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

to avoid glimpses of Avremel’s wife or his young daughters, but we’d hear their disembodied voices from other parts of the small apartment. Occasionally, one of Avremel’s young sons would join us, and even the youngest knew to close the door behind him quickly. It was the perfect Hasidic home, and Avremel, clearly, was a paragon of Hasidic manhood.
    The groom instruction sessions were different: intimate and secretive. Only the soon-to-be-married were invited, and we were instructed to speak with no one about them. These were sensitive matters, and we would slip away from the study hall in the evening, aware of the furtive glances in our direction.
    The first session took place two months before my wedding, which was to be held in early June. When the session was over, I waited until the others left, and then asked Avremel if I might speak with him. We sat on opposite sides of the table, and I remember struggling for words. What came out was a croak, a lame attempt at verbalizing my tempestuous swings from anger to melancholy to resignation during the last four months. “I am not happy.”
    Avremel’s eyes went wide in response, fiery, almost scolding. “Why?” he asked.
    Again, as in the rebbe’s chamber, there was a question and I had to come up with an answer. I thought that with Avremel it would be easier, but now I realized that here, too, I couldn’t speak my thoughts. They felt inappropriate, almost sinful. I was thinking the wrong thoughts, feeling the wrong things.
    “I don’t know why,” I said. And then I felt an explosion of despair, my face suddenly awash with tears. I did not want to marry this girl. The day, the hour, the moment was approaching, and I could not stop it. I wished I could escape, take off to some unknown place, where I could start a new life and be spared the shame of what I really wanted, but where would I go? Overwhelmed, I buried my face in my arm, unable to contain my sobs.
    When I raised my head again, Avremel was staring at me, his eyebrows narrowed, his brow creased, as if he now realized that, yes, we had a problem. But he needed more information, he said. “Perhaps you can think on it some more.”
    “I don’t know,” I remember muttering. “Maybe—I just don’t think she and I have anything in common.”
    Avremel nodded slowly, then looked at the table for a long time. Finally, he said, “You were hoping for a friend.” He stroked his beard, beads of spit trapped in the edges of his unkempt mustache.
    I shrugged with a half nod. Perhaps that was it.
    “A wife isn’t a friend.” Avremel shook his head emphatically. “Eizer kenegdo,” he said, quoting Genesis. “A wife is to be a helpmate. Your friends will still be your fellow students.”
    Avremel looked at me while I stared at the faux wood-grain patterns in the Formica tabletop and I thought about his words. After several minutes of silence, he began to speak again, more assuredly this time. I had misunderstood the whole marriage thing, he said. A wife is not a friend. A wife is not something to think about excessively. To take a wife is a biblical commandment, and so we do God’s will by taking one. A wife is there to assist with one’s service to God, nothing more.
    In later years, I would have words for that which I could not articulate to the rebbe or to Avremel, words from beyond our cloistered world of tischen and Talmud study and groom instruction: Attraction. Chemistry. Compatibility. I would later learn other words—passion, romance, arousal, desire—that I wanted as well, but to want those was an unquestionable sin; those feelings and thoughts and behaviors that passed between sexes outside of our world were anathema to us and our sacred ways.
    I remember when I first became aware of a world filled with forbidden passions. I was nearing fourteen, during my year of study in Montreal, and I had a curious thought.
    “Have you noticed,” I said one day to my friend Avrum Yida, a Satmar boy from