streams down from her twinkling eyes to her broad, happy lips.
“And may your son enjoy the sunshine on the porch.” Faigie Reich nodded pleasantly. “Boys get a little too old,” she whispered to the other woman, so that the men wouldn’t hear, “and people begin to wonder what’s wrong. I’m telling you this for your own good. My Dina is only seventeen. She is beautiful and intelligent. She will soon get over her disappointment. But at twenty-two, disappointment hits harder. A boy lives with a woman, Rebbetzin Breitman, not only with plastic bags. May he marry in a good hour!” She walked out quickly and did not turn around, although she would have given a not inconsiderable part of her share in heaven just to have glimpsed for a second the reaction on Brindel Breitman’s face.
Chapter eight
R eb Chaim Garfinkel hated amateurs. Meddling aunts, foolish fathers, pushy mothers, misguided chumash teachers, even an occasional rosh yeshiva. All those busybodies who dove headfirst into the swampy quagmire of matchmaking, dragging poor, sweet young girls and innocent boys down with them.
He stroked his long, scraggly reddish beard, picking out the crumbs left over from breakfast. He stirred his tea, then took tiny burning sips through a cube of sugar that rested on his tongue. Would these same people presume to write out prescriptions with no medical training? Would they dare to drill teeth without having been to dental school, or prepare tax returns or build houses, or even unclog drains! … He felt the burning liquid course down his throat like a hot stream of indigestion. Yet putting two people together, joining two families whose genes would determine the looks, the intelligence, of countless human beings still unborn, that they felt was easy. That they presumed.
If Reb Garfinkel had been artistically or literarily inclined, he would have likened his predicament to that of the skilled, talented writer or artist. Just because everyone knew how to put words down on blank paper, or brush colors on a blank canvas, people thought nothing of trying, of calling themselves writers or artists, of producing countless unreadable pages and unbearably bad pictures. And each time someone with no experience or talent or skill sat down and wrote or painted, what he produced was an affront, a virtual slap in the face, to all those who spent years slaving to earn the right to produce just one sentence or a paragraph worth its name, one simple line drawing worth looking it.
In very much the same way, Reb Garfinkel was insulted and angered by all those who had the offensive indecency, the sheer, stupid gall, to horn in on his exclusive territory: matches among the Misnagdim, haredi families whose near ancestors came from Poland, Russia, or Hungary. That was his stake. His homestead. He guarded it with the same rabid jealousy, the almost insane covetousness, of an 1890s prospector in Alaska who has just struck gold.
Sometimes people came to him (mostly ignorant Americans or out-of-touch Europeans) asking his help with a match for a Hasidic family. Depending on his mood, he would either curse them and slam the door or offer them a seat by his rickety table and begin the long, involved explanation of why such a thing was out of the question.
He would sit with these ignorant fools, these outsiders, who looked at the black hats, the long payess , the beards, the black coats, and saw the same homogeneous world, the way some Caucasians looked at Orientals and thought they all had the same face. To explain the profound and manifold differences in the haredi world, he began with history, with the bitter differences between Hasidim and their fierce opponents, the Misnagdim.
Being in the Misnagid camp himself, his description was hardly objective. He tended to show the beginning of the Hasidic movement in Poland-Lithuania in the late eighteenth century as the banding together of Jews too ignorant to study themselves, who put all their
“And may your son enjoy the sunshine on the porch.” Faigie Reich nodded pleasantly. “Boys get a little too old,” she whispered to the other woman, so that the men wouldn’t hear, “and people begin to wonder what’s wrong. I’m telling you this for your own good. My Dina is only seventeen. She is beautiful and intelligent. She will soon get over her disappointment. But at twenty-two, disappointment hits harder. A boy lives with a woman, Rebbetzin Breitman, not only with plastic bags. May he marry in a good hour!” She walked out quickly and did not turn around, although she would have given a not inconsiderable part of her share in heaven just to have glimpsed for a second the reaction on Brindel Breitman’s face.
Chapter eight
R eb Chaim Garfinkel hated amateurs. Meddling aunts, foolish fathers, pushy mothers, misguided chumash teachers, even an occasional rosh yeshiva. All those busybodies who dove headfirst into the swampy quagmire of matchmaking, dragging poor, sweet young girls and innocent boys down with them.
He stroked his long, scraggly reddish beard, picking out the crumbs left over from breakfast. He stirred his tea, then took tiny burning sips through a cube of sugar that rested on his tongue. Would these same people presume to write out prescriptions with no medical training? Would they dare to drill teeth without having been to dental school, or prepare tax returns or build houses, or even unclog drains! … He felt the burning liquid course down his throat like a hot stream of indigestion. Yet putting two people together, joining two families whose genes would determine the looks, the intelligence, of countless human beings still unborn, that they felt was easy. That they presumed.
If Reb Garfinkel had been artistically or literarily inclined, he would have likened his predicament to that of the skilled, talented writer or artist. Just because everyone knew how to put words down on blank paper, or brush colors on a blank canvas, people thought nothing of trying, of calling themselves writers or artists, of producing countless unreadable pages and unbearably bad pictures. And each time someone with no experience or talent or skill sat down and wrote or painted, what he produced was an affront, a virtual slap in the face, to all those who spent years slaving to earn the right to produce just one sentence or a paragraph worth its name, one simple line drawing worth looking it.
In very much the same way, Reb Garfinkel was insulted and angered by all those who had the offensive indecency, the sheer, stupid gall, to horn in on his exclusive territory: matches among the Misnagdim, haredi families whose near ancestors came from Poland, Russia, or Hungary. That was his stake. His homestead. He guarded it with the same rabid jealousy, the almost insane covetousness, of an 1890s prospector in Alaska who has just struck gold.
Sometimes people came to him (mostly ignorant Americans or out-of-touch Europeans) asking his help with a match for a Hasidic family. Depending on his mood, he would either curse them and slam the door or offer them a seat by his rickety table and begin the long, involved explanation of why such a thing was out of the question.
He would sit with these ignorant fools, these outsiders, who looked at the black hats, the long payess , the beards, the black coats, and saw the same homogeneous world, the way some Caucasians looked at Orientals and thought they all had the same face. To explain the profound and manifold differences in the haredi world, he began with history, with the bitter differences between Hasidim and their fierce opponents, the Misnagdim.
Being in the Misnagid camp himself, his description was hardly objective. He tended to show the beginning of the Hasidic movement in Poland-Lithuania in the late eighteenth century as the banding together of Jews too ignorant to study themselves, who put all their
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