Chapter 110: Getting Personal. Or Not.

I was researching my book when, the other day, I recalled a story that I had written almost forty years ago and I thought might be useful, if I could find it. I dug through copies of magazines and came up empty. I began rifling through old files folders and, pack rat that I am, discovered that I had saved the folder that contained my interview notes, along with the draft. 

The story was about my childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn – Midwood – and how in the ten years since I’d left it had evolved from a community of predominantly assimilated, secular Jews to an enclave of the deeply Orthodox. My parents, who were themselves observant, were feeling ever less a part of the neighborhood. Their new neighbors did not shun them, nor were they particularly friendly. 

I had lived in Midwood for twenty-one years and so found it more than a little disconcerting one day as I was visiting my folks, when the next door neighbor’s son approached me as I stood outside. He was perhaps ten years old but did not shy from introducing me to his worldview and where he believed I fit.

He looked up at me and said, “you’re not a Jew.” 

I looked down at him and asked why.

He pointed to the skullcap on his head and, drawing upon the given-up-for-dead language of Yiddish, replied, “you’re not wearing a kapple.”

That encounter set in motion my reporting. It was an odd feeling, reporting literally so close to home, and discovering how much had changed, and how that change was not going to be temporary. 

I wrote the story and sent it to New York magazine, which had accepted my pitch. The editor, perhaps assuming that when I meant conflict between Orthodox and secular Jews I’d have scenes of Hasidic men from rival cults shaving off each other’s beards, decided it was not quite umphy enough. Instead I sold it to a Jewish magazine and a month later moved with my wife to Tokyo. In time, my parents moved to Manhattan leaving me with little reason to visit Midwood, let alone think about what I had seen and learned and written.

The draft I found was yellowed and had been written on the workhouse manual Olivetti typewriter my grandparents had given me, fittingly, for my Bar Mitzvah – 1966, at a time when stores on the main shopping drag of Avenue J did not feel it necessary to close on the Sabbath, lest they lose pious customers. 

The story was pretty good. Complete, balanced, and, okay, I’ll give myself a gentle pat on the head and say, not badly written. B+. Maybe A-.

But reading it for the first time after so long, and with so many stories in between, I was struck by what I felt was a certain flatness. I had done everything right and done it well enough to be publishable. And yet, there was nothing of me in this story, no sense of why I, in particular, was the person who needed to find it, report it and tell it. 

I did recount the incident with my parents’ neighbor’s son. I identified myself only as an assimilated person. 

The debate about the use and necessity of the first person narrator endures. But I am not recounting the story of this story to make an argument for the first person singular. Still, I wonder whether in the case of this particular story, something was lost when, falling back on my journalistic training, I camouflaged myself so effectively that the reader had no sense of what was propelling me to report and tell what I had found.

In so many conversations I’ve had with students I am struck by how often I hear myself responding to their reluctance to seize control of their stories by reminding them that so often they are the only ones who could have reported and told it. Not merely, I add, because it may involve someone they knew, or something that might have happened to them. The need transcends the personal. 

I have seen how they have responded viscerally to something they have seen, or heard, or recalled. Don’t shy from that, I tell them; the quality that makes the story lift off the page is the feeling a reader has that this is a story by someone who is consumed by it.

I can still see and hear that ten-year-old boy. He must be fifty now.  I wonder if he’s just as intolerant of people like me as he was back then. Given what I learned in the reporting that his words set in motion, I believe he is.

I remember in the course of the reporting, an interview with a leader of an Orthodox organization whom I asked about a report that the remains of a woman who had survived the Holocaust had been disinterred by Orthodox men in an Israeli cemetery because, the story went, she was not considered sufficiently Jewish. Surely, I said, you were outraged about this.

Not at all, he replied, as if my question was absurd. He went on to say that far more troubling was the thought that his father might be buried in the same cemetery as this woman.

Note the anger in my telling. Note what sent me talking to the men and women who populated his world, and who, in their very reasonably sounding way, were so dismissive of mine. We won, they were all but saying. You people – you lost.

My story conveyed none of this. Should it have? Would it have been better – and not merely in the eyes of an editor at New York magazine who, I suspect, wanted outrage and drama.

I had been a reporter for eight years when I wrote that piece. I knew what I was doing. I knew how to get the story - how to present the views from all sides, and with it the necessary context. I knew how to tell it: a good and in this instance useful anecdotal lede, followed by a nut graf that laid things out clearly and forcefully: Enmity between Jews is not new. What has mushroomed, however, are the stakes and the scale.

But in re-reading it I wonder whether the story might have been something more had I come clean from the outset and said, this was where I grew up and where my parents feel like outsiders and I am wondering what is happening to my home?

Would I have been able to control my anger, and channel it in a way that made it effective and not intrusive? Was I too concerned about putting myself out there, even a little? Perhaps.

Decades have passed. I have written a lot of stories. I wish I could say that I have mastered my emotions to the extent that they are a reliable tool. But I know that to bury them, to ignore what sets in motion the need to make sense of things, robs my work, and really all of our work, with what is vital: us, the messy, angry, delighted, curious, outraged, bemused, confounded us.

* * *

We wanted to share our newest Delacorte Review story, Mystery of the Disappearing Teepee by Masha Udensiva-Brenner.

The story is set in Northern Manhattan, in a park that exists in sharp contrast to the bustle of the surrounding and rapidly changing neighborhood of Inwood. In the park sits a teepee.

Or rather sat a teepee.

One day it was there.

Then it was gone.

Then it was back.

Someone wanted the teepee gone. But who and why?