This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir

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For the sake of privacy, I have changed all first and last names—including my own and those of my family members—except for Dr. Cory Shulman’s. For the sake of clarity, I have left out certain characters. The stories passed on by aunts, uncles, great-aunts, and great-uncles—guardians and messengers of the family history—are all told in the book by one beloved aunt. It is the same with the children: Blimi, my best friend, is a composite of several young friends, all of whom knew or repeated rumors and myths that surrounded the strange mystery that was my brother.

This book reflects the memories of a young girl, written over two decades later. It is an attempt to re-create the world of a child caught in the family maelstrom of a brother afflicted with a horrific disorder no one at the time could understand. The memories belong to me only. It is a narrow perspective but an important one, and written with the full knowledge of its power and its faults. My brother’s story unfolded over the course of years. It involves many people and perspectives. More than one person could write his story.

This telling is mine.

Once, when I was in third grade, my teacher said that it was forbidden to fall in love. It was God who decided who would marry whom, and only the rebbe knows these secrets.

You see, up above the clouds, by the royal throne, God and his angels are gathered. It is there, forty days before each person is born, that a heavenly voice calls out in the skies, proclaiming, “The daughter of this man and this woman will marry the son of that man and that woman.”

Or something like that. It says so in the Talmud.

My teacher also told us about that time long ago when a Roman princess asked a great rebbe, “What has your God been doing ever since he finished creating earth?” And he answered, “Matchmaking.” The Roman princess laughed. She said, “I can do that too,” and ordered a thousand of her female slaves to be paired up with a thousand of her male slaves that very night. But the next morning, they came to her, all two thousand, with scratches and wounds, crying, “I don’t want to be with him,” “I wanted to marry someone else…” There was chaos in the court.

The Roman princess immediately called the great rebbe. She said, “Rebbe, every word in your Torah is great. Only your God is true.”

So this book about my family’s curse is not a love story. Because my mother and father never fell in love. That would have been a terrible sin, a gentile kind of nonsense, and my parents were pious people. It was my brother who was crazy, crazy as a bat, and because of him we were cursed. That’s why people told lies about my family, things about love and such—stories that could never be. It says so in the Talmud: There is no such thing as love.

September 1988

When I was in third grade, I made a deal with God.

I would fast for forty days and nights, and in return He’d make for me a miracle. Fasting forty days and nights was an ancient custom, a powerful way to get God’s attention. All the holy saints of once upon a time did this. They had to when they realized just how stubborn God was, and that there were problems for which prayers were not enough. God wanted suffering.

I needed this ancient omen to work so that Hashem, our one true God, would get me new heart-shaped earrings. I figured if the saints could get Hashem to listen when they asked for rain after a long drought, or for an end to a terrible plague, it would certainly work for me. Earrings were a simple miracle.

The earrings I wanted were pretty, ruby red, with a perfect glow, lying in the window of Gold’s jewelry store in Borough Park. I had first seen them two weeks earlier when I went shopping with my mother for a school sweater and school panty hose. I had prayed and prayed for them ever since, but nothing had happened. I’d thrown in extra psalms before bed, yet from Heaven there was only silence.

Then my third grade teacher, Mrs. Friedman, told us the story about the saints and their forty-day fasts during times of drought. She described how on the fortieth day, at the stroke of dawn, as the red streaks of sun rose above the earth and the gaunt, starving face of the tzaddik, it began to rain. Nay, pour. And the people of Israel were saved.

That afternoon, I sat in the big, wooden blanket box attached to the head of my bed and struck a deal with God. I would fast for forty days and nights, and He would get me the earrings.

After a thorough talk, it was agreed. I climbed out of the box.

I began my fast the next morning. I got out of bed, into my school uniform, walked to the kitchen, and pulled the cornflakes from the shelf in the pantry. Then I remembered. I could not eat. I was fasting.

I put the cereal back and went to my room. I sat on my bed and thought. Mostly, I thought of the cereal. I was hungry. I wanted to eat now. I had always known that fasting meant not eating, but I had never connected it with hunger. Somehow the saints just did it. Somehow my mother did not have breakfast, lunch, or supper on Yom Kippur while I ate my snack in the shul yard. But real fasting—this was hard. My stomach was empty, my mouth watered, and my entire being wanted cereal, any cereal.

At school that day, my stomach growled loudly. By recess, I could barely hear my own thoughts—and this was only the first of forty days. Two minutes before the end of recess, I gave up. I could not do this any longer. I crammed an entire bag of pretzels in my mouth. The bell rang. I grabbed my lunch bag. I pushed my tuna sandwich into my mouth and chewed as I hurried back to my classroom. Then Mrs. Friedman walked in, and I sat at my desk, relieved. I now had a clearer focus. I could renegotiate with God.

Mrs. Friedman was teaching us the meaning of the morning prayers.

“Girls,” she said briskly, her long skirt brushing by my desk as she walked up and down the aisles, “when we pray to Hashem, we are talking directly with a king, and not just any king, but the one and only king of the universe. The one and only king who can grant any wish in the world. When you stand in the royal court of a king, do you slouch? Do you yawn? Do you stuff banana into your mouth in the middle of the conversation?”

Mrs. Friedman stood still. She towered over my best friend, Blimi Krieger, who slouched behind her desk in the first row. Blimi was holding a banana peel, the last of the fruit squashed furtively between the cover and the first page of her prayer book. She held the prayer book tightly against her chest, the banana squeezing slowly out the side. It landed with a splat on the floor.

“And do you think,” Mrs. Friedman asked, pointedly, “that the king of the universe likes banana mush squished onto His heavenly prayers?”

Blimi began to cry. Mrs. Friedman handed her paper towels to wipe the mess off her prayers. Then, once more, she walked up and down the aisles, nudging our pointer fingers onto the right line in the holy book.

All this was important, of course, even sacred, perhaps, but I had more urgent matters at hand. This fast wasn’t working. I needed different conditions. I needed breakfast.

I told God that I’d still get the ruby earrings, but forsaking cornflakes in a bowl was not part of the deal. To fast, one must have strength, and for strength, one must eat breakfast. I would start fasting each morning right after the cereal.

The next morning, I ate a large bowl of cornflakes with chocolate syrup and sugar. I held the syrup bottle upside down and stuck my tongue into the pouring stream. But my mother, wrapping chocolate-spread sandwiches in foil, said, “Are you crazy?
What
are you doing?” Half a bottle of chocolate syrup, she said, putting the bottle safely out of my reach, was enough for any breakfast.

At recess, I gave my snack away. I gave Blimi my Milk Munch and watched her eat it. She munched on it, crunched on it, licked the caramel cream, and promised to be my closest friend forevermore. I walked around forlornly all recess long. Blimi chatted away, happy as pie.

But then came lunch. God and I had not told my mother about the deal, so she had in ignorance packed me one. And now Blimi was eating her grilled cheese sandwich right in front of my face. My lunch was in the schoolbag under my chair: two slices of white bread with thick chocolate spread just the way I liked it.

Ten minutes before the end of lunch, I ate the sandwich. I ate it quickly, so that I did not really taste the goodness of it. I explained patiently to God that a quick lunch wasn’t a real lunch, that it was therefore still allowed in our agreement, and mostly that I was really hungry.

At home that night, I was careful with supper. I ate the chicken, the potato, but not the soup or the vegetables. Then only part of dessert. It was as if I hadn’t eaten at all. Even my mother said so. She frowned. “Look—the soup and vegetables! You haven’t eaten anything.”

I explained that I could not. There were important considerations, and soup and vegetables were out for the next month.

My mother looked at me suspiciously. She said I had better eat what she put on the table and now. But I said no. I would not give in. This was an important test of faith, I knew. God was peering down at me from between the clouds, and if I ate my vegetables the deal was off. I’d never see the red ruby earrings again.

Just then the phone rang. It was someone from Israel. My mother walked away chatting, the receiver under her ear.

I quickly ran to my room.

I sat in my box, the one attached to my bed. I covered the top with a blanket. I tore the wrapping off the two Peanut Chews I’d hidden. Peanut Chews didn’t count. They were part of an agreed-upon break from the fast each day. And since they were hidden in the box, God agreed that, though He was God, He would nevertheless turn His eyes away and look elsewhere.

I fasted this way for four days. On the fifth, I stopped. I was no longer giving away my chocolate; Blimi was therefore not my best friend. And even vegetables had begun to look good.

Enough, I told Hashem. Four entire days had passed. I was tired of eating Peanut Chews in a box, and if He was God at all, He’d count it as forty. After all, I was only eight, but He—He was the Almighty, the One, True, and Only. And anyway, it was the thought that counted, not what I had eaten.

Two days later, I got new earrings. My father brought them home as a complete surprise, but I knew that Hashem had made him do it. That was the mystery of God. Things happened somehow. The earrings were bow-shaped, not heart-shaped, as I had dreamt, but still. From far away they looked like hearts.

Only four weeks later, I made my second deal with Heaven. But this one, I explained, was really important. More important than the earrings, more important than a new dress, more important than any plague or drought. It was my crazy brother, Nachum. He had come back home, and I needed a miracle now.

From inside my blanket box, I sealed the deal with God. I would fast for forty days and also forty nights, and then, on the dawn of the forty-first, He’d make my crazy brother normal.