Chapter 5
persuasion true friends
Meanwhile, as I stumbled in and out of the social elite, I spent the bulk of my time slaving away at, procrastinating on, whimpering about, and otherwise slogging through my dissertation. There’s nothing quite like writing a dissertation. You’ve gone through almost twenty years of school, including your first few years as a graduate student, and you’ve always had someone there to tell you what to do: take these courses, do this reading, answer these questions. You’ve also always had other people around to share the experience with—sit next to in class, bitch to about your teachers, study with for exams.
Then, all of a sudden, you’re on your own. It’s like being left in the woods without a map. Good luck, sucker. Drop us a line if you make it out alive. All you know is that you have to go off by yourself for four or five or six years and write what amounts to a book. You’ve never written a book, you have no idea how to write one, and no one, you quickly realize, is going to teach you, because the only way to learn is just to do it. Plus, you have to make up your own topic. And, oh yes, it has to be completely original.
I had decided to write my dissertation about community in nineteenth-century English fiction. The Austen chapter would be followed by ones on George Eliot (yes, the once-dreaded Middlemarch) and Joseph Conrad (my old standby). It was a very personal decision. The most important experience of my life had been the years I had spent in a Jewish youth movement during high school. For most people, that kind of thing is an eye-rolling waste of time—a nerd festival that your parents force you into when you’d rather be out behind the mall, smoking cigarettes and trying to get to second base.
But this was different, at least for my friends and me. We ran the thing on our own, more or less—even the “adults,” who had gone through the movement themselves, were mainly in their early twenties—and it was about discovering our own values and developing our own sense of authenticity. It was a national movement, too, with chapters and regions and camps, and kids who came from exotic places like Oregon and Illinois. It was, to the extent that we could manage it, a complete world, or at least, a complete worldview, and we were there because it gave us all the things we couldn’t find in the high-school jungle: a feeling of acceptance, an outlet for idealism, a sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves.
In a word—and it was a word that we used all the time—community. The dream we all had was to move to Israel and live on a kibbutz, a sort of Jewish version of a commune. It was a dream about sharing everything and being together forever. But however naïve the idea might have been, it meant that while we were dreaming about community, we were also living it. We would come together, in our dozens or our hundreds, for meetings and weekends and trips and summers; for songs, games, campfires, and an endless string of nights when we just stayed up and talked.
We talked about social justice and social action, idealism and identity, being Jewish and being human. We talked, until we could barely keep our eyes open, just to have an excuse to stay up together, just to feel each other nearby. We were going to change the world, but along the way, without even noticing it, we changed ourselves. It was the place where I made my closest friends, found my voice, and learned to think about the world. Where I kissed my first girl one summer and lost my virginity a couple of summers after that. Where I felt more at home than I did in my actual home.
We were escaping from high school, but it was not lost on us, even then, that a lot of us were also escaping from our families. That’s a natural thing to want to do when you’re a teenager, but I, like many of my friends, had a good deal of extra incentive.
Things were not good at home, and they never had been. The same emotional violence that my father inflicted on us, he also inflicted on my mother. I’m not sure which was worse for me. With me and her, it had always been the most primitive, unspoken kind of monkey love—the deep comfort, even as a teenager, of just being around her. We’d hang out in the kitchen sometimes after school, and I would listen to her stories, which were all about the happy life she’d lived growing up in Toronto, before she met my father. (She, too, had been in a Jewish youth movement, and she totally understood why it meant so much to me. My father was more ambivalent. He liked that it kept me affiliated, so long as I didn’t take that kibbutz stuff too seriously.) Even then I sensed that somehow, by listening, I was making it up to her for my father’s rage and ridicule, just as she had always tried to shield and solace me. We were secret allies with a common foe, even if we couldn’t come right out and say it.
But then my father would explode into the house, and all bets were off. He was really quite inventive when it came to finding ways of tormenting her. A memory from early childhood: My mother comes into the living room to announce that supper’s ready—the supper she’s been working on the whole afternoon. My father ignores her and keeps on reading the paper. He’ll be damned if he’s going to give her the satisfaction. Something like half an hour later, so much later that my mother’s announcement has started to feel like a dream—he couldn’t have just ignored her, right?—I realize how hungry I am and dare to ask, “Didn’t Mommy say that supper was ready a long time ago?”
Such was the level of emotional discourse, and that was a relatively placid evening, because they hadn’t been screaming at each other from the moment he’d come home. A lot of days were like a running battle, a knife fight with words. Years later, I was bickering with a girlfriend one night before dinner. As I sat down to eat with a gut so clenched that I could barely choke back the food, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia. Yes, I thought, I know this feeling. This is what my childhood felt like.
Was it any wonder that I clung to the movement like a cat on a tree? We clung to each other, my friends and I; we were all, in some way, in flight.
But youth movement ended, because youth does. Like a lot of my friends, I became one of those “adults” myself in college—a counselor, a leader. But eventually we all just, so to speak, ran out of movement to be part of. We had no choice but to go our separate ways, and I was left wandering the world to mourn that titanic experience, wondering how I was ever going to find something like it again. By the time I moved to Brooklyn, seven years later, I was going in the opposite direction fast, into the solitude of my apartment and the loneliness of my work. College itself was long gone, my grad-school classmates were tunneling into their own dissertations, and what friends I still had, from the movement or elsewhere, had scattered themselves across the country.
One was in Boston, doing a postdoc; one was in Chicago, studying religion; one was in Kansas, becoming a mom; one was in California, working in film. My very closest friend, the one who knew me better than I knew myself—she was also just about my last remaining link to the movement—had settled in New Hampshire and was starting her own design business. They were all living their separate lives, and the older we grew, the worse it got. The prospect of recapturing that sense of community, that feeling of belonging to something, seemed more remote than ever. So when I had to choose a topic for my dissertation, I decided to study what I couldn’t experience. It was a classic academic move. Since I didn’t have community, I would spend my time thinking about it.