Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, by Leah Vincent
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Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, by Leah Vincent
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An electrifying memoir about a young woman’s self-destructive spiral after being cast out by her ultra-Orthodox Jewish familyIn the vein of Prozac Nation and Girl, Interrupted, this brutally honest memoir tells the story of one woman’s struggle to define herself as an individual. Leah Vincent was born into the Yeshivish community, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect that shuns the modern world. When, at sixteen, Leah was caught exchanging letters with a boy—breaking a religious ban on contact between the sexes—her family cut all ties. Sent to live on her own in New York City, adrift and unprepared for the freedoms of secular life, Leah’s desperate loneliness coupled with her stubborn loyalty to the dogma of her past pulled her into a vicious cycle of promiscuity and self-harm. It took a shocking state of despair to empower her to transform a life of tragedy into a tale of unexpected triumph, one that illuminates both the oppressive world of religious fundamentalism and the broader issues facing young women from all backgrounds as they grapple with sexuality and identity.
Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, by Leah Vincent - Amazon Sales Rank: #553315 in Books
- Brand: Vincent, Leah
- Published on: 2015-05-12
- Released on: 2015-05-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.01" h x .62" w x 5.24" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, by Leah Vincent Review "Wrenching ... Her book should be read, not just as a warning of the very real dangers of the world, but also of the price to be paid when, in the name of religion, people forget humanity." —The Wall Street Journal"A sometimes-sweet, sometimes-harrowing memoir by a smart, passionate ultra-Orthodox girl. . . . engrossing and so thoughtfully written, and never mocks the traditions and values of a culture that few of us can fully comprehend." —People.com"Painfully raw." —Susannah Cahalan, New York Post"Gripping. . . . Readers will appreciate Vincent's uncensored honesty in sharing the horrors of her past." —The Washington Post "As thoughtful and heroic as it is gripping and tragic ... riveting and relatable ... [Vincent] familiarizes, rather than exoticizes, the life she's led ... The finest example of this sort of memoir yet." —Flavorwire"Visceral and uplifting." —The Daily Beast"Compulsively readable." —Bookpage"Never before has rebellion been so sweetly rendered. And never—not since the memoirs of Mary Karr—has the connection between self-destruction and family dysfunction been so tangible and clear. To know Vincent is to love her, to ache with her, to kick up your feet and let down your hair with her. This is the kind of extraordinary book you’ll finish in a day, and think about for months and years after." —Koren Zailckas, bestselling author of Smashed and Mother, Mother"Cut Me Loose brims with a girl’s longing, and shines with a woman’s insight. This book so courageously describes the forbidden: the great bind of being caught between desire and tradition. Vincent’s voice is as lyrical as it brave, as hopeful as it is honest. Leah Vincent magically depicts the labyrinth of what it means to be vulnerable, sexual and female." —Christa Parravani, author of Her"Gutsy, smart, and incredibly difficult to put down, Cut Me Loose chronicles Leah Vincent's perilous and poignant search for identity. As she grapples with profound loneliness and her dreams for the future, she ultimately arrives at a place filled with hope." —Wendy Lawless, author of Chanel Bonfire"Leah Vincent's memoir is a fascinating view into Yeshivish life that feels as familiar to the reader as her own life because, Orthodox or not, we all grew up wrestling against our forbidden desires, mundane and normal as they were. Vincent's story is full of despair, of longing, of trying to find a place for herself amid a world that doesn't allow girls to be their whole yearning selves. The reader cheers for her when she finally escapes the prisons built by the various institutions she grew up with." —Kerry Cohen, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity"Leah Vincent's family abandoned her in the name of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. In her poignant memoir, she explores the imposed ignorance of her fundamentalist upbringing, the open wounds of her abandonment, her desperate, at times self-destructive, yearning for connection, and the self-discoveries that gave her the courage to shape her life and find her voice. The voice Vincent has claimed is unflinchingly honest and incisive. It has already begun to resound on behalf of others who struggle to escape abuse and oppression." —Anouk Markovits, author of I Am Forbidden"Vincent’s writing brims with tension, insight, and longing. This quickly paced book is not about sex, though sex is a part of the narrative. It’s ultimately a meditation on love and its myriad cruelties, as well as its eventual beauty and transcendence." —Margaux Fragoso, author of Tiger, Tiger"Leah Vincent shares a harrowing journey that will speak to all children fleeing intolerance, who struggle to be seen and accepted on their own terms." —Julie Metz, bestselling author of Perfection
About the Author Leah Vincent is a writer and an activist. A first-generation college student, Leah went on to earn a Master’s in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School as a Pforzheimer Fellow. Leah now works on projects that address social justice within ultra-Orthodoxy, the rise of Jewish fundamentalism, and the female experience of shame. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Unpious, ZEEK, The Daily Beast and The Jewish Daily Forward.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
author’s note
chapter one
MY FATHER, RABBI SHAUL KAPLAN, was a short, stiff-shouldered man with flat, sad eyes and a high forehead that faded into a bald pate. Like all Yeshivish men, he dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and black fedora. When we picked through the laundry heap, looking for clean underwear, we would find his sleeveless undershirts and his worn boxers, translucent from too many washes.
There were eventually eleven of us: Goldy, Shaindy, Elisha, Chumi, me, Deena, Mordy, Boorie Tzvi, Dov, Yanky, Miriam. We were each two years apart. We had big brown eyes, olive skin, pixie chins, and wildly distinct personalities.
We called our father “Tatte.” Because we were Yeshivish, we didn’t speak a fluent Yiddish, like the Hasidim did, but our English was sprinkled with a few words in that language, when English could not do justice to a concept.
My father had called his own father “Dad,” but as a child I was not critical enough to reflect on the discrepancy between the little I knew of his history and his insistence that our way of life had always been as it was.
• • •
Our three-story home sat on the bottom of a hilly street in a quiet, residential area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On Thursday morning, a few hours before Passover would begin, I was standing in my favorite spot: behind the open kitchen door, where my mother hung my father’s clean shirts that were waiting to be ironed. All of his shirts were white, collared, and button-down, but they were not all the same. Some had a checked pattern of shiny white-on-white thread. Some were transparent with wear. Most, however, had hard stays inserted into the collar, two sharp, oblong pieces of cardboard on either side of the neck. My favorite activity at age nine was to stand behind the open door, right index finger thrust backward in my mouth, sucking hard, left hand on a collar stay. I’d run my thumb and finger around the edge, bend the cardboard, relishing the dig of the pointed end into the fleshy part of my thumb, and flip the stay while it was still in its pocket. My father, busy with prayer, teaching, lecturing, and counseling, was rarely home. As with God, I treasured him through his rare artifacts.
As the ultra-Orthodox rabbi of the largest semi-Orthodox synagogue in western Pennsylvania, my father devoted his life to bringing his congregants closer to God by urging them to leave their Modern Orthodox ways and embrace God’s true will: the Yeshivish lifestyle. At this, he was successful. Over the years, congregants exchanged knit kippas for black hats, and delicate hair doilies for heavy wigs.
Our house sat kitty-corner to the synagogue, so in the summer, with the windows of the sanctuary cantilevered ajar and our small bathroom window open, I could hear Kaddish while sitting on the toilet. Whenever this happened, I’d have to clap my hands over my ears. As an observant Jew, you could not hear Kaddish and not respond, “May his great Name be blessed forever and ever,” but you also could not speak of God in the bathroom.
Men prayed in the synagogue three times a day, but women went only on Saturday and holiday mornings, and, even then, their attendance was not required. So while my father spoke to God from a cherrywood throne beside the holy ark, overlooking a thousand pews, my mother murmured quick morning prayers hidden behind the kitchen door. I was unusual as a child in that I preferred to sneak away on Friday night to sway along to the songs that welcomed the Shabbos. I loved to feel goose bumps prickle my arms as the languorous “Lecha Dodi” changed halfway into a rollicking tune, almost as much as I loved that moment when the service ended and the room emptied and I could walk through the men’s section as if God’s home was my own. I would wait on the side as my father put away his holy books and offered some last words of guidance to his congregants. My shy stance declared that I belonged to the rabbi and, therefore, to God.
• • •
That morning, before Passover, I stood sucking my finger, fiddling with my father’s collars, tucked out of the way, as my two younger brothers chased each other up and down the stairs belting out, “Tamid tamid tamid tamid tamid b’simcha,” and two of my older sisters had a showdown over a new library book. It was a special day, and not just because of the approaching holiday. This was the day my father went to the video store.
Television and movie theaters were forbidden in our Yeshivish community, but before Passover, my father, an otherwise unyielding man, would relent and rent a few classic movies. They would keep us glued to the borrowed VCR in the attic, freeing my mother to whip together pans of tongue and roasted chickens and brownies and waves of crispy meringues, which she’d ice with thick mocha cream and adorn with strawberry slices.
I sucked my finger until the skin wrinkled, waiting for my father to return from the synagogue.
Please, HaShem, I silently prayed to God. Please let Tatte choose me.
When my father finally came home, he headed to the kitchen to talk to my mother. Elisha, my thirteen-year-old brother, home for Passover from his yeshiva in Chicago, bounded in after him, beckoning to me and to my seven-year-old sister, Deena, to join him in the hallway.
“Guess what!” Elisha whispered. Deena and I huddled in. “You’re not going to believe this! The butcher, he—he—” With our attention captured, Elisha paused dramatically to fix his yarmulke, which was sliding off his curly hair. Deena and I glanced curiously at each other.
A week before, just after Elisha had arrived home, he had passed on the juicy information that the butcher, a man as tall as a door and fat, too, had yelled at my father in the synagogue, angry about some ruling my father had made. Because he got to hang out with the men, Elisha always overheard the best gossip. We all agreed that the butcher must be crazy. Most of my father’s congregants worshipped him, sometimes speaking to him in the third person and always using a tone of respect.
“The butcher,” Elisha continued, his eyes wide, looking from Deena to me and back to Deena. “His wife found him dead, completely, totally, absolutely naked on their bathroom floor. The butcher is dead.”
Elisha grinned, nodding his head slowly. In shocked silence, Deena and I pondered the strength of God’s swift and brutal judgment on my father’s behalf.
My father passed us, and the three of us guiltily drifted apart. He reached for his hat, which was resting on a mountain of books. I scanned his face, looking for some sign of God’s mighty anger in his features, but my father’s eyes were peaceful, his calm lips buried in the hairs of his beard.
“Who do you want me to take, Mamme?” he called to my mother as he adjusted his hat.
The video store! I had forgotten!
Elisha, Deena, and I sidled up to him, our eyes silently begging: Please, pick me. Even in our desperation, we didn’t get too close to my father.
“Pick whoever,” my mother answered. Streaks of blood ran over her hands as she removed the innards from the chickens piled before her. She rested her pregnant belly against the countertop, swiping at her cheek with her shoulder.
“Leah, do you want to come?” my father asked. “You’re ready?”
I nodded. My throat was too thick with pride to answer.
“Get good ones this time!” Deena instructed. “Tatte’s favorite!” she added accusingly, in a hiss.
“Get the Abbott and Costello with the bases!” Elisha commanded.
Their requests floated past me as I stumbled to catch up with my father, who was striding toward the station wagon.
• • •
At Sun Video, I stared longingly at the forbidden pinks and purples of the new Disney blockbusters while my father asked me if I wanted an Abbott and Costello comedy or Kidnapped. I did not know that my father had grown up on these classic movies. I only knew that the more modern a thing, the more promiscuous, the more suspect. Non-Jews believed that they were descended from monkeys and so every generation forward was better than the last, but we knew that our ancestors had received the Torah from God, so every new generation was reduced in holiness.
“Kidnapped,” I told him.
• • •
A few hours later, I met Davie on-screen. A brave Scottish boy, he raced over the highlands escaping the bad guys, who marched ominously down the hills. Maybe it was his relentless courage. Maybe it was his blond curls and square jaw. Maybe it was just the right boy at the right time. It was instant love.
• • •
My mother stopped by my bed that night, as she always did, her pregnant body sinking into the mattress. Every year of my childhood, she was either pregnant or nursing a new baby.
“Did you say Shema?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Well then, close your eyes and say good night. Sleep tight. I loo loo, Leah, I loo loo.” She brushed her cool fingers down the side of my face.
“Loo loo,” a child’s attempt at the words “love you,” was the only way that sentiment was expressed between mortals in our house. My parents were not literate in the language of human emotion. Love was gleaned from the tone of my mother’s voice or the softness of her eyes. When I was very young, she and my father would sometimes call me “Leahchke,” and there were volumes of affection to sustain me in that generous diminutive. My father was more effusive. Every Friday night, after blessing the children, he would place one careful kiss on the top of each of our heads. Sometimes, as rarely and spontaneously as a sun shower, he would pause behind my chair and gift my head with an unearned kiss.
• • •
After my mother left my bedroom, I nestled into my pillowcase, with its smell of sweat and honey, fantasizing: It was my eighteenth birthday. A knock at the door. In came the movie star Davie, dressed in a black hat and dark suit.
“I’m Jewish,” he tells my father. “I became religious, and I’ve spent the past ten years studying the Torah day and night, and now I want to marry your daughter Leah.”
I would never be allowed to marry a lowly returnee to Judaism, but in my fantasy, Davie’s lineage didn’t matter. The sleeves of my wedding dress would be as big as basketballs. “You look gorgeous,” everyone would say. In the years that followed, Davie would love me, Leah Kaplan, the way I loved only God: more than anyone in the world, forever and always.
chapter two
THERE WERE FEW PROSPECTS IN PITTSBURGH for a Yeshivish teenager approaching the age of marriage, so at sixteen, my oldest sister, Goldy, dropped out of high school to go to the prestigious Manchester Seminary, in England. While Pittsburgh had a few hundred Modern Orthodox Jews, a few dozen Lubavitch Hasidic families, and about fifteen Yeshivish families, Manchester had enough Yeshivish people to fill multiple schools and dozens of synagogues. Its seminary attracted hundreds of top Yeshivish girls from all over the world. Because England offered an abbreviated high school system, the seminary enrolled girls as young as sixteen. The sooner in, the quicker out, the faster a girl could move from her father’s home to her husband’s.
A few weeks after Goldy left, we leaned our curly heads around the tape recorder, shouting hellos to her in England. When she came home for Passover, we ran through the airport to meet her. “Bazooka gum is kosher!” Deena shrieked, reaching Goldy first, exploding with excitement at this recent piece of good news.
I wanted to be that missed. I made up my mind that I would do exactly what Goldy had done. When I was sixteen, I, too, would go to Manchester Seminary, and hopefully I would be as successful as she soon was: a marriage shortly after she graduated and a baby each following year.
Initially, my parents supported my plan, but as my adolescence unfolded, they changed their tune.
The first problem arose when I objected to my father’s use of the word shvartze.
“‘African American,’ please,” I begged.
“Shvartze just means ‘black’,” he chided me. “Blacks aren’t like other non-Jews. They live like animals.” His understanding of God’s will was vastly different from that of his own father, a rabbi who had marched with black preachers in the 1960s, demanding civil rights.
Then there was the issue of several new brothers-in-law, who wrapped my father in conversations in Hebrew and Aramaic that I, as a girl, could not understand. I was used to my father sharing his wisdom in English at the Shabbos table, meeting my eyes whenever he spoke.
Now my brothers-in-law sat beside my father at holiday meals. “Can you repeat that in English?” I would ask loudly from the end of the table. My sisters rolled their eyes at my immodesty.
“Someone wants attention,” Deena frequently snickered.
Concerned about the corrupting influence of my classmates in Pittsburgh, my parents decided that I would leave Pennsylvania a year earlier than we had originally planned. After tenth grade I would move in with my Aunt Fraidy and Uncle Vrumi in Manchester, where I would attend the stringent local Bais Yaakov high school. And then I’d be back on course: Manchester Seminary, marriage, children, grandchildren, the World to Come.
• • •
When it was time to leave for the bus that would take me to the airport in New York, I ran after my suitcase as I slid it down the stairs. My mother wagged a black snow cap in my face as I kneeled to tie my sneakers. “You have to wear this hat!” she insisted. “I’ll be too worried about you traveling alone. I don’t want anyone starting trouble with you.”
“It’s an old lady’s hat!” I grabbed my suitcase and tugged it to the door, where my father was waiting, keys in hand. I hoped that if I could get the suitcase out to the porch, my mother would give up on the hat and focus on saying good-bye and telling me how much she was going to miss me.
“A hat is not going to make me invisible,” I protested. “I won’t talk to anyone, I promise, I’ll be so so safe.”
“Just wear it,” my father said. “You’re not going to be harmed, anyhow. You’re friends with black people, aren’t you?”
I watched him stride down the driveway to the car, my mouth agape at his insult. I had complained about the racism rampant in Yeshivish communities, but I was not so perverted as to be friends with non-Jews.
A playful wind blew at my ponytail, lifting my hair off my neck. “You better go on,” my mother said, finally giving up on the hat. “Have a safe trip.”
• • •
Manchester was gray and wet. Through a steady cold drizzle, I took in my new neighborhood: a religious suburban enclave of low brick homes and small green lawns. The Manchester Bais Yaakov was housed in a decrepit mansion on the far side of the highway at the edge of town, a twenty-minute walk from the heart of the community. I learned my way around the high school and around my cousins, my shyness cloaking me in nervous silence as I navigated my new surroundings.
Night came early in England, and by December, it was already pitch-dark when Jewish Ethics finished, at five. The school day done, I had my backpack in one hand, coat in the other, as I waited behind the crowd filing out of the classroom.
“Hey, Leah, one sec,” Shalamit Kohn called over the noisy chatter and the howling wind shaking the windows in their frames.
I froze. The few times my classmates had called my name over the past few months, it had usually come with a singsong “teacher’s pet!”
“DoyouwannacomeoverforShabboslunch?” Shalamit asked, stuffing three words into the space for one. A tall girl with skin the color of weak tea, she wasn’t one of the popular girls; she was a brainiac from one of the few families that straddled the line between Modern Orthodox and Yeshivish ideologies. Still, she was miles above an introverted American transplant in the social hierarchy.
I nodded yes, too many times, my chin wobbling in nervous excitement.
• • •
The Kohns lived a few blocks away from my cousins. Their house was dark and warm, the lazy English sun barely penetrating the heavy curtains. That Saturday, Shalamit was wearing a scandalously casual turtleneck, so snug the ridge of her spine lifted the back. Her plaid skirt was much more stylish than mine, puddling on the floor when she stood and flying up in small waves as she walked. She introduced her mother and her two younger sisters, quiet girls with bangs in their eyes. Moments later, Dr. Kohn and her older brother, Naftali, came home from prayers.
“Good Shabbos to you,” Naftali said to me. He lounged in a dining room chair, chin up, kippa hanging off his hair like a parachute. Gorgeous eyes, I thought. And those candy-pink lips. Is he actually talking to me, his little sister’s classmate? A girl? I hadn’t spoken to an unmarried boy who I wasn’t related to since I was a kid. Once I’d entered my teens, my future marriage prospects would have been automatically downgraded if I’d been caught talking to a boy.
“G-g-good Shabbos,” I managed to stutter back.
Dr. Kohn raced through the blessings for the wine and the bread. Over gefilte fish, Naftali brandished his fork and knife, trying to stir up an argument.
“Women should be allowed to study Talmud,” he said, invoking a debate that split the Yeshivish and Modern Orthodox communities.
“Hush.” Dr. Kohn shook his head. Though he had a doctorate, he was not as ideologically removed as his son.
“There is no valid reason not to allow it,” Naftali insisted.
Dr. Kohn launched into a lengthy refutation, explaining why women could not learn those particular texts. “‘A woman’s wisdom is only in her spinning wheel,’” he quoted. “The sages say that if a man teaches his daughter Torah, it is as if he teaches her obscenities. A woman’s brain cannot handle Talmud.” Naftali leaned back in his chair, arms folded, lips curled in amusement as his father continued. “Rav Eliezer says that it is better that the words of the Torah are burned rather than given to women!”
My heart thudded in my chest as I fumbled with my fork. Accepting, at least intellectually, the unyielding limits on women that I had been raised with, I wasn’t interested in the argument. I was watching Naftali.
Yeshivish girls were not permitted to talk to boys. We were not allowed even to think of them. Since adolescence had arrived, my desire had roiled within, getting larger in the small container of my skin. My feelings were intensified and distorted in their repression. Nearly every boy I saw became a swoon-worthy Prince Charming.
But I always held back. In Pennsylvania, when Mark Haviv had winked at me on Egret Boulevard, I’d whispered psalms to slow my heartbeat. I was the Yeshivish one. I was the rabbi’s daughter. I was the one admonishing my classmates to stop meeting boys behind the bakery. I was the one begging them to forget about some actor named Rad Pitt. I was the one imploring them to turn their hearts and minds to God.
But in Manchester, where there were thousands of Yeshivish Jews, I was no longer God’s special emissary. No one was monitoring me as I watched Naftali across the Kohns’ Shabbos table.
Naftali turned to Shalamit and me. “What do you think, girls? Want to learn Gemara?”
My fingers went numb. My knife bounced on the table before flying to the carpet. Learn Gemara, I thought, the ancient books of Talmudic law and lore that men studied in yeshiva? I’d learn advanced astrophysics in Cantonese if Naftali wanted me to.
“Don’t be stupid,” Shalamit spit out, blowing her lips in annoyance. “I have enough on my plate at school.”
• • •
As I was on my way out, later that afternoon, Naftali said good-bye.
“Good to meet you, Leah.” He studied me with his head cocked, kippa sliding off his hair. A fleck of white frosting clung to his lip. “She’s a quiet one, isn’t she?” he said to his sister.
“I’m not quiet,” I managed to squeak out. “I just like listening.”
“Well, that’s a rare skill,” he said. I beamed at his approval.
• • •
I did not know anyone my own age who had gone frei—literally, free. But I knew what happened to those who did. Sinning might seem like all bright lights and loud music, but being free had all the fun of a crazy carnival Tilt-A-Whirl—you’d be hurling in the gutter in no time. I had heard stories about those who left our Yeshivish community. They wound up drug addicts, prostitutes, or dead.
But I’m not going frei, I reassured myself as I scribbled hearts in my diary. I’m not wearing pants. I’m not breaking Shabbos. I’m just having some feelings.
A week later, I returned to the Kohns’ for another Friday night meal. I planned to disguise my hunger in a costume of spiritual yearning. Oh, Naftali, but what about the prohibition on women touching Torah scrolls? Doesn’t that point to a firm boundary? I had rehearsed it all in my head. My mind was troubled. My soul hung in the balance. God would have to excuse me for speaking to a boy.
I wore my other Shabbos outfit, a blue suit. The jacket was tight under my armpits and the stitching on the hem was coming loose, but the material was the same color as Naftali’s eyes.
When I got to the Kohns’, Naftali was there, along with a guy from his Zionist youth group named Jacob. Jacob’s red plaid sweater signaled that he was even less religious than Naftali.
The concentration of testosterone in the room made me giddy. All through the meal I gripped my fork and knife, a smile plastered on my face as I swiveled my head, following Naftali, Jacob, and Dr. Kohn as they talked of Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies toward Israeli settlers.
After dinner I was shocked when Shalamit joined the boys in the living room, plopping herself down on the velvet couch.
“Do you want to play cards?” Naftali asked. “Fifty-two pickup!” He laughed, tossing the pack in the air. Shalamit rolled her eyes.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Let’s play blackjack.”
My parents forbade cards, but I was too excited to care. We sat cross-legged on the balding carpet as Jacob and Naftali taught me the game. As Jacob dealt everyone a hand, the boys laughed about people they knew and some football team and their youth group.
“Do—do you go to college also?” I managed to choke out in Jacob’s direction after I won my first round.
“I’m finishing sixth form,” he said. “I’m thinking about going to yeshiva in Israel next year, defer university.”
I felt a stab of triumph. Even a boy as irreligious as Jacob, a boy going to college, was going to go to yeshiva.
“Are you going to university?” Naftali asked, dealing out more cards. Both of our hands touched the same card for a single magical moment.
“N-no—” I stammered, jerking my fingers back. “Of course not—we don’t believe in”—I stumbled over the British phrasing—“uni—university.” College boys and girls mixed and spent their time studying wasteful and immoral ideas. I had recited this speech to my classmates back in Pennsylvania many times. Life on this earth was short, and every moment measured, judged, and precious. What person on their deathbed regretted that they had not written one more college paper or work memo? Doing God’s will, keeping his commandments, and taking care of one’s family was what mattered most. Especially for a woman. The outside world, with its short skirts and wolf-whistling men, demeaned women. What could be more beautiful than the sight of a mother lighting Shabbos candles, her children gathered at her side? College was a distraction, an invitation to a corrupt world that would only belittle a woman and seduce a man.
Naftali shrugged. “I don’t see what’s wrong with it,” he said. “You can go to university and be religious. I do. Of course, you have to be smart enough,” he ribbed. “Is she smart enough, Shalamit?”
We giggled.
“Yes, you dummy, she’s smart,” Shalamit said. I loved how outspoken she was, how quick to defend me.
“You don’t want a career?” Jacob asked. “You want to be one of those women pushing a pram with a million babies, jumping when their husband says jump?”
“Jump!” Naftali ordered. From his seated position, Jacob gave himself a wobbly little push off the floor, his eyes rolled back in his head. We all laughed.
What Jacob had described was what I had always wanted more than anything else, but I suddenly felt ashamed of it.
“What about your mother?” Naftali asked. “Do you want to live the life that she’s lived? What’s she like?”
I had never tried to describe my mother. Like the Shabbos or the sky, Mamme was an immovable force woven into the reality of the world. I didn’t know how old she was—my parents kept that information sacred, as part of their distant, godly personas—but I did know that she’d been born in Leeds. Her father had died when she was twelve, and her mother had suffered a nervous breakdown. My mother had come to America for a match, looking to escape gossip about her broken family. My father occasionally retold the story of how, on one of their arranged dates, my mother had insisted that she wasn’t hungry, but after he’d dropped her off, he had watched her enter a bakery and devour a sweet pastry. By the time I knew her, my mother was a plump and quiet woman, taciturn when annoyed. She could gaze out the window, big eyes wide, overcome by God’s awesomeness in a brilliant sunset, but she could also drag a wailing child up two flights of stairs, her carefully filed long nails digging into their arm.
“Well, she’s always busy,” I said finally. “She cooks and bakes a lot. And my father works very hard, so she takes care of him.”
“So basically,” Naftali said, flipping his thumb over the tops of his cards, “she has no sense of self. Her life is about serving her husband and kids.”
I thought of my mother rushing from the kitchen to the dining room to serve my father dinner, listening intently and laughing at his jokes. “Ask Tatte,” she always told us when we had difficult questions. Once, some women had asked her to give a lecture on being a Jewish woman. She had asked my father to write her speech.
With sudden clarity, I saw how different my mother’s life was from the exalted Jewish woman archetype I had been taught about.
“I don’t want to be like that,” I said.
“That’s obvious,” Naftali said. “You’re asking questions. Hell, you’ve probably always felt different. Wouldn’t you say that you want something different than what you were raised with?”
“When I get older,” I told them. “When I get married and I’m away from my parents, I’ll figure out how to be more independent.”
Naftali dismissed this idea. A married Yeshivish woman had no wiggle room.
He was right. A few years back, Mrs. Blaumberg, one of the few Yeshivish women in Pittsburgh, had started wearing one of those half wigs, her own bangs showing in the front. Upon marriage, Yeshivish women wore wigs and snoods to cover their hair, which instantly became sexual, forbidden to be seen by anyone besides their husbands. The rabbis permitted a married woman to allow an inch or two of hair to show without Heavenly punishment, but that was a leniency for when one’s snood accidently slipped back. For Mrs. Blaumberg to show her full bangs was to publically flout the law. Then she started taking acting classes at the Jewish Community Center. The Blaumberg kids were doomed. They’d never be able to marry normal people.
I had always sympathized with the children, but now, sitting on the floor of the Kohns’ living room, I realized that Mrs. Blaumberg was just a girl grown up. A girl who may have felt apart from her world but was now trapped in a life she no longer wanted.
• • •
Fervently believing in the intellectual inferiority of my sex, I had never tried to develop critical opinions on my own, but now Naftali’s voice echoed in my mind.
“University is a devil’s playground,” my philosophy teacher railed.
Naftali wouldn’t think so, I retorted silently.
“The Flenkers brought a television into their home,” my uncle murmured to my aunt. “Don’t let the girls visit their children.”
You’re such a small-minded man, I thought. Naftali would never react like that.
“Some of you are wearing socks,” my modesty teacher lectured. “I can see flashes of the skin of your calves. You should all be wearing tights! God is sickened by your bare legs.”
Well, not Naftali’s God, I thought.
• • •
In the weeks that followed, I looked forward to seeing Naftali after Shabbos meals at the Kohns’ or when we crossed paths in the home’s hallways. I noted every time he glanced at me, weighing every word he said as if it were Scripture itself.
Shalamit began to get frustrated by my not-so-subtle hankerings for her brother, so I devised a plan to connect with him without Shalamit knowing.
I wrote a letter, cramming round little words into double rows on each line: Are there some college degrees that are less problematic, religiously, than others? And what do you think of religious people serving in the Israeli army?
I slipped him the note one day in the hallway outside Shalamit’s bedroom. Naftali took it and folded it in his hand. “Do you need me to reply?” he asked.
I tried not to grin. “Oh, please. Yes. Thank you.”
“How will I get my reply to you?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“How about I’ll put it under your doormat?” he said.
How romantic, I thought.
Every morning, when I left my cousins’ house, I stopped to tie my shoelaces on the front porch, shielding my hand with my stooped body as I rolled back the mat. Naftali didn’t reply to all of the letters I slid under his bedroom door, but occasionally there was a white envelope waiting for me.
I pored over his responses, trying to pick out slivers of affection from our philosophical discussions. Would I kiss him, I wondered as I lay in bed. If he lowered his face to mine and took my chin in his hand and closed his eyes and came toward me?
There was a hierarchy of sins: gossip, chutzpah, and anger were wrong but tolerated. Talking to boys was wrong and unforgivable. But they are all sins, I rationalized. I’ll never gossip again if Naftali kisses me. I wondered if God might accept that exchange, weigh the severity of forbidden touch against all the transgressions I would not commit. Of course, I hoped Naftali would marry me. Despite the fact that he was not Yeshivish. He would fall in love with me, and we would convince my parents to allow the match. Otherwise, I would have to keep my crush a secret for the rest of my life.
• • •
One Sunday afternoon, out for a walk, I glimpsed Naftali farther down the block. After double-checking that there was no one watching, I ran to his side.
“Hello, you.”
“Hi, Naftali. How are you?”
“Hunky-dory. You?”
“Fine, baruch HaShem.”
You’ve got to seize the moment, I thought. When are you ever going to have an opportunity like this again? I summoned all my courage.
“I really like you,” I said. “Would you—would you hold my hand?” My Modern Orthodox classmates back in Pittsburgh had confessed to me that they did this—held hands, kissed, hugged, made out with boys. I hadn’t understood the mechanics of the more extreme sins, but I knew how to hold hands.
Naftali raised his eyebrows, jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “You’re too young for me, Leah,” he said. “And I’m shomer negiah.”
Shomer negiah. Even though he believed in women’s rights and college and the state of Israel, he kept the laws that forbade an unmarried man and woman from touching.
• • •
One evening when I was twelve or thirteen, I’d been washing dishes when Uncle Tzuki, my mother’s brother who was visiting from Chicago, stopped in the empty kitchen.
“Your walk is prust,” he said to me. I froze, my hand clutching the plate I was rinsing, the hot water burning my fingers. Uncle Tzuki shook his head, eyes on the floor, long beard wagging. “You need to watch yourself,” he said gently and walked away.
Prust? Prust meant “vulgar, slutty.” Even the word prust had to be dealt with gingerly, like dog poop on your shoe. How could a walk be prust? It was one more thing to add to the list.
In shul, I worshipped behind wooden partitions, cut off from the men and the cantor and the rituals of Jewish life. A thousand times my mother had yelled at me for letting my skirt creep up my legs when I sat on the couch. A thousand times I had hushed my singing voice because I might be overheard by a passing boy. Modesty was a thick wall intended to keep a man’s monster at bay (women harbored no such creature). I was taught that if I relinquished my reserve for even a second, if the slightest hint of temptation slipped out, any male in my presence would transform into a rapacious barbarian. And here I was, offering my bare hand to a man, giving it to him straight out, and he was turning away.
But I wasn’t ready to unravel my world with this loose thread. Instead, I cringed with shame. I must be repulsive, I must be fat, I thought. Maybe I smelled bad.
• • •
That Friday night, still smarting from Naftali’s rejection, I sat in the Kohns’ living room after Shabbos dinner, smiling and chatting as if nothing was wrong. Dr. and Mrs. Kohn went to bed early. The Kohns were not as Yeshivish as my family, so perhaps they saw nothing wrong in my sitting on their couch, late in the evening, talking with their daughter and their son. The hours passed. Shalamit’s younger sisters put down their card game in the kitchen and went to sleep. Eventually, Shalamit also went to bed, rolling her eyes at my obvious romantic desperation.
I knew I should leave. Being alone with Naftali while everyone slept was forbidden. But I couldn’t relinquish this opportunity. Maybe he regretted having rejected me. Maybe he’d apologize and declare his love.
Naftali had been sitting next to me on the couch, his kippa hanging forward to graze his eyebrows. Suddenly, he swung around and put a pillow in my lap. He lay down on the pillow. The weight of his head sank through the feather innards to press against my thighs.
“You’re shomer negiah,” I yelped. The air sucked out of my lungs.
“We’re not touching,” he said with a shrug. The movement of his shoulders was a shock across my legs.
Indeed, we were not. The pillow was a barrier between our bodies. I looked down at his eyes, at the five o’clock shadow on his square chin. I ached to kiss him.
“I can see up your nose,” he said, bugging his eyes. “I can see all the way up into your brain!” He sat up abruptly and stretched, yawning, bending back till his shirt popped out of his pants. “Good night,” he said. “I’m zonked out of my mind.” He went upstairs to bed. I headed home to my small, cold room at the top of the stairs in my cousins’ house.
That night I couldn’t stop feeling the pressure of Naftali’s heavy head against my legs. Hours passed, but I couldn’t slow my racing heart. I tossed and turned, flipping my pillow over, wrestling with the covers, willing my mind to release me into the dark. As my thoughts began to fragment and stretch with exhaustion, a fear descended on my body.
Where to Download Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, by Leah Vincent
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241 of 260 people found the following review helpful. Don't judge until you've walked a mile in their moccasins - and even then... By Amazon Customer After reading the negative reviews, I had to read this book and judge for myself. I am in general reluctant to share details of my own life online, but the misrepresentations of Ms Vincent as a liar and even that she is mentally unstable (from one reviewer who claims to know her family) are without foundation. I feel I must stand up for the truth as I see it. And Ms Vincent speaks the truth.I read the entire book in a single sitting - it is extremely well-written and it is fascinating, helping the reader understand the thinking of someone who has lost their family and identity undertaking self-destructive behaviours. It became very painful to read - especially how she was taken advantage of by men and had no idea how to interact with them - because it is a deeply authentic account.How do I know? Because I had the same Yeshivish upbringing as Leah's. Everything from the small details and philosophy of her upbringing is true. There is no embellishment.With the important qualifier that in every community there is variation and that not all families are like Leah's, the fact is that many are. So while Leah's upbringing does not tar the entire ultra Orthodox community, it is also a valid account of her own experience for her own family and life, and her experience is representative of many ultra Orthodox people's experiences.Many ultra-Orthodox Jewish parents would have reacted with shunning at a female teenager's natural baby steps toward developing their own identity, like asserting things like wanting to go to college, and wearing a tight sweater. The slightest deviation from draconian modesty rules can make a girl the equivalent of a prostitute in this black and white world where there is only one path to God. Every move of a young woman is watched to class her as pious, or as a 'rebel', which is called 'prost' (which means what it sounds like). The goal is to make her a dutiful wife, willing to bear as many children as her body will handle in exchange for poverty, little real relationship with her husband, and to accept a position of inferiority to men (who are not in a much better position with their own lack of education and options).Punishments come down hard to nip deviations from the path in the bud; if they are not successful and the girl commits more 'infractions' that would be considered downright cute in normal society, banishment occurs because a teenager's reputation, once damaged, is lost forever, no matter her youth. She can rarely make a good marriage if she was a 'rebel' as Leah was by putting on an attractive sweater.Worse, her behaviour is deemed to cause 'shame' to the family and ruin the marriage chances of her siblings and cousins, so she must be cut off before she can 'worsen' and damn the entire family with her grave sins of writing letters to another teenager or expressing a desire for an education. Boys, however, are given much more freedom and are allowed to rehabilitate themselves. This certainly brings to mind attitudes of very traditional Muslim families, who severely punish their daughters for any perceived breach of chastity as bringing 'shame' on the entire family. It is not a Western mentality, and it takes some getting used to.The racism and the attitude toward non-Jewish people, especially Blacks, although I believe it has improved among the Yeshivish community, is accurately described especially for the time (15-20 years ago). So is the poverty, of material things, educational opportunities, and of time for children from parents, with the father constantly away on religious duties (including study and prayer even if the father is not a rabbi) and the mother keeping house with many children with no support from the husband. Boys get much more of their father's time than girls do, because they go to synagogue with him and learn Jewish law and Talmud with him in the men-only community study hall; girls are forbidden from being educated in Talmud. A desire to study it marks a woman as rebellious. Therefore, given fathers' lack of investment in time and education in daughters, in many ultra-Orthodox families the emotional relationship between a father and a daughter, especially when she grows up, is an extremely watered down version of a normal father-daughter relationship. There is also no open affection between parents, including physical affection that others can see, including even little things like holding hands and the slightest of loving touches. Open displays of affection, including in front of one's own children, are regarded as highly immodest in this ascetic lifestyle. The life is very functional: taking care of children, work, running a household, and adhering to myriad religious rules that pervade everyday life and take up substantial amounts of time.In this world, children do not belong to themselves but to God, their parents and their community, and there is no such thing as simply giving a child the best education letting them make up their own minds as to what they want to be so long as they are ethical people. The child is educated to be an ultra Orthodox adult - a copy of their parents - and is given no education to allow them to be anything else. All other forms of oppression flow from this: you are not your own person. You have no right to have your own choices respected.Leaving - although it is the only option for many people who need to be honest with themselves - is increasingly traumatic the more religious one's family is. One can lose one's entire family, and one is dumped out into the world with no skills, no money, and no identity. In other words: there is no such thing as unconditional love.Can you imagine how it would be if your entire family - everyone you loved, invested in and thought you could count on forever - would cast you out because of a private choice you made for your own life that had nothing to do with your love for them? The effect on most people is devastating. Especially with the financial hardships that come along with this (which mean a whole slew of hardships), people understandably lose their sense of self and self-esteem. Some take their lives. Don't judge until you've walked that mile in another person's moccasins.One commenter has said that Leah should have been happy to go to an ultra-Orthodox women's 'secular' college. Sure, if she wanted a substandard education with very limited choices as to career (limited to 'female' professions like speech therapy), and no rigour. That commenter seems to have little appreciation of the value of the Harvard education Leah strove to get instead.Fortunately, with the increasing use of the Internet, the ultra-Orthodox (frum) community has become more open, although this is still a work in progress. Leah's struggles happened a decade and a half ago, and the Internet (with communication among religious people through the blogosphere and other democratic forms of commentary) has only really started making inroads in the last 5 years or so. At the same time, there are well-attended rallies against the use of the Internet in these communities, because of its power to educate people to make up their own minds.Those who criticise this book seem to fall into roughly two categories.There are the apologists, who want to discredit Ms Vincent, degrade her and attack her pain, because they feel her book is embarrassing to the ultra Orthodox community or Judaism as a whole. Some of these are Orthodox or ultra Orthodox people themselves, made plain by their demanding to know why she couldn't stay Orthodox instead of ultra-Orthodox: a common attitude that shows the writer's religious certainty that they know what God wants. It's an attitude that shuts down all rational debate: people can speak only for themselves. A theological discussion, if one is desired, should be respectful. At any rate, people should accept that ultra Orthodox culture has its flaws like any other culture - instead of pretending it is perfect because it is God's right way, and the way forward to change is by books like these that ventilate issues for discussion. I trust people reading this book who are not Jewish are rational and realise it does not represent all of Judaism, just as a book on an oppressive aspect of fundamentalist Christianity does not represent Christianity as a whole, or denies positive things fundamentalist Christians do, like great acts of charity.The other camp are those who have no idea what this world is like, and what some of its teachings can do to a vulnerable young person's psyche. The frum girl thrown out in the world has less than a sixth grade education in real terms, and little confidence. She would be extremely naive in relationships. To those of you in this camp: Most of you have been reared with the privileges and freedoms others only dream of. You have received an education that helps you navigate the real world and has given you incredible options. Denial of education and real experience in the world stunts a person's development. Leah's experience is not that much different from an immigrant child's from a very different culture. It's hard to put ourselves in another person's headspace, but image yourself as a small child going out into a completely alien world and not understanding what people in it mean, what the rules are and what the governing philosophies are.For anyone who actually reads the book with an unvarnished, plain attitude: the book stands on its own merits.For now, bravo to Leah: you are a great success. A master's from Harvard KSG no less. I'm sure we'll hear wonderful things from you.As a final note: a number of fundamentalist religions have the same features as I've written above, and more. It is amazing to those who leave to realise how common these control methods are when they finally obtain information about the world outside their group. At the very pointy end of things, a community is simply a cult. These groups are called "high demand organisations". Katie Couric interviewed Leah along with women who had left the FLDS polygamist Mormon community and the daughter of a Westboro Baptist Church leader, and the similarities of the groups' beliefs are no coincidence. These are just a sampling of fundamentalist interpretations of religion: Muslims in fundamentalist communities face similar lives:Poverty. Denial of education from toddlerhood so people don't know what other options exist in life. Tightly controlled information within the group, including controlling what books, newspapers, magazines, phones, films and computers people can buy. No TV. Shaming and strong moral condemnation of even slight deviations from the very strict codes of practice in the group. Girls taught from a very young age (2-3) that their primary role in life is to be wives and mothers. Young marriage and no contraception so a young woman is trapped even if she wants to leave: The husband gets the kids in the event of divorce, 1800s style. Women providing enormous economic (but unpaid) benefits bearing children, running households. Women dressed in dowdy clothes and denying them a sense of individual identity. Individualism denounced as apostasy. Women covering hair or wearing them in girlish styles. Women treated like children compared to men. Strict gender roles: with powerful and lucrative jobs and positions overwhelmingly in the hands of men. Male-only clergy. And, importantly, so that people buy into this impoverished lifestyle that robs them of their potential in life: 1) the teaching that the followers are living the 'hard' life God wants to test them with so that they'll go to heaven, so their suffering is worthwhile; 2) the specific religious philosophy and rules of that group is ancient and unchanging from time immemorial; 3) the specific religious philosophy and rules of the group is the **only way** to salvation; and 4) all those outside the group are degenerate, disapproved of by God, unholy and crude, including in intelligence. Racism and bigotry is rife, but it serves the purpose of making the 'in-crowd' feel superior and special. After all, if other people were just as loved and valued by God even if they have a very different life, why not live their much less demanding and happy life?Ms Vincent has seen past this crap. She has gone on a journey that proves that she obtains her feeling of being special as all of us should: through education, and finding our unique calling in life that serves others. We all have awesome creative gifts to make this world a better place. We are all special. If that's not what's meant by the verse in Genesis that says that all people are created in the image of God, I don't know what is.Fundamentalist religion takes away the wonder of life and replaces it with a poor substitute, like an abusive relationship. It's important to see it for what it is. It's not valid. It's not loving. And it's not life-affirming. Fundamentalists have more in common with each other than other adherents of religion: so that moderate Jews, Christians and Muslims have more in common with each other than they do with fundamentalists of their own religion. Why the world has moved toward fundamentalism in the last 30-40 years is an important discussion to have. Please comment :)
52 of 61 people found the following review helpful. Compelling if vulgar story of a girl rebelling against serious family problems By Joel Avrunin On the surface, this book is a memoir of a girl being raised in what some would refer to as an "ultra-orthodox" or Yeshivish community. While proclaiming she wants to keep her family anonymous, for those in the Jewish community, she certainly gives enough details in the book to deduce the identity of her family (or anybody good enough with Google who isn't Jewish). The surprising part of the story for many is that she is not writing of an insular community like Boro Park or New Square, but rather growing up in what the outside world might call a more modern seeming yeshivish family. According to the book, when she is caught writing letters to a boy, her parents take her out of high school to enroll her in a seminary for older women who are learning about their religion. She gets no high school education, and is then left on her own in New York with a child's understanding of the world. Leah writes with a raw and vivid style that is certainly compelling and will keep you drawn into the narrative. I read from start to finish and could not put it down. That being said, it was not the greatest work of its genre as I will explain.First, I was confused in comparing the book as written to her TV interviews. Some of the incidents from her Jamaican drug-dealer boyfriend to her encounter on CraigsList are described quite differently in the book than she describes them on TV. In her interviews she says she was abandoned by her parents, but the book describes them setting her up with a job in New York. Some of this might just be sensationalism for TV, so I won't fault it only in that I was confused while reading the book which incidents matched with the ones I heard her describe before. As a result, my review has to treat the facts in the book at face value and judge it for its literary merit rather than my judgement of the veracity of her story. Such is the case with any memoir.If you are a more sensitive reader, be aware that the book is extremely graphic. You may want to just watch her interviews on YouTube rather than actually read some of her more vivid descriptions of her random sexual encounters.However, my biggest issue with the book is that it seems Leah almost shies away from dealing with the bigger institutional issues in the Jewish world that she sounds like she wishes to address. Perhaps this is because as the story is told (assuming all she says is accurate), the issue she faces is not emblematic of real problems in the Orthodox Jewish world, but rather a reportedly dysfunctional family life coupled with emotionally distant parents. The irony is that while rejecting her parents religion, she embraces the coldness she describes and faces problems forming real relationships with anyone. As you read the book, there are real psychological problems that somehow get embodied in her rejection of her parent's religion as well. As I read the description of her brother, her writing almost seemed to imply a subtext that he had been sexually abused. Instead of following that thread, she suddenly veers into seeing if he will join her in rejecting religion than in investigating his possible emotional problems.The book holds promise, but maybe Leah Vincent is just not the right spokesperson for reform in the yeshivish world. First, she did not become modern orthodox but left religion altogether (yes, plenty of people keep the Sabbath and Kosher while getting full educations and having careers). Second, her "maskilim" organization concerns me, not in that it encourages people to leave their religion, but that dropping religion is often a symptom. The cause is often something deeper, abuse whether emotional, physical, or sexual. She says they are "maskilim", a rather odd term for her to choose from 19th century Jewish enlightenment when Jewish intellectuals would challenge ideas on an intellectual basis. Some "maskilim" stayed religious, many did not, but Leah seems to imply that having sex with dozens of random men makes one an enlightened intellectual. Certainly I fear that Leah's zeal in encouraging people to join her could be masking real issues that need to be addressed.The book also ends rather quickly. Her going to college, meeting her husband, having a child - that all flies by. I wanted to read more details on her time at Harvard and how a girl without a high school education managed to get in and succeed. The book could have had a bit less smut and a bit more intellectual introspection and it would have told a more compelling story of her life. She uses terms such as living a "self-determined life" - perhaps echoes of a philosophical foundation she formed at school. But the only glimpse we get of her schooling is her sexual relationship with a professor.The lack of introspection might just indicate that Vincent just needs to mature as a writer. If the book is not going to be an expose on the Jewish world, then have it be a thoughtful memoir. I didn't really feel like I got either. So I recommend it, but can only give it 3 stars.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. life lessons By carol Hard lessons she endured without support . Lost her family and such low belt esteem of one self.I enjoyed reading how she turned her life around and used all of her life lessons to help others !Bravo and delighted to learn she found love and success !
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Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, by Leah Vincent
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Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, by Leah Vincent
