Hush (27 page)

My
litvish
aunt from Lakewood and my mother had never gotten along quite that well. My mother said that she was a narrow-minded
litvish
who thought only the
litvish
were holy. She called my mother a small-headed
Chassidustah
who knew only about C
hassidim
, but my father said it was really all about a fight they had that nobody remembered anymore twenty years before when my aunt had called my mother a fatso after my mother had called her a
ganuv
and a thief because she had taken the larger share of silver after my great-uncle had died.

“There is really barely a difference between
Chassidim
and the
litvish
today,” my father said. After all, he chuckled wryly, “Every Jew today learns Torah, wears a hat, and believes he is the chosen within the chosen.”

My aunt wasn’t just
litvish
. She was
Yeshivish
, a group whose name derived from the word
yeshiva
, study hall. Back in Lithuania in the late 1800s,
Reb
Shapiro Lubling, one of the greatest Torah scholars of the century, opened the doors of the first
yeshiva
—a place where young men would come, leaving their families and homes behind, and dedicate themselves completely to a life of Torah learning. The idea spread fast among the
litvish
and then the
Chassidish
. In a deteriorating world where morality was sinking fast into the dark abyss, they realized that it was Torah, only Torah, that could save the Jews from the darkness. It was Torah, only the sweet sounds of Torah learning, the swaying of a thousand bearded Jews, that would stand as the spiritual pillar and support for a joyless world of goyim and materialism.

But what had started out as a small exclusive group back in Lithuania quickly grew over the decades to a phenomenon unseen in the history of the Jews, a mass production of Torah scholars, an ideal that turned into the law, especially among the
litvish
. And it was in Lakewood, a small city in New Jersey, where cheaper housing could be found, that the core group of
Yeshivish
families settled, quickly growing into a city of ten thousand scholars. A place so holy, they said, that the beautiful sounds of Torah learning rose up to the heavens creating a halo over the polluted skies of New Jersey.

My aunt from Lakewood was a true Woman of Valor, an
Eishes Chayil
, she said so herself. Years before, when she had had her fifth child, she had spoken with the famous
Reb
Aharon Kotler, Grand Rabbi of Lakewood, and had asked him whether her husband should go out to work now that they had no money for food.

“No,” he had ruled. “There is no greater reward in heaven than for a woman who encourages her husband to bury himself in the wisdom of Torah.” And bury himself he did while my aunt supported her growing family by teaching in the local high school in the morning, tutoring at night, sewing after midnight, and giving birth to a blessed child every January.

“I have eleven children,” she once boasted to anybody who bothered listening, “and all seven sons and three-sons-in-law are learning only because of the Torah they saw at home, because we listened to the
tzaddik,
the angel in the body of man,
Reb
Aharon Kotler.”

But my aunt had a terrible secret. Avigdor, son number three, father of six children, named after Avigdor Miller, the greatest scholar of this generation and last, had left
yeshiva
to go to work not long before. My aunt had cried as hard as my mother would have had my brother removed his
shtreimel
. She sobbed brokenly to my father on the phone that the way to heaven was lost, if she,
she,
had a son who had stopped learning Torah for something as trivial as bringing food home to his family.

In fact, Aunt Bluma’s daughter, Chevi, just a few months older than I was, had recently gotten engaged to Chaim Kamenetsky, a budding scholar. Well, they almost broke off the engagement when my aunt and uncle found out that the budding scholar was attending the gym twice a week to exercise. Exercise? My aunt was aghast. “I don’t know,” she fretted. “It
past nisht
, it sounds wrong. What
yeshiva bachur
who takes Torah seriously does
exercise
?” Only Chevi herself, insistent on getting married, promised she would persuade him to stop the offending action after the wedding. Exercising for a boy was really a strange idea. It was a waste of Torah time and showed that his head was elsewhere, and I knew that if Yankel exercised, the
shidduch
would never have come through.

Chevi and I had become close friends as teenagers. Though we had grown up in different cities, we often visited each other for
Shabbosim
and attended the largest seminary in New York,
Bais Yaakov
Teacher’s Training Seminary, together. Shortly after my engagement, we went strolling down Thirteenth Avenue after seminary browsing through stores and discussing our upcoming weddings, when we passed by Boutique Lingerie. A bright orange sign on the window declared a half price sale on all items inside. We ran inside looking through the rows of bathrobes, nightgowns, and lingerie, when Chevi—with a small gasp of excitement—tore a hanger off the rod.

“Look!” she said.

I looked.

The nightgown was sleeveless, it was short, it had a slit at the side. It was gold satin, cut low in the chest, with barely two strings to hold the whole thing up.

“What is that?” I asked in shock.

“It’s a nightgown for my wedding night!” Chevi answered giddily, holding up the nightgown like a prize. “The bedroom is a place where you’re supposed to attract your husband.”

“What?” I envisioned Yankel’s pale face upon seeing the nightgown.

“Yes!” she said, carefully folding the garment. “You’re supposed to attract your husband so you can have a good relationship.”

Yankel, I believe, just fainted somewhere.

“If a man doesn’t feel fulfilled with his wife,” Chevi explained, “then he can’t concentrate on learning Torah.”

I considered fainting myself.

“If a man is fulfilled with learning Torah,” I retorted, “then he doesn’t need all this
shtism
! And what does a nightgown from goyland have to do with a good relationship?”

Chevi grimaced. “Of course it has to do. It says in the Talmud that a woman is supposed to attract her own husband.”

“It says in the Talmud that a man is supposed to watch his eyes…even in his own home.”

Chevi continued to clutch the devious nightgown.

“The most important thing is Torah, that a man’s mind should be only on Torah and not on anything else. If a man is satisfied in the bedroom, then he is not distracted and can think only holy thoughts.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about and told her that with a nightgown like that a man would be distracted out of his brain. How can one’s lips repeat the holy words with visions of satin cloth held up by two strings waving in one’s mind!

Chevi turned to me furiously. She said that I had no idea what I was saying, the
litvish
who put a greater emphasis on Torah learning were much holier, the
Chassidish
just knew how to dance around their
Rebbe
and curl their long
payos
.

I said that I had never heard such nonsense. The
litvish
thought that as long as you sway over the Torah, you are the holiest. One has to apply what is
in
the Torah to life, and wearing
goyishe
clothes is not part of it.

She said that of course the
litvish
apply Torah learning to life. She would never let her husband as much as wipe one dish because then three seconds of Torah learning are lost. A husband is not expected to lift a finger, so he can concentrate on Torah every second of the day.

“It says in the Torah that behaving like a
mensch
comes before learning Torah,” I retorted. “If a man can’t help his own wife and family, his Torah learning is not worth the dish she is washing and a relationship is dependent on respect to each other, not on a nightgown,” and on and on until we were out of breath and decided to stop the useless argument and go have pizza at Mendel’s.

When I told my mother of Chevi’s nightgown and the dish her husband would never wipe, she said that they had their own way of doing things and we had ours. And anyway, we should not be having these discussions. What each couple did behind closed doors was absolutely no one else’s business. She then took out a pile of fashion catalogs and we began leafing through them.

Though there were still some months until my wedding night, my mother decided we would do our shopping right then. There were holidays, other weddings, work, and who knows what else in between now and the big night and relying on time was never a good idea.

We had already begun shopping for clothing. We combed through Macy’s, cleared out Lord & Taylor, and began exploring Bloomingdale’s. We made long lists of items needed, stores to check out, and hints to convey to the in-laws. There was the Wedding Night Itself, The Day After, and Life in General, which required an exhaustive investigative committee of experienced wedding people that included my aunt—who married off five; my second cousin—seven; and my mother’s former classmate Mrs. Frish and her eleven daughters. Shoes, clothes, lingerie, head coverings, house appliances, linen—all this needed expert advice on what to buy where, and for how much, and most important of all, how long it would last. Elegant’s linen lasted at least until the third child’s bed-wetting. We weren’t to bother with cheaper brands; they could barely absorb one child’s vomit. Ralph’s shoes with three-inch heels were good until the sixth month of the first pregnancy; Versani, though, was a better choice. Mrs. Frish had stumbled in them until at least the seventh month of the seventh child, when the heel broke clean off the shoe right in the middle of Thirteenth Avenue and she had to hobble to the nearest car service with the twins in the carriage. Wilhelm’s porcelain plates were by far the best—my cousin knew. Her sons had used them for trampolines and most of the set remained intact. And as for the fridge, and most appliances, we were to go directly, without turning our heads in any direction, to Yoily’s Electronic. They were the cheapest, installed them for free, and even had a package deal where you could get a washer and dryer at a discount.

We ran from store to store, comparing prices, bargaining with the salesmen, making lists for the lists. By the end of the week, my mother had purchased the dishes, towels, and cutlery, my grandmother had pledged a dryer, my aunt a mixer, my friends the cookbooks, and my sister-in-law two sets of fine linen, but she had promised to buy me a bracelet for my
Bas Mitzvah
five years earlier—and hadn’t—so I decided not to wait.

As for clothing, it never ended. There was the Before, when a bride had to look like a bride, the After, when a just-married bride had to look like a just-married bride, and the General After After, which my mother insisted was not an excuse to look like a
shluch
. There was the elegant wear for
Shabbos
and special events, the elegant-but-simpler-wear for work and every day, and the very-simple-but-still-elegant wear for staying home.

Dressing a bride, she said, was a mission unto its own, and she had five sons but only two daughters on which to spend her life savings. She strode purposefully through the wide aisles of every store in New York City, chewing her lips, narrowing her eyes, clicking her heels as she picked out clothing of every design and texture and tried to predict which one Pessy, the only daughter of her best friend, Goldy, would never buy. A month before, my mother had bought me an expensive suit for Sarah Leah’s upcoming wedding. After long deliberations, we had purchased the suit at Estee’s Exclusive on Coney Island for a price she never told my father about, only to see Pessy wearing the very same dress at the very same wedding after Estee had explicitly promised that she would sell it to no other
Yushive
girl.

This time my mother took no chances. Every dress was scrutinized, redesigned on paper, and sewn up in a slightly different version by the good Asian seamstress Dia, whom Goldy did not use. The dresses were stylish and elegant but modest, the way a Jewish girl should look.

Then there were the shoes. The saleslady at the new Shoe Center store recognized my mother from seminary some thirty years before, and they laughed as they reminisced about this teacher and that, and how one absolutely needed two shades of black because patent leather reflected differently on silk black than on velvet black.