Exodus: A memoir Read Online Free Page A

generation of survivors, and it compensated somehow for all those who had died horribly, and in whose stead we now existed.

    It wasn’t until I hit the very last year of my childhood, when my seventeen-year-old self detected a small spark of something that seemed like it could be—wait, was it? Yes, there it was: a small, hard kernel of anger, wrapped tightly into a ball, packed into the very core of my inner self like some seed waiting to sprout and bear fruit.
    “I found it,” I said triumphantly.
    “Good, where is it?”
    “I’m seventeen. I’m getting married.”
    “There’s nothing earlier?” Ed asked searchingly.
    “No, this is where it is.”
    “Okay then. Breathe deep. Be in the anger. Experience the memory.”
    I went back to that time, the days and weeks after my wedding.

    Perhaps it was reasonable for my aunt Chaya to see an early, arranged marriage as the ultimate solution to the problem Ipresented. There were hardly any other options for a young girl. I remember it was discussed whether I should be allowed to travel abroad to a seminary for girls, considered a haven for those from a troubled background. But it was decided that the stigma would only make it more difficult to marry me off when I returned. I was very disappointed when my dreams of traveling abroad on my own were dashed.
    I wonder now what prompted Chaya’s choice of husband for me. She knew me well enough to understand that a little bit of freedom and understanding from a spouse might have been enough to keep me in my place. But instead, she chose a man from one of the most fanatical families in our community, more extreme than any of our relatives. Was she trying to quell my obvious independence by trapping me in a repressive marriage? How ironic then, because I surely believe that was a major catalyst to my break from the community. Take everything people value away from them, and they have nothing left to lose—but give them some of what they want, and they may be too afraid to let go of the little that they have. In the end, I did not feel like I was losing much.
    When I did get married, it was with as much hope as Chaya must have harbored. To her, my husband represented legitimacy; she assured me that if I succeeded at building a family with him, it would redeem the shame of my past. I may never have fit in with my blood relatives, but this new family would be rightly mine, she reminded me. I would be the head of it; there would be no chance of being an outcast within my own home.
    Sadly, my marriage was doomed from the moment my husband and I entered our new apartment for the first time and found ourselves unable to consummate the arrangement. This was unacceptable according to Jewish law, and Chaya’s plans for me. “A manmust be a king in the bedroom,” she told me the next morning, when Eli had absconded to the synagogue for prayers. I will never forget that particular aphorism she shared with me, although I could list many others as disturbing. In that moment, she tried to reveal her secret, her means to gain the power she so craved. Satisfy a man in the bedroom, she implied, and you will be ruler everywhere else.
    I could not make my husband a king in the bedroom, no matter how much I wanted to, just to get everyone off my back. Rabbis, religious counselors, my in-laws—everyone put pressure on me to achieve intercourse, as if all it could possibly take were the right words, just threatening enough, or just cajoling enough. In the end, it took a year of fruitless doctor’s visits to figure out what was wrong with me and try to fix it. In the process, my husband’s family mutinied and tried to convince him to divorce me, which he almost did. Only when I finally got pregnant was I left in peace.
    Three years later, it was Chaya who informed me over the phone of the messages that had been discovered by my uncle Jacob. They had been exchanged between his youngest unmarried daughter and my husband and had begun in our