Exodus: A memoir Read Online Free

The memory and associated stimuli are inadequately processed and stored in an isolated memory network. The goal of EMDR therapy, therefore, is to
re
-process these distressing memories, reducing their lingering effects and allowing patients to develop more adaptive coping mechanisms.
    What Ed was doing wasn’t too far off from an EMDR session. Distract the client with visually stimulating displays, apply pressure to sensory points, and there you have it—the forced recall of traumatic memories travel along alternate neurological routes.
    And so, with this realization, I resolved to fully commit myself to the effort.
    “Now, go back to the first time you felt angry,” Ed said.
    “Angry?” I asked dubiously. “I’m not really a very angry person.”
    “That just means you have to go deeper. Try to find the place where the anger is.”
    I genuinely did try. I traced delicately over the map of my childhood memories, as if holding a pendulum of my own, waiting for it to find true north. Where, oh where, was the anger? Sadness there was plenty of. Loneliness, despair, and self-loathing I could find, but no anger.
    Here was the little girl who wore hand-me-downs from the seventies, not because her family was poor, but because nobody cared enough to buy her new clothes. She watched as her cousins were lavished with cashmere sweaters, velvet hair ribbons, and lacy stockings, and so deduced that they were more worthy of love than she was. Here was the adolescent living in her grandparents’ empty nest, a house that resonated with the booming silence of deflated and abandoned dreams. She sat on sofas covered in plastic, watching the flickering candle commemorating her murdered relativesburn through the years, and wondered how to find happiness in a world that seemed to admonish against it so strongly.
    This was a girl who was considered a black sheep in her family long before she broke any rules. A product of a destroyed marriage in a community that placed all value on the health of the family unit, she was the daughter of the mentally retarded man whose condition had caused all of his siblings difficulties in finding a match, and birthed by a woman who had dreams of education and a life that was unacceptable to the Hasidic world. She was doomed before she could even talk in her own defense.
    Although the Hasidic community hates me for rejecting the way of life I was taught to hold sacred, in actuality I was rejected by those same people before I’d ever even entertained the slightest thought of rebellion. Rejection was my fate, to be an outcast was my destiny. What was asked of me, then, was acceptance of God’s will, the grace to live under the burdens I had been doomed to shoulder without complaint.
    Until recently, I couldn’t remember much about my early childhood. Now, the occasional beating stands out: the time when I was standing on a chair and someone tipped it over just so I would fall; when a vacuum cleaner was thrown at me so hard that I developed enormous purple bruises. Abuse was common in the world I grew up in. Parents hit their children, teachers hit their students, and rabbis claimed that the Talmud made it right. You could count yourself lucky if you went through life and didn’t once suffer at the hands of a parent, spouse, sibling, or teacher. The Satmar Hasidic community in New York is a culture of violence, not necessarily because its members fetishize it, but because the group’s only inheritance is the violence of European anti-Semitism thatculminated in the Second World War. Authority and discipline are seen as necessary, as much to preempt divine punishment as to self-flagellate for the sin of surviving a tragedy that wiped out most of our ancestors. I do not remember ever feeling victimized when a blow fell; rather, it was such an event that gave me a form of equality among my peers. Like some grand initiation into the postwar Hasidic identity, suffering brought us closer to that first