Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (4 page)

Yoni didn’t judge others. There was something about his transparence, his vulnerable blend of impatience, suggestibility, and ardor that inspired me to tell the truth.

“Yeah,” I said, “it sucks.”

“Aw, man. That’s some heavy shi—,” he said, swallowing the end of his thought with a giant gulp from his water pipe.

I had to concede the point. My job was freelance, meaning I got paid almost nothing per article, forced to hustle hard to make rent. I had neither job security, nor health benefits. I was effectively broke.

To compound matters, I had recently suffered a bit of a demotion, even within this humble station of mine. I had been writing metro news and features for my hometown paper, the
Boston Globe
. Yet for quixotic reasons—namely, that I enjoyed writing obits—I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city’s dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.

And there was other bad news from the front. Newspapers weren’t hiring. I was told not to expect a promotion at the
Globe
, regardless of how hard I worked. The rickety ship of newspaper journalism was rapidly sinking. Everyone was telling me, Get out while you can. An editor told me that if I stayed too long, there would be only two obits left to write: the
Boston Globe
’s and mine. I dealt with his joke with characteristic aplomb and a mild case of stress-induced hives.

I knew that writing obits would be short-lived. But, since I enjoyed the work, I’d delayed searching for something new. Then one day, while helping a sweet but disorganized young anarchist, a friend of my family, find a job, I came across an unusual ad on Craig’s List. It was brief:
Boston, Prison Librarian, full time, union benefits
. I certainly hadn’t known that prisons hired full-time librarians. To me, libraries and prisons seemed like polar opposites. Perhaps even at cross-purposes, like a pie-baking class at Marine boot camp. Something about it sounded fishy. Out of sheer curiosity I inquired about the job.

The more I learned, though, the more interested I became. At first, I’d assumed that switching from the corpse beat to prison work would be, from an existential perspective, a lateral move. But as a woman from the prison described the position to me over the phone, I became aware of the things absent from my current work life: there was a strong social dimension to this new job, I’d be working as part of a big staff and doing some teaching. Working as an obituary man, I was starting to get lonely, disconnected.

Best of all was the promise of job security and health insurance. But, still, I was on the fence. Was this another half-baked scheme, like the All Bar Mitzvah Network?

T
hese were the questions churning around my feverish brain as I made my rounds at the wedding. It was the hors d’oeuvres hour—affectionately known in Orthodox circles as “the shmorg,” which, though short for smorgasbord, is actually more like fifteen pornographically proportioned smorgasbords.

Through my uncut bangs, I observed my former classmates. They were becoming bankers, doctors, lawyers, professors, rabbis. They were getting married, and many already had their first children. They were landowners, budding philanthropists, pillars of their communities. They had retirement funds, and college funds for their infants. They were busy with serious commitments. And religious.

In the midst of my panic-attack doom-and-gloom, I reaffirmed my commitment to not becoming a good Orthodox Jewish doctor or lawyer. The most notorious Jewish terrorists of recent times, Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down twenty-nine Palestinians at prayer in Hebron, and Yigal Amir, the man who murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin were a good Orthodox Jewish doctor and a good Orthodox Jewish lawyer, respectively. You didn’t see formerly Orthodox obituary writers gunning anyone down.

But aside from not engaging in religious-fueled political violence, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. And, to my dismay, the yearbook prediction made by these very people was surprisingly accurate.
Avi will be a shepherd in the Negev
. Here I was, seven years hence, out to pasture, living hand-to-mouth. Even more disturbing was the fear that this figurative sense of being out to pasture might, eventually, lead to the quite literal version. If a shepherding position had opened up, I probably would have sent in a résumé.

To my great relief, these waves of anxiety were kept at bay by the simple comforts provided so generously, so systematically, by the shmorg. The unbridled, unrepentant American Jewish optimism that finds expression in the cocktail weenie dipped in a whole mustard sauce; skyscrapers and oceanliners of sushi; small piles of the flaky, the spinachy, the mushroomy; skewers of barbecued Korean steak tips and Hawaiian chicken; corned beef, pastrami, and turkey carving stations; breads, egg rolls, crepes, pastas, salads, fishes, tofus, fruit baskets the square footage of medium-sized New York City apartments. And booze. All of it served as a softening agent to conversations about what
shul
I belonged to or what product just became kosher and made it fun to listen to gossip regarding a certain married woman’s Orthodox-mandated wig (“you wouldn’t
believe
how much she paid for it”). There were worse ways to pass a Sunday evening.

But, still, I was sticking to my mission. Avoid rabbis. I’d already been to too many events in which I’d ended up in heated debates, condemned for my move to irreligiosity.

I had disappointed my teachers, many of whom I still admired. I obeyed none of the Jewish laws. Nothing. I was a complete heretic. Their displeasure was magnified by the fact that I had once been a promising, or, at least, devoted, yeshiva student.

Some highlights from my youth as a zealot. At age fourteen, I quit my yeshiva high school basketball team—the mighty MCATS—to dedicate myself to the study of Torah. I walked around with a pocket edition of the
Mishna
, the central Jewish legal text, codified in the third century, and studied the cover off of it. During any lull in the day, and I mean
any
, I’d whip it out. Whenever there was literally a second to spare, walking down the hall, waiting for a bus, for five minutes between classes, for fifteen seconds while a teacher paused to find his place in a book. I took the rabbinic injunction of “not wasting a moment for the study of Torah” literally.

I didn’t stop there. Unhappy that my school, whose schedule was a mere 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., offered only one and a half hours of Talmud a day, I lobbied successfully for an extra, voluntary Talmud class on Wednesday nights that met until 7:30. I passed on Dylan tickets to attend a weekly Saturday night Torah discussion group (that I had organized). I founded and ran a Torah-studies journal. Refused to shake women’s hands. Won an award at graduation for commitment to Torah study. Spent an inordinate number of teenage hours in silent prayer.

During summers, I’d jet off to a yeshiva in a West Bank settlement and study for fourteen hours a day. Talmud Camp in the ancient Judean heartland, a.k.a. the Occupied Territories—this was my paradise. Even my parents, who were religious, were concerned about my fervor.

For my senior year project I didn’t get an internship at a newspaper or a research lab. I didn’t volunteer at a soup kitchen. Instead I sat in solitude and studied the volume of the Talmud dedicated to corporeal punishment. As indicated by its refreshingly straightforward title,
Lashes
, this legal volume explores, in pitiless detail, the dozens of instances in which the rabbis reserved the right to arrest an offender and flog the crap out of this person (literally, as they note in chapter three). And how it was done. The strangest part about my careful study of
Lashes
was that I didn’t find it strange at all. Neither did my rabbis, who were in fact quite encouraging.

After high school, I spent two years in yeshiva, first on the West Bank and then in New York City. But now I neglected the whole thing. I was a big-time Orthodox failure.

I
n the bathroom at the wedding my plan came to an abrupt end when a stall opened and Rabbi Blumenthal emerged. I’d never fully appreciated how much like a pygmy owl Rabbi Blumenthal looked. He was short, compact, with a fine, close-cropped beard that seamlessly blended into a close-cropped haircut, forming a white halo around his remarkably round head. This frame offset a small dark face, two large unblinking eyes, a sharp efficient little nose. It might have been an image of diminutive cuteness were it not for its air of menace. The mouth was nowhere to be seen. The eyes just looked and looked and looked and observed and gave nothing away.

Years ago, he had taught us the sublime, morality-intoxicated poetry of the prophet of Isaiah. The class was utter chaos. Nobody had paid attention. Students goofed off incessantly, some sat with their backs to the rabbi, chatting and laughing. People walked about freely, forgetting entirely that there was a teacher at the head of the classroom.

The only students who listened were me and another boy, a Torah prodigy and math wiz whose name was also Avi. We, the two zealots with identical names, sat all the way up front, our two desks pressed right up to the rabbi’s and to each other’s—a three-bulbed potted Torah plant swaying in the wind.

Now here was Rabbi Blumenthal in the bathroom, unblinking and thoughtful as ever. He washed his hands meticulously, like a surgeon, and made guarded small talk, gathering information about where I’d been these past few years since graduating high school. I told him about Bugs Bunny and obituaries and about my hazy aspirations. In my drug-induced state, I added some weird asides about how nothing really mattered since the sun is going to die anyway. Then I mentioned the possibility of working in a prison library.

The rabbi assumed his raptorial gaze. His eyes narrowed. The killer bird spoke.

“A prison?” he said. “Why would you do that? Don’t do that.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“You should be involved in the Jewish community. Why would you waste your time with that?”

He adopted an annoyed, but professional, manner and ticked off a litany of questions, which I answered in order. No, I confessed, I did not pray or put on
tefillin. No
, I did not observe Shabbat or keep kosher. And yes, I added, unprompted, I loved shrimp.
Loved it!
They should serve it at shmorgs.

“What happened to you?” he said.

W
hat happened?
It’s the first question a reporter tries to answer. For an obituary writer, the question is, What happened in this person’s life? What were the facts, and what did these facts amount to? Every morning a fateful message would appear in my inbox, an email whose subject line was simply a person’s name. McMahon, Kovar-Sletten, Montague, Goolkasian. These were the names of the dead. I would inhabit their realm until bedtime. Often I’d dream about them.

The email from my editor would say something like, “This person seems kind of interesting, why don’t you check her out.” This message, in which an entire life was reduced to “kind of interesting,” was the first of many poignant moments in my day. I spoke to as many people as possible. Each interview expanded the story of the life, threw in a new twist. Sometimes there were tears, or laughter. Sometimes bitterness, the disclosure of secrets, of regrets. People would confide in me, speak to me for much longer than they’d intended. It sometimes felt as though I were a rabbi or priest making a pastoral call, helping people cope with the issues of life and death and mourning, especially when I made housecalls for interviews. I would sit with the mourners, look at photographs, old letters, and try to piece together the life.

But, ultimately, my deadline loomed. I was forced to cut the conversation short, sit down, organize competing versions of the biography, the disparate details, the secrets and semi-secrets, inconclusive plotlines, mysteries, coincidences, and moments of truth, and make sense of an entire life in a thousand words. The conclusion of the obituary, a person’s life story, was a simple, deceptively neutral list of names, the survivors. The omissions to this list and its length—extended or brief—often articulated more than any quotation could.

When you write obits it is impossible to avoid thinking of death—or more precisely, of the totality of a life: why it turned out the way it did, how it might have turned out differently, how one thing led to the next (usually by accident), what decisions and crucibles a person faced, what was left behind. I had pieced together the lives of many people, but hadn’t dared do it for myself.

I
n the hotel ballroom, the music started.

The joy at an Orthodox Jewish wedding borders on desperation. Before long, it gives way to fits of mania, first individual, then collective, culminating in widespread hysteria and, finally, in small-scale acts of violence. It is the ultimate release of the community’s worst fears, stewing for millennia: the never-ending sense of persecution, a feeling so dense and often justified that it itself is a form of persecution. The wedding is a celebration of a new young family with its promise that at least another generation, a new guard of Jews, will help stem the tide of history, repel the constantly impending genocide at the hands of notable haters, Pharaoh, Haman, Hitler, Stalin, Ahmadinejad, and Mel Gibson—and, worse, the self-haters within the community who aid this cause by marrying gentiles, eating shrimp cocktail, criticizing Israel’s right wing, or making Holocaust jokes.

This outpouring, coupled with the effects of alcohol on people who are of below average height and don’t tend to drink, can be dramatic. Which is to say, things get rowdy.

It doesn’t take long before the trappings of a Western wedding ceremony, with its stifling pageantry, fall by the wayside, and the truth emerges: a Jewish wedding is a hoedown, sweaty and tribal. Buttoned-up outfits—designed for cocktails on moonlit verandahs— quickly become a hindrance. Men loosen their black ties and toss away their jackets, women hike up their gowns (modestly). Respected physicians and CEOs juggle, lift each other onto their shoulders, throw each other in the air, break-dance, wrap their arms around each other, catcall, hug strangers. Meanwhile, the waitstaff stand by and exchange looks.