Acts of Faith (2 page)

Several months before the Nazis would have annihilated his own community, my father led his flock to yet another Promised Land—America. Here they recreated Silcz in a tiny corner of Brooklyn.

The members of his congregation had no problems dealing with the customs of this new land. They simply ignored them and continued to live as they had for centuries. The frontiers of their world did not extend beyond an easy Sabbath walking distance from the pulpit of their spiritual leader.

They dressed as always in lengthy coats of solemn black, with beaver hats during the week and round
shtreimels
trimmed with fur on festive days. We boys wore black fedoras on the Sabbath, grew sideburns down in ringlets, and looked forward to the day when we could also grow a beard.

Some of our clean-shaven and assimilated coreligionists felt embarrassed to have us in their midst: we looked so odd—so conspicuously Jewish. You’d hear them mutter,
“Frummers,”
under their breaths. And while the word simply means Orthodox, their tone betrayed their scorn.

My mother, Rachel, was my father’s second wife. Chava, his first, had borne him only daughters—two of them, Malka and Rena. Then she died in childbirth, and the little boy she had been carrying survived her by a mere four days.

Toward the end of the prescribed eleven months of mourning, a few of Father’s closest friends discreetly started to suggest he seek another wife. Not only for dynastic
reasons, but because the Lord decrees in Genesis that “it is not good that the man should be alone.”

Thus it was that Rabbi Moses Luria wed my mother, Rachel, who was twenty years his junior, and the daughter of a learned Vilna scholar who was deeply honored by Rav Luria’s choice.

Within twelve months a child was born to them. Yet another
daughter
—Deborah, my older sister. But to my father’s great joy I was conceived in the following year. My first cry of life was regarded as a direct response to a pious man’s most fervent prayers.

The next generation was assured that the golden chain would not be broken. There would be another Silczer Rebbe. To lead, to teach, to comfort. And, most important, to be an intermediary between his followers and God.

It’s bad enough to be an only son—to see your sisters treated almost as invisible because they aren’t brothers. Yet, the hardest part for me was knowing how much and how long I had been prayed for. From the beginning, I could sense the burden of my father’s expectations.

I recall my very first day of kindergarten. I was the only child whose
father
took him. And when he kissed me at the schoolroom door, I could feel tears upon his cheeks as well.

I was too young to realize that this was an omen.

How could I have known that I would someday cause him to shed far more bitter tears?

T
im Hogan was born angry.

And with good reason. He was an orphan with two living parents.

His father, Eamonn, a merchant seaman, had returned from a long voyage to discover his wife pregnant. Yet Margaret Hogan swore by all the saints that no mortal man had touched her.

She began to hallucinate, babbling to the world that she had been blessed by a visit from a holy spirit. Her outraged husband simply sailed away. Rumor had it that he found another “wife” in Rio de Janeiro, by whom he had five “mortal” children.

As Margaret’s condition worsened, the pastor at St. Gregory’s arranged for her to be given shelter in a sanitarium run by the Sisters of the Resurrection in upper New York State.

At first, it seemed that Timothy, flaxen-haired and cherubic with his mother’s porcelain blue eyes, was also destined for an institution. His aunt, Cassie Delaney, already burdened with three daughters, did not think it possible to feed another mouth on what a New York cop brought home each week.

Besides, Tim had arrived just after she and Tuck had decided, despite the dictates of their religion, to have no
more children. She was already exhausted from years of sleepless nights in the penitentiary of diaper changing.

Tuck overruled her.

“Margaret’s your own flesh and blood. We can’t just leave the lad with no one.”

From the moment he entered their lives, Tim’s three sisters did not disguise their hostility. He reciprocated fiercely. As soon as he could lift an object, he would try to strike them with it. His trio of antagonists never exhausted their plans for persecution.

On one occasion, Aunt Cassie walked in just in time to stop them from pushing three-year-old Tim out the bedroom window.

After this hairsbreadth rescue, it was Timothy she slapped for provoking her daughters.

“Nice boys never hit girls,” she chided, a lesson Tim might have better assimilated had he not on several Saturday evenings overheard his uncle roughing up his aunt.

Tim was as anxious to leave the house as they were to be rid of him. By the time he was eight, Cassie had given him a key threaded on a braid of yarn. Worn around his neck, this talisman gave him the freedom to roam abroad and vent his innate aggression in appropriately masculine activities like stickball and street-fighting.

He was not faint of heart. In fact, he was the only boy who dared to challenge muscular Ed McGee, the undisputed leader of the grade-school pack.

In the course of their brief but explosive battle in the playground, Tim caused extensive damage to Ed’s eye and lip, although McGee had managed to unleash a mighty left, which nearly broke Tim’s jaw before the Sisters pulled the pugilists apart. The nuns’ intervention, of course, made them fast friends thereafter.

Though an officer of the law, his uncle nonetheless took pride in Tim’s fighting spirit. But Aunt Cassie was livid. She not only lost four days’ work in Macy’s lingerie department, but had to make endless ice packs for her nephew’s jaw.

In the Delaney family album, Tim had seen his mother, Margaret, and could discern a pale reflection of her in Aunt Cassie’s face.

“Why can’t I go and visit her?” he pleaded. “I mean, just say hello or something?”

“She wouldn’t even recognize you,” Tuck asserted. “She’s living in another world.”

“But
I’m
not sick—I’d know
her.
”

“Please, Tim,” his uncle insisted. “We’re doing you a kindness.”

Inevitably the day came when Tim learned what everyone else in his world had been whispering for years.

During one of their Saturday night bouts, he heard his aunt shouting at her husband, “I’ve had just about all I can take of the little bastard!”

“Cassie, watch your language,” Tuck upbraided her. “One of the girls might hear.”

“So what? It’s true, isn’t it? He’s my slut of a sister’s goddamn bastard and some day I’m going to tell him myself.”

Tim was devastated. In one blow he had lost a father and acquired a stigma. Trying to control his rage and fear, he confronted Tuck the next day and demanded to know who his real father was.

“Your Mom was very strange about it, lad.” Tuck’s face had turned crimson and he refused to meet Tim’s eye. “She never mentioned anyone—except this holy angel business,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

After that, Cassie continued to find fault with whatever Tim said or did and Tuck simply avoided him whenever possible. Tim began to feel as if he were being chastised for his mother’s sins. How else could he describe his life with the Delaneys, except as perpetual punishment.

He would try to come home as late as possible. Yet when darkness fell, his friends would all disperse for dinner and he was left with no one to talk to.

The playground was dimly illuminated by a soft kaleidoscopic haze from the stained-glass windows of the
church. Careful to avoid detection by the likes of Ed McGee, he would go inside. At first it was merely to warm himself. Gradually he found himself drawn to the statue of the Virgin and, feeling abandoned and lonely, he would kneel in prayer, as he had been taught.

“
Ave Maria, gratia plena
—Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women … Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now …”

But even Tim himself could not fully understand what he was seeking. He was not old enough to comprehend that having been born in a web of questions, he was asking the Virgin Mother to deliver him from ignorance.

Why was I born? Who are my parents? Why doesn’t anybody love me?

Late one evening, as he wearily looked up, he thought—for a single fleeting instant—that he saw the statue smile as if it were saying, “One thing must be clear in this confused life of yours.
I
love you.”

When he went home, Cassie slapped him hard for being late for supper.

D
eborah’s earliest memory of Danny was the glint of the sharp knife moving toward his tiny penis.

Though there were people crowded all around her eight-day-old brother, she could see everything clearly from the arms of her mother, who was standing in a corner of the room, alternately staring and wincing.

Danny lay on a pillow on the lap of his godfather, Uncle Saul—actually a distant cousin, but his father’s closest male relative—whose strong but gentle hands were holding Danny’s legs apart.

Then the
mohel
, a tall, gaunt man in white apron and prayer shawl, placed a clamp around her brother’s penis and a bell-shaped metal shield that covered the tip down to the foreskin. At the same moment his right hand raised what looked like a stiletto.

There was a silent gasp as the males present all dropped their hands instinctively to cover their own genitals.

After rapidly reciting a prayer, the
mohel
pierced the baby’s foreskin and in a single motion, swiftly sliced the tissue all around the rim of the shield. Little Danny wailed.

An instant later, the ritual surgeon held up the foreskin
for everyone to see, then dropped it into a silver bowl.

Rav Luria intoned the prayer in a mighty voice, “Blessed art Thou, O ruler of the world, Who has commanded us to make our sons enter into the covenant of Abraham our father.”

There was a sigh of relief, followed by a cheer.

A whimpering Danny was returned to his beaming father.

Rav Luria then called out to everyone to eat, drink, sing, and dance.

Since the Code of Law demands it, the men and women were separated by a partition, but even from her mother’s side, Deborah could hear her father’s voice above all the others.

When she was old enough to speak full sentences, one of the first things Deborah asked her mother was whether there had been a similar celebration when
she
was born.

“No, darling,” Rachel answered gently. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t love you just as much.”

“But why not?” Deborah persisted.

“I don’t know,” her mother answered. “That’s the way the Father of the Universe ordained it.”

As time passed, Deborah Luria learned what else the Father of the Universe had ordained for Jewish women.

In the men’s morning prayers, there were benedictions to the Lord for every conceivable gift:

While the men were giving thanks for their masculinity, the girls had to be content with:

Deborah was enrolled in a traditional “Beis Yakov” school, whose sole purpose was to prepare Jewish girls to be Jewish wives. There, they read the Code of Law—or at least a specially abridged version compiled for women in the nineteenth century.

Their teacher, Mrs. Brenner, constantly reminded the girls that they were privileged to help their husbands fulfill God’s injunction to Adam to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.”

Is that all we are, Deborah thought to herself, baby machines? She did not dare ask it aloud, but rather waited impatiently for Mrs. Brenner to provide an explanation. The best her teacher could offer was that since women were created from one of man’s ribs, they are therefore only part of what men are.

Pious though she was, Deborah could not accept this folklore as fact. And yet, she did not dare give voice to her skepticism.

By chance, years later when he was in high school, Danny showed her a passage from the Talmud that she had never been allowed to read during her own education.

It explained why, during intercourse, a man must face down and a woman upward: a man looks at the earth, the place whence he came, a woman at the place where
she
was created—the man’s rib.

The more Deborah learned, the more she became resentful. Not only because she was regarded as inferior, but because the sophistry of the teachers tried to convince the girls that this was not really the case—even while explaining that a woman who gives birth to a boy must wait forty days before she becomes “pure” again, whereas one who gives birth to a girl must wait eighty days.