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

the rebbe would cry, his sobs reverberating through the pitch-black chamber. A chill would go up my spine until I felt the hair along my temples go straight. “Come near to me, behold my strength, for there are no harsh judgments.”
    “Hey, Skverer, where are your boots?” one of my Satmar classmates would taunt me. Skverer men, once married, wore tall peasant boots on the Sabbath instead of the knickers and white stockings of other Hasidim. But I felt not taunted but proud. I would wear those boots, too, when the time came, when I found a girl from a Skverer family to marry, and raise our children as Skverers.

Chapter Four
    A dozen of us attended each of Avremel Shayevitz’s sessions of “groom instruction.” Beneath the harsh white light of two long, naked fluorescent bulbs, we sat around a brown Formica table in Avremel’s dining room. Through the closed door to the kitchen came the sounds of children playing, crying, laughing, bursts of raised voices followed by a woman’s scolding: “Shh, Tatti is studying with the bucherim. ”
    “‘Respect her more than your own self!’” Avremel would cry during those sessions, quoting the Talmud, his jerky arms and fists slicing and pounding the air. “But how do we understand this passage? What does it mean to respect a woman?” Avremel would twist a hair from his scraggly black beard around his finger, pull it out, and drop it absentmindedly on the table between us. “What it really means, esteemed young men, is that we must be vigilant! Respect what she , a woman , can do to a man if he does not remain careful.” He would wag an index finger over his head, “Let down your guard, and she will lead you into sheol tachtis —the abyss of sinful temptation!”
    There were other “groom instructors,” too.
    There was Reb Noach, with his mangy blond beard and his springy step and ever-present smirk, who would teach me about the female body and the many laws related to its function. There was Reb Shraga Feivish, who would, on the afternoon of the wedding, teach me the mechanics of how to perform “the mitzvah.” There was Reb Srulik, with whom I would consult after the wedding on various questions—embarrassing ones, mostly, about body fluids, and shades of red and brown and ocher, anything that might interrupt our “family cleanliness.”
    But before, after, and in between all the others, there was Avremel, the facilitator and clarifier of all that information, casting it in its appropriate light, ensuring that it was properly understood and acted upon.
    Avremel’s mentorship had begun nearly three years earlier, in our first year at the Great Yeshiva, not to prepare us for marriage but as a general counselor. He was a thin man, with hollow cheeks and dark eyes that opened wide to reveal the whites and narrowed to slits so intense that they were frightening. Avremel was one of a cadre of men chosen by the rebbe to serve as special mentors. In later years, I would see Avremel as a caricature of religious fanaticism, a Savonarola of the Hasidic world; but at the time, I idolized him. His speeches were masterful: he was able, in a single breath, to weave talmudic passages about hell and the afterlife into a scathing comedic rant against one sort of wickedness or another, scorning the sheer idiocy of those who could not resist temptations of the flesh, who veered from “holiness and purity.”
    Once a month, for the New Moon feast, scores of young men would squeeze into Avremel’s small dining room and sit around his table or on the battered divan by the wall or cross-legged on the floor. We would dip chunks of challah into bowls of yishke —a concoction of overripe tomatoes, diced onions, and bits of schmaltz herring, drenched in vegetable oil—and wash it down with flat seltzer while Avremel spoke of the evils of gluttony and earthly temptations, sinful thoughts in our sleep, insufficient devotion in prayer or to the rebbe. We would enter through a rear door,