Sotah Read online

  Sotah

  Ragen, Naomi

  St. Martin's Press (2009)

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Part One

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  Chapter twenty-six

  Part Two

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Chapter twenty-nine

  Chapter thirty

  Chapter thirty-one

  Chapter thirty-two

  Chapter thirty-three

  Chapter thirty-four

  Chapter thirty-five

  Chapter thirty-six

  Chapter thirty-seven

  Chapter thirty-eight

  Chapter thirty-nine

  Chapter forty

  Chapter forty-one

  Chapter forty-two

  Chapter forty-three

  Chapter forty-four

  Chapter forty-five

  Chapter forty-six

  Chapter forty-seven

  Chapter forty-eight

  Chapter forty-nine

  Chapter fifty

  Chapter fifty-one

  Chapter fifty-two

  Chapter fifty-three

  Epilogue

  Also by Naomi Ragen

  A Letter to My Sisters

  Reading Group Questions

  Copyright Page

  For

  Bracha, Asher, Rachel and Akiva,

  With all my love and hope.

  Foreword

  The story of Dina Reich began with a newspaper article in an Israeli daily, a classic tale of extramarital love which—because of its milieu in the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem, took on interesting nuances for me which I decided to explore.

  There were several reasons for this. My first book, Jephte’s Daughter, had taken place in that setting. I felt I had more to say about that world, particularly the relationship between the sexes, with a focus on marriage. I wanted to show a different kind of marriage, a more representative one, than that of Isaac Harshen and Batsheva Ha-Levi in Jephte’s Daughter. With Dina Reich and Yehuda Gutman, I found the married love story I needed to continue my portrait of marriage in the ultra-Orthodox world.

  It was with the publication of Sotah that I began to feel most keenly the difficulties of being a writer of English novels living in a Hebrew-speaking country. The material, its descriptions of the people and places of the Jeruslaem I loved, lived in, and knew so well, could not really be appreciated, I felt, by those living outside the country. While its publication by Crown Books in 1992, was well-received by American and British readers, it was only when Sotah became the first of my books to be translated into Hebrew and was published in Israel by Keter Publishing, that I understood how right had been my instincts. Sotah—called in Hebrew “And to your husband shall be your desire”, based on the verse from Genesis—became a literary phenomenon in Israel, leading bestseller lists for over 92 weeks. The experience of finally reaching my Israeli neighbors and friends made a lasting and unique impression upon me, giving me a sense of truly having set down deep and permanent roots in the country and culture I had chosen as home. I felt too, enormous satisfaction that my work had, finally, been judged by a jury of my peers.

  With the publication of this Reader’s Guide Edition, I am delighted to be able to once more introduce a new generation of readers to this book which did so much to bridge the gap between the Jewish experience in Israel and America, both for myself, and for my readers.

  Naomi Ragen

  Jerusalem, 2001

  Part One

  Chapter one

  “Yes, I understand all that!“ Chaya Leah insisted, biting the pillow pressed to her chest to keep from screaming in frustration. “But what I can’t understand is how you just agree to it all! How can you just marry him!?”

  Dvorah looked at her youngest sister and smiled serenely, indulgently, feeling a strange mixture of compassion and contempt. Poor Chaya Leah with her red, puffy cheeks, her red, impossible hair! I would die if I had hair like that, Dvorah mused, putting down her knitting for a moment and smoothing back her own dark, smooth, docile locks. If you tried to braid it, the hairs kept pulling out and curling up, going their own way. If you combed it back and pinned it, it bunched together and rose up like yeast. If she would only lose a little weight, though, she might be made to look presentable, or something close to. “Child,” Dvorah said imperturbably. “You don’t understand. I’m very lucky. Yaakov Klein studies in the best yeshiva. His father owns an appliance store. They’re willing to pay for half an apartment, to support us for two years while Yaakov goes on with his studies …”

  “And on and on and on! …” Chaya Leah shouted, flinging aside the pillow. “While you get big blue veins on your legs and wrinkled, hard hands! Working day and night like our ima and his ima, earning a living, taking care of the house, the babies, one after the other!”

  The knitting fell from the older girl’s hands and she looked up, shocked. “G-d forgive me, you sound like one of them, the chilonim,” she said with rare yet deliberate cruelty.

  This comparison to the secular Jews who mocked them, who kept no Sabbath or holiday, who ate pig and shellfish, who never said a prayer or visited a synagogue, and who had probably forfeited all share in the World to Come was a sickening and shocking blow to the younger girl, as indeed it would have been to any member of Jerusalem’s haredi community, of which the girls and their family were respected and longstanding members.

  Actually the term haredi—literally “those who shook from fear of G-d”—was a catchall phrase used by secularists that ignorantly lumped together many diverse and warring religious groups. It encompassed the many separate Hasidic clans, each united under their own charismatic leader and each cordially despising the other as well as their age-old opponents, the study-conscious Misnagdim. The latter heartily returned the contempt, viewing their Hasidic brethren as pathetically misguided in their blind belief in a leader and for putting prayer above study, emotion above intellect. However, there were two things that united all the groups, giving some credence to their collective title: their sincere, uncompromising adherence to the tiniest dictate of law and custom and their boundless contempt for and rejection of the secularists.

  Dvorah knew she could have said nothing more damning. Yet she felt no guilt in having flung the epithet. (The child deserved it. Richly. The nerve!) Still, as a daughter of Rebbetzin Faigie and Rabbi Alter Reich, haredi Misnagdim, brought up to suppress not only every bad word, but every unkind thought, her hands shook as she took up her knitting. “Where were you brought up that you talk to me this way? May G-d forgive you!”

  “Please, please. Don’t fight. I can’t stand it,” Dina interrupted softly, placing herself between her two sisters, her delicate white hands reaching out to connect the three of them. “Dvorah, how can you be so unkind? Chaya Leah, our Dvorah is almost engaged! She’s happy, baruch Hashem, G-d be blessed! Why are you doing this? Acting this way?”

  Chaya Leah’s eyes brimme
d hotly, but her mouth was defiant. “He is short and overweight and slurps his soup. I heard him. He is … fat!”

  “Those are all petty, physical things. If you were on a higher spiritual level, a different madrega, if you’d learned more Torah instead of wasting time sneaking off to goodness knows where …” Dvorah said loftily, her head lifted, her back stiff with insult.

  “She’s so young. She’ll understand when she gets older,” Dina tried.

  “And more mature,” Dvorah interrupted with growing malice, her black eyes snapping with disgust. “You’ll both understand what a bridegroom is. You’ll understand what we are,” she added darkly, her ominous glance reducing the others to an uncomfortable silence.

  It was a tiny room in which the three sisters sat, crowded with two bunk beds, an old hanging wardrobe of peeling light wood, and one small desk piled with books. Yet they felt themselves almost privileged. In contrast to the rest of the family, they had the roomiest bedroom in the house. Their parents shared a tiny alcove created by covering a back porch with sliding aluminum windows, and their five little brothers slept two and three in a bed in the third bedroom. The apartment was in a new building in one of those huge apartment blocks that had sprung up like mushrooms on the acres and acres of no-man’s-land incorporated into Jerusalem right after the Six Day War, buildings ten stories high with twenty-five or thirty tiny two- and three-bedroom apartments. True, the ten of them shared one bathroom, but at least it was new and indoors. Besides, they had not one but two porches overlooking Judea’s lovely rolling hills, its undulating, dark green forests. On clear days they could even see King Hussein’s unfinished summer palace, like the skeleton of a dinosaur caught in a cataclysmic change of ages.

  Indeed, by the standards of Jerusalem’s haredim, it was a most roomy and enviably comfortable home. In fact, considering their former residence in Meah Shearim—a crumbling, one-bedroom walk-up built during the Ottoman Empire, a place with rusty outdoor plumbing and a roof that wept like a mourner during the short winter rains—Rabbi Reich often viewed his new place as almost sinfully luxurious. Often he asked G-d to forgive him for his delight in it and prayed that no disaster should befall the family because of their new material luxury. Leaky roofs, broken pipes, exploding boilers, were viewed as G-d’s mercy, his way of exacting payment for sins from metal and stone rather than human flesh. Secretly he worried that the reward he had so painfully and diligently accumulated for himself in the World to Come might be badly depleted as a result, like an overdrawn bank account.

  There was silence in the room. “What’s wrong with us?” Chaya Leah asked slowly, accusingly.

  “You’re fourteen years old. You know nothing.”

  “And you’re twenty and beautiful and intelligent and a tzdakis, a saint! You can find someone better!” Chaya Leah ran over and held her sister’s languid, smooth hands, caressing them. Dvorah shrugged her off impatiently.

  It was ice cold in the room, as the heating system was run collectively and the majority of their neighbors had voted for only four hours of heat during the coldest winter months, all most could afford. All the sisters wore flannel pajamas and robes and slippers, each set handed down to them through a dizzying network of relatives and connections. The great-aunt in Milwaukee bought the clothes for her granddaughters, who in turn gave them to poorer cousins in New York, who in turn shipped them to Israel.

  Until recently Dvorah had always gotten first pick. But now America’s return to short skirts and her own gain of several inches in height had resulted in most of the skirts and dresses falling shamefully shorter than midcalf, making them immodest and unwearable. But when they’d been younger, the clothes had been routed routinely from her to Dina to Chaya Leah.

  They had all learned to be careful with clothes, except Chaya Leah, who knew she was the end of the line. She always looked untidy. A blouse that looked crisp and demure and sweet on Dvorah, soft and romantic on Dina, always looked unironed and loose-buttoned and messy on Chaya Leah. She was a big, strong girl who would have looked right in overalls with a hoe; the kind of woman who had drained the swamps in the Hula Valley and outlived malaria, typhoid, and Arab snipers to bear nine or ten children. The genteel pleated skirts and tucked-in blouses of Beit Yaakov Seminary for Young Women looked flimsy and painfully strained over her big bones.

  Dina was her exact opposite. Petite and fragile, slim and porcelain fine, she seemed almost too delicate to be real. Everything about her seemed softly molded, like a piece of blown glass coaxed to an evanescent bubble shimmering with light, too beautiful to last. Her face was like a blooming, watered garden: a rosy, blossoming complexion, eyes of sun-reflecting, blue-green water, brows a shining arc of sun-kissed blond. It made a person smile and feel somehow lighter, warmer, just to look at her. She made people forget themselves, ordinary, busy people. Strangers would just stop and stare at her the way people sometimes do at a lovely sunset. And if modesty allowed her to look back at them, she did so with eyes that were like a newborn’s—so clear and clean somehow, without depth, but not smug or shallow. Just uncomplicated, direct and fine. Her hands and feet were tiny, almost childlike, so that it seemed almost cruel to her mother to send her on chores like carrying the heavy bags of bread and milk from the grocery. Only her hair kept her from being a raving beauty. The light blond of her childhood had darkened with adolescence into a dull, indistinct color, neither blond nor quite brown. Had she been an American girl, she would have used one of those blond highlight rinses and given herself a rich, genteel ash-blond look. But such things were unheard of among Jerusalem’s young haredi women. That and heavy makeup of any kind was considered cheap and bold. Mrs Reich often thanked G-d for Dina’s mousy hair. Too great beauty was almost a defect in the haredi world. People were suspicious of it, feeling a really beautiful girl was a danger, a pitfall, too difficult for average men to overcome. A really stunning girl had trouble finding a husband.

  She was sixteen, the middle sister. The peacemaker. The peace seeker. The passions of jealousy and anger that rocked Dvorah and Chaya Leah passed over her most of the time. She had a naturally even temper and could remember only two times when she had been torn with uncontrollable passion. Once, when she was eight years old, an old man had stopped her on her way home from school to ask the way to the central bus station. He seemed as bent and fragile as the old piece of wood he leaned on as a cane. It hurt her almost physically to imagine the long walk ahead of him. She explained the road very carefully, then anxiously watched his slow progress. But a few minutes later she saw him stop and ask again, this time a group of older boys who pointed him in the opposite direction. She watched him turn and to her horror walk in the wrong direction. The boys were laughing. She stood paralyzed, unable to scream at the laughing boys, unable to protest her innocence to the old man when he passed her and sighed accusingly. She’d wanted so much to do something, to say something, to put it right, but her body wouldn’t move. She stood like that until both the boys and the old man had disappeared. Only then, in the dark, did she run crying all the way home, her fists beating her thighs in frustrated fury.

  The other time was when a small clique of classmates had sent their teacher an anonymous picture of a woman with a mustache. The teacher’s face had boiled red, and she’d sat down and covered her eyes and her mouth and her mustache with her hands. Dina had cried so hard and so long that the teacher was convinced she’d sent it. The principal finally sent her to the nurse, and the nurse sent her home.

  “What’s wrong with us?” Chaya Leah repeated belligerently, her face getting that bullish menace that meant more loud noises and probably Ima rushing in shocked and hurt and blaming herself for her failures in child rearing.

  “Please, Dvorah, you might as well finish,” Dina begged her, prompted equally by expediency and curiosity.

  Dvorah lifted her slim legs off the floor and slid them under the covers. “I might as well tell you both, even though Chaya Leah has no business thinking about these th
ings yet. But you, Dina. You’ll be next, so you might as well know. It isn’t easy for girls like us to get married at all.”

  “What! Why not?!” Chaya Leah bellowed.

  “Sshhhh!” Dvorah and Dina said fiercely. “Do you want Ima in here? Do you want Aba asking us what we’re talking about?”

  The very idea of their father asking them to explain themselves made their hearts freeze. You could never lie to Aba. It was like lying to G-d himself. And you could never tell him any truth that would hurt him, either. The very idea of doing the slightest thing that might fill their father’s kind blue eyes with disappointment or pain was unthinkable to the sisters.

  Chaya Leah whispered: “I’m sorry. I’ll be quiet. But tell me already. I have a right to know!”

  “When each of us was born, Chaim Garfinkel wrote our names down in his book, along with the names of every other boy and girl born at the same time. Now, he looks into his book and sees when one of us turns sixteen and begins to look for a match. First he looks at the boy and the boy’s family. He asks questions at the yeshiva, in the neighborhood. If the boy has a reputation as a serious student, a talmid chachem, and the family has yichoos, ancestors who were scholars, then he goes looking for the top, aleph, aleph kind of girl.”

  “What kind is that?” Chaya Leah demanded.

  “The kind that is first of all from a family descended from talmidei chachamim, Torah scholars. A family with a good reputation that hasn’t had any physical or mental defects anyone knows about. Then he sees the girl herself. Is she slim and pretty? Did she go to Beit Yaakov and have a good reputation there?”

  “We come from a good family. On Mother’s side there was Rabbi Eliezer from Minsk, on Father’s, Rabbi Reich from Munkatsch …”

  “Rabbi Eliezer from Minsk! Rabbi Reich from Munkatsch!” Dvorah mocked. “No one has ever heard of them! They didn’t write any books, they didn’t found any yeshivas.”