Prologue
Is tragedy dead?”
This is what I asked Mrs. Hartman at the end of it all, when I was still obsessed with every fatal flaw but my own.
She didn’t ask why I needed to know. Instead she asked me to define tragedy for her. I told her this was impossible: tragedy was a subphilosophy, something to be felt, not defined.
She shook her head. “Majestic sadness,” she told me. “That’s tragedy.”
I thought about that night, standing side by side with Evan and Amir in those waning moments before the policemen, the fire trucks, the body count. I thought about the look on Evan’s soot-washed face. “I wonder if Noah is seeing this,” he had said, his voice soft, sad. After everything that had happened our senior year, it was the way he said this that made me cry. If that was not majestic sadness, I decided, nothing was.
“Well, Mr. Eden?” She blinked at me. “Did it die with the Greeks?”
“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”
August
Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
—Tennyson, “Ulysses”
For the first seventeen years of my life I lived in Brooklyn. From nursery through the eleventh grade—blurred, prehistoric years—I attended a small yeshiva called Torah Temimah, the translation of which (“the Torah is perfect”) was our credo. School was single-sexed, with a black-and-white dress code, thirty boys per grade and a reputation for functioning as an academic travesty. Yiddish-speaking rabbis refused to teach anything vaguely related to evolution. Former hippies, plucked from the street, incapable of landing a job in the regular school system, ranted incoherently about civics. Freshman-year math was canceled abruptly after Mr. Alvarez, our lone competent teacher, decided he’d seen enough of our wondrous country and returned to Argentina. The Torah was perfect, our education was not.
None of this mattered much to our community. Never was there any pretense that this was anything but a yeshiva first and a school second, dedicated to “the uncompromising development of students into the leaders of modern-day Torah” and then, with whatever time was left in the day, to a secular education. Most graduates spent years floating aimlessly around the country, studying in a Beis Medresh here, a Beis Medresh there, where their fathers had once studied, where a second cousin once removed was a notable donor, wherever, really, they were offered a bed. No one had college on his mind. It took me all this time to realize that this amounted to a beautiful life.
My family wasn’t too different, at least back then. My father was an accountant for a small, local firm, which I suppose made us something of a minority in a community in which many fathers spent their days learning or teaching Torah. Still, my father fancied himself a learned man—his grandfather, he enjoyed reminding me, had been a fairly prominent rabbi in Williamsburg and descended from a line of middling Talmudic scholars—and spent his free time engrossed in study. His profession was infinitely boring, but he was satisfied with his lot and prone to pious overgeneralizations: “God-fearing specks in a vast universe do not require fancy careers.” He was, in short, eminently suited for our community: graying hair, worn smile, the simplest man I’ve ever known.
My mother—thin, elegant in the way receding youth clings to certain women—was more unusual. Her parents, third-generation Chicagoans, maintained a semi-traditional household: occasional Friday night gatherings, synagogue on the High Holidays, no pork, some lobster. As a freshman at Barnard, she partook in a Hillel-sponsored trip to Israel and, nearly overnight, became infatuated with the spiritual fulfillment, moral discipline and communal structure offered by Orthodox Judaism. She returned reborn, studying with a local rebbetzin, adopting increasingly complex mitzvoth and, by the end of her fall semester, transferring to Stern College. Soon after, a shidduch was arranged with my father.
I was deeply curious about my mother’s early life, but she said little on the subject. She insisted, in fact, that she hardly remembered her childhood in Chicago. I used to ask questions—what was it like eating nonkosher, having Saturdays free, attending public school—but instead of substantive answers received instructions, mostly from my father, to keep private my mother’s status as a Ba’alat Teshuva, a newly religious Jew. Her real life, she claimed, began with my father. After marrying, she earned her master’s at Teachers College, a rarity for the other mothers I knew. She taught fourth grade at Torah Temimah, which meant she witnessed firsthand its academic horrors.
“Aryeh,” she announced after it’d become apparent my fifth-grade teacher took personal offense to the concept of required reading, “enrichment is in order.”
And so every day after school we’d sit in the Borough Park Library, my mother and I, and read. She gave me books to devour—Tom Sawyer and To Kill a Mockingbird, Flowers for Algernon and A Wrinkle in Time. Soon, I was biking over after school and perching myself in the corner, where the librarian, Mrs. Sanders, with her cherubic-white hair and feline eyes, had grown accustomed to leaving me stacks of “mandatory” books. “Nobody reads these,” she’d say. Night. Death of a Salesman. “You’re going to make up for everyone else.” Dickinson once described her father as a man who read “lonely & rigorous books.” This was what I became: a contemplative boy surrounded always by lonely, rigorous books.
Such was the way I received some semblance of an education. I stood out in English classes, if only because an alarming number of my classmates flirted with illiteracy. Their parents were content with whatever the school managed to teach—astonishingly little—and actually preferred their children study Talmud exclusively.
“What’re you doing at the library?” my friend Shimon would probe. He had comically long payot wrapped twice around his ears, a kind, thin face typically covered with acne and was always sweating, his shirt a mosaic of ketchup from lunch and dirt from recess. “Is there a shiur there or something?”
“You’re asking if they offer Gemara classes at the public library?”
“Yeah.”
I shook my head.
“What do they have, then?”
“Books, Shimon.”
“Sefarim, you mean?”
“No,” I said. “Real books. Want to come?”
He frowned. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“My father says that stuff stains your neshama.”
* * *
THERE’S A POEM I LIKE by Jane Kenyon. It’s three stanzas, ten lines, rather somber. The poem’s called “In the Nursing Home”; it likens aging to a wild horse running tight circles that grow smaller, smaller, until eventually they cease. As a teenager, I felt this neatly encapsulated the suffocation of my childhood, the trackless wasteland of tightening circles I inhabited. I felt sometimes as if I existed alone, outside the external world, bearing no true relation to anyone or anything, as if the invisible harnesses that tethered humans to their surroundings had, in my case, come undone. I was accustomed to living unmoored, inured to rappelling through a shrinking reality with neither rope nor anchor. This was all I knew: gazing out at the coming night, alone, waiting diligently, like Kenyon’s horse, to be retrieved by some force—any force—that could reinsert me into my own life.