by Deen, Shulem
On the Internet, too, I encountered hostile reactions. On Tapuz, a Yiddish forum, one irate commenter going by the name of Muzar found his own creative voice in his condemnation:
I have come across the blog of Hasidic Rebel: a loathsome swine, a disgusting poisonous snake, a revolting outcast, the shit-covered asshole of a sick dog. A gruesome death upon him…. May the cholera descend upon his limbs, may he be ensnared within the devil’s clutches, may he be buried alive, his mendacious tongue skinned, his mad eyes gouged; may he hang, strangle, and choke. May we live to see it speedily and with joy.
The violent imagery shook me, even as it did not entirely surprise me. I also found it perversely amusing. May we live to see it speedily and with joy. The same phrase we used for the coming of the Messiah. The thing we’ve been waiting for forever, and will likely go on waiting for forever.
I did not know who Muzar was, but I recognized him, the maniacal language echoing so much of what I’d heard from rabbis and teachers. I also recognized in him aspects of my younger self—the swagger, the lazy resort to overstatement. I knew that we were not as quick to punish offenders as we were to issue threats; and to declare minor sins capital offenses, only to have passions cool the next morning.
At the same time, I remembered the slashed car tires and broken windows of Amrom Pollack, when he chose to perform his son’s bris outside our village, denying the rebbe the honors.
I remembered the tales of Mendel Vechter, the rumors of how he’d been stripped naked, beaten, his beard forcibly shaved by his former Satmar comrades for having absconded to their arch-nemeses, the Lubavitchers.
I remembered the story of Itzik Felder, a former Skverer Hasid who left to follow the rebbe of Rachmastrivka. When he came back to New Square one evening for a family wedding, he was slapped in the face and punched in the gut and instructed to never again defile our streets with his presence.
I remembered my own incident with Moshe Wolf on the bus. I remembered the eruv disturbances in Williamsburg that had driven me to begin writing the blog in the first place.
We must determine the identity of Hasidic Rebel, find out where he lives, and hold a not-so-peaceful demonstration, wrote another commenter on the same Yiddish forum.
“What will we do,” Gitty asked one evening, “if people find out it’s you? What if something happens?”
I did not believe we’d be harmed, I told her, even as I secretly worried about it.
“What if the children are expelled from school?” she asked.
This was more likely. School expulsions were the primary method for maintaining ideological conformity among parents.
“Maybe we can move to Monsey. Find a more relaxed environment.”
But Monsey wasn’t an option for Gitty. “Whom will the children marry?”
This was the Great Anxiety of our world: shidduchim, the system of arranged marriages. Good marriages were available only for those with perfect, unblemished families. Those who would not conform, though, who stood out in ways colorful or unconventional, suffered the heartache of having their children consigned to the scrap heap of the matchmaker’s notebook.
I reminded Gitty that our eldest was barely nine years old, but she only looked at me glumly.
“It is never too early to worry about shidduchim.”
Chapter Nineteen
Summer evenings, when New Square felt suffocating, after the children were in bed, and Gitty would join other women on lawn chairs outside our home for another evening of chatter, and the men gathered at the synagogue for prayers and several hours of study, I would drive my Honda Odyssey down the Palisades Parkway and over the George Washington Bridge, seeking an escape with no particular destination. Often I would end up in Greenwich Village, strolling the leafy streets, gazing at its nineteenth-century row houses and NYU campus buildings, observing the vibrant nightlife around MacDougal and Thompson and Bleecker, and imagine a different life.
I was aware that here, too, there must be regrets, dreams of youth shattered by the realities of modern living. Here, too, I was sure, there were unhappy lives, stalled careers, loves lost and loveless connections maintained for all the wrong reasons. Here, too, I knew, there was the need to conform, with social codes just as arbitrary and stifling. Yet I would return, again and again, drawn to the mystique of freedom, only an hour from home but so many worlds apart.
One evening, I thought I might visit a bar. Bars, I had come to learn, were a celebrated institution of Western culture, where humans went to meet other humans, at least those without synagogues and mikvehs and coffee rooms. But how did it work? Did one buy a drink, and then simply strike up a conversation with a stranger? Was there a protocol to it? Or did one simply sip one’s drink in silence, and then leave? I wondered what kinds of drinks I might order, whether there were rules and conventions that I should first learn. In our world, alcohol was consumed with few rituals, cheap whiskeys and vodkas straight up in one-ounce “schnapps cups,” at kiddush on Shabbos morning or at a vach nacht for a baby boy. In movies, I had seen James Bond order his martinis, “shaken, not stirred” and seen people drink beer out of tall glasses, thick layers of foam at the top, but I did not know what martinis or beers tasted like or how to choose one.
I passed several bars along Bleecker Street and peered inside. Some had TV screens showing sports games, others had crowds huddling over the bar counter, chatting with the bartenders. Others seemed subdued, couples sitting at small tables, chatting over flickering candles in small glass cups.
I would pick one at random, I decided, and I stepped inside a crowded bar near Bleecker and Seventh. The noise was disorienting, loud conversation and laughter and shouts across the room. Did all these people know one another? I wondered. The seats at the bar were taken, and the standing areas were crowded as well. I wondered whether I looked out of place. I had left my hat and long coat in my car, but still I wore my yarmulke and sported a full beard, with my sidelocks twisted up in knots over my ears.
I would order a drink I had seen in the movies. “Gin and tonic,” I’d say to the bartender, as if I’d been drinking it all my life. I had never had gin, or tonic, but it sounded like something one might order in a bar. Yet what if this, too, was wrong? What if “gin and tonic” was not a drink but an inside joke of some sort, an allusion I had missed? What if it was like moonshine, something sold in another place and another time, and I’d appear foolish for asking for it?
My eyes fell on a series of framed photographs on the wall. They were of smiling men, although something was odd about it all. They appeared to be striking sexually suggestive poses. Some of the men in the photographs wore pants with large circles cut open to reveal their buttocks, flashing their backsides to the camera. Some of the men were grabbing one another’s crotches or tucking their hands inside one another’s pants.
Then it hit me. This must be a gay bar. Did straight people go to gay bars? Did my being here suggest that I was gay? Would I be approached for gay sex? Before I could give it much thought, I fled, out the door and into the street and back to my car, back to my home in New Square, where I knew the rules, and where pants generally covered butts completely, at least in public, and where a schnapps cup of Old Williamsburg whiskey could be had without worrying about looking foolish.
Still, I could not stay away from New York City for long, and soon returned, spending evening after evening searching for entry into this world. Some nights, I would head to Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, on the fifth floor of the new Time Warner Center, where, behind the band, through floor-to-ceiling windows, I could take in the backdrop of Columbus Circle and Central Park, which gave me the feeling that the jazz club itself was in the park, its stage lights iridescent against the moonlight. Sometimes I would go for a movie at Loew’s at Sixty-Eighth, or to Barnes and Noble at Sixty-Sixth and Broadway, to browse its shelves until the store’s midnight closing time, then head around the corner to Starbucks, where I would sit with my laptop and soak in the pleasure of simply
being in Manhattan. I knew that there were other Hasidim who spent time in the city, tucking their payess up behind their ears, donning less conspicuous headgear, trading in their wide-brimmed hats and long coats for Ascot caps and short leather jackets. But I didn’t know them and didn’t know where I might find them, and so I wandered the streets of Manhattan alone.
One day, I received an e-mail from a stranger named KeaLoha. She was a photographer, she said, with an idea for a new project. She wanted to photograph Hasidim. Would I help? she asked. Could I tell her more about my world and what it was like?
I could help, maybe, I said. More important, I craved a meeting with an outsider. I wanted to speak to somebody, anybody, from the world outside my own. After blogging for six months, my regular stream of posts had slowed to a trickle. The attention my blog received had been gratifying, if a little overwhelming, but it also turned what was originally a casual outlet for off-the-cuff musings into an energy-sapping frenzy of thinking up ideas for new posts, and the growing need to write with more consideration for maintaining reader interest. The initial burst of satisfaction soon dissipated, and what I wanted now was a real-world engagement with the outside world, not merely a virtual one.
KeaLoha and I arranged to meet at the Barnes and Noble café at Sixty-Sixth and Broadway. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the place was crowded when I stepped off the escalator on the fourth floor. I hadn’t thought to ask how I’d recognize her, until I saw someone waving. She was a young black woman, who looked to be in her thirties, and I wondered if it struck anyone as odd: a black woman and a Hasidic man having coffee.
I’d been interviewed several times by then. Aside from the Village Voice reporter, there had been Pearl, a twenty-four-year-old Columbia journalism student, who was writing about renegade Hasidim for her master’s thesis. There was Isabella, a producer for a German-language program on a Swiss radio station. I clung to these encounters as potential anchors for life outside the Hasidic world, although I had to remind myself that these people sought not friendship but my story. Still, these engagements offered a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people.
KeaLoha and I had meant to talk about her photography project, but we quickly switched to talking about our personal lives. She had recently returned from several years of living in West Africa, and she eagerly shared her experiences. When I described my life to her, KeaLoha appeared stunned.
“You met your future wife for only seven minutes?” KeaLoha shook her head in disbelief. “And you’ve never had sex with anyone else? Ever?” She fired off the questions one after the other, sometimes circling back and asking the same ones over and over again. “Do you love her? Are you attracted to her?”
The questions put me off for a moment. The answers were no, to each one, and made me fidget in my seat. I wanted to tell KeaLoha the truth. That if I’d had a choice, I would not have married Gitty. But it felt unkind to say it, even cruel, and I didn’t want to be cruel, and I didn’t want KeaLoha to think me cruel. Why, then, did you marry her? I imagined her asking in outrage. How could you? The poor woman. I was ashamed of my own feelings, afraid even now to be misunderstood.
KeaLoha did not judge me, though, nor did she misunderstand. She shook her head and let out a long sigh.
“Can’t you get divorced?”
I remember seeing sadness in her eyes, which were unusually large, the whites visible around her irises. Not pretty but striking nonetheless. I looked at her long locks of curly brown hair and the soft brown skin of her cheeks and forehead. And again those eyes. Something about them repelled and mesmerized me at the same time. In her voice was something both gentle and insistent.
“Lots of people get divorced,” she said. “You can live the life you want. You have that right.”
It was all so simple to her. I didn’t know how to explain that it was nearly impossible. How divorce came with a dreadful stigma, that the effects on my children would be so terrible that it felt too cruel even to consider.
I looked around at the others in the café. There had been a young couple ahead of me at the counter a few minutes earlier, and now they were sitting a few feet away, leaning over the table, nuzzling noses and nibbling at each other’s lips. I wondered what that felt like, to have the burning desire to be so physically close to someone, to have no restraints about being so in public. Then I thought back to Gitty and to KeaLoha’s insistent questions.
“We do have good sex,” I said.
“You have nothing to compare it with,” she said with a scoff. After a moment, she asked, “Would you ever have sex with someone else? Would you cheat? Would you have an affair?”
In later years, I would learn of the stereotypes of Hasidic men as patrons of sex workers of all kinds. Strippers, prostitutes, dominatrices, even male escorts. At the time, however, the thought would’ve shocked me. I could not imagine any of my friends being of that sort.
We spoke for almost three hours. For KeaLoha, this was a project; but to me, the experience had a lasting effect. For days, my thoughts were preoccupied with how different KeaLoha’s life was from my own. More than anything, though, I couldn’t get one comment out of my mind: Lots of people get divorced. You can live the life you want. You have that right.
My sister’s husband, Gedalya, had seen me change, had watched me go from devout young Talmud student, oblivious to the ways of the world, to what I had become. He was a Bobover Hasid, several years older than I. Gedalya and I didn’t see each other much, but on those occasions that I dropped by my sister’s Borough Park home, we would end up talking for hours.
He was shocked, however, when I told him that I was no longer a believer. “You believe in nothing at all?” He thought it was perhaps understandable to reject the Hasidic lifestyle, or belief in the rebbe, but he could not fathom how I could reject the Torah as God’s word. It was even harder for him to accept that I no longer believed in the power of prayer. When I told him that I no longer believed in any conventional notion of God, or of a divinely imposed order to our universe, he stared at me wide-eyed. “What are you, nuts?”
After several hours, he finally accepted that my beliefs had changed and that he wouldn’t be able to talk me out of them. But now he had a different question.
“So why are you still here? Why are you still living the lifestyle?”
“Because it’s complicated. I’m married. I’ve got kids. What am I supposed to do, drop it all?” He knew as well as I that it wasn’t so simple. “But who knows? Maybe one day.”
“It’ll never happen,” he snapped, scorn shooting from his eyes like darts. “You’ll never leave.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You, my friend, don’t have the guts.”
Those who leave simply cannot resist temptation. This mantra was repeated so frequently that I felt the accusation acutely, whenever the prospect of leaving crossed my mind, even if only as a fantasy. What was it that I sought in encounters with outsiders, in my meetings with KeaLoha and Pearl and Isabella? What was it that I really wanted?
It wasn’t clear to me at the time; but later, I would realize that I wanted no more than a world in which I was not lying and hiding. I wanted the freedom to simply be who I was, without fear or shame. When caught in a world where your very essence feels shameful, life turns into a feverish obsession with suppressing your true identity in favor of a socially accepted one. I knew that something, soon, would have to give.
Chapter Twenty
If during the week, I found ways to relieve the tension of living a double life, on Shabbos I had few such options. Worst of all were Shabbos morning services. For three hours each Saturday morning, every adult male member of the community, and a good portion of its male children, packed into the village’s synagogue, and I had no choice but to take part.
“Tatti, can I come to shul with you?” Akiva would ask. And I would sigh, and say, “Not this week, shayfele.” I couldn’t imagine a three-year-old enjoying what I, at thirty, now found excrucia
tingly humdrum.
Women and girls did not attend shul except for special occasions, but for any male above bar mitzvah age, to stay home was unheard of. Gitty would be furious if I stayed home. The children would ask uncomfortable questions. Neighbors might catch a glimpse of me through the window, or one of our children’s friends would come to visit and spot me and report me to her parents.
And so I attended each week, even as I despised the monotonous grind of bowing and swaying and mumbling and chanting. In the summer, with two thousand bodies packed into one hall, the heat was oppressive. The layers of clothing—small woolen tallis katan worn over one’s shirt, the long black caftan on top of it, all of it covered with an enormous wool prayer shawl, with its heavy silver brocade adornment as a headpiece—made it even worse.
One Saturday morning, I discovered that the yeshiva building across the plaza was unlocked. The building was cleared of its usual bustle, and I wandered the corridors, peering into empty lecture rooms in which, all week long, students gathered to study the laws of betrothal and divorce, property damages and court-ordered floggings, sacrificial lambs and burning red heifers. At the end of the corridor were the doors to the cavernous study hall, now completely empty. It was the perfect place for a heretic to pass the time while everyone else prayed.
The first few weeks, I brought along a book, but soon I realized I was not alone. In an alcove of the study hall, or in some of the farther lecture rooms, I began to find other men passing the time, sometimes in twos and threes. Each was there for his own reason—some simply disliked the crowds in shul, others just didn’t care for prayer—and within several months, we came to form a group that gathered each Saturday morning. While the rest of the village men spent three hours praying, reading from the Torah, and engaging in the tedious call-and-response between prayer leader and congregation, I, along with Yitzy Ruttner, Hershy Brizel, the three Dunner brothers, and several others, would gather to discuss the important topics of the day—general news, Hasidic politics, community gossip—identical to the discussions one heard in the ritual bath, in the shul’s coffee room, or the yeshiva dining room.
