Bungalow Summer - Part I

For sentimental reasons, I had neglected to remove my dead sister’s number from my phone. Seven years passed, and late one night I pressed it by mistake. Seconds after hanging up with the man who’d usurped her phone number, I began receiving pushy texts and calls from him. His name was Dave and he was an ultra Orthodox Jew living in the much scrutinized town of Monsey, New York–a place where, four decades earlier, I’d had a shocking and sinister experience that felt like something from ancient Biblical times. Could Dave be one of the men who was in the dark woods that day?

THIS IS PART 1 of a FIVE-PART STORY

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

For sentimental reasons, I had neglected to remove my dead sister’s number from my phone. Seven years passed, and late one night I pressed it by mistake. A male voice answered and I assumed it was my brother-in-law who, also perhaps for sentimental reasons, had hung onto the number. “Morty?” I said. 

The man at the other end said, “This isn’t Morty.”

I explained that his number was the same as my late sister’s and that I’d inadvertently pressed my finger on it. Seconds after hanging up, I began receiving texts from him. “Call or text whenever you want,” he wrote. “I don’t sleep much, so I’d be happy to engage in conversation.”

I texted him a happy face and assumed that would be the end of it. But the next day he called me, and during the course of our conversation I learned that he was an ultra orthodox Jew living in the much scrutinized town of Monsey, New York.

Well, I knew Monsey, having spent a summer near there. The man, who introduced himself as Dave, wanted to know if A) I was Jewish, and B) if I was married. I told him I was a secular Jew and yes, I had a husband of many years. It turned out that Dave was looking for a wife. His own wife had kicked him out after bearing four children.

Poor Dave was lonely and miserable, and had I said I was single, would happily have flown me up to New York and married me even though we were total strangers.

Dave called me several times and he was pushy, trying to sell his brand of Judaism, which he insisted was joyous and all-consuming, the only belief system any person who identified as Jewish should engage in. Ugh. I grew up without religion of any kind. My parents had escaped Hitler Germany under duress. I knew I was Jewish, but that was in name only, an ethnicity that set me slightly apart from others. We never went to synagogue, never practiced any of the many dictates of our inherited faith. I didn’t know a single prayer, not even the one recited as Friday evening candles were lit to honor the Shabbat. My mother celebrated Christmas, buying and decorating the tallest, bushiest tree she could find and installing colorful towers of gifts beneath its furry branches. I think she just wanted us to be regular Americans, but we weren’t: we had too sad and desperate a story behind us.

Next: Read Bungalow Summer, Part 2 >>