All Who Go Do Not Return

by Deen, Shulem

  I walked over slowly. A Hasidic woman sat bundled in her winter coat, upright and stiff, her hands folded in front of her. On the table was an untouched glass of water. The woman looked up at me, her expression blank.

  “Malky?” I said.

  Her jaw hung slightly down as she stared. I sat down, and she kept looking at me, her eyes wide.

  Finally, she spoke. “You look like a regular shaygetz!”

  We eased into conversation. She was twenty-three, she said, married with two little daughters. She described how she had been raised in a typical Satmar family, with nearly a dozen siblings and scores of cousins, and had once been happily ensconced in her world. Then she discovered the Internet and began interacting with others online, and the world opened before her. The library was now her place of refuge. Every evening, she would ask her husband to babysit their two daughters, saying that she was going to visit her sister or her mother. Then she would walk for thirty minutes down dark, wooded back roads to the library in the nearby village of Monroe. Her inner life had completely changed. She was determined to make her way out but had no plan and still saw too many obstacles.

  In the days and weeks that followed, Malky and I spoke on the phone several times, and then began to meet up regularly. The pretense was that I, already out, was giving her a line to grab, a sounding board for her own plans. In reality, Malky meant as much to me as I did to her. She was all that was saving me from what was beginning to feel like soul-crushing solitude.

  And yet, however disorienting my transition, I knew that I had chosen the right path. On Saturday mornings, those weeks when the children were with Gitty, I would drive to nearby Harriman State Park and hike miles of crisscrossing trails. As morning passed into afternoon, I would think of what my children were doing—at noon, they would be in shul, finishing prayers; at two, home with Gitty, or perhaps at their grandparents’ or with cousins, having their chulent and kishke and onion kugel and singing the Sabbath songs out of worn bentchers.

  I would think of those songs now, and the Sabbath atmosphere, and feel pangs of nostalgia that were both painful and pleasing. Stepping carefully across streams, climbing cliffs, up one mountain and down another, I would sing the songs I had sung so many years during Sabbath afternoon meals: “This Day Is Most Esteemed of All Days,” “A Sabbath Day for God,” “When I Keep the Sabbath, God Will Keep Me.” My favorite trail went up the Popolopen Torne, where, at the peak, twinned with Bear Mountain several miles away, I would have a 360-degree view for miles. On a clear day, I could see Hoboken and sometimes even New York City. Near a tall cairn, a makeshift memorial for members of the U.S. Armed Forces, I would stick my hiking poles into the soft ground, take off my sweaty backpack, and get out my turkey-and-cheese sandwich.

  It was Shabbos afternoon, and I was desecrating it by hiking and eating trayf. I would reflect on the fact that such simple pleasures were so meaningful. It felt exhilarating to be able to do what had for so many years been forbidden for fear of not heavenly but human judgment.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Do you think you’ll get married again?” Malky asked me one day. “Do you want to have more children?”

  We were in the middle of a hike up Bear Mountain, headed to the Perkins Memorial Tower at the peak. Malky had told me that she wanted to join me on my hikes but could not get away on Saturdays, so I switched my hiking day to Sunday.

  “Not sure about marriage. But children, yes.”

  “Really?” She looked at me, her ponytail wig bobbing behind her.

  “I want to raise children without having to hide my true beliefs.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ll be honest, though. Part of me feels it would be wrong. Something about it does make me uncomfortable.”

  She looked at me quizzically, but I wasn’t sure how to explain. We fell silent as we scrambled up the face of a jagged crag, stepping carefully onto sharp outcroppings of rock to maintain our footing. Up on top, after we caught our breath and felt the breeze of the open skies on our sweaty necks, Malky took off her backpack and withdrew her water bottle, while I sat down on a large rock nearby.

  “Why does it make you uncomfortable?” She tilted her head and fixed me with a look, her brow creased, as if staring at an object she couldn’t quite make out.

  “Maybe this is absurd,” I said. “But … it just feels disloyal. Like the kids I have now aren’t good enough. Like I cherish them less because of the world they’re in and need other kids to replace them.”

  She edged beside me onto the rock, and we sat silent, both of us lost in our thoughts. It had been an unusually mild March day. The sun above a cloudless sky had warmed us for most of the afternoon. Now, however, the sun was quickly moving to the west, and a gust of wind reminded us that dusk and an evening chill were approaching.

  We stood up and gathered our packs, but Malky’s movements were slow, dreamy, as if she was still processing something.

  “I think I understand,” she said finally, as she reached to fasten the chest-strap of her backpack. “For me, there’s only one option, though. If I leave, it’s not without my daughters.”

  The thought of taking my own children with me had not occurred to me. Later, there would be those who would tell me that I had no right to leave because—among other things—I had no right to expose my children to a worldview and a lifestyle to which they were not accustomed. Others would tell me that I had been cruel to leave without fighting to take them, to change their lives along with mine. But at the time, it seemed as if living with Gitty was truly best for the children. She loved them, too, and wanted what was best for them. I was not at all convinced that the path I had taken, this transition, was necessarily the path to happiness for all.

  One day, Malky called me, nearly hysterical. “Shulem, my father wants to kidnap my girls!”

  She’d been at her parents’ home a few days earlier, she said, for the haircutting ceremony of one of her three-year-old nephews. While standing in her parents’ kitchen, immersed in the babble and cheer of the assembled women and girls, she noticed her husband and her father speaking earnestly in the dining room nearby, and she leaned in to listen from behind a door.

  “They were talking about taking my daughters away! Shulem, I am so frightened!”

  Several days earlier, she told me that whispers were spreading about her in the community. She had stopped wearing the special stockings of beige fabric with the seams sewn up the calf. Her husband noticed that she was no longer shaving her head. She’d taken to wearing pajamas to bed instead of a nightgown. She considered these minor transgressions, but her husband, to whom she had once, in an unguarded moment, expressed a fantasy about leaving the community, reported her to her father.

  “He can’t possibly be serious,” I said. A kidnapping sounded far-fetched. “There are laws in this country!”

  “You don’t know him, Shulem.” Her father was an askan, a klaktier. An activist and a political liaison. He delivered votes to elected officials. He advised rebbes. He stood at the head of important institutions. He wasn’t accustomed to being defied. “Besides,” Malky said, “you know this place isn’t exactly law-and-order central.”

  The next time I saw her, I realized immediately that something had changed. She had taken a bus to Monsey to run some errands, and had only a few minutes for a quick chat before she returned. I picked her up from behind a local shopping center, where she stood waiting behind an enormous Dumpster.

  After looking around carefully, she got into my car. I leaned in for a hug, and for a moment she hesitated, then leaned in and pulled back quickly. “I can’t hug you anymore, Shulem.”

  She’d spoken to a divorce attorney, and he advised her to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

  “Here?” I looked around the empty lot.

  She shook her head. “I can’t risk it.” I could see her eyes glistening. “Shulem, what am I going to do?”

  She needed to pull back, she said. We could speak o
n the phone occasionally, but that would be it.

  She wants to meet someone who is not a fuckup. My friend’s words played over and over in my head as the months passed. It was the common stereotype of those who left: fuckups. Troubled youths. Men and women from broken homes, bad marriages, victims of abuse—physical, sexual, emotional. Only those afflicted with a psychological ailment would choose to abandon the loving embrace of the Hasidim. And sometimes I wondered: Could they be right?

  On the outside, I functioned well enough, went to work each day, continued my studies. But I began to feel a small part of myself crumble. I did not regret my choice; yet I was growing uneasy. Malky was gone. I had failed to strike up a lasting friendship with Aliona. On Friday nights, when the children did not come, I would ache for a friend to call, but there was no one. Sometimes I would go to a movie theater, but the movie would end, and I would have nowhere to go but back to my Monsey apartment, alone. I took to driving into Manhattan to wander the streets of Greenwich Village, looking for something but I did not know what.

  Once, at two in the morning, I strolled past a middle-aged man leaning with a cane against a wall at the corner of University Place and Washington Square Park. He pointed at me with his index finger: “You. You’re beautiful.” I looked behind me, but there was no one else. He pointed more emphatically: “You.” He shouted an offer for a sexual service, assuring me of our mutual pleasure, then chortled as I hurried away. And yet, I could not help but take small pleasure in our interaction. I had been noticed.

  Another evening, I saw a man and a woman smoking outside a door on West Houston Street, near Sixth Avenue. For some reason, I slowed as I passed.

  “Looking for the meeting?” the man asked. “Second floor.” He pointed at the door, then crushed the cigarette under his shoe. It was around midnight, the streets filled with the clamor of Greenwich Village nightlife, women in tight skirts tottering on high heels, men at their sides, hailing cabs, jittery with the night’s promise.

  “Come on,” the man called. “Don’t be shy.” He held the door, and I followed him up a narrow staircase. Upstairs, a sign said, “Midnite Meeting.” In a large room, several rows of chairs were laid out on three sides, facing a small platform. Piles of brochures were spread out on a table near the door, and from their titles I realized what I had already assumed: This was an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Men and women of various ages, looking respectable and earnest, took their seats. A man got up on the platform, and began to speak about how alcohol had destroyed his life and how the “itty, bitty, shitty committee” had interfered so many times when he tried to sober up. He spoke of persevering against the odds, of falling and picking himself up, repeatedly. Others shared, telling stories about lives of ruin and failed promise and picking up the shards of what was left of them, after their families, jobs, and life aspirations had left them. Each one announced his or her length of sobriety. Seven years. Three months. Five days.

  I returned to that meeting several times, on lonely Friday nights when I had nothing better to do, nowhere to be, no one to meet. I was not an alcoholic, but I felt a kinship with these people, each in his or her own way suffering from a combination of bad choices and unfortunate circumstances. They had been fuckups, and yet, they were not. They were there, determined to go on.

  I found a therapist, a birdlike woman in her sixties. I wanted her to tell me that there was something wrong with me, but she wouldn’t. “You made difficult choices, and they led to real consequences. You’d be a fuckup if you didn’t feel a little bit lost.”

  I thought about Footsteps, the organization in Manhattan that offered assistance to people who had left the ultra-Orthodox world. Leiby, whose departure from New Square three years earlier had prompted the bezdin to expel me, had sought its assistance. Leiby had moved on and was pursuing a degree in chemical engineering at Cornell University, but the organization was still around.

  In the first weeks after I’d left, I had looked up its website and read its program calendar: education night. GED tutoring. Résumé writing. Assistance with college applications. I didn’t need those things; I had a job, had enrolled in college without much difficulty, and my English skills were fine. I called the number to inquire about any other services they offered, but there was little they could do for me, and so I thanked the staff for their wonderful work and put the organization out of mind.

  Now, however, I realized that I needed the people. If I didn’t need the services, maybe I could mentor others, tutor some of the younger members in English or math. I could offer assistance, and perhaps that alone would help me in return.

  It was the second night of Passover when I arrived at the downtown location. The tables were laid out with boxes of matzah next to piles of pita bread, gefilte fish and sushi platters, pasta salads, potato kugels, and apple compote. A table off to the side with a “kosher” sign had been set up for those who still maintained degrees of religious observance. As a potluck dinner, though, the food was mainly provided by members, and most of it did not appear to be kosher. Most startling to me were the products that were clearly chometz, made of leavened dough—bread, pastries, pasta. He who eats chometz [during Passover] shall be excised from his people, the Bible said. So severe was the sin that, before the holiday, Jewish communities large and small burned all chometz in backyard trash cans or enormous communal Dumpsters. During the eight-day holiday, Hasidim even refrained from eating anything prepared outside their own homes. But here sat a group of men and women exercising the freedom to choose for themselves.

  A man who looked to be in his twenties and was wearing a gray AC-DC T-shirt sat down next to me.

  “AC-DC fan?” I asked.

  “Huh?” He looked at me blankly as he forked a slice of gefilte fish onto a plate.

  “AC-DC. Your T-shirt.” I pointed at the logo, with its three-dimensional lightning bolt slashing through Gothic lettering.

  The man looked confused, and then looked at his shirt. “Oh. Yeah. AC-DC. They’re, like, a band, right?”

  I thought he was joking, until he told me he was a former Belzer Hasid, only vaguely aware of popular music groups. “I just liked the shirt,” he said, laughing. “Someone told me later it’s the name of a band, but I know nothing about them.” If I’d seen him on the street, I’d have taken him for a fashionable academic type. He was tall and thin with a shaved head and smart-looking glasses. He worked as a truck driver, he said, and was studying for his GED. He hoped to get into college eventually.

  “Good for you, man,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It’s rough, you know. I’m twenty-four. I have a daughter. And I feel like I’m in the first grade.”

  Another man, whose name was once Burich but who now went by Brad, told me of his frustrating attempts to make new friends in the outside world. He’d only recently joined this group but had been out for two years. The entire first year, he didn’t know how to speak to people.

  “Then I bought a book.” He grinned, with a twinkle in his eye. “101 Ways to Make Small Talk. It helped me make friends, start conversations on the subway or at Starbucks or in a bookstore. Now I make new friends wherever I go.”

  The themes I heard that evening were all too familiar. Some people appeared broken by their pasts, when their lives as individuals had been subservient to the welfare of family, community, sect, people. Almost everyone spoke of feeling suffocated, compelled to act and behave in ways that were not true to themselves, until finally they could take it no longer, and risked ostracism and alienation in return for a chance to live more authentic lives. Many were still adjusting, struggling with linguistic limitations, learning basic concepts about the outside world: how to buy clothes, what to do on a date, where to buy a Halloween costume. One former Chabad woman mentioned that she had taken to listening to hundreds of rock bands in order to become familiar with secular music. An ex-Satmar man sitting nearby perked up his ears. “Vat it means a rock band?” he asked. It was the first time he’d heard the term.


  Later that evening, I met some who had been out for years and were now indistinguishable from other New Yorkers. Many were college students, pursuing degrees in psychology, medicine, art, engineering. There were aspiring filmmakers and writers and actors. Several already held advanced degrees, with a disproportionate number of attorneys, especially among the men—years spent honing analytical skills on Talmud study had apparently led to lifelong appreciation for the nuances of legal texts.

  During the months and years to follow, I would meet many “Footsteppers” for whom this group had become a surrogate family. Founded in 2003 by a former Chabad woman, Footsteps was officially a service organization but had also built the framework for a fledgling community. There were holiday dinners and summer camping trips and weekly discussion groups, where members could drop in to speak to others who had been through similar experiences. Some of the meetings were facilitated by hired social workers, and others were free-form conversations. The peer support, I learned, was valuable even to those who felt as though they’d “made it,” who already held degrees and jobs and had lovers and closets full of secular clothes and years of secular experiences. Many members had been disowned by their families, and now they attended one another’s college graduations, celebrated birthdays and holidays together, and, in later years, served as best men and bridesmaids at one another’s weddings. Soon there would be child-births, too, and the sparks of a second generation would glow from the cracks of so many broken hearts.

  One day, during a conference with a prospective client, my employer looked around the table, and made introductions: Eileen. Amber. Jeff. Lisa. Shulem.

  “The new Shulem!” my boss said with a laugh. “There once was an old Shulem. Now there’s a new Shulem.”

  My coworkers laughed nervously, while the clients smiled, throwing glances at me, clearly bemused by my boss, a small man in a red bowtie with a big laugh and a stunning lack of social graces.