//creative//
Spring 2017
On Trembling Fingers and Trembling Feet
Ruthie Gottesman
I imagine my father being born with mystical ancestors dancing before him. Their black coats hovered above their feet and their payos gaily flew behind them as they gracefully lulled him into a trance. They were made of faint strokes of watercolor; their eyes were dark blots. They whispered the secrets of God and my father strained to hear them.
***
When my dad came into the world it was the continuation of a significant bloodline. His father’s ancestors could be traced all the way back to the Baal Shem Tov, Master of the Good Name. In the early 1700s, this towering figure gave rise to a new sect within Judaism, the Hasidic movement. The Baal Shem Tov was a learned man, but he upheld the value of simplicity in his community. He taught his followers that in order to become close to God, they must pray to Him, they must love Him, and they must love each other. This notion was revolutionary; it meant that even men who weren’t blessed with the ability to become Torah scholars could still reach great spiritual heights. Little beyond this is known about the Baal Shem Tov, since he never wrote down his teachings. Nevertheless, his name is often invoked by his progeny. Over time, the Hasidic movement became increasingly strict. Its members started to study Talmud with an intensity that desperately looked for new rules to obey and new ways to bring meaning to their lives.
And so my father was born and the Baal Shem Tov danced before his eyes. The rabbi moved with an urgency, rocking back and forth with his feet glued together. He was shrouded in mystery; his image was deteriorating under the weight of time.
***
“What can I say? The Holocaust screwed them up,” my father always tells my family, whenever we question his parents’ behavior.
The details of my family’s experience in the Holocaust are hazy. They have been revealed to my father over time in bits and pieces. My grandmother tells stories in broken fragments, circling around ideas only to abandon them. Details are repeated over and over, until they are unhinged from reality. Other details are changed upon each retelling.
Here is what I’ve learned:
In Poland, my grandparents were only separated by two towns, but they didn’t meet each other until they emerged from the dust of the Holocaust in Brooklyn. When hostilities began to escalate in their childhood shtetls, they had no other choice but to leave the only life they had ever known.
My grandmother’s family left in a great hurry. She remembers her parents getting into a huge argument after they had put enough distance between themselves and danger. She awoke the next morning to find her mother was gone. It wasn’t until years later that my grandmother understood what happened: in her family’s haste, they hadn’t had time to bring winter clothes. My great-grandmother insisted on going back to retrieve their coats, refusing to let the Nazis prevent her from taking care of her family. She was shot on sight upon her return. My grandmother and what remained of her family spent the rest of the war in Uzbekistan.
My grandfather and the members of his shtetl fled to Russia. Soviet soldiers stopped them at the border and presented them with the option of joining the Soviet army, where it would be impossible to maintain a devout life or return home. Wanting to remain faithful to their ancestors and unaware how the hate would escalate in the coming years, all of my grandfather’s friends went back to Poland. But my grandfather and his father, recognizing how difficult life would be back home, agreed to join the army. No one who went home made it out of the hellfire that was soon to come. The Soviets, as it turned out, did not want these pious Jews in their army anyway, so they sent my grandfather to a labor camp in Siberia. He used to tell my father all the time about how he had to riiiiip his back from the unforgiving grip of icicles that formed on his bed every morning.
***
My dad doesn’t like to talk about himself, which is why I carefully collect the information I find out about him. I catch glimpses of his past when bursts of Yiddish spring from his mouth--“Shpilkes!”... “A Gitin Yontif!”... “Ikh Vis Nisht!” These phrases are always followed with a clearing of the throat, as if he is trying to deny ownership of the words. I gain insight into his past when he bangs on the piano and sings Billy Joel. He seems to have a forever replenishing reserve of strength flowing straight from his chest to his fingers to his voice to his rocking body to his tightly shut eyes to his feet that happily bang on the pedal. You can tell simply from his piano playing that he is a man of prayer.
The first time I became fascinated by my father’s story was when he mentioned that he once tried to read the dictionary from cover to cover. He brought it up as a side note in a conversation, but I pressed him to discuss it further. He told me he got about halfway through the F’s when he gave up.
“Why would you feel the need to study the dictionary?” I asked. I’ve always been a lover of language, but I’ve had the luxury of being able to trust my education and the people around me to give me all the words I need.
“I don’t know… I felt insecure about my secular education, I guess.”
This insecurity has made my father one of the most diligent people I know. I’ve always been wary of asking him for help with homework because he insists on performing the most thorough job in assisting me. He’s a computer programmer and has the ability to pour over his code until one or two in the morning––his face bathed in the otherworldly glow of the screen.
***
My grandfather arrived in America with empty eyes straining to see God. My father always tries to emphasize the huge sense of loss that his parents felt emerging from Eastern Europe: almost all of their friends and family had been murdered in just five years. Their family artifacts had been redistributed and their humanity lay broken on the floor. Robbed of their childhoods, they looked into a world that seemed to have no God.
Detaching himself from generations of ancestors, my grandfather broke off from the Hasidic movement. The war had made him question the basic structure of the Jewish world around him. Though he remained an Orthodox Jew who studied to become a rabbi after arriving in Brooklyn, he could not practice his religion, the supposed reason behind his existence, in the same way that his ancestors had.
The implication of giving up Hasidism was more than just abandoning a set of customs. My grandfather only knew how to look at life through the lens of Hasidism. He had been taught that the more pious one is, the more his life means. But he had to take into account how much his friends and family had surrendered for Judaism––they had died in the Holocaust for this cause. My grandparents were left dangling in between their skepticism and the massive guilt that this doubt brought with it.
There is a stereotype that Jews harbor a deep sense of guilt. Only now am I starting to understand where this stems from, but I think my father learned what guilt means at a young age. While my father didn’t grow up Hasidic, he nevertheless constantly received the message that being a Hasid was how one could get closest to God and holiness. His family used to take him to the Hasidic households of his relatives where he says he “stuck out like a sore thumb.” He wore the wrong clothing and talked the wrong way. My father constantly felt as though he did not observe enough rules and simultaneously questioned the ones he already observed.
***
With no questions asked, my father was sent to a Jewish day school, where studying Talmud took precedence over studying secular subjects. At age 13, he was placed on a plane to attend a religious summer camp in Cleveland. My father’s teachers would check his skin for the marks of tefillin every morning, to see if he had prayed. He used to wrap the long leather strip around his arm and pull it tight enough to forge imprints into his skin, so he could prove that he had struggled that morning to go through the daily prayer ritual that all men were expected to perform. He then would quickly removed the tefillin, without praying. He had too many questions, though no place to express these doubts because he thought that no one else shared them. My father desperately wanted to please his parents; he asked nothing and did as he was told.
When it was time for college, it was no surprise that my father’s parents sent him to Yeshiva University. It was the only place Orthodox families in his community sent their children for higher education. At Yeshiva, like in his previous schooling, there was no room for questioning––it was assumed that the students believed in the observances of Orthodox Judaism. My father knew before entering the university that it wasn’t the right place for him, but worried about disappointing his family. Studying Talmud all day made no sense to him. He felt like a fraud. Halfway through his sophomore year, my father secretly sent in an application to Queens College. It was the only other college he could think of as he had a cousin who went there. When the Yeshiva dean saw the paperwork for my father's transfer, he called him into his office and asked him why he wanted to leave.
“Well, I don’t know if I believe in God” my father simply stated.
“Oh,” the dean quickly responded, “Then you definitely don’t belong here.”
***
My father treads on the ground lightly. His voice is silky and always paired with a smile. He’s the middle child in his family, sandwiched in between an older brother and a younger sister. My aunt and uncle, along with my grandmother, tend to speak loudly. I’m told that my father inherited his soft voice from my grandfather. I never got to find this out for myself, since my grandfather passed away at age 66 from a heart defect. I’m supposed to refer to him as Zeide, the Yiddish word for grandfather, but I always have difficulty placing the unfamiliar word on my tongue. There’s one picture of him on the wall in our house. In it, his arm is wrapped around my dad and their faces look sallow against the blackness of their coats. Their smiles are relaxed and made of soft lines. Their eyes are kind and warm and tired.
***
When my dad enrolled at Queens College, he found himself unsure of his identity in both the secular world and the Jewish world. He worked meticulously to create new names for God. He went to a non-kosher pizza place for the first time in his life and spent the whole time trying to hide his face. He then strayed even more when he started seeing a Catholic woman named Marie, without informing his family.
He still went home every Friday for Shabbat despite getting the impression from his mother that he was not living up to her expectations. As the years passed, his thinking about Judaism slowly evolved and he established the sort of Jewish life he wanted to live. He became less observant, but maintained a love of the culture and halakha. He eventually found like-minded friends, some more observant, some not even Jewish. He worked to build a community where he could be himself.
My parents met in the fall of 1995 on a blind date. My dad called my mom the day after, obliviously abandoning the unspoken protocol of not calling until a week after the date. After dating for a short while, my mom was surprised when my dad asked her to meet his family at a Chanukah party, full of Hasidic Jews in black hats. Looking back, my dad says it was his way of letting my mom know where he came from and what she was getting herself into. My mother was overwhelmed. She grew up in a Conservative Jewish home and had no exposure to this sect of religious Judaism. Still, she recognized that she had found someone that she cared for deeply, so she was undeterred.
Six months later, while walking in Central Park, my mom asked my dad where he thought they stood. My mother had become well aware at this point that my dad had dated a lot of women. She was looking for some clarification that he liked her and was committed to the relationship.
“Well, I love you, Karen!” he responded, without having to think twice. “I love you and I want to marry you!” My family always laughs about how he skipped the big romantic proposal and just jumped to the punch line. I’ve always considered this the greatest love story of all time.
***
My parents started to plan the rest of their lives. Figuring this out took time; they’ve spent many years negotiating and defining their relationship with Judaism. My mom came from a family that identified strongly as Jewish, but wasn’t observant. However, on her own she had decided to keep kosher, go to synagogue on Saturdays, and take a class with a rabbi at the 92nd Street Y. My parents attempted to merge their two backgrounds.
“I want our children to go to a Jewish day school,” my dad mentioned one day, while my parents were strolling down the aisles of Ikea, searching for a couch. This was only a week or two after they got engaged.
“What children?!” my mom cried out, in surprise, thinking children were a long way into the future. However, after looking into my dad’s pleading eyes, she could tell he was being serious. She expressed her strong belief in the public school system. She didn’t want her children to become more religious than she was, she didn’t want to be a stranger in her own home.
“Of course you won’t be a stranger. You’ll be their mom, their biggest influence,” my dad replied.
After arguing about this for some time, my mom decided to ask if this was a dealbreaker.
“Kind of. I want my children to know where I come from.”
***
My dad likes to tell me about how Hasidism started out as one of the most liberal sects of Judaism. He relays to me about how whenever his followers were in trouble, the Baal Shem Tov went into the middle of the woods, lit a bonfire, and meditated. His bones vibrated as they were filled with the vigorous and beautiful presence of God. This is why Hasids tremble so much, he says.
***
My family celebrates most of the Jewish holidays with my mom’s side of the family. My dad and my mother’s father put the extra board in the dining room table, in order to accommodate our large family. My grandma prepares sweet potatoes topped with golden brushed marshmallows and buys the second cut of brisket from her local kosher butcher. My grandpa reads from the English side of his siddur all of the prayers with his Brooklyn accent. My mom’s family always looks to my father for rules on when to say the prayer for new experiences and when they should ceremonially wash their hands. On Passover, my dad leads us all in the song “Who Knows One” which he taught us in Yiddish. “OY VEY TATA ZISIN” we all scream together at the climax of the chorus, shrieking with glee.
My grandma on my mom’s side once told me how she feels like my father is one of her children.
“I love him!” she told me, with her squinty eyes beaming with pride.
***
I could never imagine having to build a life on my own, since I inherited one that gives me unending support and love. But this is what my father had to do. He is much too humble to tell me the tale, but I listen for it in the way he rocks back and forth at synagogue and how the rough tallit that once belonged to his father, roughly brushes against my skin. I heard it in the folds of my father’s silky voice when he used to sing “Amar Rabbi Akiva” to me as I went to sleep. I heard it on the last night of Chanukah when I would stay up with my dad to watch the last candle flame dramatically twist in agony and then finally collapse into ash.
These are the things my father delivered to me while darting through countless obstacles. This is the spirituality he carried with him for the longest time, clutched between his desperate fingers. And I cup the Judaism he passed on to me ever so carefully in the palm of my hand. After all the effort he put into bringing it to me, I don’t want to drop it.
***
When my dad came into the world it was the continuation of a significant bloodline. His father’s ancestors could be traced all the way back to the Baal Shem Tov, Master of the Good Name. In the early 1700s, this towering figure gave rise to a new sect within Judaism, the Hasidic movement. The Baal Shem Tov was a learned man, but he upheld the value of simplicity in his community. He taught his followers that in order to become close to God, they must pray to Him, they must love Him, and they must love each other. This notion was revolutionary; it meant that even men who weren’t blessed with the ability to become Torah scholars could still reach great spiritual heights. Little beyond this is known about the Baal Shem Tov, since he never wrote down his teachings. Nevertheless, his name is often invoked by his progeny. Over time, the Hasidic movement became increasingly strict. Its members started to study Talmud with an intensity that desperately looked for new rules to obey and new ways to bring meaning to their lives.
And so my father was born and the Baal Shem Tov danced before his eyes. The rabbi moved with an urgency, rocking back and forth with his feet glued together. He was shrouded in mystery; his image was deteriorating under the weight of time.
***
“What can I say? The Holocaust screwed them up,” my father always tells my family, whenever we question his parents’ behavior.
The details of my family’s experience in the Holocaust are hazy. They have been revealed to my father over time in bits and pieces. My grandmother tells stories in broken fragments, circling around ideas only to abandon them. Details are repeated over and over, until they are unhinged from reality. Other details are changed upon each retelling.
Here is what I’ve learned:
In Poland, my grandparents were only separated by two towns, but they didn’t meet each other until they emerged from the dust of the Holocaust in Brooklyn. When hostilities began to escalate in their childhood shtetls, they had no other choice but to leave the only life they had ever known.
My grandmother’s family left in a great hurry. She remembers her parents getting into a huge argument after they had put enough distance between themselves and danger. She awoke the next morning to find her mother was gone. It wasn’t until years later that my grandmother understood what happened: in her family’s haste, they hadn’t had time to bring winter clothes. My great-grandmother insisted on going back to retrieve their coats, refusing to let the Nazis prevent her from taking care of her family. She was shot on sight upon her return. My grandmother and what remained of her family spent the rest of the war in Uzbekistan.
My grandfather and the members of his shtetl fled to Russia. Soviet soldiers stopped them at the border and presented them with the option of joining the Soviet army, where it would be impossible to maintain a devout life or return home. Wanting to remain faithful to their ancestors and unaware how the hate would escalate in the coming years, all of my grandfather’s friends went back to Poland. But my grandfather and his father, recognizing how difficult life would be back home, agreed to join the army. No one who went home made it out of the hellfire that was soon to come. The Soviets, as it turned out, did not want these pious Jews in their army anyway, so they sent my grandfather to a labor camp in Siberia. He used to tell my father all the time about how he had to riiiiip his back from the unforgiving grip of icicles that formed on his bed every morning.
***
My dad doesn’t like to talk about himself, which is why I carefully collect the information I find out about him. I catch glimpses of his past when bursts of Yiddish spring from his mouth--“Shpilkes!”... “A Gitin Yontif!”... “Ikh Vis Nisht!” These phrases are always followed with a clearing of the throat, as if he is trying to deny ownership of the words. I gain insight into his past when he bangs on the piano and sings Billy Joel. He seems to have a forever replenishing reserve of strength flowing straight from his chest to his fingers to his voice to his rocking body to his tightly shut eyes to his feet that happily bang on the pedal. You can tell simply from his piano playing that he is a man of prayer.
The first time I became fascinated by my father’s story was when he mentioned that he once tried to read the dictionary from cover to cover. He brought it up as a side note in a conversation, but I pressed him to discuss it further. He told me he got about halfway through the F’s when he gave up.
“Why would you feel the need to study the dictionary?” I asked. I’ve always been a lover of language, but I’ve had the luxury of being able to trust my education and the people around me to give me all the words I need.
“I don’t know… I felt insecure about my secular education, I guess.”
This insecurity has made my father one of the most diligent people I know. I’ve always been wary of asking him for help with homework because he insists on performing the most thorough job in assisting me. He’s a computer programmer and has the ability to pour over his code until one or two in the morning––his face bathed in the otherworldly glow of the screen.
***
My grandfather arrived in America with empty eyes straining to see God. My father always tries to emphasize the huge sense of loss that his parents felt emerging from Eastern Europe: almost all of their friends and family had been murdered in just five years. Their family artifacts had been redistributed and their humanity lay broken on the floor. Robbed of their childhoods, they looked into a world that seemed to have no God.
Detaching himself from generations of ancestors, my grandfather broke off from the Hasidic movement. The war had made him question the basic structure of the Jewish world around him. Though he remained an Orthodox Jew who studied to become a rabbi after arriving in Brooklyn, he could not practice his religion, the supposed reason behind his existence, in the same way that his ancestors had.
The implication of giving up Hasidism was more than just abandoning a set of customs. My grandfather only knew how to look at life through the lens of Hasidism. He had been taught that the more pious one is, the more his life means. But he had to take into account how much his friends and family had surrendered for Judaism––they had died in the Holocaust for this cause. My grandparents were left dangling in between their skepticism and the massive guilt that this doubt brought with it.
There is a stereotype that Jews harbor a deep sense of guilt. Only now am I starting to understand where this stems from, but I think my father learned what guilt means at a young age. While my father didn’t grow up Hasidic, he nevertheless constantly received the message that being a Hasid was how one could get closest to God and holiness. His family used to take him to the Hasidic households of his relatives where he says he “stuck out like a sore thumb.” He wore the wrong clothing and talked the wrong way. My father constantly felt as though he did not observe enough rules and simultaneously questioned the ones he already observed.
***
With no questions asked, my father was sent to a Jewish day school, where studying Talmud took precedence over studying secular subjects. At age 13, he was placed on a plane to attend a religious summer camp in Cleveland. My father’s teachers would check his skin for the marks of tefillin every morning, to see if he had prayed. He used to wrap the long leather strip around his arm and pull it tight enough to forge imprints into his skin, so he could prove that he had struggled that morning to go through the daily prayer ritual that all men were expected to perform. He then would quickly removed the tefillin, without praying. He had too many questions, though no place to express these doubts because he thought that no one else shared them. My father desperately wanted to please his parents; he asked nothing and did as he was told.
When it was time for college, it was no surprise that my father’s parents sent him to Yeshiva University. It was the only place Orthodox families in his community sent their children for higher education. At Yeshiva, like in his previous schooling, there was no room for questioning––it was assumed that the students believed in the observances of Orthodox Judaism. My father knew before entering the university that it wasn’t the right place for him, but worried about disappointing his family. Studying Talmud all day made no sense to him. He felt like a fraud. Halfway through his sophomore year, my father secretly sent in an application to Queens College. It was the only other college he could think of as he had a cousin who went there. When the Yeshiva dean saw the paperwork for my father's transfer, he called him into his office and asked him why he wanted to leave.
“Well, I don’t know if I believe in God” my father simply stated.
“Oh,” the dean quickly responded, “Then you definitely don’t belong here.”
***
My father treads on the ground lightly. His voice is silky and always paired with a smile. He’s the middle child in his family, sandwiched in between an older brother and a younger sister. My aunt and uncle, along with my grandmother, tend to speak loudly. I’m told that my father inherited his soft voice from my grandfather. I never got to find this out for myself, since my grandfather passed away at age 66 from a heart defect. I’m supposed to refer to him as Zeide, the Yiddish word for grandfather, but I always have difficulty placing the unfamiliar word on my tongue. There’s one picture of him on the wall in our house. In it, his arm is wrapped around my dad and their faces look sallow against the blackness of their coats. Their smiles are relaxed and made of soft lines. Their eyes are kind and warm and tired.
***
When my dad enrolled at Queens College, he found himself unsure of his identity in both the secular world and the Jewish world. He worked meticulously to create new names for God. He went to a non-kosher pizza place for the first time in his life and spent the whole time trying to hide his face. He then strayed even more when he started seeing a Catholic woman named Marie, without informing his family.
He still went home every Friday for Shabbat despite getting the impression from his mother that he was not living up to her expectations. As the years passed, his thinking about Judaism slowly evolved and he established the sort of Jewish life he wanted to live. He became less observant, but maintained a love of the culture and halakha. He eventually found like-minded friends, some more observant, some not even Jewish. He worked to build a community where he could be himself.
My parents met in the fall of 1995 on a blind date. My dad called my mom the day after, obliviously abandoning the unspoken protocol of not calling until a week after the date. After dating for a short while, my mom was surprised when my dad asked her to meet his family at a Chanukah party, full of Hasidic Jews in black hats. Looking back, my dad says it was his way of letting my mom know where he came from and what she was getting herself into. My mother was overwhelmed. She grew up in a Conservative Jewish home and had no exposure to this sect of religious Judaism. Still, she recognized that she had found someone that she cared for deeply, so she was undeterred.
Six months later, while walking in Central Park, my mom asked my dad where he thought they stood. My mother had become well aware at this point that my dad had dated a lot of women. She was looking for some clarification that he liked her and was committed to the relationship.
“Well, I love you, Karen!” he responded, without having to think twice. “I love you and I want to marry you!” My family always laughs about how he skipped the big romantic proposal and just jumped to the punch line. I’ve always considered this the greatest love story of all time.
***
My parents started to plan the rest of their lives. Figuring this out took time; they’ve spent many years negotiating and defining their relationship with Judaism. My mom came from a family that identified strongly as Jewish, but wasn’t observant. However, on her own she had decided to keep kosher, go to synagogue on Saturdays, and take a class with a rabbi at the 92nd Street Y. My parents attempted to merge their two backgrounds.
“I want our children to go to a Jewish day school,” my dad mentioned one day, while my parents were strolling down the aisles of Ikea, searching for a couch. This was only a week or two after they got engaged.
“What children?!” my mom cried out, in surprise, thinking children were a long way into the future. However, after looking into my dad’s pleading eyes, she could tell he was being serious. She expressed her strong belief in the public school system. She didn’t want her children to become more religious than she was, she didn’t want to be a stranger in her own home.
“Of course you won’t be a stranger. You’ll be their mom, their biggest influence,” my dad replied.
After arguing about this for some time, my mom decided to ask if this was a dealbreaker.
“Kind of. I want my children to know where I come from.”
***
My dad likes to tell me about how Hasidism started out as one of the most liberal sects of Judaism. He relays to me about how whenever his followers were in trouble, the Baal Shem Tov went into the middle of the woods, lit a bonfire, and meditated. His bones vibrated as they were filled with the vigorous and beautiful presence of God. This is why Hasids tremble so much, he says.
***
My family celebrates most of the Jewish holidays with my mom’s side of the family. My dad and my mother’s father put the extra board in the dining room table, in order to accommodate our large family. My grandma prepares sweet potatoes topped with golden brushed marshmallows and buys the second cut of brisket from her local kosher butcher. My grandpa reads from the English side of his siddur all of the prayers with his Brooklyn accent. My mom’s family always looks to my father for rules on when to say the prayer for new experiences and when they should ceremonially wash their hands. On Passover, my dad leads us all in the song “Who Knows One” which he taught us in Yiddish. “OY VEY TATA ZISIN” we all scream together at the climax of the chorus, shrieking with glee.
My grandma on my mom’s side once told me how she feels like my father is one of her children.
“I love him!” she told me, with her squinty eyes beaming with pride.
***
I could never imagine having to build a life on my own, since I inherited one that gives me unending support and love. But this is what my father had to do. He is much too humble to tell me the tale, but I listen for it in the way he rocks back and forth at synagogue and how the rough tallit that once belonged to his father, roughly brushes against my skin. I heard it in the folds of my father’s silky voice when he used to sing “Amar Rabbi Akiva” to me as I went to sleep. I heard it on the last night of Chanukah when I would stay up with my dad to watch the last candle flame dramatically twist in agony and then finally collapse into ash.
These are the things my father delivered to me while darting through countless obstacles. This is the spirituality he carried with him for the longest time, clutched between his desperate fingers. And I cup the Judaism he passed on to me ever so carefully in the palm of my hand. After all the effort he put into bringing it to me, I don’t want to drop it.
//RUTHIE GOTTESMAN is a freshman in Columbia College. She can be reached at rag2188@columbia.edu.