All Who Go Do Not Return (39 page)

“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.

Several days later, as the children ate their dinner around my small kitchen table, I wondered: Was I new to them, too? They had seen me change over the years. They had seen my beard grow shorter. They had seen my clothes grow increasingly casual, after I traded in my long coat for a short sport jacket, my large velvet yarmulke for a small suede one.

“Where are your
payess?
” Chaya Suri asked one day, as if she’d suddenly noticed. They had once been long and dense; unrolled, they had come down almost to my waist. For years, I would twist them into a coiled knot and tuck them behind my ears, until I began to snip them, a few millimeters each time. After a year or so, they were completely gone.

I tugged on some hairs at my temple. “They’re here. I just keep them short now.” She looked more closely at the spot, doubtful, and ran off.

“Family hug,” I would announce as the children prepared to leave, after they were bundled into their coats and hats and mittens, and the six of us would gather near the door and squeeze together in a tight circle. “Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss,” we would all go, puckering lips against cheeks and foreheads.

The children appeared to be doing OK, but as the months wore on, things grew tense with Gitty.

“Why do you have to wear jeans when you pick them up?” she snapped at me one day over the phone.

“I stay in my car,” I said. “No one can see my pants.”

“You got out of your car once,” she shot back.

It was true.
Once.
I had come to pick up Hershy and Akiva for the weekend. The girls had a special event that weekend, and the two boys, aged six and eight, had come alone. They came out of the apartment carrying their sleepover bag between them, each holding one end. I watched as they struggled to carry it, and then laid it down near the car. I wanted to help them but was wearing jeans. Through the mirrors, I watched as they opened the back door of my Honda Pilot, and together they lifted the bag into the rear, and then looked up at the door, now high above their heads. I stepped out of the car, closed the rear door, and in a flash, I was back in the driver’s seat.

It had taken no more than ten seconds, but as the boys got into the car, a little boy on a bicycle called to Hershy in a loud whisper: “Who is this goy?”

I did not want my children to be embarrassed by me. Still, I wondered: What were the limits for accommodating a child’s anxieties about a nonconforming parent? Were children so lacking in resilience that they could not overcome the trauma of a parent wearing the wrong kind of pants?

The liberal-minded side of me believed that it served children well to be exposed to different worldviews. But perhaps these were special circumstances. I had assured Gitty that I would maintain strict observance of Jewish law in the children’s presence. Hasidic custom was of a lesser priority, although I promised to be sensitive to their lifestyle and to avoid exposing them to practices that might unsettle them.

More challenges arose. During the intermediate days of Passover, the children and I took a trip to Six Flags in New Jersey. After hours of riding the bumper cars and roller coasters and pirate ships, we took out the lunches I’d packed, matzah and cheese and yogurts and other specially prepared “kosher for Passover” foods. The matzah I brought for the children was the traditional kind—round, handmade loaves—but I soon realized that I’d brought along too few, only seven or eight of them. The children ate them quickly, and Akiva turned to me and asked: “Do you have more matzah?”

I had thrown in a box of square, machine-made matzah before we left—fully kosher according to Orthodox law but frowned upon by Hasidim. Still, they were kosher, and even Gitty had allowed these in the past from time to time. They were better-tasting, and they cost a lot less.

“Have some of this,” I said to Akiva quietly, and handed him a square matzah from the box beside me.

Hershy noticed. “Can I have one, too?”

I handed him one, even as I wondered if this wasn’t going to cause trouble. For a moment, I considered telling them to keep quiet about it, not to tell their mother.

The next day, Gitty called, livid. “How could you feed them machine matzahs!”

I tried to calm her. “It was all I had. And I gave it only to the little ones.”

She screamed. “You’re feeding my children trayf!”

I reminded her that there was no such thing as trayf matzah and that not only was it a minor transgression but that she herself had permitted it on occasion. My responses only infuriated her, and it wasn’t long before the arguments snowballed.

“You let them watch television!” Gitty yelled at me one day.

There was a TV in my bedroom, and the day before, Akiva had wandered in and asked, “Why do you need a computer in your room?” I told him it was not a computer. “What is it, then?” he asked, and I wouldn’t say, because I knew the word “television” would unsettle him. “Turn it on,” he said, and I thought there could be no harm if I did so for a quick minute. He then watched, mesmerized, as a man and woman on the screen delivered the evening news. Hershy, hearing the commotion, popped into the bedroom, followed by Chaya Suri. “OK, that’s enough,” I said, and the three of them moaned in unison. “Just one minute longer!” Akiva pleaded, as I herded them into the kitchen for dinner, where Tziri and Freidy were setting the table.