For anybody who doesn’t already know, I live in this really Hasidic Jewish neighborhood…and when I say neighborhood, I mean it goes on for at least 10 blocks in all directions. 10 blocks of men dressed in black with extremely uncomfortable-looking headgear. 10 blocks of modest, ethereal women with their heads, elbows, and knees covered, pushing baby carriages (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Hasidic woman walking around without a baby carriage, or very rarely, her husband). 10 blocks of Yiddish signs I can’t read. 10 blocks of trying to “blend in” and look “nonchalant” and figuring out how not to make eye contact accidentally. Let me tell you, I stick out like a sore thumb. As someone who knows only a little bit about Hasidism (what I know I know only from reading Chaim Potok novels), I can’t pretend to understand my neighbors in the slightest. But as odd as they seem to me, I’m like an alien to them. Mothers glare at me if I speak to their children. The children act like children and are insatiably curious about everything about me, my car, my bicycle, my funny fuschia-tinted hair. They press their faces up to my car windows. They stick their tongues out at me. I’m a woman with my elbows and knees and hair naked to the world, walking around alone, adjusting my bicycle seat alone, moving my stuff into my apartment alone, and with the sort of looks I get, I’m starting to feel like this is some sort of blasphemy or something. I mean, it’s really bad. Sometimes I even cross the street when I go to work so I can avoid the gauntlet of the morning school-bus crowd.
But then on flip side it’s also extremely fascinating to live here. It’s like stepping backwards into some vague time period in some vague past in the US. Hasidic women really fascinate me. I wonder what they’re thinking while they’re pushing their uniformly black baby buggies. I wonder if they’re happy. They wear big colorful kerchiefs, clumsy wigs, round, tight, 30s-style hats with a feather, or sometimes just a thin scarf to cover their hair modestly. They wear lots of striped shirts and dresses and skirts. So much so I’m starting to think of that particular navy-blue striped pattern as “hasidic stripes”. They wear loose long-sleeved or three-quarter sleeved blouses and mid-calf length skirts. Sometimes their skirts are flowing, and sometimes they’re straight. I’ve never seen them wear pants. They walk very slowly, in this dignified, otherworldly sort of manner. One thinks of some movie from the 30s or something. I can’t imagine them crouching or sitting on the ground cross-legged like I do. They never seem to sweat or be out of breath. They come in two sizes: underweight and post-babies fat. They wear nylons and low, modest, solid colored heels. The only time I saw a Hasidic woman talk to a non-Jewish person, it was late at night and this woman was directing a black woman and a black man to clean up some garbage in front of her apartment. She was standoffish, perched on her balcony instead of standing on the ground and clutching her gowns around her with one hand while gesturing with the other. It was just a weird picture to my brain. I’m not saying that she was particularly doing anything demonstratively racist or bad (I didn’t really know what the story was), it was just that it seemed weird.
Hasidic children seemed to be dressed in matching clothes according to what family they come from. I’m really not kidding. All the girls in the family will be wearing different sizes of the same dress if they go out. The boys all wear black and white uniformly. I’m reminded of the old days when I used to go to church and my mother would have us all wear our “sunday best”. That’s the type of clothing they’ll wear. I’m not trying to be mean in my observations, by the way. It’s just a puzzle to me, and a world that I can’t, by my nature, penetrate, so I remain extremely curious. I wonder what they think about me, or if they think anything at all. Sometimes I’m resentful. It’s them I rent my shitty warehouse apartment from…they should accept the fact that I live here….they’re the ones who control that. Sometimes I’m wistful…like I wish I weren’t afraid to talk to them. The men don’t intrigue me very much, but the women seem like they’d be really interesting to talk to, if I could find a woman who didn’t glare too much at me.
Anyways I hope you enjoyed your little peek into my neighborhood life. Here’s a pic. Cheerio!
