All Who Go Do Not Return

by Deen, Shulem

  “Well,” Yakov Mayer said. “They’ve got a job placement program.”

  Several days later, Yakov Mayer and I sat in the very last row of the Monsey Trails commuter bus to Manhattan. It felt like a synagogue—the sights and sounds were the same: men in their prayer shawls and phylacteries, eyelids still heavy from sleep, mumbling prayers. The prayer leader stood in the center of the aisle, calling the ends and beginnings of chapters: Halleluyah, halleluyah, mumble mumble, And David blessed the Lord, mumble mumble, On that day Moses sang with the children of Israel, mumble mumble.

  The men all sat on one side of the bus with a curtain drawn down the aisle, beneath which we got glimpses from the other side: gold-foil flats, fashionable heels, stockinged ankles.

  For the Shmoneh Esreh, we rose and squeezed into the aisle, swaying along with the jerky motion of the bus as it cut between cars, tractor-trailers, and New Jersey Transit buses on their way to the Lincoln Tunnel. A man squeezed through the throng in the aisle, dangling a navy-blue velvet pouch between his thumb and forefinger: Rabbi Mayer, Master of the Miracle was embroidered on the pouch in gold thread. From within came the jingle of coins as men dropped nickels, dimes, quarters, to support the pious men of Jerusalem. For the Torah reading, a scroll was taken from a makeshift ark overhead. One man read aloud from it, his tinny voice losing strength as it traveled through the mass of bodies, sounding, to us in the rear, like an overseas phone call with a bad connection.

  The men were Orthodox, and yet most of them were non-Hasidim, working professionals—attorneys, accountants, doctors, investment bankers. They wore starched button-down shirts and sharp suits and polished black shoes. A handful of Hasidic men, who worked mostly as diamond dealers in midtown or as salesmen for the Hasidic-owned B&H electronics store, huddled in the rear. Unlike the others, the Hasidic men looked shabby, in ill-fitting overcoats, beaver hats speckled with rain spots, unkempt beards. These were my people, and at first, the others filled me with disdain. Such vanity! Their shoes so polished, they sparkled. Their trousers so perfectly creased, it was as if they had pressed them just that morning. Who had time for such nonsense?

  Yet they had something I wanted. I envied their sense of purpose, the vibes of success they emitted, electric charges of money and comfort zapping off their power ties and their shimmering gold metal cuff links. These men, I imagined, didn’t pawn their wives’ jewelry to make rent.

  Could I be like them?

  Only a few years earlier, the thought would’ve horrified me, but now, I wondered, why not? They, too, were Orthodox. They prayed, they kept kosher, they kept Shabbos, and yet they lived in the modern world, engaged with it, interacted with it, earned decent livings through hard work and honest professions, and then they came home to their families and lived fully religious lives. Couldn’t one have it all?

  Later that morning, in an office building on a narrow street in Manhattan’s financial district, Yakov Mayer and I sat in a room filled with long tables as a nervous little man in a white shirt, his tangled tzitzis fringes hanging from his belt, handed us a pile of stapled sheets of paper. This was the course’s entrance exam, an “aptitude test,” and it had three sections: English, mathematics, and logic. We had thirty minutes for each, and I zipped through the questions with ease.

  What comes next? 16, 32, 64, 128,?

  Rewrite the sentence: Theirs a dog on the porch with a tale between it’s legs.

  True or false? If all keneebels are gezeebels, then all gezeebels are keneebels.

  “Why would they give us such a difficult exam?” Yakov Mayer asked, as we headed to catch the bus back home. “What’s English grammar got to with programming?”

  He’d guessed his way through most of the questions, he said.

  Clearly, we experienced the exam differently, and I wasn’t surprised. All Hasidic boys’ schools were substandard in their general-studies curricula, but in New Square, things were particularly bad. Yakov Mayer’s “English” classes had consisted of little more than lessons in the English alphabet and basic arithmetic. His teachers were young men who had themselves been educated in New Square’s cheder, and they didn’t know much more than the students. “Aynglish, foy!” we had cried at the Krasna cheder in Borough Park, but now I felt thankful for those two hours we’d had in late afternoon. As disdainful as we were back then, it gave me a good enough foundation. Yakov Mayer hadn’t been so lucky. In preparation for the exam, he had asked his wife to tutor him in English and math, but even so, he found it all too challenging.

  Two days later, we got our test results. I passed, but Yakov Mayer failed.

  “I still don’t understand what English has to do with programming,” he said to me over the phone. Yet he was not discouraged. “I can take the test again,” he said. He’d already begun new tutoring sessions with his wife.

  A couple of weeks later, he retook the test, and this time he passed—just barely. There was still a catch, though, for both of us. Neither of us had high school diplomas, and so we would have to take another exam that covered some of the basic high school subjects.

  “You ready for the next exam?” I asked.

  Yakov Mayer was silent for a moment. “I think not. I’ll just have to make a diploma.”

  I was stunned. “Forge one?”

  “What else can I do? There’s no way I’ll pass this exam.”

  A few days later, I took the bus to the city, alone this time, and took the second exam. It was more challenging than the first, especially the math questions. I found myself staring at problems involving x’s and y’s, and was stumped.

  Simplify: 9x + 3y * 6 = 24x − 2

  How did letters get into a math problem? Baffled, I stared for a long time at the sheet in front of me. Was it A equals 1, B equals 2, and so on? I tried to remember back to my math lessons as a child. The last lessons we had were on fractions, and I vaguely recalled converting mixed numbers and finding common denominators, but nothing about the value of letters.

  This time, it was my turn to guess my way through my responses. I answered the questions as best I could, and handed in my exam. I wondered if I should’ve just followed Yakov Mayer’s lead and forged a high school diploma. But now it was too late. Perhaps my first instincts had been right. Maybe this course wasn’t for people like me. Maybe it was meant only for non-Hasidim, those raised in less sheltered environments, who’d taken high school math and all kinds of other subjects that our Hasidic yeshivas did not bother with.

  To my surprise, I passed this exam, too. Not with a perfect score, but good enough. Yakov Mayer, for his part, submitted his forged high school diploma, and on a scorching day in July 1999, we took the bus to downtown Manhattan for our first day of class.

  Two months in, Yakov Mayer sat down next to me in the classroom.

  “I’ve decided to drop out,” he said. “I struggle to get through every page.” He pointed to our textbook, The C Programming Language, which lay on the table in front of us. His tone was almost apologetic. The course had turned out to be more stimulating than I’d expected, and as much as I’d taught myself on my own, I quickly learned a lot more. Yakov Mayer was a bright fellow and was quick to grasp the concepts when they were explained to him. He had been a good student in yeshiva. He was disciplined and determined and conscientious about the reading and the lab assignments. But his English skills were too weak. Even with his wife’s help, he had trouble reading and understanding the material.

  Optimistic as usual, he assured me that it was for the best. Programming just wasn’t for him.

  Yakov Mayer’s departure from the class left me anxious—for his sake but also for that of my own family. It was he who had encouraged me to pursue this course seriously; yet his own handicaps, a result of the educational neglect of our world, kept him from pursuing his own career aspirations. Even if I myself had been more fortunate, was this to be my children’s fate, to be raised not only with rigidly defined roles but deprived of any ability to step out of them?

&nb
sp; It was early January 2000, and the course was winding down. It was a new millennium. The Y2K bug brought no catastrophes. Hundreds of Internet-based companies were going public. The national economy was in better shape than it had ever been—in less than a year’s time, outgoing president Clinton would announce that the federal government had an unprecedented $230 billion budget surplus, with projections of paying off the national debt within the decade.

  Hope and optimism could not have been more infectious, and it seemed apropos of these good times that I received a phone call one day from a woman about a job. I was in the computer lab, finishing our final class project, when the call came. I’d e-mailed my résumé to a number of listings on several job websites—Monster, Dice, Jobs.com—and now a recruiter was calling in response.

  “I was wondering if you would like to take this interview,” she said. The name of the company was Bloomberg. “They’re a media company. They provide news and analysis on the financial markets.” “Bloomberg?” She couldn’t really mean—

  “Yes, Bloomberg. They’re a company in midtown.”

  “The Bloomberg?”

  “Yes,” she said with a chuckle. “The Bloomberg.”

  It felt surreal. Only a few years earlier, I had been a kollel student. A cheder teacher. A Hasidic young man who knew so little about the world that I had to sneak behind my wife’s back to listen to the radio or read books at the library. Now I faced the prospect of working for an iconic New York corporation.

  A job interview at an iconic New York corporation was different from an interview at one of our Hasidic-owned businesses. The portly fellow who sat two rows behind me in shul, or the fellow who, like me, soaked a little too long in the hot mikveh on late Friday afternoons: they weren’t intimidating as interviewers, but an interview at a major New York corporation required preparation. And so on my way home that day, I drove to Barnes and Noble and purchased a yellow handbook: Job Interviews for Dummies.

  On the bus ride home, I felt a wave of anxiety. There were Hasidim who interacted with outsiders with confidence, even arrogance, never pausing to consider their handicaps—of education, of language, of their essential alienness from the surrounding culture. But I had never been that way. Just walking down a Manhattan street in my Hasidic garb made me uncomfortably self-conscious, as did my Yiddish accent. I was suddenly anxious that I, a former aspiring Torah scholar, would never fit into a secular office environment. I would say the wrong thing, or look the wrong way, and it would only confirm what everyone knew: just another Hasid, freakishly stuck in a medieval world, unable or unwilling to make the necessary accommodations to modern living.

  At home that evening, I stood in front of the vanity mirror and assessed my appearance. I looked at my close-cropped hair, my un-trimmed beard, the tangled knot of payess over my ears. I stared at my large boxy plastic-framed eyeglasses, black on top and blending into clear on the bottom, and saw for the first time how remarkably ugly they were. I had first begun to wear those glasses as a teenager, when paying attention to one’s appearance was considered unseemly. At the yeshiva, there hadn’t been a single mirror on the premises. It is forbidden for a man to gaze into a mirror, we studied, as he must not act in the manner of a woman.

  Now, however, I needed to make some adjustments. Later that evening, I drove to an eyeglass store in Monsey. The middle-aged Hasid behind the counter grinned widely when I pointed to the display case with its selection of stylish pairs of glasses.

  “Time for an upgrade, eh?” He nodded approvingly when I pointed to a gold-wire frame. “Givenchy,” he said, removing it from the display case and laying it on the counter.

  “What?”

  “Givenchy,” he said again, with an excited nod. “A brand name.”

  I had never heard of the brand, but I liked the style, and walked out of the store with a new burst of confidence.

  The day before my interview, I stopped into Men’s Wearhouse, down Route 59. I had never before been to a non-Hasidic clothing store, but I was now out for a special purchase. I had been reading through the various sections of Job Interviews for Dummies, and I came to notes on attire. Men, the book said, were to wear a suit and tie to all job interviews.

  I had a suit but had never worn a tie. No one I knew had worn a tie. Hasidim simply didn’t wear them, and yet, there was no rule against it—and that’s when it struck me: a tie! The perfect touch to transform me from slovenly Hasid to modern gentleman.

  After purchasing what I thought was a suitable style, I brought the tie home and called to Gitty to have a look. I removed it ceremoniously from the store’s plastic bag, and held it across both hands, resplendent in its gradations of soft blue and gray.

  “You bought a tie just to wear it once?”

  “Maybe I’ll have more than one interview,” I said hopefully, forgetting for a moment that the objective was fewer interviews, not more.

  It wasn’t only the tie that Gitty was skeptical about. She hadn’t been taken with the whole programming idea. “Who’s going to hire you?” she had asked throughout the six-month course. When I told her about the interview at Bloomberg, she only shook her head in exasperation. “Has it not occurred to you that we’ll lose our food stamps?”

  Gitty intuited another problem as well. “Do you even know how to wear it?” she asked. Before I could respond, she turned back to the full-color brochure of prizes for some local organization’s Chinese auction, leaving me to wonder on my own.

  I took the tie to the vanity mirror, turned up my shirt collar, and placed the tie around my neck. I wrapped it first one way and then another. I flipped and pulled and twisted and wrapped it around in every conceivable way until I’d nearly strangled myself, but all I got was a sloppy bulge at the base of my throat, which promptly undid itself as soon as I removed my hand.

  I was nearly ready to concede that the tie was a foolish idea, when, thirty minutes later, I had the answer. “God bless the Internet!” I shouted to Gitty as I ran from the computer in the dining room to the vanity mirror. In my hand, I held printouts of all the tie-knotting instructions I would ever need, courtesy of howtotieatie.com.

  I chose a full Windsor, practiced in front of the mirror for half an hour or so, and then placed the printouts carefully in my coat pocket. I might need the instructions again when I got off the bus the next day. I would find a corner somewhere on the streets of Manhattan, and fasten the tie under my collar before heading to the interview. For a moment, I considered fastening the tie before I left home, but quickly gave up the idea. I couldn’t possibly wear a tie on the bus. I imagined men staring, women casting nervous glances, children pointing and laughing: Look! A Hasid wearing a tie!

  But the Bloomberg people wouldn’t laugh. They would be impressed. Look! A Hasid wearing a tie! How uncanny—just what we were looking for!

  Around noon the next day, I stood at the corner of Park Avenue and Fifty-Eighth Street, my shirt collar up, staring at my reflection in the glass wall of an office building. Around me, men in smart suits and women in tight skirts and fashionable heels strode purposefully between buildings, a corporate sheen reflecting off the many revolving doors. Stern, uniformed men looked out from behind security desks, guarding the entrances to these palaces of capitalism.

  It took several tries, until the tie finally felt right, more or less. The knot felt a little too wide and a little too loose, and I wasn’t sure that I got it the correct length down to my belt but decided that it would do. I couldn’t be late for the interview.

  In the waiting area of Bloomberg’s headquarters, I sat with my beaver hat on my lap and stared at giant yellow-and-orange iridescent fish in floor-to-ceiling aquariums. Employees came and went from a nearby room filled with snacks and drinks—I remember a retail-store-style refrigerator filled entirely with Coke cans—and bantered with one another in a way that I knew I never could. Their speech sounded like a foreign language. I tried to sit tall, purse my lips into the polite-but-not-too-expressive smile that every
one else appeared to be wearing, but I knew that I was putting up a facade.

  Tie or no tie, I was a Hasid from New Square, and this was too strange a world for me. When I was finally summoned for my interview, the interviewers were cordial and businesslike, but I wasn’t surprised when the recruiter told me the next day that I didn’t get the job. Still, just the fact that I’d managed the interview made me feel proud. I was certain that I was the first Hasid from New Square to be interviewed at Bloomberg. That had to count for something.

  A month later, I took the bus into midtown for another interview, this time at the offices of a trade magazine for the diamond and jewelry industry. I didn’t bother with the tie. The business was owned by an American-Israeli businessman who was used to hiring Hasidim. The owner himself was Modern Orthodox, and he admired those who’d honed their analytical skills on years of Talmud study. Some of his clients were Hasidim, too, longtime diamond and jewelry dealers, and I felt right at home.

  On a Monday in February 2000, I rode the 7:15 bus from Monsey to my first day of work. It was an entry-level position, creating custom software applications for the staff of a dozen or so employees. Still, my salary was greater than anything I’d previously earned. Three weeks into the job, I received my first paycheck. Soon after, as Gitty predicted, we lost our food stamps. And for the very first time in my life, I felt like a man.

  The next time I saw Yakov Mayer, he was trying his luck again with life insurance. He’d sold a couple of policies, he said. “With God’s help, it’ll all work out.”

  I wished him well.

  “Maybe we can sit down some time, talk a little about finances and stuff?”

  “About finances?”

  “Some life-insurance policies can be attractive investments. And also, you know, if something should happen, God forbid—”

  I shook my head sadly. I was in no position to buy life insurance. I was only now finding my footing in life. Matters of death would have to wait. As it was, our expenses were up. Just a few months earlier, we’d welcomed the newest member of our family. In September 1999, Gitty gave birth to our fourth child, our first boy: Akiva.