All Who Go Do Not Return (3 page)

I remember one of the first times I had questions that I could not ask. They were not questions of faith but of more mundane matters—about the girl proposed to me in marriage. What I wanted to ask was chiefly this: Is she pretty? Is she smart? Is she personable? And if she isn’t those things, can I say no?

The questions I would eventually ask—Does God exist? Does our faith really contain the universe’s essential truths? Is
my
faith truer than someone else’s?—would, on the surface, seem of greater consequence. But at the age of eighteen, I had no big questions, only relatively small ones. And those small questions seemed so trivial that I was embarrassed to voice them.
Charm is deceptive and beauty is vain; a woman who fears God, it is she who is praised.
I was told that the girl was very much a God-fearing one. Did I really need to know more?

I was in the middle of doing laundry when I was told of the girl I was to marry. I was a student at the Great Yeshiva of New Square, when the washing machine in the dormitory had stopped working and students scattered to the homes of friends and relatives to do their laundry. I dragged my laundry bag to the home of the Greenblatts, family friends who lived at the edge of the village. My father had died several years earlier, and my mother was still trying to rebuild her life after my father’s death. So the Greenblatts were standing in as family, providing meals, laundry services, and the kind of meddling ordinarily reserved for family members.

It was close to midnight, and Berish and the children had long gone to bed. The only sounds were of Chana Miri finishing chores in the kitchen, cabinets gently opening and closing, the careful clinking of dishes being placed in the sink, running water. Soon these sounds died down, and I heard the soft tap-tap-tap of Chana Miri’s slippers as she came toward the laundry room, near the stairway to the bedrooms upstairs. I imagined she was heading to bed. I would let myself out, as I often did.

Chana Miri appeared in the doorway to the laundry room, and I raised my head in her direction without meeting her gaze. She wasn’t family, and to look at her directly was forbidden. From the edges of my peripheral vision, I could see the cloudy image of a diminutive female form, a kerchiefed head, a shapeless floral-print housedress.

“Did Berish tell you about the
shidduch
?” she asked.

I shook my head, my eye fixed on the motion of the iron. Chana Miri fell silent.

“Well,” she said finally. “Berish can give you more details tomorrow, but I might as well tell you now.” She paused, and then said haltingly, “I know … this might not sound like a great proposal. But … give it some thought.”

I nodded as I moved the iron across the white polyester fabric, watching the soft creases disappear under the gentle hiss of steam. I was hoping to appear nonchalant, although I felt my heartbeat quicken with a tick of excitement.

“Chaim Goldstein’s daughter,” Chana Miri said finally.

I must have looked crestfallen because Chana Miri’s next words were, “I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not as bad as you think.”

I didn’t know the girl, but I knew her male family members. Chaim Goldstein was a portly man who prayed exuberantly and unself-consciously in the back row of the shul. During Friday night services, I would see him making his way through the synagogue aisles, silver snuff box in hand, while the cantor’s twirling voice filled the high-ceilinged sanctuary. Shuffling from table to table, he would offer worshipers a pinch of his peppermint-scented snuff, while behind him trailed three of his young sons, with unkempt sidelocks, mud-crusted shoes, snotty noses. He was not the kind of man I imagined as my father-in-law, and I turned away now, not wanting Chana Miri to see my disappointment.

I thought also of Nuchem Goldstein, Chaim Goldstein’s son. I remembered a day when, my study partner absent, I had asked Nuchem to be my partner for one study session. This was during my first year at the yeshiva, and I’d thought it kindly to reach out to the boy who sat day after day without a study partner, idling over his Talmud, drumming his fingers on the table for hours, never once letting his gaze fall to the open volume before him.

Nuchem seemed to have little aptitude for Talmud study. In fact, I had never before encountered a partner like him. “Why did the sages ask all these questions if they already knew the answers?” he asked, as if the entire form were unfamiliar, as if he hadn’t been studying Talmud since the age of six.

“It’s a process,” I said, scarcely believing I was having this conversation.

“Why does the process matter?” he asked, scowling and indignant, as if personally affronted by the sages’ lack of consideration, putting him through the grind and toil of rediscovering conclusions that surely ought to have been known by now. “Why don’t we just study the conclusions?” It was a startling question, and I felt bad for this boy, who was clearly not enjoying his time at the yeshiva. But what I felt mostly was contempt; he was asking that which we knew must not be asked. Was he so dense as not to know that?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Chana Miri said again now. “You know her father, you know her brothers. But I was told she is different.” She stood in the doorway, and the silence hung heavy between us.

“What’s her name?” I asked finally.

“Gitty,” she said, all too eager. “Gitty Goldstein.”

Gitty. From the Yiddish,
git
, good. It had a pleasant ring, suggesting femininity, innocence, devotion.

Still, all I could think of was her family—Chaim’s simpleminded mannerisms, the dim look on Nuchem’s face, the little boys following their father at the shul, shy and timid, as if aware, even at that young age, that some people were more worthy than others and that they, by virtue of some arbitrary social code, had been placed among a lower class.

“I need time to think about it,” I told Berish the next day. I said the same to my mother after Berish asked her to speak to me. Only Chana Miri seemed to understand. But still, she thought I shouldn’t dismiss it.

“She’s different from her brothers,” Chana Miri said. “I hear she’s very normal.” I couldn’t help thinking:
Normal
? Is that her best quality?

Several months earlier, my classmates and I were taken by surprise when the first of our friends got engaged.

“Hust gehert?”
The news went from table to table and bookstand to bookstand, sweeping through the vast study hall within minutes. “Have you heard? Ari Goldhirsch is engaged!” The studious looked up from the tiny letters in the margins of their Talmuds, and the idlers halted their conversations. We were stunned, hardly expecting one this soon. Most of us were only seventeen, some even younger.

“Bei vemen?”
was the question on everyone’s lips.

Bei vemen.
Not
with whom
but
in whose home
?—into which family, and within which extended clan of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents.

“Mordche Shloime Klieger.”

The name of the bride didn’t matter, only the name of her father. It wasn’t just a girl that a boy married but an extended set of family relations, with all its respectability, if one was lucky—or its grim ordinariness, if one wasn’t.

It was April 1992, and I’d been hoping that the engagements wouldn’t start until the following year. It was said that the rebbe didn’t approve of these early engagements but that families sometimes rushed them when the match was too good to let pass. Sometimes, if the boy or the girl was not yet eighteen, the engagement was kept secret; but soon enough, word would get out. The first engagement brought with it the pressure to be among the first. Early engagement was a sign of desirability; extended bachelorhood, a mark of shame.

With Ari’s engagement, the race was on, and other classmates soon followed. Moishe Yossel Unger and Burich Silber were engaged within a week of each other to two sisters, granddaughters of the rebbe’s personal secretary. Of course, none of us knew what the girls were like, but the girls themselves were hardly the point.

Aron Duvid Spira was soon engaged to the daughter of Avigdor Blum, the wealthiest man in the village. Zevi Lowenthal followed soon after, to the daughter of a prominent scholar. My afternoon study partner, Chaim Lazer, was engaged to the daughter of his uncle Naftuli. As one friend after another was paired off, I, too, waited for the matchmaker’s call. I congratulated each of my friends at their weddings, accepted in return their gracious smiles—
mertzeshem bei dir
, your own engagement soon, if God wills it—yet my heart ached, anticipation seasoning into dread. On Friday nights, as I prepared to lift the glass of sweet wine to recite the kiddush, I prayed that soon I might be doing so with a wife at my side, rather than alongside hundreds of other hungry yeshiva students.
King of kings, command Your ministering angels to commend me with mercy.
Let it be soon. Let it be with a good girl from a respectable family.

At the
tischen
, the rebbe’s public Sabbath meals, we stood on six rows of tall bleachers to the rebbe’s right. Each year, the yeshiva students shifted one set of bleachers nearer to the rebbe himself, until the yeshiva seniors, the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who would be married that year, stood nearest. All eyes were trained on the latest group of eligible students, appraising each one, wondering which daughter of which community member he might be paired with.

“What is wrong with Chaim Goldstein’s daughter?” Berish asked a few days later.

I said only that I needed more time to think, unable to formulate the torrent of thoughts into words.

“She has everything a wife should have,” Berish persisted. “What’s to think about?”

I didn’t know what there was to think about. If at first, I was not drawn to this match because I was not drawn to this girl’s father or brothers, I soon found myself wondering about the girl herself. But the questions I had in my mind could not be asked aloud. I wondered: Was she pretty? Was she intelligent? Was she thoughtful and charming with a pleasant smile and an endearing laugh? Or did she have none of those qualities, and maybe even decidedly unpleasant ones? I wondered if I might ask for a photo of the girl, but since none was offered, I thought it improper. I imagined that Berish and the matchmaker and the girl’s family would wonder: What kind of boy is this, who needs a photo of a girl before deciding to marry her?

“I hear she is very sweet,” my mother said, after making her own inquiries. “The fourth child of twelve, takes very good care of her younger siblings. That says a lot. She’d make a good wife and mother.”

“She’s very social, too,” my mother added brightly. “Attends weddings and other family celebrations very eagerly. Joins in the dancing. Has friends. She’s very well spoken of.”

When none of these bits of information had the desired effect, Berish suggested the obvious solution. “Why not ask the rebbe?”

Of course.
The rebbe. The rebbe would have the answer.

Late one night, several days before Chanukah, Berish and I went to seek an audience with the rebbe. The
gabbai
, Reb Shia, the rebbe’s elderly secretary, sat in his office adjoining the rebbe’s chamber, while several dozen Hasidim waited in the large, brightly lit waiting room, pacing nervously, reciting Psalms, or brooding in silence. Reb Shia wrote my
kvittel
, a request note scribbled onto a small white square of paper, and ignored Berish’s query of how long the wait might be. Hour after hour passed as, one after the other, the men were summoned for their turn with the rebbe, soon emerging with smiles for the surly door attendant, slipping ten- or twenty-dollar bills into his palm, now pleased, with hearts and minds unburdened.

Finally, Berish and I were ushered in. I’d only been to see the rebbe for hurried blessings and rushed handshakes, never for advice on a personal matter. Now, for the first time, I was to make a decision based on the rebbe’s guidance. It was a comforting thought. This was the special privilege of the Hasid, having access to the divine inspiration channeled through the tzaddik, the perfectly righteous individual.

The rebbe sat at the head of a long table on an elaborately gilded chair upholstered in rich blue fabric. I could see him observing the door, fingering a gold pocket watch. His forehead was misty with sweat, his stout frame and graying beard appearing so close, so lifelike—unlike in shul, where he seemed only a blurry impression beheld from afar. Strewn across the table were piles of request notes from earlier visitors, mixed with the traditional money gifts—twenty-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills.

“Nu, gei shoin!”
the attendant shoved my arm when I hesitated at the door. “Go already.” There was no time to be awed; others were waiting. Berish stood off to the side as I handed the rebbe the
kvittel
and watched as he read it:
Shulem Aryeh the son of Bracha. For blessings and redemptions.

Berish stepped closer and told the rebbe why I had come: a girl was proposed, and I was here to seek the rebbe’s advice. The rebbe looked at me for a moment, and then, with a flash of recognition, grew animated.