All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inside the American Shtetl.
Captivating.

Most people outside of New York City will not know anything about the various Orthodox Jewish communities that thrive there and in its hinterland. And even most New Yorkers will not know that the primary purpose of these communities is not just to re-create the physical mode of living of the Eastern European shtetl-culture which was annihilated by the Holocaust, but more importantly to re-create the essential ethos of this culture: the continuous recognition of and submission to the Almighty in every detail and nuance of one's life.

As among Christian monastic groups or some Anabaptist sects, there is a spectrum of meaning to the term orthodoxy. But most Jewish Orthodox communities share a recognition, like the monastics, that an existence as separate as possible from the prevailing culture is necessary for the full performance of one's religious obligations.

But, unlike monastics, Orthodox Jews have families, frequently rather large families, that have to be maintained very much as part of religious duty. This means that children are born into a commitment that is much more than nominal. One's entire life, including language, studies, dress, the smallest details of decorum and relationships, are established by tradition as that tradition is interpreted by the religious leadership.

To use an entirely inapt but accurate metaphor: in religious devotion, Christians are the hens that contribute an egg or two, Orthodox Jews are the creatures that provide the meat of commitment with their very bodies.

So what happens when the child becomes an adult and takes issue with the cultural isolation enforced by the community? Particularly if the adult is male, has a family, but has few life-skills (even language) in the wider world, and yet remains Jewish in their very being?

In short it ain't pretty. Ostracism by the religious leadership is the least of the punishments involved. Total loss of family, of friends, of social environment, of economic sustenance, indeed even of one's sense of self is understandably devastating.

Reading this memoir of extreme spiritual dislocation, one, I think, must become torn. Tragedy exists in this situation for both the individual and the community. Both feel themselves failures. The striving to maintain a counter-culture which rejects the materialism of the enveloping society is heroic. The loss of even one person to that materialism is profoundly demoralising. Conversely of course the oppression and subsequent rejection experienced by that person is excruciating.

Appropriately, Deen's memoir ends not with a resolution or reconciliation but with the continuing but ultimately accepted agony of separation as the necessary price to be paid for what he believes is independence. Good luck is the only thing to say.

Postscript: For those who might be interested in the phenomenon of religious leave-taking, I can highly recommend the 1985 God in Fragments (Dieu Fracture) by Jacques Pohier, a Dominican friar forced out of that Catholic Order by dogmatists. It too was written in medias res as it were and mirrors many of the same emotions that Deen recounts.

Postscript 15Nov18: Several recent pieces on this community: https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/2752... https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life...

View all my reviews