22 Sep Book Review: All Who Go Do Not Return // Shulem Deen

As someone who has left the Hasidic community and continues to be fascinated by how much nuance this insular community hides, I’m especially interested in literature that comes from insiders – and often, of course, they will have the bias of those who left. I read this book at about the time of its initial release, but didn’t analyze it too closely. Now, after some time and having heard many people base their knowledge of the Hasidic community on this book, I thought it’s time for a second, more critical look.

When I reread Deen’s book, I can still see the bright spots; especially in the scene describing his engagement. It’s warm, it’s funny, it’s real. Deen isn’t hiding any ghosts there – as far as I know – so he is able to portray an engagement that is original, humorous, human. There are several such isolated scenes that capture Hasidic life, and they speak to his potential. Deen isn’t an author of great insights but he is able to frame a sentence so that reading it is a pleasure; and small details effortlessly bring the scene to life.

But the book isn’t what it could have been, because in addition to being a memoir about leaving Hasidism, it is also a dance around Deen’s demons. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian author of “Americana”, once described one memoir as “a well-written act of image-making”. Adichie sees through the memoirist whose slick honesty is there to disarm, whose self-criticism is calculated to deflect.

Deen also composes his story as an act of image making. He is aware that society can idolize the stories of the coming of age, leaving insular communities genre, but that the adoration turns sour when children are left behind. Since Deen’s relationship with his five children deteriorates over the last part of the book, he writes to avoid being judged harshly by readers.

Deen’s wife Gitty is never humanized. If we can’t feel her presence, we can’t imagine that there is more to this than one man’s feelings. Gitty rarely speaks, and when she does, the lines she’s given are so all over the place, it creates a dismembered character. On one hand we are told that there is nothing but clipped conversations between the couple — Gitty doesn’t even respond to a gift, and only offers a begrudging thank you after being asked for feedback — while on the other she is accused of taking over and being so overbearing, that Deen feels cast aside in her matriarchal tyranny. We assume that this is what Hasidic women are like; empty and dead inside, devoid of personalities, brainwashed. While I don’t know this woman, I’ve yet to meet a Hasidic woman who is like that. I found myself wondering what we are not told of Gitty. Either Deen really did not see her, or he thought it dangerous to tell the reader too much about her.

There are several other instances in which we are primed to see him a victim of impossible circumstances. He describes a Hasidic world of bleak poverty and no food to feed the many mouths. “Most of my friends from yeshiva were living the same way…. Either still studying in the kollel, or teaching at the chedar, and struggling, making do with whatever they could – yeshiva vouchers, food stamps, Section 8. They went from one poor moneymaking idea to the next…”

The subject of Hasidic economics is too complicated to go into here, but Deen does not even try; he turns to the stereotype of Hasidic men who are unemployed and uneducated, and gently goads the reader into outrage at the Hasidic system of “welfare mooching.” The reader gasps “who could stay in such a world?”

We get only a superficial glimpse into Deen’s life during the crucial years after he lost faith and before he got divorced. In 2003, when he had already been writing for some time under the pseudonym Hasidic Rebel, I started my own journey with a blog. My impressions from reading the few regular bloggers (including Deen) and from my interactions with them (some now close friends) were that these men lived double lives that became more untenable as they adventured more in the secular world  – bars, pot, travel, lovers, etc. But Deen writes as if he never as much heard of a party. He describes himself as a lone man spending night after night in Manhattan, venturing into bars alone, always alone. A man driven by longing. We are not reminded of Gitty whose world was unraveling while raising five children. How might this have played into the bitterness in the divorce?

In all, Deen’s story could raise an important question: is he culpable for his fall; the alienation from his family, the anguish that led to a breakdown? Should we all point fingers and say “I told you so” when the book ends with so much sadness? I wouldn’t say so. As often, responsibility can be split like fair minded pirates doling out loot. I think the important question the book could have raised is of the conflict between self and family. But Deen carefully casts himself as the pitiful victim of a society, paints over any moral ambiguity, and bangs the gavel, the verdict is out, he did all he could, the system wrought all his pain.

The book isn’t useless as a work on Hasidic life, but its depiction is flawed because it is contrived. As I saw it, it was written not to illuminate, but to absolve.

09 Sep Book Review: The Marrying of Chani Kaufman

The book is a compilation of several fictional stories about a few individuals in the ultra-orthodox community. The stories are unoriginal; about a couple meeting through a shidduch, a meddlesome mother in law, a young yeshiva boy who has an affair with a black girl and a middle-aged woman who runs off from the community. The stories are cut up in chapters that skip between the different stories, so all stories span the length of the book. But most of the book actually reads like a long long long introduction to the climax: the salacious wedding night scene between Chani Kaufman and her groom. The author clearly loves to write about the going-ons between couples. I regret to say however, that except for the final chapters, the couples’ going-ons are rather uneventful.

The people in the book seem mostly stifled, uninspired, obsessed with Hashem and repressed by the religious society. It is very frustrating and grating to read a book that is full of giant inaccuracies. Not inaccuracies of ritual, but inaccuracies of the cultural essence, the characters and the spirit of the people. So my problem with this fairly negative book is not that it is negative, but that the negativities are often inaccurate.

For example:

The ultra-orthodox women have many children. While to the outsider, each child may seem to come as quickly as a single breath, well, that is not how it actually happens. The biological law of the nine month pregnancy applies to religious women too! (Surprise!) So young Chani Kauffman whose mother had many children “had watched her mother’s stomach inflate and deflate like a bullfrog’s throat” we get probably the worst, inhumane and ridiculous description of the life of a woman who has many children, condensed into one terrible metaphor. A nine month process is described as superficially as the duration of a breath. Are women really getting pregnant and unpregnant as grotesquely as a bullfrogs throat’s dilation? The author expands: “Chani’s mother had become a machine whose parts were grinding and worn… an exhausted mountain of dilapidated flesh, endlessly suckling, soothing, patting or feeding… Her father sowed his seed time and time again in his wife’s worn out womb”. Is this realistically how big families happen, or is this rather overflowing with the condescension of store-bought feminism? I think the latter. Women everywhere work themselves to sheer exhaustion for whatever they value; and the ultra-orthodox women do too. The assumption that this makes them machine like objects without any agency or pleasure is classic narrow-mindedness. All that this description reflects is someone’s snap judgment of large families. It lacks any empathy or insight. In fact, when Chani’s mother is actually seen in action throughout the book she is engaged and warm and not at all ‘a machine of dilapidated flesh.’

There are many more such problems, for instance in the way the children experience being stifled (they wonder about bacon; right, because another culture’s diet is REALLY what a curious person would think about) or in the radical, unrealistic way the rebbetzin runs off from the community.

Well. The inaccuracies were actually only the least of my problems with this book. The writing is, to quote its own words “not talking like a mentch!” I have no idea who the hell the Man Booker prize people are, or what their prize is, but I cannot begin to understand how a book like this one can receive an award. The writing tries very hard to be cute, so hard; it distracts from what’s happening in the stories. And the stories are told in chopped up pieces, hopping from one character’s tale to another, giving you a long drawn out piece about Chaim’s interest in Chani’s looks, or in Mrs. Levy’s scheme to stop the shidduch, so you lose your tale just when you were maybe (maybe!) starting to get faintly interested in one saga or another. In trying to describe what these characters are like, nothing comes to my mind but their physical characteristics (either great youthful beauty or terrible unsightliness) and their endless kvetching. The characters are so flat, that when you read it you almost see caricatures get pasted in from a crafty handbook of stereotypes. There is very little dialog, all of it stale. (example: “Chany Kaufman, your behavior today was inappropriate at the very least.’ ‘Yes, Mrs. Beranrd,” Chani whispered. “What’s that?” snapped the Deputy Head. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Bernard.” Etc.)

Lots of things happen because the author tells you it happened (“they grew closer”) not because the scenes are in the book, in over-decorated language riddled with bad metaphors: “her eyes shone with liquid apology” and she walks down the street “her legs pumping like pistons.” Or my favorite “he flamed the colour of chraine.” The pacing is distracting too because of the way the story jumps abruptly from character to character, but worse because you spend so much time with the drawn out descriptive language, nothing happens, and then suddenly it is six months later. Most of all, the appeal of this book seems to lie in its exciting wedding night scene (which isn’t so exciting after all) and this single episode seems to be the book, with three hundred pages of adjectives fluffed around it. In all, I had a hard time getting through it and I would not recommend it.