All Who Go Do Not Return (38 page)

Months passed, and I found myself with a kind of loneliness I had not anticipated. For nearly fifteen years, my wife and children had been right beside me. I’d had scores of friends, hundreds of acquaintances, and a community of thousands. Suddenly unmoored, I began to worry: How was I going to replace it all?

A small handful of old friends still called occasionally, but there was a chill to our interactions. “So, are you happy now?” they would ask, their tones flat, rhetorical. I would say that yes, I was happy, or happier than before, or what did it mean to be happy, really? Or I would turn the question back at them—“Are
you
happy?”—and they would grow annoyed. “You’re the one who made this big change.” Those conversations were awkward and stilted. We were careful to skirt sensitive issues, questions of faith, the details of non-Hasidic life, whether I
really
no longer kept the Sabbath, or if it was all just theoretical, as my brother Avrumi had once asked. Invariably, my friends would say, “You’ll be back, Shulem. You’ll be back.” They would offer their best wishes, hopes that I find myself soon, find peace of mind, find whatever it was I was looking for, so that I might, the sooner the better, stop all this nonsense for the good of everyone involved.

“We should hang out sometime,” I said to Aliona after class one day. “Maybe get coffee or something.” I placed my books into my bag, then flung the bag over my shoulder and slipped out between our seats. I had hoped for a casual effect, as if the thought had just occurred to me, as if I hadn’t prepared those words in my head, rehearsed them with different cadences and tones to get the effect just right.

Aliona looked up. “Yeah, we should.”

Did she say it brightly? Did she seem eager? Was she just being polite?

“We’ll figure something out,” I said as I took off, not knowing what else to say. Later, I agonized over it: How will she react when she learns about my past? What if we have nothing to talk about? Scenarios of rejection—catastrophe!—played out in my head, which soon became not only possibilities but certainties, as if they had already occurred, instead of the imaginations of my frenetically anxious mind.

Soon there was only one class left. I was dismayed at my own failure to turn Aliona into a friend. I could not bear to attend our last class, so I skipped it and pushed Aliona out of my mind.

A fellow blogger, a Hasidic man in Brooklyn, with whom I’d been in touch over the years, called me one day. He’d become acquainted online with a Hasidic woman who had confided in him.

“She wants to leave,” he said. “But she wants to speak to someone who’s already done it. Someone who is not a fuckup.”

Was that me—
not a fuckup?

I told him to give her my number, and a few days later, the woman called. She sounded out of breath.

“I’m sorry, I’m—” I heard her panting, then silence.

Moments later, she was back.

“Sorry, I’m on my way to the library. I thought I saw a Hasidic man following me, so I started running.” She sounded distracted, and I heard a groan. “Ooh—sorry, I almost fell into a ditch here. I think he’s gone now. Gosh, it’s so dark!” Then she laughed. “You must think I’m nuts. I’m not nuts, I promise!”

Her name was Malky, she said, and she lived in Kiryas Joel, the Satmar village in Orange County, thirty minutes north of Monsey. Could we meet? she asked.

We arranged to meet a few days later, at an Applebee’s near enough to Kiryas Joel for her to walk. No proper Hasid would step into a nonkosher eating establishment, so as long as she wasn’t seen entering, she’d be safe meeting a strange male.

I arrived several minutes late. A middle-aged man sat alone in a booth, eating dinner. A few tables down, a teenage couple leaned into each other, side by side, a half-eaten plate of dessert between them. The server at the door raised an eyebrow. “One?”

“I’m supposed to meet someone.” I wasn’t sure how to describe her. “Have you seen … a woman in a …?” I raised my hands to indicate a covered head. Before I could finish the question, the waitress pointed to a corner booth at the far end of the restaurant. Peeking from behind the high-backed bench was a head covered with a floral lavender kerchief, facing away from the entrance.

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.

“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 on 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.