All Who Go Do Not Return

by Deen, Shulem

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I wasn’t overly upset by the bezdin’s verdict. For several months, I had been trying to convince Gitty that if I was to continue living an Orthodox lifestyle, then, at the very least, we would have to leave New Square. Gitty had resisted, though, wanting to remain near her parents and her twelve siblings. This was the only community she’d ever known, and she wouldn’t know how to live elsewhere, how to engage with neighbors who didn’t understand people from our world—people who, she was sure, would mock her provincial manner, her flawed English, her outmoded fashions.

  Now, however, we had no choice. The bezdin had ordered me out. Unless we decided to end our marriage, Gitty would have to move with me.

  Over the next few weeks, as Gitty and I packed our family’s belongings, sold our house in New Square, and closed on a new home in Monsey, I thought back on another time when I had suffered the shame of expulsion.

  When I was thirteen, when I first came to know the Skverers, the Skverers thought they might do better without me.

  At the Skverer yeshiva in Williamsburg, I had earned myself the distinction of uncooperative student. According to the official yeshiva schedule, we were to arrive each Sunday morning at seven, stay in our third-floor dorm rooms throughout the week, and return home on Friday afternoon for the Sabbath.

  I, however, had established my own routine.

  On Sunday morning, instead of waking at six and rushing through the cold December and January mornings to catch the bus to Williamsburg, I would stay in bed until ten, then stroll off to the Munkatch shul on Forty-Seventh and Fourteenth, where the ritual bath was open late and prayer groups assembled every twenty minutes. “You have to get to yeshiva!” my mother would cry, but I had few anxieties about it. Most Sundays, by the time I returned home, ate a leisurely breakfast, and determined that it was time to start the day, it would be long past noon. No point in going to yeshiva now, I would think, and then I’d spend the day lazing around at home.

  On Mondays, I would repeat the routine.

  On Tuesdays, I would show up at the yeshiva around lunchtime.

  The Skverer teachers, unlike the cheder rebbes at Krasna, were warm and gentle, scholarly and pious, lax with discipline. “I am very afraid I will have to suspend you,” my morning instructor would say to me, and I would nod, sympathetically. He had to do what he had to do. In the end, he wouldn’t bother. “Can you make an effort?” he would ask, and I would say that I would, knowing that I wouldn’t. I studied well, when I was around, but by lunchtime on Thursday, I would decide I’d had enough yeshiva for the week. My tefillin pouch under my arm, I would make my way down Bedford Avenue, to the entrance ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and hitchhike a ride back to Borough Park.

  “I don’t want to use the word expulsion,” Reb Chezkel, the dean, said to my mother over the phone. Unbeknownst to either of them, I was listening in from another extension. “He is a very fine boy. But if his week lasts from Tuesday afternoon to Thursday morning, there isn’t much sense in keeping him here.”

  “What do you suggest we do with him?” my mother asked. She sounded surprisingly calm, as if arranging a delivery of groceries.

  “Maybe a yeshiva out of town,” Reb Chezkel said. There were many options. London. Zurich. Montreal. Jerusalem. My heart leaped. I would travel, make new friends. I was all in favor. He could use the word expulsion, too, if he liked.

  My father was ill at that time, in the hospital with a strange condition. For years, following the practices of obscure Jewish mystics, he had lived a life of asceticism and taxed his body severely. The practices were known as sigufim. Self-punishment and bodily deprivation. Mystics of old rolled their naked bodies in snow-blanketed fields, hammered holes through ice-covered rivers to immerse in frigid waters. They spent their days in fasting and prayer. My father did not roll his body in snow or break holes through ice, but he slept little and fasted frequently. When he ate, it was with such regimented discipline that it was barely enough to sustain him. Breakfast would be a toasted rice cake and a couple of spoonfuls of plain yogurt. Lunch, a bowl of steamed vegetables; supper, a thin slice of specially prepared rice bread that my mother would bake for him. Sometimes, he also had a tablespoon of peanut butter.

  Finally, in the summer of 1987, a month after my bar mitzvah, he collapsed, and was hospitalized. He was six-foot-two, weighing in at ninety pounds. His body had worn away, unnourished. According to my mother, he was suffering from a rare form of anorexia nervosa. He was not only physically ill but psychologically ill.

  “He’s gone crazy,” my mother would say, and I would get angry at her. I had always thought of my father not only as brilliant but saintly. A man who truly lived for otherworldly aspirations. I could see no other way to explain his behavior.

  “He has become intolerable,” she would tell us, knowing certain things about him that we children did not. Soon she was dropping hints of divorce.

  When I argued that she was being unfair to him, she would grow exasperated. “Shayfele, your father is a brilliant and unusual man. But he is very, very sick.” She explained that sometimes, those who practiced extreme behaviors for what seemed like religious reasons were really afflicted with psychological conditions. My father, she claimed, was suffering from a mental illness that drove him to treat his body cruelly. Religion and spiritual practices provided the cloak, but underneath was a terrible malaise that was destroying him.

  My father would scoff when I’d ask him about it. “Nonsense. Mommy means well, but she reads things in books or hears things from doctors and thinks they must always be true.”

  I didn’t know which of them was correct, and I was upset with it all. I loved my father, but I wanted him to start eating and to get better and to stop being crazy and go back to being just saintly. I loved my mother, but I wanted her to stop berating my father and to stop threatening to break up our family. I knew they cared deeply for each other, but if they couldn’t take responsibility for their own lives, they would have no authority to instruct me on mine. When adults misbehave, I reasoned, they forfeit the right to tell children what to do.

  “When the two of you shape up your acts,” I told my mother, “I’ll shape up mine.”

  The yeshiva in Montreal was not the panacea that my parents had hoped for, nor was it the fulfillment of my own dreams for travel and adventure.

  “Nu! Nu! Wake up! Wake up for the service of the Creator!” Reb Hillel, the mashgiach, would shout as he walked through the dorms at six o’clock each morning. I could see his scowling face even without opening my eyes. These rabbis were not Skverers but Satmars. They shouted, they slapped, they pinched, they thwacked. There was no way to hitchhike home on Thursday afternoons. There was serious studying and serious punishment. The doors to the study hall would be locked at the beginning of each session, and anyone who didn’t make it in time was punished—either fined or, with repeat offenders, slapped. The yeshiva was headed by the Ruv, a rotund and austere man, the scion of great rabbinic dynasties, whose presence in the study hall was so thick that when he was around, the already-high decibel level in the study hall would reach an eardrum-pounding pitch.

  In June, the yeshiva moved to the Laurentian Mountains. Our summer campus was a converted resort on the edge of a small lake with a private beach, once used for swimming but now forbidden to us students. Behind several bungalows that had been converted to lecture rooms, past the gravel road that led to the main road, past a large clearing on a hilltop, a path led into the woods. After a five-minute walk, the path forked sharply to the left, where, past tangles of brushwood and scattered thornbushes, stood a tremendous boulder, twenty feet high, abutting a wide creek on the other side. Around the far side of the boulder were a series of ridges, where I could climb to the top for a magnificent view of cascading waterfalls a hundred yards upriver.

  On that boulder, during our one-hour lunch break at midday or during the dinner break in early evening, my friend Avrum Yida and I would sp
end the time in brooding conversation. Avrum Yida was from Williamsburg, the Satmar stronghold in Brooklyn, and he, too, came from a family with troubles. His father, he told me, was a drug addict, and his parents, after years of domestic strife, had recently divorced. We found commonality in our respective miseries.

  In July, my mother called to say that my father was in the hospital again and that he wanted to see me. He’d been out of the hospital for a couple of months but apparently had not been entirely cured. My mother didn’t elaborate. She said only that she’d already made flight arrangements and spoken to the Ruv. One of the rabbis would give me a ride to the airport.

  After the flight from Montreal to New York, after lugging my suitcase up to our second-floor apartment in Borough Park, I opened the door to find my mother standing in the hallway, waiting. She gave me a silent hug, then looked at me sadly, her gaze steady.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  My father was dead.

  The adults hadn’t shaped up their act. My father hadn’t gotten himself better, and my mother hadn’t been much help, either. Before she had time to follow through on her threats of divorce, my father had died, leaving our family in a state of turmoil.

  After the seven days of mourning, I returned to the yeshiva, more apathetic than ever.

  “My plan,” I said to my friend Avrum Yida, “is to end up a shaygetz.” A shaygetz drove a sports car or a motorcycle. He cavorted with shiksas. He wore jeans and leather jackets. He didn’t bother keeping Shabbos or kosher. He was, in short, no different from a goy. The shaygetz declared God and His laws irrelevant. The shaygetz was unprincipled—there was no principle in sin. For spite, for temptation, for mindless apathy, for sheer wickedness—the shaygetz defied God, the rabbis, his parents, and all that was good and righteous and noble. I had no clear formula for becoming a shaygetz, but I was determined, in the meantime, to show my general intentions.

  Reb Mordche would attempt to put a stop to it.

  Reb Mordche delivered his lectures each afternoon, for an hour and a half, in one of the tiny converted bungalows, where we sat cramped against one another on wooden benches around a three-sided arrangement of tables. He sat on the fourth side, facing us. My place was the first to his left, within easy reach.

  One day, all of us were restless from the heat, the broken air conditioner a teasing reminder of the comforts we lacked, and Reb Mordche struggled to hold our attention. To my left sat Chaim Nuchem Ausch. Reaching silently from behind, I flicked my middle finger against his left ear. Chaim Nuchem flinched, then looked angrily toward the boy on his left: “Why you flicking me?”

  The boy to Chaim Nuchem’s left protested, declaring his innocence, and Reb Mordche threw me a stern glance.

  A plastic straw lay on the table in front of me, alongside an empty soda can. I reached for it and held it between my index and middle finger, pretending to twiddle it absentmindedly, while at the same time, I put a small piece of paper in my mouth and let it soak in my saliva for a few minutes. A few minutes later, I shot a prodigious spitball across the room, watching with delight as it whizzed past Pinny Greenfeld’s nose and landed on Yossi Hershkowitz’s forehead with an audible sprrt. I remember the laughter, and how it stopped abruptly just as I saw, from the corner of my eye, Reb Mordche’s arm jerk up from where it rested on the table, his open palm headed directly to the right side of my face.

  There were no thoughts in my head at that moment, only reflexes, and my right arm went up to block his strike. My arm struck his forcefully. I remember the stunned look on Reb Mordche’s face, his arm still partially raised in front of him. I was aware that the room had gone frightfully silent. I had committed the greatest offense possible for a yeshiva student: striking an instructor.

  My punishment would be severe. If I was lucky, I would be slapped senseless. More likely, Reb Mordche would summon Reb Hillel, and together they would beat me as no student had been beaten before.

  There was only one thing to do: escape.

  I sprang backward up onto the bench. With one arm in the air for balance, I jumped toward the door, pushing it with my free arm midair. The last thing I heard, as the flimsy screen door banged shut behind me, was: “All of you! Go get him!”

  I was fast, and I knew where I was headed. By the time my classmates had bounded out of the lecture room and determined the direction I’d gone, I was already halfway up the trail to the woods. By the time I heard their shouts—“Which way? Where’d he go?”—I was halfway up the boulder abutting the creek, hidden behind a dense thicket, climbing to the top and settling into the familiar ridge.

  The minutes passed, and the sounds of my classmates receded. From my perch, I watched the rushing cascades of the falls and the pools of white foam in the water below. I wondered what I was going to do now. Certain punishment awaited me back at the camp, but where else could I go? I was hundreds of miles from home. My transportation had always been arranged by the yeshiva, chartered buses that brought all the New York students back and forth over the various term breaks. I had no money for a bus or an airplane ticket.

  I wondered what it was that had led me to all this trouble. I wondered why I found myself, over and over again, on the wrong side of adult expectations. Overcome with self-pity, I thought of jumping off the edge and sinking into the rushing torrents. But the water didn’t look very deep, and I wasn’t likely to drown easily. I considered taking off through the woods to the railroad tracks that passed not far from our camp, and walking until I reached some destination or collapsed from exhaustion. I needed to get away, far from the yeshiva and its tedious grind of Talmud studies, far from the rabbis and teachers, with their beatings and their insistent scoldings and their buffoonish piety, far from the friends who sided with a teacher and pursued me into the woods.

  I checked my watch. There were fifteen minutes until afternoon prayers, and I realized with a start that it was my turn to lead prayers. If I wasn’t there, a new offense would be piled on to all my existing ones. I listened carefully to the stillness of the forest and to the sounds of rushing water. Here and there, a bird called and another responded. The sounds of my friends had quieted down, but who knew if they were lurking somewhere, behind a tree or a rock?

  Then again, what if they were?

  It was unfair that life presented only bad options. It appeared that whatever I did, I was bound for trouble. I would head back and face whatever punishment awaited me. Adults were often unpredictable—maybe they’d spare me this time.

  Stepping tentatively out of the woods, I looked around and saw no one. The afternoon sun beat down on the trampled grass around the cluster of buildings, the two-story dormitory, the study hall and dining room, the small cottages serving as residences for faculty members, who brought their wives and children with them for the duration of the summer. From above the study hall doorway, set within the transom, a massive air-conditioning unit hummed loudly, a steady drip of condensation falling on all who passed beneath it.

  I pushed the door open slowly. My classmates were all in their places. I looked for Reb Mordche and noticed that he wasn’t in the room. Neither were the other instructors, or even the Ruv, who ordinarily sat up on a platform at the end of the hall, eagle-eyed over his domain. Here and there, students began to close their texts, reaching for their hats, offering concluding remarks to their partners as they headed to the sink in the rear to wash before prayer.

  The clock on the wall read two minutes to four. No one looked my way. Slowly, I angled my way through the maze of tables and chairs to the front of the hall, and took my spot at the prayer leader’s podium. I turned and saw my friends at the other end of the room noticing me and whispering.

  I watched the clock. The moment it struck four, a side door opened and the Ruv walked in, followed by the rest of the faculty. I could not read their expressions. The Ruv looked around at the students, then made his way toward his lectern, opposite the one for the prayer leader, where I now stood. I watched him, my heart po
unding wildly, trying to discern his intentions, but he appeared not to notice me. Perhaps he’s saving my punishment for later, I thought. Or, I dared hope, maybe Reb Mordche decided to keep quiet about the incident.

  The Ruv was now at his lectern, opening his prayer book. Clearly, my punishment was not at hand. I looked at him, anticipating his signal, ready to launch the opening verse: Ashrei…. Fortunate are those who dwell in Your houses.

  All of a sudden, the Ruv turned to face me, then raised his arm and pointed a pudgy index finger toward the door: “AROIS FIN DU!”

  I froze. The hall fell silent, and I could feel the stares of fifty pairs of eyes on me.

  “GET OUT OF HERE!” the Ruv shouted, louder this time. “I won’t tolerate gangsters in my yeshiva! You are now expelled!”

  For a moment, I was struck by the word gangster, thrown into his furious Yiddish. Was I a gangster? The word was meant to shame me, I knew, but instead I felt proud. A gangster was worse than a shaygetz, and so I had achieved something.

  I turned and made my way through the hushed study hall. The students stepped aside to let me pass, through to the rear, past the last tables, where my classmates, the youngest group of students, stood watching me. I nodded to a few of them as I passed, offering a hint of a smirk, and opened the main doors and headed up to my dorm room.

  A hour later, I finished packing my things into my suitcase, but not before Reb Hillel appeared suddenly and delivered a slap to my face so forceful that the world went black for a long moment and I thought I was going to faint. When I finally looked up, Reb Hillel stood there in silence, contempt all over his face, and then turned on his heels and left the room.

  That night, I slept at the home of a kind rabbi in Montreal, who offered to let me stay until I could get a bus back to New York. As I dragged my suitcase into the small guest room on Durocher Avenue, I felt a sort of melancholic emptiness. I had been expelled twice now—first by the Skverers, and now by the Satmars. After I had been branded an outcast, my plans to become a shaygetz no longer seemed so hot.