In her memoir, she recalls hiding her contraband Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott books: ' Once a year when Zeidy inspects the house for Passover, poking through our things, we hover anxiously, terrified of being found out.
She suggests that at age 12, she was sexually assaulted by a cousin and was made to feel it was her problem: 'It’s obviously all your fault and not his, and you need to keep quiet about it,' she told the newspaper. She rode in a car without a seatbelt, never visited a doctor and was made to respect all older Hasid men, even if they posed a threat to her wellbeing. She told the Post that the emphasis on faith was so all-pervading that every day she was forced to put her life into the hands of God - and health and safety was all but ignored by her family and friends. Reading an English book is even worse it leaves my soul vulnerable, a welcome mat put out for the devil.' An impure language, Zeidy says, acts like a poison to the soul. “Der tumeneh shprach!” he thunders at me when he overhears me speaking to my cousins in English. I wither instantly in the heat of his scorn. When my zeide gets angry, his long white beard seems to lift up and spread around his face like a fiery flame.
Bubby might get away with a scolding, but I would not be spared the full extent of my grandfather’s wrath. We both know that our small stash of secular books would shock my grandfather more than a pile of chametz, the forbidden leavening, ever could. She is as defensive as I am when he rummages through her lingerie.
Only when I tell him that this is my private female stuff does he desist, unwilling to violate a woman’s privacy, and move on to my grandmother’s wardrobe. Zeidy even rifles through my underwear drawer. Would Bubby tattle on me? I hide my books under the bed, and she hides hers in her lingerie, and once a year when Zeidy inspects the house for Passover, poking through our things, we hover anxiously, terrified of being found out. Or perhaps I have only imagined her complicity there is a chance this agreement is only one-sided. Maybe Bubby knows about them, but she won’t say anything about mine if I don’t say anything about hers.
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