Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde Read online

  AMY EINHORN BOOKS

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Dana

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  “Amy Einhorn Books” and the “ae” logo are registered trademarks

  belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60917-0

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  Version_2

  To Nora

  We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

  —JOAN DIDION, The White Album

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  The Complete Story of How I Got Everything I Ever Wanted

  Doom

  Lush Places

  Mars for a Price

  Lost Messiah

  The Jilted-Lady Beat

  Chosen People

  Christmas with the Goldfarbs

  Journey to the Warm Reaches of My Jewish Soul

  A Stick with Two Ends

  The Outer Reaches of the Universe

  Finding God

  Rough Beasts

  Jujitsu Blonde vs. Big Oil

  Things of Wisdom

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  It’s ten o’clock on a Tuesday night, a light rain is falling on the wide streets of Brooklyn and I’m in my living room, strangling a rabbi.

  This is the first time I’ve ever physically assaulted a man of God, and I have to say, it feels excellent. My fingers, with their chipped red nail polish, are digging into the soft white flesh of his rabbi neck. My heart is pounding loudly in my ears. Normally, I am the least violent person on the planet—a practitioner of yoga, a shopper for shoes—but in this moment, I’m completely unhinged. I’m a ballerina assassin, a ninja superstar, a platinum-haired dragon slayer in Stella McCartney vegan loungewear. Watch out, assholes: Jujitsu Blonde is in the house. (She lives here, actually. She was trying to read the December Vogue before turning in early on a work night, but then this bearded dude rolled up talking smack, and now she’s on the path of destruction.)

  Somewhere off in the distance, someone is blasting the 10,000 Maniacs on a wheezing desktop speaker system, and I can just barely hear Natalie Merchant whining about something, and I make a mental note to kick her ass someday too.

  Who is this guy, anyway—this Hasid, this pillar of his community, this ginger-haired fucker with the squinty eyes and the placid demeanor and the beige yarmulke the size of a dinner plate bobby-pinned to his head? I want to smack the Coke-bottle glasses off his pale God-fearing face. Has he ever even seen the sun? I can tell he’s wearing tzitzit, a religious garment, underneath his clothes because the fringe is hanging out like some short sham of a hula skirt. And the T-shirt he’s got on over it is a trip: It has a drawing of Calvin and Hobbes on the front and a dialogue bubble with the words “New York Attitude.” I’ll show this gentle Yid some New York Attitude. I’ll show him what two hours a day of Iyengar yoga and a bachelor’s degree in American history and an encyclopedic knowledge of the last eight seasons of ready-to-wear from Paris, New York and Milan and a diet of sushi, soy milk and organic spinach—and, oh yeah, a broken motherfucking heart—can do. I’ll send him back to Russia with a collapsed windpipe and no knees!

  Because the night belongs to lovers!

  You’re next, bitch.

  The rabbi twists around forty-five degrees and looks at me with one straining eye. We’re basically the same size, only he has more padding around the middle, and he’s wearing some heinous pair of frayed brown rabbi shoes that lift him up an extra half inch. But still I’m thinking: no problem. I don’t care how “chosen” this flabster is, he’s going down. My hands are steel claws. I tighten my grip, taking a moment to contemplate my options: Would it be better to body-slam him down right here in the living room or drag his limp carcass out into the courtyard first so everyone can watch? Then I notice the muscles in his back tense, and—uh-oh. There are muscles in his back.

  In an instant, everything changes. He reaches up and grabs my wrists and performs some freaky Mortal Kombat maneuver, nearly stripping the delicately exfoliated and moisturized skin of my forearms from the bone. He pulls me toward him, into his damp right armpit, and holds me there for just one second, just long enough that I can see the fire in his eyes, just close enough that I can smell his breath: pizza. And then without warning I go down, I don’t even know how, like one big bag of elbows clattering against the wood floor, blinkered and speechless, while above me, Cosmo the Rabbi grins madly.

  Everyone has a fight-or-flight response, but in this case, both impulses strike me simultaneously. I want to run away, and I want to clock him. Fight and flight. Maybe it’s a Jew thing. Observance-wise, Cosmo and I are opposites, but in the technical aspect, we are the same. Equal in the eyes of God and the SS, we are both genetically Jews, both members of a tribe that has been chased around the world, kicking and screaming—fighting while fleeing—for the last three thousand years. Millennia of genetic imprinting and a lifetime of poor impulse control nearly propel me in two directions, at him and away, but in the end both lose out, and I sit there, motionless, holding back tears.

  “At this point I would stomp on your face,” he says cheerfully. “Or kick you in the head, at least.”

  That’s what happens when you fuck with God.

  IN MY DEFENSE, he asked for it.

  “Please, Rebecca,” Cosmo had said. “Choke me!”

  “No,” I’d said. “Jesus! No.”

  I’d been curled up in my usual position on an emerald-green velvet armchair incongruously plopped in the center of our large, dirty, empty parlor. For nine days, the rabbi and I had lived together like this, in circumstances any sane person would describe as “sin.” We were not involved, would never become involved—get that out of your head right now—but the means by which we had arrived at this point, and would remain suspended there, in awkward cohabitation for nine weird months, were, at a minimum, unusual. I am a twenty-seven-year-old nonpracticing Jew, a journalist who
’d spent her adult life pursuing the feminine ideal as laid out by the Sex and the City television series. Cosmo is an ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch-Hasidic Jew, an ascetic, a practitioner of a faith that forbids an unmarried man and woman from being alone in a room together, let alone living side by side, separated by one thin wall. I don’t know what the Talmud says about a rabbi drop-kicking a skinny girl in the middle of the apartment they share, platonically, but I suspect the scholars would frown on it.

  There are a lot of complicated explanations for what was going on then in our shithole two-bedroom in Brooklyn—explanations that draw on ancient scripture and popular culture, that deal with the peculiar appeals and deceptions of modernity, the privilege of youth and the limits of faith—but for the time being, a simple explanation should suffice: I was broke. Rent was cheap. He needed the money.

  A week before I moved in, Cosmo had taken up jujitsu. He was rapidly losing interest in God, so why not? He was not leading a congregation now. He was, instead, the smartest employee of the Fast Trak Copy Center in the neighborhood, where he duplicated keys and halfheartedly tried to rescue people’s hard drives while dreaming of becoming a rock star. Whatever nerves the retail job hadn’t destroyed, the creeping agnosticism had, and the godless rabbi needed an outlet. An amateur jazz historian with a six-year degree in philosophy, he spent much of his spare time playing the electric bass, for a time in a band called Denim Fajita, which he really thought was going somewhere, but which went nowhere. Fluent in six languages, he had briefly dated Leah, a Yiddish scholar who really got his motor running, until she ditched him. He had just wrapped up an extension course in introductory Portuguese, so, he figured, it made sense to study hand-to-hand combat next.

  Jujitsu was great but also “gay,” in Cosmo’s estimation, since it involved rolling around on the ground with men. Whatever Maimonides might have thought of me, there’s little doubt how he’d view that. Cosmo had just arrived home from jujitsu class when he began nagging me to choke him—he wanted to practice, and at least I wasn’t a dude.

  At last I obliged, taking a short break from wallowing, my activity of choice since moving in, days after a breakup that had sent the world as I knew it crashing down on my head. I was single, miserable and living in a muggy apartment in the middle of the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, wherever that was. I figured I might as well fight a rabbi. That feeling changed abruptly when I found myself on the ground, nursing a bruised shoulder and two hinky wrists. He hadn’t even really gone at me—it was all just pretend—but I hadn’t eaten more than an occasional bowl of plain oatmeal since the breakup, and by that point, the pope could have done me in.

  “Ouch, Cosmo,” I say.

  “Sorry!” he says, beaming, and trips off to make tea.

  “You know, Rebecca, you should really do jujitsu,” he calls from the kitchen.

  In nine days, we had already been over this half a dozen times. Every time I fell into talking about my ex, every time I started to cry or wallow or reminisce about lost love, Cosmo would beg me to join him for a class. I had other outlets for my feelings, I explained. I was a writer. I worked out. I went to sample sales and cocktail parties and had long dinners with friends. I was a regular New York City gal, as I’d always imagined I would be: a Yale graduate, a social drinker, a reader of Us Weekly and the Wall Street Journal. What I was not was the sort of person who got all sweaty rolling around in a leotard on a mat.

  “Why do I have to do jujitsu, Cosmo?” I ask, for the seventh time.

  He shouts over the screaming kettle, “Because it’s just like sex, only without the sadness!”

  He was morose, listless, hilarious—possibly a virgin, I wasn’t sure. At a minimum, he should have been, if he’d really followed all the rules. Cosmo had come over from Moscow a decade earlier with a suitcase of clothes, a hundred dollars cash and a road map to Brooklyn—nothing else. He fancied himself a Raskolnikov, but his darkest vices were good beer and big boobs, which together had edged God largely out of his thoughts lately. He had a weakness for awkwardly translated Russian expressions of disbelief, the best of which was: “You could be from Mars for that price!” He played the bass, listened to psychedelic punk rock and watched Top Chef online, over and over, season after season, until he could recite the dialogue from the cable reality cooking show, on which contestants whipped up all kinds of delicious dishes that Cosmo, strictly kosher, would never be allowed to eat.

  We had a surprising amount in common, for a Russian rabbi and an atheist from Pittsburgh. We were both only children, both broke, both alone and both well accustomed to fighting and running away. Cosmo’s religion was Judaism, and it was failing him. My religion was a secular hash of things I picked up from books and movies during a boring childhood in the suburbs. I didn’t think much about the next world, but I thought plenty about this one: the kind of person I wanted to be, the kind of clothes that person would wear, the man she’d date, the apartment she’d live in, the restaurants she’d go to and the items she’d order off the menu when she got there. I had done everything right, had followed all the rules for a happy adulthood, just as Cosmo had followed the strictures of Orthodox observance to the tiniest detail. Yet here we both were, lost and depressed. Our faiths had faltered. The stories we’d been telling ourselves suddenly stopped making sense.

  I crawl up off the floor and back into the green velvet chair, while Cosmo carries in our tea. Mine arrives in a small brown cup. His is in a rainbow-striped mug the size of his head that says, in big letters, NO KVETCHING.

  “What’s gonna happen to us, Cosmo?”

  “I don’t know, dude,” he replies, rolling a cigarette with loose tobacco from one of the dozen-odd Bali Shag bags lying around the apartment. “I guess we’re pretty much fucked.”

  The Complete Story of How I Got Everything I Ever Wanted

  One morning seven months after I graduated from college, I quit a job I never liked as a reporter for the Washington Post, jammed my wardrobe into a rolling suitcase and went to the train station without even bothering to look at the schedule first. It was January 27, 2005, a date I remember as well as my birthday. I arrived in New York in the middle of the afternoon, with twenty dollars and one credit card in my wallet and an expired driver’s license that I didn’t renew for three years. A week earlier, I’d secured a relatively firm but by no means ironclad commitment for a $24,000-a-year reporting job at the New York Observer, a small, salmon-colored weekly newspaper that I’d read for the first time two weeks before that. I owned no furniture and had arranged for no permanent place to stay. None of that mattered—I was home.

  The taxi line outside Penn Station was long, so I walked a block north, dragging my suitcase, with its one functioning wheel, through puddles behind me. Midtown seemed glorious in the winter drizzle. The fumes wafting out of sidewalk nut-vendor carts were warm and sweet. Steam puffed up around my ankles from the subway grates, and it looked a little like I was walking on clouds. It felt like I was walking over a fetid subway grate, but at that point I had trouble distinguishing between the look and the feel of things. Life looked right, and I was thrilled. Some girls imagine their wedding day when they’re young: the dress they’ll wear, the music that will play, the man they’ll spend the rest of their life with. I imagined my first day in New York: the way it would smell, the first taxi ride I’d take, the people I’d meet in all the days thereafter and the life I’d live, down to the finest detail.

  I am from Pittsburgh. Technically, I’m not even from the pea-size industrial city, glamorous as it seemed in my youth, but O’Hara Township, a small suburb to the north, nondescript in every way. I don’t know who first introduced me to the idea of New York, but for as long as I can remember it has been my Jerusalem—the shining city off in the distance, the only place to go. I’d visited a few times before I moved there—exhausting, confusing weekend trips, once with my parents and a few times with friends—but by and large, my sense of the city came from books I read, TV shows I watch
ed, movies, pictures and stories in the newspaper.

  I had read enough to know that New York was made up of three kinds of people: those born here (the Glass family, Ed Koch, certain hard-bitten tabloid news reporters); the commuters (my friend Matthew’s father, a buyer at Macy’s who specialized in women’s intimate apparel and went home to Westport every night); and the people like Truman Capote, J. P. Morgan, Zelda Sayre and me, who came from somewhere else and gave the city its soul. In my mind, it was simply the place one went, as soon as she possibly could. What would I do there? I would work and eat and go to parties and watch TV on boring afternoons and fall in love, and eventually I would die—happy.

  I looked north, up Sixth Avenue to the midtown canyon and Rockefeller Center and after that Central Park, and felt everyone else’s stories falling like fresh soot from the skyscrapers above: Anne Welles and Neely O’Hara in their first apartment uptown. Faye Dunaway, braless under a chiffon blouse, smiling her taut smile on the executive floor of Union Broadcasting System. Holly Golightly stroking her cat on an idle Sunday afternoon. Diane Keaton shopping for Christmas presents on Fifth Avenue in a gentle snow, driving her beat-up Beetle wildly up the West Side Highway, staking out a town house with Alan Alda. And of course Carrie Bradshaw, clomping all over the place in her towering heels. To live in New York was to participate in the world’s largest choose-your-own-adventure story, one that featured millions of possible adventures, all of which had already been chosen. I knew instinctively, from the moment I arrived, that my eventual obituary, should I merit one, could be plagiarized entirely from ones that had already been written. For a long time, this was a comfort to me.

  In this way, everything about New York felt new and daunting and wondrous, but at the same time, that wonder was weighed down by a layered foreknowledge of the New York experience—by the pictures and stories of everyone I was imitating, who’d already done every imaginable variation of this very thing before. As I took deep breaths of the damp, polluted January air, I already knew that there is no one in the world younger than a girl in a new dress on her first day in New York. I was authentically wide-eyed, but never quite fully, since I knew enough to recognize “wide-eyed” as a phase. What I didn’t know then was that a life made up of fragments of other people’s lives is still something materially new. A kiss on the Brooklyn Bridge is not every kiss; a reporting job is not every reporting job; a photocopy is not exactly the original. To understand this, you don’t have to abandon your entire life, everything you ever wished for, and move in with a Xerox shop rabbi in Brooklyn, but in my case, it certainly helped.