The Book of Separation: A Memoir

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Epigraph

The Book of Separation

Part 1

New Year, New You

Day of Judgment

Home

Not Ours

Between This Day and All Others

Israel

Part 2

Pizza

The Underworld

The Freedom Trail

Jump

Part 3

Other People, Other Worlds

Passover

Shelter in Place

Weddings

Letting Go

A New Year

Acknowledgments

Reading Group Guide

A Conversation with Tova Mirvis

Sample Chapter from VISIBLE CITY

Buy the Book

About the Author

Connect with HMH

First Mariner books edition 2018

Copyright © 2017 by Tova Mirvis

Reading Group Guide copyright © 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Q&A with the author copyright © 2018 by Tova Mirvis

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mirvis, Tova author.

Title: The book of separation : a memoir / Tova Mirvis.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015328 (print) | LCCN 2017030254 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544520547 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544520523 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328477873 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Mirvis, Tova. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

Classification: LCC PS3563.I7217 (ebook) | LCC PS3563.I7217 Z46 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.54 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015328

Cover design by Michaela Sullivan

butterfly: © Thomas Vogel/Getty Images; clouds: © Instcaner/Getty Images

v3.0220

The Journey from Dream Work, copyright © 1986 by Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Lines from I Go Back to May 1937 from The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds, copyright © 1987 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

For my family

Author’s Note

The Book of Separation is based on my recollection and understanding of events that have shaped and changed me. I am aware that others may regard these same events in different ways. In writing this book, I have re-created dialogue from memory and, in a few instances, have simplified chronology for the sake of narrative flow. I have changed the names of everyone who appears in the book except for myself.

The Journey | BY MARY OLIVER

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

Mend my life!

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations—

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice,

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do—

determined to save

the only life you could save.

I stood before a panel of rabbis. I was dressed in the outfit of the Orthodox Jewish woman I was supposed to be: a below-the-knee navy skirt and a cardigan buttoned over a short-sleeved shirt that without the sweater would have been considered immodest. But no matter how covered I was, I felt exposed. What kind of shameful woman, I imagined the rabbis thinking, leaves her marriage; what kind of mother overturns her life? Yet a month shy of my fortieth birthday, after almost seventeen years of marriage and three children, I had upended it all.

On one side of the conference room, the rabbis, in beards, black suits, and dark fedora hats, huddled together to examine the get—the divorce document I was waiting for them to confer upon me. It was black ink hand-scribed on beige parchment, written on behalf of my husband the prior week, when he had come before this same group of assembled men. It didn’t matter that I was the one to end our marriage. Jewish law dictated that only a man had the power to issue a divorce.

It also didn’t matter how I felt about being in this conference room before this religious tribunal whose job it was to enforce the very rules that I had long felt shackled by. My role was to remain silent as I followed the careful choreography of this ancient ceremony in which no deviations were allowed. A misspelled name, and the document could be nullified. Any tiny irregularity in the ceremony, and the validity of the divorce might one day be called into question.

To ensure that the court had the right woman, the rabbi from my synagogue had been deputized to verify my identity. On my cell phone the week before, I’d confirmed that I had no nicknames, no aliases or pseudonyms. My father, I answered, also had none. This kind of scrutiny wasn’t new to me. I’d lived my life among the minute rules of Orthodox Judaism. Until now, I’d complied even when I questioned them—pretending when necessary, doing anything in order to stay inside. I might have fantasized about leaving, but it was never something I thought I’d actually do. If you left, you were in danger of losing everyone you loved. If you left, you were in danger of losing yourself.

When every letter of the document had been deemed correct, the rabbis stood. I tried to keep my face impassive, to pretend that nothing here could touch me.

One of the oldest of the rabbis read the document out loud, in Aramaic, dated the year 5772 from the creation of the world, in the city of Boston, by the Ocean Atlantic.

I, Tova Aliza, was released from the house of my husband.

I, Tova Aliza, was permitted to have authority over myself.

The words might have been ancient, but the freedom they promised seemed radical.

The piece of beige parchment was carefully folded into a small triangle, and I was given further directions: One of the rabbis would drop the parchment into my hands and I was supposed to clasp it to my chest to show I was taking possession. Without saying a word, I was to turn and walk from the room. As soon as the door shut behind me, the divorce would go into effect.

The rabbi who had been appointed as my husband’s emissary came over and stood directly in front of me. The other rabbis remained behind the table to witness and thus validate this act. I stood silently before him as instructed, but I knew that I had arrived not just at the end of my marriage but at the edge of the supposed-to-be world. Until now, this had been the only world that existed. Here was the way the world was made, and here was the way the world worked. Here was what I was to do and here was who I was supposed to be. Every decision I’d made up to this point had been stacked on top of these truths. But once the foundation had started to shake, everything else did as well. One by one, the pieces had begun to fall.

The rabbi dangled the folded piece of parchment from his fingers. I cupped my hands and waited.

Part 1

New Year, New You

It is September, the first Rosh Hashanah since the divorce, and I’ve set out on my own.

My three children are with their father, at his parents’ house, where I’d spent the past decade of these holidays. My parents, sister, and grandparents are at home, in Memphis, where they will observe this celebration of the Jewish New Year in the Orthodox synagogue I attended every week of my childhood. My friends are in their homes, cooking for family gatherings. My brother, along with four of his eight children, has traveled with throngs of fellow Breslover Chasidim, an ultra-Orthodox sect, to Uman, a city in Ukraine, the site of their spiritual pilgrimage. And I am fleeing to Kripalu, a yoga and meditation retreat in Western Massachusetts.

Until this year, I celebrated every Rosh Hashanah the same way I had the one before. To spend this holiday anywhere but in the long solemn hours of synagogue would have been unfathomable. Now, without the rules wrapped tightly around me, I no longer know what to do. Dreading the arrival of this year’s High Holy Days, I’d considered pretending they didn’t exist and decided to go to Kripalu only because yoga and meditation seemed to be the obligatory way of moving on. (I assume you’re doing yoga, an acquaintance said upon hearing the news of my divorce.) I’ve told few people where I’m going for the holiday because to do so would be to admit that I’m no longer Orthodox, something that I’m still unsure of myself.

Kripalu is three hours from my house in the Boston suburb of Newton, a highway drive that until recently would have been impossible for me unless I’d studied the maps in search of easy back roads and plotted a route that felt sufficiently safe. For almost a decade of living in the Boston area, I’d been gripped by a fear of driving, steadfastly avoiding rotaries, bridges, and tunnels, driving only when I had to, wishing I could still be in a driver’s-ed car equipped with a passenger-side brake and someone who could stop me if I went too fast or too far. I was terrified of getting lost, most of all terrified of the highway. I couldn’t bear the sight of those green signs announcing the Mass. Pike or I-95, couldn’t merge into the stream of speeding cars. I had nightmares of making a wrong turn onto a wrong street that would lead me to an entry ramp that would take me onto a highway from which I’d never find my way back.

Yet I’m now on the Mass. Pike; the cars are passing me, too many and too fast, and, still shocked that I’m driving on the highway, I clutch the steering wheel, worried about getting into an accident. The biggest fear, though, is not of any injury I might sustain but of the fact that then people will know I’d planned to spend Rosh Hashanah at some suspect retreat center instead of praying in synagogue for a year of blessing, a year of goodness. At the start of all other years, I knew exactly what sort of goodness I was supposed to be praying for, but on this new year, there is no ready prayer, even if I could bring myself to utter one.

It’s not just where I’m going for the holiday, but when—I’d left too late and now the sun is setting and the clock on my dashboard reminds me how close it is to the deadline of exactly 6:08 p.m. that, until recently, would have divided my day into unalterable domains of allowed and forbidden. It’s forbidden to drive on this holiday, and it still feels impossible that I could break one of the religious rules prohibiting the use of electricity, against riding in a car. Every transgression feels like a first, each one new and destabilizing.

I speed up—better to break the laws of Massachusetts than the laws of religion that are still binding in my head. If I go faster, maybe I can make it to Kripalu before driving becomes forbidden. But the sun is sinking lower in the sky, and no matter how fast I go, I won’t arrive before Rosh Hashanah officially begins. The only option now in accordance with Jewish law would be to pull over by the side of the road, knock on someone’s door, and ask to stay for the next forty-eight hours, as though I were a hiker stranded in an unexpected blizzard. If this were a Jewish fairy tale of the sort I’d been raised on, I’d wander in the forest of Central Massachusetts until, in a clearing, with just minutes until the holiday began, I’d come upon a small cabin bathed in golden light and inside, lo and behold, a nice Jewish couple, probably childless, with the holiday candles ready to be lit, an extra place at their table waiting just for me.

I keep going, watching the dashboard clock as the numbers change to 6:08. Finally, I’ve traversed the line that divides me from my past. The drivers around me—shouldn’t they have the same look of fear on their faces, distressed at finding themselves in their vehicles at this hour on this day? Even though I am in my getaway car, my every action is recorded, my every word, every thought, known and evaluated. The voices that have been speaking in a whisper this entire drive are now thundering. If you veer this far, you will never be found. If you leave the path, you will be cut off and alone. My iPhone, my trusty companion, might be ably guiding me toward my destination, but there are other ways to get lost. I’ve driven not just into Western Massachusetts but into the outermost region of who I was supposed to be.

The road transforms from the Mass. Pike of the city to the Mass. Pike of the country. Alongside the highway, a scattering of precocious trees are on the brink of change, eagerly dusted with yellow and red, as though they’ve arrived early to a party. I’ve passed the most congested areas of the drive, and now there are few cars ahead of me or behind. The offenses add up—I stop for gas, check my phone, turn up the radio; seemingly innocuous actions, yet forbidden too on this day, late entries to my ledger of wrongdoing. If God is in the details, sin lies there as well. By now it’s entirely dark. The iPhone maps the way from the Mass. Pike onto winding roads that lead me through the Berkshire towns of Lee and Lenox. No matter how many miles I go, I still expect to look in my rearview mirror and see the people I once knew coming after me. In my mind, there is a stampede of feet, the incessant thrumming of voices: She was driving on Rosh Hashanah, they say. We thought she was one of us.

In this alternate universe, I can still turn the car around. I can find the map that marks the underground passages through which I will travel, not just down miles of highway but into the past, to the white Cape house in Newton where my husband and I and our three children once lived; the key would still turn in the lock, and there we are, gathered around a table set with our blue-and-white wedding china, observing Shabbat—the Jewish Sabbath. Then I will be standing at the sink washing dishes and looking out the window, fantasizing about escape while lamenting the fact that nothing, nothing, can change. I will be in synagogue, bedecked in my married woman’s hat, imagining myself somewhere, anywhere, else.

A few years before, in my in-laws’ Orthodox synagogue, I stood in the back row of the small women’s section, as I did every Rosh Hashanah. I was fenced in on one side by the mechitzah (which separates the men from the women in an Orthodox synagogue) and on the other side by two women who groaned and rolled their eyes anytime I or one of my sisters-in-law needed to pass by. Overhead, in a larger section, the majority of women sat in the balcony, looking down at the figures draped in prayer shawls, a congregation of men.

In what I’d now term a custody arrangement but for all my married years jokingly referred to as a prenup, my husband’s parents, who lived in Brookline, a fifteen-minute drive from us, got Rosh Hashanah and Thanksgiving, while my parents, farther away, in Memphis, got the Passover seders. Rosh Hashanah inaugurates the autumn holidays, the start of the school year swiftly interrupted. For months before, there is talk, with an air of resigned hardship, about how the long string of holidays fall out this year—whether early or late, whether on weekends (which is preferable) or midweek (precluding any regular attendance at work). How do you explain to your colleagues that you’re out of the office again because it’s Shemini Atzeret? people exclaim about observing even the more minor holidays, all the while knowing they would never consider skipping any of them.

On this day it is decided, who shall live and who shall die, the congregation sang in Hebrew.

Remember us for life. Inscribe us in the book of life, we pleaded.

The rabbi—white-haired, white-bearded, and dressed in the thin white robe in which men are both married and buried—moved his hands in time to the prayers as though conducting; on his face was a look of beatific pleasure. I wanted to be moved but it was a performance I’d seen too many times. Here is the part of the service where you sit. Here you stand. Here you bow. Here you proclaim unwavering belief. I stared into my prayer book, hoping my face gave nothing away, but just in case, I pulled the brim of my black silk hat lower—as constricted as I felt by it, at least it provided a place to hide. I counted pages, averaged how many we were covering per minute, and calculated when we would be done—the same game I’d played as a child when time had passed unbearably slowly.

On the other side of the partition stood two of my brothers-in-law and my father-in-law, who’d become Orthodox as a young man. Each of them had a black-and-white tallis—the prayer shawl worn by married men—draped over his shoulders. My husband, Aaron, stood next to them in his navy-blue suit and tallis. From behind the mechitzah, I watched how he swayed to the words, knowing how moved he felt by the High Holy Day tunes.

Layla, my almost three-year-old daughter, was upstairs in the play group with the other nursery-age children, who weren’t expected to sit through the nearly five-hour service. I went to check on her, incurring the annoyance of the women seated next to me as I apologetically squeezed past. In the upstairs classrooms, local college girls looked after the kids, who were dressed in miniature suits and flowered dresses, all wearing name tags made before the holiday began because writing was among the many forbidden tasks on this day. As I watched my daughter play, I removed my hat for a few minutes, to give myself a break from the pressure of it wrapped around my head. When I returned to the sanctuary, I put the hat back on and watched my two sons, Noam and Josh—who, at eleven and seven, were not interested in the play group—standing beside Aaron. They were dressed in khakis and blue button-down shirts, Red Sox–logo yarmulkes clipped to their light brown hair—yarmulkes were required of boys and men as a sign that God was always above. I’d packed books and snacks to keep them occupied during the service, as though it were a long car ride we had ahead of us, but that wasn’t enough to stem the boredom that made them squirm and whisper. They hadn’t yet mastered that most necessary skill: how not to be where you are.

Instead of reciting the prayers, I surveyed the dresses of those around me and the hats of the married women, especially the outlandish one worn by a woman across the aisle, festooned with a webbed black veil and scarlet-speckled feathers. Most women had on more staid wool hats, and a few of them tucked all their hair underneath in accordance with the strictest of Orthodox injunctions that a married woman’s hair must always be covered, that it was little different than her breasts or thighs. Some of the younger married women had started opting for less obtrusive scarves or twenties-era cloches or even wide headbands, which seemed more like decorative afterthoughts than anything seriously intended to cover, a means of probing the edges while remaining inside. Each of these hats conveyed a world and a worldview. Like birds, we could be spotted and identified by the feathers and crowns on our heads.

I tried to pray, but my mind kept wandering. Under all these brims and bows, what were people really thinking? There were few clues, only the fantasies I spun out. Did any of these women ever worry, as I did, that too much thinking might unravel their lives? You were supposed to believe that this way of life was the only true one. You were supposed to tell yourself that the rituals and restrictions were binding and beautiful. And if you felt any rumblings of dissatisfaction, you were supposed to believe that the problem lay with you. My own discontent, I hoped, remained well hidden. It wasn’t the sort of thing I would have shared with my mother-in-law or sisters-in-law, who sat beside me wearing hats of their own. Along with the actual rules, there was another set of laws, equally stringent yet more unforgiving, enforced not by a belief in God but by communal eyes that were just as all-seeing and all-knowing. Inside my head, a voice constantly whispered: What will they think?

I’d learned to squelch the question. I knew how to ease doubt with the routine of ritual: Invite guests for festive meals on Shabbat. Prepare the hot-water urn before sundown every Friday so I didn’t have to perform the forbidden act of boiling liquid on Shabbat. Unscrew the light in the refrigerator and set the timers in our house so I didn’t have to perform the forbidden act of switching on a light on Shabbat. Check every package of food I bought for the proper kosher certification. Check my underwear for signs of bleeding that would make me sexually off-limits to my husband. Immerse myself in the mikvah, the ritual bath, a week after my period ended so that I would once again be permitted to him. Change the dish racks in the sink according to the kind of meal I’d prepared, wash the dishes with sponges designated for meat or for dairy so that the two never mixed. Sit on the women’s side of the synagogue and tell myself that this didn’t bother me. Believe in modern interpretations to make the rules sound more palatable. Advocate for liberal positions within Orthodoxy so that women could be more included. Tell myself that I could live with the remaining contradictions. Console myself with the thought of being part of a chain of tradition. Listen to the men recite the prayers, deliver the sermons, make the rules. Light the candles for Shabbat on Fridays, light the menorah for Chanukah for eight nights, prepare baskets of food for friends on Purim, vacuum the car for any drop of forbidden leavened food before Passover. Doubt quietly, but don’t talk about it, don’t act on it.

Now it was time for the shofar—the blowing of the ram’s horn that was the highlight of the Rosh Hashanah service—and the children, released from the play group, came rushing into the sanctuary like prisoners on furlough. Eager to hear the shofar, which they’d been learning about in school for weeks, they crowded to the front of the men’s section, where the view was better. The man blowing the shofar wore his black-and-white-striped tallis over his head, and the speckled ram’s horn emerged from underneath this zebralike covering, turning him into some sort of hybrid animal at whom we all gazed expectantly. Layla was still young enough to be allowed in the men’s section, and her white-blond curls and hot-pink dress stood out in the sea of black and white as Aaron held her, his head draped with his tallis as well. Seen from this vantage point, he looked like every other man.

Instead of the usual soft murmur of conversation, there was silence in the sanctuary. We were required to hear every single note of the shofar—all one hundred blasts—in order to satisfy our obligation. Does it really matter if we don’t actually hear each one, I quietly wondered as Aaron leaned forward in concentration, as intent on fulfilling this command as he was with the others that governed our shared lives, sometimes pulling manuals from our bookshelf to remind himself of the specific rules for a holiday. When he did that, I felt uneasy at how readily he followed even the smallest details of the law, but how could I argue with his devotion, which should have been mine as well? Now, too, I bristled as I watched him, feeling like I was spying on a stranger. What he took refuge in was the same thing that I wished to flee. If I ever tried to share how deadened I felt whenever I stood supposedly in prayer, he professed understanding but smiled nervously, hoping my discontent would disappear before it became something to be reckoned with. If I said too much, I saw in his eyes a look of fear, the same kind I felt myself.

It was safer not to talk about it. And I saw little reason to, because I was convinced that nothing could change. These words I’d held on to for years now: nothing can change. It was far too late to question my marriage or the Orthodox life in which we were steeped. Change might be something I longed for but never something I dared to bring about. I had long ago passed the exit ramp; with three kids, a husband, and a home in the Orthodox community, I couldn’t have thoughts of leaving. People who left Orthodoxy did so earlier in their lives, during college or in the years soon after, when they could still choose who they wanted to be.

That year, we’d gone with the kids to New York City, where we’d watched street performers who folded themselves, arms over legs over necks, into smaller and smaller glass boxes. I smiled and clapped along with the crowd at what seemed to be an impossible feat of enclosure, but even after we wandered on to the next spectacle, I couldn’t stop thinking about these performers, feeling like I was one of them.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to be Orthodox, I’d once said tentatively to my best friend, Ariel, as I continued to feel my own sense of enclosure. Like me, she was a writer and Jewish. But because she wasn’t Orthodox, it was easier to broach this subject with her.

I’ve wondered why the rules don’t bother you more, she admitted carefully.

I try not to let myself think about it. I work so hard just to hold it all together, I told her, but afraid of my words, I didn’t say anything else about it, and she, out of respect, didn’t ask.

More than anything, I wanted these feelings to go away, but they only grew stronger. One Shabbat, I had been at the synagogue we attended every week, waiting to enter the social hall after the service ended. It was like any Shabbat morning, like every Shabbat morning. People talked, laughed, milled around, and so did I, though my arms were folded across my chest, my fingers tightly digging into my arms as though I needed to hold myself intact. A debilitating headache came over me, the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head. Around me, people continued their conversations, but, startled by the pain, I rushed from the crowd. It was a brain tumor, an aneurysm. Afraid of what was erupting inside me, I pushed through the glass doors of the building. On the steps of the synagogue, I ripped the hat off my head, and the pain disappeared.

Tekiah, a man called out now, bringing everyone in my in-laws’ synagogue to expectant attention, and a long unbroken sound emerged from the shofar—a siren, a wail.

Shevarim—three broken blasts, like hiccups.