In my family, we detest the religious — holy-water frogs, cassocked priests, bearded men and veiled women — and, with a particular aversion laced with sarcasm, men with sidelocks and women in thick stockings dragging strollers loaded with broods of little ones.
I remember that, as a child, when we lived on the boulevard Magenta not far from the Sentier where my father had his workshop, a family among our neighbors regularly waited, on Saturdays, for someone in the building to press the buzzer in their place so the door would open for them. My father, whom “this hypocrisy,” as he called it, drove into a fury, had devised a diabolical strategy: he would barely crack the door open, then, having slipped inside, slam it brutally shut behind him so as not to let the neighbors in. “Who do they take me for? For their Shabbes Goy?” he would still fume once the door of our apartment had closed.
To pass these families in black, with their pale complexions, their often threadbare clothes, those little boys “got up in costume, poor things,” with their sidelocks framing their childish, close-cropped faces, those men whose tzitzis hung out from under their jackets (“Couldn’t they tuck them into their trousers — what’s wrong with them, showing off like that!”), judged “Shmoutsek” (dirty), “backward” — all this had the gift of sending him off the deep end.
He was hounded by fate, for no sooner had he moved, upon his retirement, to the chic part of the 17th arrondissement than that very neighborhood was, over the years, to become the one sheltering the largest Jewish community in France, within which there still lives a sizable proportion of observant Jews, some of them of Orthodox persuasion. Since the attacks of November 2015, the yeshiva on the corner of his street has stripped its façade of any distinctive sign and fitted it with opaque tinted glass, preventing anyone from seeing what goes on inside. I am grateful to the owners for it, given my father’s nerves, for he could not walk past without belching out, “What’s wrong with them, krertz-ing (whining) all day long, swaying back and forth like idiots!”
Having myself little attraction to religion, and having received no religious education, I always found strange the boundless anger that these beliefs and attitudes — which he prides himself on despising — arouse in my father. For his anger, I came to understand little by little, draws its virulence from being mingled with shame. That the word “Jew” can at once designate those silhouettes, as if surging from another century, with the practices of another age, and himself, who means to be modern, freed from the shackles of his ancestors — this resonates within him like an insult. Worse still, like a threat. “We are not the same kind of Jews,” he seems to repeat at will.
And no doubt he is not wrong. Were it not for the memories that come back to him as old age sets in: of the joy of his mother lighting the candles for Shabbat, proud as she was to know her husband and her son at the synagogue while she herself finished preparing the meal.
It took me until my fifties to learn that my father read Hebrew and knew the prayers. Such would not have been his destiny had it not been that, after his expulsion from the state school where he was enrolled in Berlin, his parents had no other choice but to enroll him in a Jewish school. The rise of Nazism, the arrest of his parents and then their murder, his own deportation to the camps, were to set him forever at odds with God, and still more — no one knows why — with His faithful. To this day I avoid with him any subject touching on religion, such is the wound it never fails to reopen in him, together with an inexhaustible fury. My only blunder was to give him, for his last birthday, a boxed set of the series Les Shtisel (Shtisel), thinking that this “Downton Abbey among the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem,” as the publicity puts it, might please him. Having watched one episode, he handed it back to me, having no use, he told me, “for all these stories about rabbis.” That men in caftans and women bare-headed beneath their headscarves might know, like anyone else, broken destinies and family rivalries, might see their marriage go to ruin, might fear old age and loneliness, might wish to live and to love — that the screenplay of this series should be one of the most marvelous there is — none of it interested him in the least. For him, whom so many human things passionately engaged, this particular portion of humanity was doomed to remain forever outside his field of vision.
A few years earlier, being cautious, I had refrained from telling him that, in the course of a book project, I had had occasion to explore the haredim neighborhoods of New York and the passionate curiosity they had aroused in me. From Crown Heights, the center of American Lubavitch Judaism, to — above all — Borough Park, nicknamed by its inhabitants “The Jewish capital of United States and a kosher utopia,” I walked streets lined with brick houses, a neighborhood circumscribed by metal wires in the sky forming an eruv, symbolically extending the space of the home so as to allow the inhabitants to move about with their arms full during Shabbat; on the eve of Passover I witnessed the making of unleavened bread in an atmosphere full of fervor, crossed paths with men and women, none of whom would conspicuously meet my gaze, heard beings whom everything separated from me speak the Yiddish language of my grandmother. I would have liked to understand; everything seemed opaque to me. In a manner analogous to, and at the same time the inverse of, my father’s, I wondered what these Jews, who were utterly foreign to me, could have in common with me. I still do not know.
Talking with my guide — himself Orthodox, but of a less strict persuasion that allowed him to converse with a woman (without, however, going so far as to be able to shake my hand) — I remember asking him how men and women met in this world where everything was arranged to keep them apart from childhood. They met, as I had suspected, through arranged marriages, on whose procedure he gave me all manner of detail. Seeing my perplexed and no doubt more than reluctant air, he then told me that his own daughter, who would herself be free to choose her husband without any arrangement of any kind, had friends who had married according to these ancestral codes, and that these friends had told her they pitied her for her freedom. This anecdote, for an instant, made my certainties waver. A part of me could understand these young women. Does not every way of living always go hand in hand with a measure of renunciation? Whether of freedom, or of an order that reassures us? Scattered phrases, sensations, suspended my judgment, absorbed as I was in looking.
My New York wanderings had at the same time revealed to me the existence of an organization created in the early 2000s, whose activity had not ceased to grow since. The association Footsteps (which one might translate as “to take the plunge”) addressed itself, and still addresses itself, to members of the ultra-Orthodox communities wishing to free themselves from their milieu of origin in order to join mainstream society. To leave a world hemmed in by immutable codes, a world whose life, down to its least activities, unfolds apart from the secular world, is a veritable obstacle course. The testimonies posted on the organization’s website let us glimpse the colossal difficulty of it. Those who have left needed the strength to break with the world of their childhood, and still more to accept being banished from it forever. Then the courage to plunge into a world utterly unknown to them, so faint were the echoes they had until then perceived of it. In the ultra-Orthodox world, one does not listen to the radio, one does not watch television, one has access through the Internet only to community networks, one does not go to the cinema, one takes no public transport other than that governed by one’s community, and of course one knows nothing of the social, professional and even amorous relations that govern the outside world. One of the most striking scenes in the marvelous book by Shulem Deen, Celui qui va vers elle ne revient pas (All Who Go Do Not Return), to which I shall return, shows the narrator on his first escapade to Manhattan. The young haredi has until then never ventured there, and suddenly he is seized by the irrepressible urge to go into a bar. But how does one order a drink? What does one consume in such places? How is one to behave there? It is also all these tiny gestures that Footsteps teaches to those who are called “out of the derech” (“Those who have left the path,” in a mix of English and Hebrew).
I tried in vain to meet the heads of Footsteps who, too solicited by countless requests, could not receive me. And it was finally through two books, among the most beautiful I have ever been given to read, that I discovered the odyssey of those who have left the road.
First, the one by Anouk Markovits who, under the French title Je suis interdite (I Am Forbidden) (J.-C. Lattès, 2003), tells the story of a young girl raised in France in the very closed community of the Satmar, a Hasidic movement originating in Transylvania. The novel also tells, and perhaps even more so, the story of her adoptive sister Mila, a young survivor of the Shoah. While Atara, the heroine — and at the same time a double of the author, whose own path was analogous — develops a passion for books and for knowledge to the point of refusing the destiny prescribed for her, Mila, for her part, accepts of her own free will the one that awaits her. Atara, as a young girl, breaks with her family in order to build another life for herself. She will never again see her father, who banishes her. Mila, for her part, makes a religious — but also a love — marriage with a young Satmar with whom she lives in the Hasidic neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. A tragedy, of which she is both the victim and in part the author, will shatter Mila’s destiny. I leave the reader to discover for himself this poignant story of infinite depth. For beyond the power of the narrative, what makes this book an unforgettable text lies above all in the author’s point of view. Anouk Markovits, like Atara, knows the Hasidic world from within; she carries it inscribed in her flesh, and she shares it with us with great precision, but above all with immense delicacy. She who has severed her ties with that world casts upon it, surprisingly, a gaze full of empathy. Without judgment, nor yet complacency, without losing any of her lucidity, but with that intimate and fraternal knowledge one has for one’s own. As Anouk Markovits explained in an interview: “On the one hand, I had made personal choices that rejected the milieu I came from and, on the other, I knew that the people who choose to remain in those milieus are not crazy fundamentalists, but people like us, full of desires and conflicts.” I had read before then other books set in the Hasidic milieu — the very beautiful novel L’Élu (The Chosen) by Chaim Potok in particular — but Anouk Markovits’s was for me the first to render the ultra-Orthodox milieu visible with that mixture of distance and benevolence that only the struggle one has waged to leave it can permit.
The author of Je suis interdite speaks rather little of this struggle and its rendings. These are, on the contrary, the central subject of the book by Shulem Deen cited above. Celui qui va vers elle ne revient pas (All Who Go Do Not Return) (éditions du Globe, Prix Médicis essai 2017) is not a novel, but the autobiographical account of a child, then a man, raised in the Skver community, one of the most closed (more closed even than the Satmar, which is saying something!) of the ultra-Orthodox New York world. The vast work of more than 400 pages plunges us into the staggering and, in many respects, fascinating labyrinth of this community almost entirely cut off from the world; it reveals to us its rigidity, its brutality, but also the moments of sharing and fervor, the comfort and the occasional gentleness of certain human relationships, beginning with the one the author maintains with his wife, whom he had to marry without loving her when he was nineteen. The mutual understanding of the two spouses, constrained to this joyless union, the family they form with their five children, constitute one of the great beauties of this book, which contains countless others. Shulem Deen is going to leave. Without premeditating it, but because an irrepressible movement of his conscience will lead him little by little to secede. A few events will play the role of trigger, such as hearing for the first time a radio program that a friend lets him listen to in secret. From then on, his curiosity about the world, his quest for what is other, can no longer be stopped. How and why does one escape the hold of one’s milieu? By what paths, never traced before oneself, does one find one’s road? In a word: how, by solitary ways, does one become an individual? That is what this breathtaking book recounts in negative, its stakes reaching far beyond the sole framework of the haredim communities.
Shulem Deen had not planned to leave his wife and children. It was the religious authorities who forced him to. In the several years since he left, he has never seen them again, except for a brief moment, forcing his way into the wedding of his daughter, to which he was not invited. And yet nothing in his book lets any anger show through. Author of the blog Hasidic Rebel, then of the site Unpious.com, which gave a voice to marginal Hasidim (now closed), he has nonetheless never expressed any hatred toward his community of origin, and has several times testified to his attachment, his nostalgia even, for certain moments of that life which he will miss forever. The unfathomable mystery and complexity of the human soul, of what one flees, of what one lacks, and of what one pursues. A mystery as great as my father’s anger.