All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen Read Free Book Online

rebbe’s food.
    For the first time, I understood the tisch, not as something a teacher or parent declared important but as something experiential and inexpressible. It was some combination of the people, the food, the bodies pressed tightly together swaying in unison, the Hasidim’s warm smiles that inexplicably captivated me. For the very first time, it occurred to me that being a Hasid allowed for more than the daily grind of studying Talmud and adhering to the minutiae of our religious laws.
    Here was the ecstasy and the joy. Here was all that I had been told that we Hasidim once had and lost. “The teachings of the Baal Shem Tov have been forgotten,” the old rebbe of Satmar had famously said, but here among the Skverers, they appeared not to be forgotten at all.
    It was soon after that evening that, if anyone asked, I would say, “I am a Skverer.”
    Other Hasidim, those I had grown up among in Brooklyn, were different. They cared a great deal about their crystal chandeliers and Persian rugs, their summer bungalows in the Catskill Mountains and and the prestige of their children’s marital arrangements. On Sabbath afternoons, the men paraded through Borough Park in their finest clothes, the tassels of their silk, handwoven gartels flapping at their sides, their gleaming fur shtreimels tall on their heads, with the outer edges shooting up in circles of tiny spires. But they did not cry as they stomped their feet: “Grant us! Grant us! The good inclination!” as the Skverers did. Hasidim in Borough Park remodeled their kitchens frequently and got the best deals on late-model cars, but never had I seen them squeeze together to allow another Hasid to experience the song and dance of a rebbe’s tisch. “Animals!” my friend Shloime Samet’s father screamed when he discovered a light scratch along the side of his brand-new tawny Oldsmobile, and I stood stunned that a scratch on a car could enrage a man so. “Don’t ruin my furniture,” my friend Nuchem Zinger’s father growled as I brushed lightly against the mahogany china cabinet in their dining room. In Borough Park, I had been told tales of men who embraced asceticism and poverty and want, who did not go to bed until they had given their last coin to the poor, and yet we lived as if those tales had taught us nothing. But the Skverers were different; they appeared to live exactly like the pious and modest folk of the old European shtetl, and now I longed to be one of them.
    Several months later, my parents sent me for a year of study at a yeshiva in Montreal. The dean was a Satmar Hasid, as were most of the students, but there were also Belzers and Vizhnitzers, and Bobovers, and even one Lubavitcher. I, along with only two others, was a Skverer. A year later, at fourteen, I would return to study with the Skverers, first in Williamsburg, and later, at sixteen, in the Great Yeshiva in New Square. But it was during that year in Montreal, among Hasidim of so many different sects, that my new identity took firm hold.
    On the Sabbath, at the third meal, as evening blended into night, we would gather around the tables in the dining room over pickled herring and cooked chickpeas, and I would think of New Square, where the same meal was held in the rebbe’s great synagogue, the lights extinguished, as if it were a Ukrainian town a century earlier, when the candles of the previous evening were burned out and new ones could not be lit until nightfall.
    “The sons of the inner chamber, who yearn to gaze at the countenance of Ze’er Anpin,” the boys in my Montreal yeshiva would sing, while I would not sing with them but only chant mournfully, as I had among the Skverers in their shtetl, where hundreds of men and boys would stand pressed together, the blackness of our coats and hats blending with the blackness of the dark hall, creating an eerie otherworldliness, at once melancholic and strangely joyful. “Rejoice! There is goodwill in this hour, no anger or fury,”