Modern Orthodoxy
by
Elizabeth Levine
In 1973, Brooklyn still belonged to the Jews. Midwood anchored my family to our history in the neighborhood. It served as our atlas. Twelve of us kids grew up together on my block, some across the street, some right next door, and some up the road, almost to the Avenue. We sprawled across East 21st street like an octopus in eight ungainly directions, all arms and legs and movement. Kids lived from sewer to sewer.
We crouched in the alleyways between houses or behind apartment buildings or my grandmothers’ blue hydrangea bushes, seeking cover. Warm weather nights ended with stickball, double Dutch, or games of kick the can. The neighbors gathered on porches and debated everything arguable, backing down only if a ballgame interrupted. The Mets won the Subway Series that spring, and for an entire season, Brooklyn forgot about politics in favor of baseball.
That was my world: this big, beautiful borough was home. All my aunts and uncles and cousins from converged like an intersection at my grandmother’s house, as if our family house were the equator from which we never strayed north or south, but rested in a state of permanent equilibrium, where safety could always be found. Home. Family. History.
That summer, sunshine stretched across to the shady side of the street. Brooklyn wilted. Scorching heat squeezed the air out from under us. Even the asphalt smoked. Fire hydrants dripped water so lethargically, that they leaked with disappointment. Sprinklers showed their spouts, dreaming of rain. Public pools ran out of water as if the heat wave suffocated the water supply. Ice cream trucks ran out of Good Humor Creamsicles and Italian Ices.
We withstood a shortage of rain, wind, relief, or refrigeration. Shoppers and pedestrians abandoned the avenues from the unforgiving, oppressive temperature rising from tar streets.
The entire borough ignited. Fans and refrigerators blew fuses, sucking out all the remaining electricity; Residents without air conditioners smashed shop windows in frustration, stealing fan floor samples on display at Silverrods’ on Avenue J. Blackouts spread north to the Bronx. At night, Howard Cosell’s voice crackled on the transistor radio in our kitchen, “The Bronx is burning.”
Brooklyn was also burning, but our firefighters were too exhausted from overtime shifts in the South Bronx, or too busy playing Spades, or too fat from eating donuts with the cops from the 66th Police precinct. Violence erupted across neighborhoods. Before we realized it, a trail of yellow crime scene tape and white chalk bodies decorated the streets and doorways around us, a visual reminder of how crime would alter all of us.
Vietnam veterans started coming home that year, ghosts in uniform smoking and shaking in front of the Off-Track Betting storefront on the bad side of the tracks.Frequent muggings at the seedy Avenue H subway station displaced the homeless Vets who drank Mad Dog right from brown paper bags and slept on the park benches, even in winter. Phantom Lords, and the Savage Nomads’ gang members stabbed each other in deserted alleyways.Heroin addicts reclaimed the abandoned buildings along Coney Island;the neighborhood looked as bankrupt and uninhabited as the boardwalk itself. Nobody pretended they had anything left to lose. Only the Atlantic Ocean stopped arsonists or thieves from stealing the shoreline.
Kids had swarmed the Coney Island amusement park rides and arcades only a year before. Now, parents refused to take their children to the beach, leaving the Cyclone rollercoaster and Ferris wheel perpetually lonely. The New York Aquarium, landlocked by violence on one side and garbage on the other, drowned in bad debt. But when the Russians from Brighton Beach finally refused to swim in the contaminated Atlantic Ocean, then we finally paid attention.
Suddenly, parents supervised us more closely, hovering like seagulls on the pier. Our movements shrunk, restricted to the length of our street. At night, like gunshots, we heard trucks backfire in the distance on Kings Highway. Bars covered first-floor windows, altering our view of the outside. Drug dealers invaded Checkerboard Park, shaking down the monkey bars. Rats rifled through stagnant garbage cans, ripening in the heat because of the Sanitation Department strike.
Brooklyn stayed home that summer. Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Caribbean Blacks and Russians kept to their kind, afraid of one another. Nevertheless, my immediate bubble remained intact, at least for a little while longer. I attended nursery school at East Midwood Hebrew Day School. Jewish life resembled Amish country, except that Jews believed in electricity. This enclave sheltered me, keeping me immune from forces circulating outside of school, waiting to implode. Religion floated throughout the school day, like awe. I sang foreign and sorrowful prayers- the sound of lament. These forlorn, familiar rhythms became my lullaby. I studied English in the mornings and spoke Hebrew in the afternoons when time seemed more sacred. Hebrew letters seduced me with their intricate shapes and mysterious markings. I loved the magic of hidden vowels, the trick of reading from right to left, and the intricacy of this backward alphabet. Hebrew words, on the other hand, tasted like gravel, gritty, and rough sounding harsh and ugly outside of the refuge of East Midwood’s walls.
Yeshiva students normally walked home in groups.I always stayed in the middle of their herd for protection. Strangers made us paranoid, our xenophobia and suspicions following us from Canarsie to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Our Eastern European great-grandparents had passed down their persecution complex as our inheritance. Whenever I stared at my ancestors' black-and-white portraits,they looked identical, their grim lips wearing only worry.Fleeing the pogroms and frequent invasions from neighboring countries, my relatives abandoned their meager Ashkenazy harvest of only limp carrots, hungry from deprivation and persecution.
Intuitively, I understood I was just not like the other students at East Midwood. In first grade, I discovered we were different from Christians. Suddenly, my perceptions about my neighbors shifted and these differences left small, secular scars. Doubts about my Jewish identity swirled around my ankles, as fierce as fire ants. At six, I found myself with an unforeseen itch, one I could not stop scratching. Would God punish the Jews for being outsiders, by casting them into pillars of salt? Would we evaporate or fold, tumbling out of the Brooklyn sky like shooting stars?Suddenly, being Jewish felt dangerous. My sense of anxiety about God, religion, safety, identity, and belonging grew until I finally brought my fears home to my family.
“Why are all Christians bad?” I asked my parents. Silence. Normally, everyone in my family spoke over one another, forks waving in the air like swords. My father grabbed my arm.
“Where did you hear that?”
“On the playground today at school.”
“I will meet with the Rabbi tomorrow.”
News of my transfer to public school spread quickly. Families stopped talking to my parents, demanding, “How could you leave!” My parents did not respond. Kids I knew since nursery school suddenly would not play with me anymore.
My parents enrolled me in second grade at P.S. 152. Albanian political refugees arrived that year and these foreign boys promptly set fire to the grey garbage cans in the bathrooms. We tiptoed around them, afraid of matches.
God disappeared that year. I no longer prayed, read the Torah, or spoke Hebrew. I discovered Blondes, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans. I read my new friends like Braille, mesmerized by their mystery. I met Casey Stein when she plopped down at my table in the cafeteria.
“Hey, you must be the new girl! My name is Casey. I can tell you everything about everybody. I have been here since nursery school, so I know who people really are.How do you like it here so far?” Casey asked, chomping on her peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“I like our teacher Mrs. Johnston. She is nice and pretty!”
“Pretty is not important! What matters is Mrs. Johnston is real. She is the real deal!Casey declared, staring straight into my eyeballs.
The bell rang before I could ask her what that meant.When I arrived at class, Casey was laughing out loud. I heard her say to the girl sitting next to her in the reading circle “THIS book. THIS is the real deal!”
“So, what’s up, pussycat?” How’s life as the new kid?Where do you live anyway? I live in an apartment building on Ocean Avenue. You will have to come over and play one day after school. You will love my neighbors-they are all old and speak these funky, weird languages you have never heard before.”Her litany of questions, my inability to answer.
That reminded me.
“Hey, Casey, what does it mean
to be the real deal?”
“You don’t know what that means?” she asked in disbelief, leaning closer to me, her plump arms pulling me into her as she cupped her chubby hands, her stubby fingers speckled with hot pink, chipped nail polish. She whispered into my ear, “It means no bullshit. You can trust who they are. Finding the real deal is everything. You will see.” For me, Casey became the real deal.
I was struck by the word “trust.” It never occurred to me not to trust grownups.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked her at recess.
“Are you nuts?” “Of course, I do not believe in God. I do not believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, either!”
Casey was Jewish but she did not care. She allowed me to forget about East Midwood. I could leave Judaism behind now because Casey gave me a new place to belong. Suddenly, there was no longer any need or room left for God. She taught me about the Chinese Zodiac, a heresy in Judaism, to worship false Gods or indulge in other paradigms different than our own,
“Hey, we were both born in 1964, the Year of The Dragon. Our horoscope promises us we will accomplish amazing things. Nothing will stop us;we are already on fire!” She roared with laughter.
Casey reminded me of the sunshine, she burned that bright and that hot. I reminded myself of dusk, that vaguer period between extremes, not day or night but crepuscular. Without her, I could have faded away and nobody would even notice I had vanished.
“You worry too much, Lizzie, that is your problem. We are kids for Christ's sake, we are supposed to have FUN! You are always afraid. Live a little. It will not hurt! I bet it would be good for you. Let’s cut class and see the Streakers at Brooklyn College! Then you will have an adventure instead of being a goody two shoes,” Casey said one chilly autumn day.
“What do you mean cut class? I did not do things like cut class. Won’t we get into trouble?And what are streakers?” “Follow me!” Casey commanded. And I did.
We were friends for a year before she asked me to sleep over.My father convinced my mother to let me go. My father was not afraid; my mother did all the worrying in our house.
We walked to Casey’s apartment building. It was getting dark earlier now, as fall turned into winter. I was nervous and I could tell that my mother was too. I was about to enter a world of secrets I would carry within me into adolescence.
She lived in a Gothic pre-war apartment, where her Jewish and Eastern European neighbors appeared majestic in stature, like a mausoleum of refugees, regal with sadness and melancholy. They languished in her building. Many had survived the Holocaust, but never worked again, virtually immobilized to leave the safety of their apartments. Yiddish and German spilled out from salmon-colored doorways; their foreign accents resonated on the landing. Garish or depressing mezuzahs marked their doorways,tangible proof that Jews lived there, despite their perpetual state of diaspora.
The Russian refugees in Casey’s building differed in both class and charm from the Jewish residents. Rough, they spit on the street, as if the taste of the cold war coated their lungs, overtaking their other vital organs like hearts or intestines. The Slavic men drank shots of schnapps from crystal glasses, carelessly slamming them down on their handmade wooden tables in their eat-in-kitchen. Like the Polish men, these Eastern European immigrants usually wore white, sleeveless undershirts. Big and bloated from drinking on the docks at the Navy Yard, they often had to work overtime or double shifts, because they earned minimum wage. After their second shift, the men played late-night poker games in Greenpoint, finding comfort in cards.
Latinos did not live in Casey’s building yet, but several still played dominos in the park on the island divider in front of her complex. Most worked as handymen in the apartment complexes. Jesus, the Puerto Rican superintendent in Casey’s building, lived in the basement apartment of her complex, with his five children, who sprouted like tubers in the dark cellar.
Jesus’ kids hated him with good reason. His older children, joined the Pentecostal church in Sunset Park, just to get away from his drinking. Even God seemed preferable to his binges. Mimi, his eldest daughter, lay on her twin cot with hot rollers in her hair, in the bedroom she shared with her sister, Lulu. She dreamed of their mother who died in childbirth before the doctor arrived at their farm in Ponce. When it became obvious that neither the baby nor her mother would survive childbirth, Mimi dispatched her younger brother, Tito, to find Jesus at the bar on the plaza, “El Refugio.” Jesus stumbled drunk and pitiful back up the dusty, dirt road to their two-bedroom house without indoor plumbing.
He heard his wife groaning, squatting like a peasant in the kitchen, pushing down to release the baby, breech, inside of her. She hemorrhaged to death as her baby screamed in protest.
“Coňo!” Jesus cursed. “Name that damned baby Dolores, because already she brought us nothing but pain.” When Jesus moved to Brooklyn, all he dreamed of was running water and the privacy of his own bathroom.
Casey’s stepfather, Fernando, was the only other Latino besides Jesus. Tenants often mistook them for one another. They smelled of manual labor: a scent of wood, gasoline, and sweet nicotine. Their odor resembled a mixture of elements: fire, earth, minerals, chemicals, or toolboxes of gadgets. They periodically took seasonal work at the Brooklyn Terminal Market, where they butchered and hung freshly killed goats, blood coagulating around their mouths. but this work was better than the Fish Market where they beheaded fish, gutted entrails, and severed tails, stinking of seafood.
Behind each of these doorways, another tragic immigrant story unfolded waiting to erupt into the light of a new day. It was 1973 in Brooklyn, and I had just stepped into a narrative I could not understand yet, but would change how I saw the world.
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