The Good Chasidic Wife

Many years ago, I was visiting in the city with a then-young, not yet famous novelist I had gotten to know in a writing program in the Midwest.  His mantra, like everyone’s back then, was write what you know.  He was Jewish and from New York.  I was Jewish and from New York, which at the distant writing program practically made us twins.  He was a bit older, single, an early hipster in writing circles, and he had a kind of neurotic Jewish guy charm, smart but neb.  I was very married and had just returned to the states after several years in Israel trying to rid myself of my insane family and being raised by an entire community that had Cossack nightmares, Kristallnacht nightmares, and ghetto round-up nightmares.  We were drunk on our own journey; the distance we had traveled.  Neither my husband nor I had ever finished high school, so we marveled at the fact that we were hanging around real writers, people who graduated and taught at places we would never have imagined a few years prior.

I liked our friend. He was smart, handsome, witty, a damn good writer, and ambitious.  He also had this air of “I belong here,” and here was wherever he happened to be. Although his physical appearance told a different story—thin and bony, awkward joints—in fact, it screamed Jewboy, former sissy pants, sickly kid, these two traits coalesced in a very appealing way, to me at least. So much so that I found him in a hallway in Williams Hall, I just said, “Hey, you, come for Shabbos.”

“I’ll just come for dinner,” he said.  “What’s the address?” We did not know each other then.

He had graduated from the Columbia Writing Program a few years earlier, and that spring of our visit was back teaching there.  He was also just coming off the high of having his first novel compared to Philip Roth in the Sunday section of the New York Times.  “Fucking Roth, man,” my husband would say. “Yeah, fucking Roth,” he would say.  In truth, though, he was stalled in his own writing, someplace one hundred pages into a second novel, floundering, frustrated and scared—fucking Roth, I thought.

In his tiny kitchen I asked what the novel was about, and he said, “Chasidim.”  I was incredulous. “What the fuck do you know about Chasidim, you know not a thing.”  He had no Yiddish, no Hebrew, had once asked me to translate “boychik,” and wrote more like F. Scott Fitzgerald than I.B. Singer.  As far as I could tell, the comparison in the Times was obligatory because of his last name and his shocking Semitic appearance. He shrugged. “Breaking out,” he said as he wiped his hands on a dish towel and looked at me and my husband.

I immediately thought I knew where he was going: sell out—hot, sweaty, horny Chasidim.  Chasidim fucking, swinging from chandeliers, wife swapping on the down low—oh no, not on my watch.

“I am so tired of that novel,” I said. “Come on.” My stomach a roil of anger and revulsion, but I said nothing else.   I sulked.

After about six cups of coffee in his stifling apartment he suggested I go for a walk with him over to Columbia. He said there was someone he wanted me to meet.  On the way I almost asked him, what about the credo: writing what you know—but I didn’t.  To be honest, I quickly got lost in my own reverie, and after a couple of blocks I was fully expecting to meet Harold Brodkey or Gordon Lish, since both breezed in and out of Columbia and both were so worth meeting. And at this point, my friend, I think, owed me something.

We arrived just as classes were letting out and the quad filled with students. He suddenly started waving wildly. “Hey, Malky!” he yelled, and a tall modern looking Chasidish woman stopped, tucked her notebook into a stylish camel bag and stood waiting on the stone path. I eyed the bone-colored stockings, expensive ones, and the taupe shoes.

“Wait till you meet her,” he said. “You’re going to love her, smartest woman ever.”  I didn’t know how smart she would be but I knew she was strikingly beautiful, tall, poised, groomed—the silk blouse with off-white piping screamed rich and of course married and the cute neat page boy sheitel and fawn pillbox howled.  I did a mental tally: her bag alone was at least four hundred dollars, the petite gold watch, the diamond pedants around her neck, it felt like I was seeing those escaped green parrots flying through Flatbush.  I could not figure it out.  I felt suddenly naked in my yellow hippie skirt and Israeli top and brown sandals.

I was told that she was studying “linguistics,” which is by no means an easy course of study.  Linguistics is the calculus of language, filled with equations and very exact sounds, discrete units of language and theories.  I barely made it through linguistics–barely.  I did not tell my friend that I was gripped, not by curiosity, but rather by suspicion.  I did not trust her and my friend was not to be trusted on any account; he was a writer, de facto an opportunist.

Parrots: Why was this woman studying linguistics, where exactly was her husband and what were, I assumed, her many children? She looked to be a few years older than me and a few years younger than my friend.  When he introduced me it was clear that he had told her about me and I was meant to serve to legitimize him in some way.  Writers pull all kinds of crap on people, so I assumed he wanted an invite into her world for his book, research.  I was only partially right.  We exchanged some pleasantries.

“Oh, you look so Israeli,” she said as we began to walk toward the library —he needed a book, and she needed books—I don’t remember. I do remember, though, that when she went off into the stacks to get something and we were waiting for her he was practically breathless.

“So what’d you think, isn’t she something, have you ever seen anybody like her, she speaks four languages, oh, and sharp, she’s sharp.”

What I thought was he was about to get swatted down like a fly.

“What I think,” I said. “She’s married.”

“Oh, yeah, I know,” he said. “But that was forced. Her family made her. Not real.”

I turned the words made over in my mind and hoped that I would not spit venom at him.

No Brodkey, no Lish, and I did not want to debate what constituted a “real marriage.”

“Look,” I said, “she said two words to me, and I can’t detect brilliance from that.”

“Trust me, she is the smartest woman I have ever met and for god’s sake take a look at her, that’s real beauty.”

Okay I would grant her beauty but not go an inch farther.  I began to sense that my friend really was only writing a novel secondary to pursuing one.

What could I say about this woman? She looked, well, beautiful, but also old enough to have at least five kids by my calculations.  She did not seem “standoffish”—in fact, after she returned from the stacks she rapid fired questions at me.  Where was I from, oh, she had relatives nearby, where did I go to elementary school, “yeah, that makes sense, but it is now another type of school”—oh, she had a cousin here and one there.  I told her both my parents were only children and I had no cousins.  Really, I did not want any part of whatever this was.  She pursued every topic: where did I go to college, Pell grants.  My mind swirled.  I could only silence her when I told her that the famous linguist Noam Chomsky’s grandfather “learnt” in the Mir yeshiva and that they were distant mishpacha, just a thin blood tie to Yerucham Levovits, and yeah, for real, Franz Kafka had been engaged to the Gerrer Rebbe’s second daughter, the famous redheaded one who saved Jews during the Holocaust, but she broke the engagement. And why did she think so many Gerrers were redheads—weird, right?

From standing there I could not get a sense of what was going on. She only mentioned her husband once, and while she did not sound like a young bride puffed with pride, she did not say anything that sent up a flare either.

I was more concerned about my friend.  So far, in the course of that conversation he had invited her to join him both at the Yaddo writer’s colony and at McDowell.  Where, it was common knowledge, people just drank, made connections, screwed each other, and drank some more.  As if, of course, she would just leave her husband and, of course, go spend a week with him upstate, in the beauty of the trees, nature and a converted mansion, and fall into this very pattern.  A part of me wanted to pull him up short on his stupidity and arrogance—to imagine a woman, any woman, would just drop what they were doing to follow him—and another part of me wanted to explain how many social and cultural lines he was crossing.  This woman baffled me.  Why was she even speaking to him?

To say he just wanted to get laid by some Chasidish beauty would be grossly unfair of me, although the thought skimmed the surface of my mind.  If I had to characterize it now I would say he was, simply put, in love and looking for ways and excuses.  Anyway, what I remember my friend told me: her husband was ill, not an invalid but he had something, heart, kidney.  What he did not say, but I surmised—they had fertility problems, because I noticed she had mentioned her sister’s children but none of her own. When she went to the desk to check the books out, my friend leaned over and told me that she was the daughter of an important rabbi. My fury unrestrained, I hissed back, “They’re all the daughters of important rabbis. Itzy Shmulick the grocer never had a daughter, only big shots have daughters.” But what was really upsetting me was his disregard for a marriage that was not his own and seeing him so emotionally out of control, unmoored, pursuing something so off the wall. It scared me.  I accrued resentment; I had introduced him to at least four nice, normal Jewish women and he had found something wrong with each.  Then he wants me to meet this, a married Chasidish woman.  Are you frickin’ nuts? I wanted to ask.  Do you know what these people are like?  I did not even know how I would frame it to my husband, and I understood clearly why he had only asked me to go.

Up until this point he had shown no interest in anything remotely Jewish.  When my husband would go on his tirades about my family in Monsey he would join in and they would both somehow turn it all back to the political problems in Israel, the parasites living off the tit of the state, in America the ignorance, the lice, the hepatitis, scams, welfare, yada yada yada.  In fact, both of them together could have had punch cards, to clock in at hating pan-Orthodoxy, ball park figure, a good 20 hours a week.  Just say the word “Charedi” to my husband and he’d cock his forefinger and thumb to my temple and then to his. Our murder suicide pact.

“Right,” he’d say.

“Right,” I’d say. “Better dead.”

“You know she can read Proust in the original French,” My friend said.

I have never been good with situations that strike me as teetering on immoral or messy—affairs, sex outside of a marriage were scorched earth in my mind.  It would be close to 15 years later when I was 37 that I would ever have to confront adultery.  The academic world still seemed where I wanted to be and rife with such shenanigans.  I figured out pretty early to just not involve myself, which was hard when I felt pressured into saying or doing something. On the other hand I did not want to lose a friendship that seemed, well, the only writing friend I had.  So very early I just learned to accept, this is what people do.  So I nodded and smiled.

I am not sure what happened between Malky and my friend.  I do know he took her upstate and they spent a day together in Woodstock and took pictures. Did her husband hobble around the house that day or was he bedridden?  I know that after that trip my friend once even went as far as to go to her house in Brooklyn, knocked on the door in the middle of the night, maybe in some irrational state reserved only for a Chekhov story, and yes, he was invited in and he met her husband.  I tried to imagine him standing there in that sad childless house with dark Hungarian furniture, the table laid with a white damask cloth fringed in gold tassels, and I think I even may have said: leave it alone, they have enough sorrow without you.

That next winter he paced, he sweated, he called us at all hours, but I had made clear that I would not discuss her in any way, shape, or form.  I wondered if I was being cruel.  Maybe just two lonely people, maybe there was something there, but too bad, I thought, you can’t have everything in this life. But she was always there on the next word to leave his mouth if I allowed, caught in his throat, a harsh wind blowing through an unzipped jacket. There was nothing to talk about.  Honestly, sometimes I thought her a callous bitch, a real bitch.  I had a fantasy about going up to her and saying: “Why?” How could she have not known how he felt?

After about nine months he no longer seemed on the edge, and in fact acted like he didn’t want to mention her again.  I certainly did not bring her up.

Some years later when his second novel finally came out to much fanfare, and after we had lost touch, I read the review in the Sunday New York Times. It said:  “Set in Upstate New York and an enclave in Brooklyn, this novel is about a desperate and childless Hasidic couple that devised an elaborate scheme, to have the wife impregnated by an unsuspecting, soulful Jewish college professor.”   I turned the paper over so I would not be staring at his photograph.

Okay, I thought, she was that smart.