Living on the Edge of the World by Irina Reyn

Author:Irina Reyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’m hard-pressed here, pushing, searching for something positive and uplifting to write about the place where I grew up. After all, it is my own internal landscape, the place where my stories began, and thinking about it raises a moral question: Would I trade my own painful childhood for a happier one and not possess this material as a writer? Those years of childhood isolation are what have shaped my voice. There is no doubt in my mind that those years made me a writer, but they could just as easily have made me psychotic.

We had a hard time in Hillside. It was just one of those towns, a piece of bad luck, the wrong place to live. We were surrounded by families who were all more like one another than we were like them. Worst of all, we were Orthodox Jews. In a neighborhood that didn’t take kindly to Jewish families to begin with, my parents arrived with their foreign customs, such as a wooden succab —a glorified shack—which we erected in the backyard each autumn to celebrate the old harvest days with shafts of wheat and bitter lemons. We had mezuzahs on all the doors, and we didn’t drive on the Sabbath. We were kosher, in every sense of the word. Each Saturday morning, my father would don a dark suit and yarmulke and walk the mile or so to synagogue, past the houses of those who had thrown eggs and set fire to his lawn.

If asked, my father would have defined himself first and foremost as a Jew. Even before he was a husband, a father, a Wall Street businessman, he was an observant Jew. The traditions of orthodoxy were his roots, the bedrock of the family he came from, and though he was probably conflicted at times, he never rebelled, never ran away. For a while, he and my mother agreed to raise me Orthodox. Until I was thirteen, I went to a yeshiva in a nearby town, where I became fluent in Hebrew and learned to climb around in the intellectual branches of the Talmud. But while my classmates went home to neighborhoods and communities where there were other Orthodox Jewish families, in my mother’s chocolate-brown Eldorado I reentered a neighborhood where it was a bad thing, an odd thing, to be a Jew. It was the beginning of my sense of not-belonging; an invisible wall had gone up between me and the rest of the world, and before I knew it, I was banging against it, trying to get out.

In those days, we had live-in housekeepers, though now, as a grown woman, I don’t understand why. I was an only child, and my mother didn’t work outside the house. What did she do all day? The house was spotless. These housekeepers, who never lasted more than a year or two, were from faraway islands: Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Antigua. They wore white uniforms during the day, and at night they retreated to a small room in the basement, near the laundry room, where it was implicitly understood I should not bother them.

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