we referred to our wives using only coy and oblique euphemisms. “The household informed me of a wedding next week,” my study partner said, when notifying me of a pending absence. Yitzchok Schwartz was fond of speaking of his yiddene, his “Jewess,” causing heads to turn at such bold language.
“Is there any news yet?” Avremel asked when I ran into him one day outside the study hall. When I told Avremel that there was no news, he fixed me a look with his dark, scolding eyes. “There should be news by now,” he said. “Why is there no news?”
I didn’t know why there was no news, although Avremel came up with a reason soon enough.
“You must be doing it wrong,” he said.
He asked for details, and I gave him the rundown of our routine, parroting the directions I’d been given: We performed the mitzvah every Tuesday and Friday night after midnight, exactly as I’d been taught, always with “holiness and purity” at the forefront of our minds. We said the necessary prayers. We covered the windows with a quilt. We told stories of righteous men. We kissed twice. And then we did it quickly. As if forced by a demon—the vividness of those words proved extraordinarily effective in keeping the act sacred and devoid of pleasure.
Avremel looked confused, and then angry. “If that’s the way you do it, then a slice of noodle kugel is more pleasurable!”
I remember feeling confused. Wasn’t that the point, not to experience pleasure? “No,” Avremel said. That was the point but also not quite the point, because if there was no pleasure, it wasn’t the real thing. I was still confused, as he stood there making wild, wordless gestures and shook his head in exasperation. When he spoke again, it was with palpable irritation.
“For a woman’s body to respond,” he said, bringing his five fingers together opposite his nose, “in order for her to create a child, there must be liebshaft.” Liebshaft is the Yiddish word for love, and it was a strange word to hear, applied to a woman, from a man who was otherwise obsessed with guiding me on the path to holiness and purity. I did not know how Avremel knew this medical fact, but I had no reason to doubt him. Yet the idea made me angry.
“Love her?” I asked. The notion seemed ludicrous. “How?”
“If the love isn’t there,” Avremel said, “then you have to create it.” He shook his head and closed his eyes, as if thinking through a complex problem, and then opened them again. “You just have to find a way.”
Later that evening, as we ate our dinner of roast chicken and breaded egg noodles and spoke quietly about the things we’d done that day, I looked at Gitty and wondered if I could love her. When she stood up to clear our dishes, I noticed the curve of her hips as they swayed gently when she walked. As she stood at the sink and washed the dishes, I leaned on the counter nearby, and noticed the color in her cheeks, the gentle way she looked at me when she spoke, the softness of her voice when she asked what to prepare for lunch the next day.
The next evening, after my last study session, I made my way to the Mazel Tov Gift Shop, a small basement store that sold everything from Rachel’s Tomb needlecraft kits to sterling-silver menorahs to diamond rings. One night a week, after ten, the shop was open for one hour, for men only. The proprietor, Reb Moshe Hersh, a stocky man in a yellowed and grease-stained tallis katan, laid several trays of rings and earrings on the counter. I looked at the selection, and then looked at Moshe Hersh, who stood with his hands resting on the counter, waiting for my decision.
“What do you think?” I asked. I had never bought a woman a gift before, and the selection in front of me was a baffling array of gold and silver and glittery gems, like a field of pebbles glittering in the sunlight.
Moshe Hersh shrugged. “You’re the customer,” he said.
I studied the items in front of me. As Moshe Hersh stood breathing heavily, I inspected the pieces one by one and slowly began to notice their differences: silver and gold, sleek and intricate, chunky and subtle. I settled on a silver ring with a scalloped pattern and tiny diamonds inlaid across the top. I liked its understated elegance and hoped that Gitty’s tastes weren’t dissimilar.
I left the ring in a box on Gitty’s pillow when I left for yeshiva the next morning. Under the box I placed a folded sheet of plain white paper on which I wrote what seemed like appropriate sentiments, using the same Hebrew script I used for jotting notes on the Talmud or for transcribing the rebbe’s talks. I hope that our love will grow and last forever. As if the love was already there, and needed only to be tended and nurtured. As with faith, Avremel had declared it something one might will into existence.
When I returned home that evening, Gitty was at the kitchen counter, her back to me, putting our dinner onto plates. She said nothing, and so I thought perhaps she hadn’t discovered my gift. I checked the bedroom, but the package was not on her pillow. “Did you find … the thing?” I asked when I returned to the kitchen.
She nodded without turning, and then, almost as an afterthought, said, “Thank you.” She made no more mention of the gift, and neither did I, and I wondered if she liked it, if I was making any progress toward creating love.
Several days later, she turned to me bashfully as she laid our dinner plates on the table. “I’m two weeks late,” she said, her face aglow with a brighter than usual smile. It was almost as if she were suppressing a giggle, embarrassed by her own giddiness. I wasn’t sure what she meant, until she said, “I’m not certain about it yet. But I think there’s a test I can take.” The test could be purchased at the pharmacy. She was going to ask her sister, and if she was right, we would know tomorrow.
Later that night, as we prepared for bed, I noticed, on her left hand, the polished silver ring I had bought, with its scalloped patterns and tiny diamonds sparkling against the soft light of the bedside lamp.
Finally, there was news. There were so many questions and so many things to talk about—it was as if we were suddenly new people in an entirely new relationship. The reticence that had hovered for six months in the tiny apartment at the end of Roosevelt Avenue was now gone, almost as if it had never existed. We talked of baby names and upcoming doctor’s visits. We also disclosed to each other how little we knew about what it meant to be parents.
One night, as we lay in our separate beds across the room, I turned to her. “Can I ask you a question?”
She propped herself up on one elbow.
“How does the baby come out?” I asked. I immediately thought, what a foolish question, and tried to explain. “I mean, where does it come out from?”
This was before Gitty had gone for her first doctor’s appointment, before we’d had a chance to read any of the books and pamphlets she would bring home and point excitedly to charts and diagrams and drawings of ovaries and fallopian tubes, before I’d had a chance to go to our local bookstore and whisper to the cashier that I needed one of the books from beneath his counter, where they lay hidden from the prying eyes of teenage boys who made the bookstore their evening hangout.
“I don’t know,” Gitty said. “I wondered about it myself.” She looked at me from across the room, a sliver of light from the edge of our window shades casting a thin white glow across her face, and in her expression I saw a touch of anxiety. “You don’t think it requires surgery, do you?” she asked. I did not know what to say, because that was exactly what I had thought.
When I asked, hesitantly, before her first doctor’s appointment whether we would see the doctor together, Gitty burst out laughing. It was a
ludicrous thought, she said. Men did not accompany their wives to the doctor. “But I’ll let you know what I learn,” she said.
Gitty made an appointment at the Refuah Health Center, an imposing building with a beige art-deco facade at the entrance to the village. A five-doctor practice from Manhattan sent one doctor every Wednesday afternoon to attend to all the pregnant women of New Square. It was an arrangement worked out by the wizards of Hasidic politicking, through which patients on Medicaid were provided with world-class medical services. The exams typically lasted only a few minutes each, most of them for ordinary and uncomplicated pregnancies, so the doctor was able to see many women in a short time slot, for maximum efficiency.
“See the head here?” Gitty pointed breathlessly one day, showing me the photos of the first ultrasound scan. “See the hands? The feet?” I saw nothing but blurs of blacks and grays, and felt a distinct pang of envy for the attachment between mother and child, an attachment I realized that I could never fully share.
Gitty neared her due date toward the end of summer. The weeks were hectic with preparation for the seemingly endless procession of major and minor holidays squeezed into three and a half weeks: Selichos, Rosh Hashanah, Tzom Gedalya, Yom Kippur, Sukkos, Chol Hamo’ed, Hoshanah Rabbah, Shmini Atzeres, and Simchas Torah. Our baby’s arrival was imminent, but in the frenzy of holiday preparations, it felt to me all but forgotten. Our refrigerator was stacked with aluminum pans of gefilte fish, roast chicken, farfel, kreplach, and jars of apple compote. In the freezer were a dozen containers of chicken noodle soup. While Gitty baked a surplus of challahs to last us the entire month, I climbed a ladder outside our small apartment, assembling wall panels, adjusting nuts and bolts, and putting up rafters on our eight-by-eight sukkah, the outdoor booth in which, during the Sukkos holiday, we would eat our meals, read, schmooze, and, along with the rest of the village, catch cold from sleeping seven nights under the cool autumn skies.
