Posted By richards on March 27, 2015
Riveting and Painful Memoir Offers an Unflinching Look at Hasidic Life
Pearl Gabel
Narrating the Unraveling: Shulem Deen grew up in Brooklyns Boro Park, the largest ultra-Orthodox community in America.
All Who Go Do Not Return By Shulem Deen Graywolf Press, 288 pages, $16
Family and God are the essences of a Hasids life. From cradle to death, one is taught to love, fear and obey God, and to cherish and respect family and all the customs, traditions and quirks that are the hallmarks of a Hasids life. To lose one family or faith is to lose a limb; to lose both is to lose all limbs, to be left immobile and desultory. In All Who Go Do Not Return, the new, raw memoir by Shulem Deen, the author describes, in harrowing detail, how he lost all his limbs: his deep, unwavering faith in Hashem, and the custody of his own children.
Like every ex-frum narrative, Deens features some of the usual tropes: the initial questioning of the faith, the experience of disillusionment, discovery of enlightenment, and attempts to find ones way in an entirely unfamiliar secular world. But unlike most others in this quasi-genre, All Who Go Do Not Return is not a triumphant tale, and its protagonist does not come out the other end as a hero. Instead, Deens is an unflinchingly honest book a work of remarkable introspection, punctuated with a healthy dose of Jewish self-deprecation.
Deen grew up in Brooklyns Boro Park, the largest ultra-Orthodox community in America, to parents who were baalei teshuva, returnees to the faith. Raised by a father with humanistic leanings, whose excessive devotion to God and mankind, and neglect of his physical needs, eventually put him on his deathbed, and a crunchy-granola, non-conformist mother Deen never quite fit into the Hasidic community. His father was not a Hasid of any particular living rabbi, yet he believed, quite fervently, in the mystical teachings of the late Hasidic greats. As a young boy, Deen felt like an outsider in his own cheder, the Hasidic all-boys school he attended, thanks, in part, to his fathers indifference to Hasidic convention. Of his own volition, Deen joined the Skverers, Hasidim of the Skver sect, whose epicenter is in New Square, New York a small, insular and entirely isolated enclave in upstate New York and whose rebbe, the supreme leader, rules with an iron fist. Deen felt that the rigidity of New Square was precisely what he needed to find a sense of order in his life.
At 18, Deen was married off to a pious girl from the community, despite his initial hesitation when the match was offered up, and despite his qualms about the girls family. The Skverer Rebbe gave his blessing for the match, and Deen felt he had no choice but to marry Gitty Goldstein, a girl he met only once for a few short minutes before agreeing to marry her.
In the tragicomic scenes following the wedding, Deen and his wife make multiple attempts to consummate the marriage. In hindsight, he writes, it was a bit like assembling a piece of furniture.
Life in New Square is extraordinary in so many ways that readers unfamiliar with Hasidic fundamentalism may find it all cockamamie. I myself grew up Hasidic, albeit in a different but equally-restrictive town, and I can assure you that the details of life in Deens account from the modesty police tasked with keeping the village holy, to the sexual cluelessness of brides and grooms, down to the awkwardness of the first few months of living with a person of the opposite sex in an arranged marriage are accurate. Although the private details Deen includes, such as those pertaining to his personal transformation, his relationship with his wife, and the events that lead to the alienation of his children, are unverifiable, as a memoir skeptic might point out, I am, nevertheless, convinced of the overall truthfulness of Deens memoir, given his sympathetic depiction of the characters who eventually betray him notably, his ex-wife.
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How Shulem Deen Lost Everything and Found Himself
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