Exodus, Revisited Read online

  ALSO BY DEBORAH FELDMAN

  Unorthodox

  Exodus

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Originally published in the United States of America by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2014 and by Plume, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2015

  First revised edition published by Plume, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Copyright © 2014, 2021 by Deborah Feldman

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the excerpt from “My Tribe Speaks,” by Anna Margolin, in With Everything We’ve Got: A Personal Anthology of Yiddish Poetry, edited and translated by Richard J. Fein, Host Publications, 2009.

  PLUME is a registered trademark and the P colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  has been applied for.

  ISBN 9780593185261 (paperback)

  ISBN 9780593185278 (ebook)

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

  Cover design and illustration by Vi-An Nguyen

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  Dem Andenken meiner unvergesslichen Großmutter gewidmet!

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Deborah Feldman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Preface

  1: Fragen

  2: Verzweiflung

  3: Handlung

  4: Wurzeln

  5: Reise

  6: Entdeckung

  7: Versöhnung

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  No one expected the story of leaving a Hasidic enclave to find many readers, least of all myself. The many polite rejections of my book proposal back in 2009 referred to my story as too local, too niche, suited at best for a feature article in a regional newspaper or magazine. Later, when a publisher did take a chance on me, I was gently warned not to get my hopes up. So the overnight success of Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (subtitle added by a shrewd marketing department to up the book’s chances) caught all of us completely unawares. Suddenly people around me were surmising that perhaps my story was indeed an American one after all, like the tales of runaway Mormons and Mennonites that populated the memoirs of the age, and the rebellious Amish teenagers on reality TV. Editors, publicists, and agents alike pondered if at the end of the day there wasn’t some American bottom line in the act of running away from a religious sect in the pursuit of liberty and happiness.

  My publisher naturally wanted to follow up on the success of Unorthodox, which ended on the cliffhanger of my departure not because I wanted to deprive my audience of the satisfaction of knowing what happens next, but because I wrote the book too soon after leaving my community to know the next phase myself. He proposed another memoir and enthusiastically advised me to travel across the country and write about finally becoming an American. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll was the phrase mentioned, as if my becoming an American was predicated on embracing the hedonism my family and community had deemed a grave sin. I longed more than anything to be allowed to keep writing, to have a career as a writer, so although I was filled with anxiety, I was determined to try my best to follow this assignment.

  Yet I soon realized becoming American was impossible. I had been raised in a world resembling an eighteenth-century European shtetl, where I had spoken a different language, had consumed a different culture, and was subjected to religious law instead of civil law. It may well be an American tradition to run away, but if so, it is only because it is American to nurture and protect worlds that need running away from. Certainly, for me, the United States could never be the country I knew and trusted; it could therefore never be home.

  I submitted a manuscript to my publisher that was part exploration of unwelcoming territory and part long-awaited discovery of my own ancestral roots abroad. I felt torn between two personas: the one everyone expected of me, and the one I felt magnetically drawn to. I longed to write about the latter, but I was told that the story was too Eurocentric. Americans want to read about themselves, my editor insisted, you’re the American dream, write about that! In the end, I became a European despite all the discouragement, and I relocated to a continent rich in narrative heritage. I felt that since I did not have the “right” story or that “American” persona, I was no longer qualified to write about my journey. I switched to a new language, one much closer to my mother tongue, and I plugged into a new yet old culture with greater ease than I could ever have imagined. I began writing about my European experiences for Europeans.

  Now, all these years later, the success around the globe of the Netflix series Unorthodox, which inspired translations of my work in countless foreign languages, proves the universality of the journey. Regardless of the geographic specifics of my post-religious exodus, the audiences for stories are no longer local or regional, as many once feared. More and more, our treasure trove of stories is becoming a common resource, transcending all boundaries of culture, identity, and language. It is a result of this transformation that I can offer you the fully realized story, revisited from a later vantage point. Although the trajectory of my life has taken some surprising turns since my departure from the Hasidic community, somehow I have the feeling it will prove its universality as well.

  PREFACE

  In urban Williamsburg, in the confines of the Satmar Hasidic community where I grew up, children were taught the ancient biblical laws dating from the era of the temple, a time before the diaspora, when Jewish people had a sense of home and the dignity that is its consequence. These laws had been rendered mostly abstract by the changes in our circumstances, but even though we rarely had the opportunity to apply them, they were part of the great inheritance that was to serve as our solace in what is seen as a temporary period of exile.

  An exception to those laws was declared for my grandmother’s garden, perhaps one of the last plots of land in Williamsburg that had not been smothered with cement, which my grandfather treated as if it was our personal holy land, applying the complex laws of agriculture to that little island of greenery as if it were a farming initiative and not simply my bubby’s personal sanctuary, a rare thing of beauty to which she escaped when she needed peace. My grandfather insisted on imposing a religious order on everything in our lives, not only those aspects that were required, and the garden was certainly not to be overlooked. Perhaps this relentless discipline gave him comfort after the chaos he had experienced during wartime. However, it was the order of nature to which my grandmother, also a Holocaust survivor, was still most loyal. The conflict that sputtered between them all their married life, and probably the conflict that brewed early on in my own spirit as well, can very likely be traced back to these competing allegiances. In their case, however, it was my grandfather who eventually triumphed, and biblical law was applied to the garden my grandmother had so lovingly cultivated over the years. The inflexible application of those ancient edicts
proved to be the death of that miniature paradise and, in a way, the loss of the grandmother I knew and loved, which I would realize only many years later, when I was wrestling with her sudden physical absence. I had already experienced losing her emotionally and spiritually, as old age seemed to fragment and diminish her, to carry her further and further away from me and into the world she had always privately inhabited.

  * * *

  —

  In the world I grew up in there was no rest or retreat from the omnipresent intrusion of religious tenets. Even then, I imagined I knew God better than any of the old and wise people around me; I suspected they had grievously misunderstood him. Such is the arrogance of a childhood that has known no abject degradation or suffering. These people had survived the apocalypse, and they had conjured a new, postapocalyptic God, a paroxysm of uncontrolled fury, and therefore my community no longer availed itself of the many leniencies and permissions that had once marked our religion like complex embroidery on a simple cloth. Instead it sought to draw a pristine cloth ever tighter around itself, in the hope that the narrowness of structure and belief would restore the sense of security that had been permanently snatched from them. The more open the world around them became, the more they withdrew.

  I too should have been subsumed by the regulations as I came of age in our little shtetl, but somehow the forces within me conspired to carve out enough mental space for independent thought to flourish. Later, desperate for the physical space in which to apply my own ideas, I left for the outside world, never to return. Upon doing so, I promptly attempted to shed the obligatory personality I had worn like a shell for all those years, hoping that what would emerge from underneath it would be my true self, like a sapling bursting forth from freshly turned earth.

  I soon discovered that both of my personalities, the one I saw as authentic and the one I saw as artificial, had inseparably entangled roots, the entirety of which had been torn from its terrain in the process of fleeing. It took time to realize that hacking away at that tangle of roots in an attempt to separate from the parts of my identity I wanted to be free from was doing more harm than good. Finding myself on the other side of the invisible barriers that had always hemmed me in, I felt sure that my future was out there somewhere, waiting for me, but I had no sense of direction to help me navigate through the void between those two points—of what had been and what was to come—except for the moral compass that had been instilled in me by my grandmother, whose spirit seemed to come alive in me now like a quivering magnetic needle striving toward true north. It was this force that helped me realize that the key to reaching this hazy, veiled shore was not to abandon my past, but rather to reach back and sew the ties from it to the future. To do this, I traced back along the fabric, feeling for a place where the weave was still strong, where it could support ties. I wanted to close the chasm as if stitching a wound; to reconcile the forces that had always seemed like contradictions, yet had in truth been complementary parts of a whole all along.

  * * *

  —

  Now, more than ten years since my departure from the Hasidic community, those two personalities that had developed side by side, yet separate from each other, have finally been allowed to integrate, and with that has come the first real sense of a whole self, here in this old yet new world. Within my consciousness I still have the memory of the past; not only the recent past, but also the deeper, older past that comes before it, and because of this, I have acquired the ability to envision the future as something infinite and unqualifiable, something within our collective hands, as opposed to the hands of a temperamental and individual God.

  For the period of time this book chronicles, I was a kind of refugee. Sadly, many people I once knew who also followed this path have taken their own lives in the preceding years. After all, what happens when you open a door but all you find on the other side is emptiness? And I mean not just what happens to us, but what happens to any person who embarks on a journey with no return ticket? I have asked myself this question constantly over the last decade: Is it even possible to arrive? As fresh news of each suicide reached me, it felt like a personal blow to my own reserves of hope. They had each answered the question for themselves by taking a decisive leap into the void. I asked myself why I had not yet done the same. But later I would realize it was because all that time my feet had already been treading on solid ground. In leaving my community I thought I had also lost the only source of love and beauty in my life: my grandmother. Yet it was her personal journey that had blazed the trail I traveled in reverse, and her love of harmony that taught me how to bring together the disparate parts of myself. I felt the magnetic pull of the European continent, the place that my community had declared to be scorched earth, and now, against all probability, I am no longer one who is fleeing, or one who has fled—I am one who has returned.

  Berlin 2020

  1

  FRAGEN

  QUESTIONS

  Bubby, am I one hundred percent Jewish?

  I am eight years old when I first dare to formulate the question I had been turning over in my mind for such a long time. I have been worrying that there might be a sinister reason for the way my thoughts tend toward doubt instead of faith. This way of life we lead, it does not come naturally to me, although I know it should. Because no one else suffers from this affliction, I wonder if genealogical contamination can explain the anomaly. I suspect I am regarded as tainted by my mother’s actions, so it follows that she too could have been tainted by someone else, by some mysterious, forgotten ancestor in her past. This would explain why I am the way I am, and not like the others.

  Bubby, am I one hundred percent Jewish? I ask. Because I think that whether I am or am not is a matter that defines my destiny. Because I need to know if I have a hope of fitting in.

  What a silly question! she exclaims in response. Of course you are Jewish, she assures me. Everybody in our community is. She dismisses my earnest fear with a laugh. But how can she be so certain?

  Look at our world, she says. Look at how separate we live. How we have always lived. Jews don’t mix with others, and others don’t mix with us, so how do you think you could be anything less than one hundred percent?

  I didn’t think to inquire then why so many people in our community have light eyes, pale skin, and fair hair. My grandmother herself had always spoken proudly of her blond children. Pale, non-stereotypically Jewish features were valuable commodities among us. They meant one would be able to pass. It was the gift of disguise that God granted, seemingly at random, although we were led to believe that he had a precise system in terms of granting privileges, so perhaps lack of blondness denoted a spiritual inferiority, or perhaps it was actually the other way around, depending on how you looked at things. When I met my husband for the first time at the age of seventeen, I focused mostly on his golden hair and what that would mean for my genetic legacy. I wondered if the gene was strong enough to guarantee me golden-haired children, children who would be safe when the world, trapped in its unalterable pattern of orbit, turned against them.

  Now I understand that those Eastern European features and fair coloring align perfectly with the genetic studies that have long since confirmed that none of us are one hundred percent of anything. But these findings never made it into our midst, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t have mattered. In our community, we believed that as long as we were separate, we were pure by default.

  This word, though, “pure”—it doesn’t come from our language, from our vocabulary. Our word for “pure” is tuhor, and its original meaning applies only to spiritual purity. It means to be pure of intention, to be clean of sin. In the Hasidic tradition, this kind of purity ostensibly outweighs the importance of strong ancestry. The obsession with pure bloodlines would come later, perhaps as a by-product of the ideology and laws that defined us by exclusion. One drop of Jewish blood was all it took, not for the first time in Hitler’s Germa
ny, so those who could, fought to hide that drop and deny its existence, but out of instinctive protectiveness, those who could not retreated into a perverse pride. They invented a kind of purity for themselves. They created family trees that went back a thousand years to show their intact stems. They discriminated against Jews who couldn’t prove their undiluted status. Just like the Nazis, they too withdrew into the false and treacherous cocoon of consanguineous identity. Since they couldn’t be a part of that other world, the next best thing was to create a special club to be a member of instead. We are tuhor, they said, and they meant our souls of course, but this time they also meant our blood.

  If my blood is Jewish, then my soul is as well. This is why I want to know. I want to understand how exactly Jewishness is imprinted on me. What exactly is it that I have inherited? How can I force the concept of it into something graspable? But really, the question underneath all questions is this: How can I make my Jewishness bearable to me?

  Bubby says to me, quite absentmindedly, while sitting at the table running individual cabbage leaves under a fluorescent light bulb to check for worms, which would render them unkosher, that God put the other nations onto the planet for the sole purpose of hating and persecuting the Jewish people. It is this opposing force in the end that defines us, like how God created night and day, darkness and light. We need one to define the other. Our Jewishness exists precisely in the context of the attempts to eradicate it.

  This statement from her—which is supposed to explain the world to me, which says that everything out there is terrifying and will always be so, because it is the way things have to be in order to justify our existence—it is so extreme that I feel then that she can’t possibly mean it; she’s just parroting what the rabbi says, what everyone in the community is always repeating. Because wouldn’t it be a grave overestimation of ourselves to imagine that all the evil in the world was created for our suffering? Isn’t that kind of arrogance a sin in itself, to regard one’s suffering as the holiest of holies, submitting to it like an orchestra to its conductor, sacrificing personal will for the sake of some ultimate directorial vision?