The Times Magazine 37nce a girl and boy are engaged,
there are generally three months
between engagement and wedding,
as too much idle time makes for
dangerous ideas. During that time,
groom and bride attend marriage
classes. The girl takes kallah classes
from a very holy rebitzen, and the
guy takes choson classes from a holy
rabbi. Most girls who get married have zero
clue as to how babies are born and know
nothing about sex. Forget about having a
clitoris and what an orgasm is; they don’t even
know where a penis goes. The kallah classes
are supposed to educate girls in the ways of
marriage and the marriage bed, and the guys,
who are much more knowledgeable, as the
Talmud talks about sex in detail, are taught
what is and isn’t appropriate in bed.
Suffice to say my teacher taught me
nothing about sex or pleasure and everything
about what I was supposed to do, according to
what she claimed was Torah law, to keep my
family and my children pure. The one thing
she drummed into me was that while my
husband was “doing his duty”, I was not to
think of my body, but I was to recite psalms.
I was to think of God as his seed spilt into me,
as that was the only way to ensure that my
children would come out holy.
My soon-to-be husband Yosef fared even
worse. His teacher was one of the strictest,
most pious rabbis at his yeshiva. I will never
forgive him, because he made the first years of
my marriage so miserable. He told Yosef that
it was sinful for him to kiss me too much, to
speak to me too much, that having warm
feelings about me would take away Yosef’s
concentration from his studies.
During the months preceding our wedding,
after I would daven shacharis (say the morning
prayer) each morning, I would enumerate the
few things I knew about Yosef and think how
wonderful his middos (character traits) were.
I decided not to ever think about him in
the bathroom, because the bathroom was the
least holy room of the house. Can you even
imagine? It sounds hilarious when I write it,
but I was so so absurdly naive and idealistic.
So very brainwashed.
Being that I was interested in clothing,
I was excited about getting to choose my
wedding dress. I couldn’t wait to go to the
bridal store in our community, which sold
only “kosher bridal dresses” that covered you
head to toe. I couldn’t sleep the night before,
because the bridal store was in the Chasidic
neighbourhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn,
which meant that I’d get to go to the city andwalk down 13th Avenue. Borough Park was my
Paris! It was so cosmopolitan and exciting
compared with where I lived in Monsey.
You could rent a dress for the night and
then return it after the wedding, or you could
have a dress custom-made. My mother had
been too busy to be bothered with my dress,
so my only option was renting one, and she
didn’t understand why I was disappointed.
“You’re only going to wear it for a few hours
and never again, so it seems like a waste to
make a new one for just one night.”
She was very clear with her instructions.
“There are plenty of dresses there. Pick one- quickly, please, because we have many other
errands to do, and I don’t want to have to come
back to Brooklyn again. It’s such a shlep.” It
took the whole day, back and forth on the
Monsey Trails bus. My people didn’t travel on
regular transportation. Sit with the goyim?
Where they sit all mixed together, women and
men? Impossible. Our bus only made certain
stops, in the kosher parts of the city.
I stood there feeling very sad in that dank
and smelly basement, looking through racks
of dresses worn by other kallahs, on other
wedding days. They were all so huge. I tried
so hard to be cheerful, to yell at myself that it
was just a dress, and that my mother was right:
I would be wearing it for only a matter of hours.
But I must have taken too long, as my
mother’s patience had reached its limit. She
grabbed one, this monstrosity with puffy
sleeves and a full skirt made of shiny material
masquerading as silk satin, with pasted-on
flowers and rhinestones. “Try this one.” I
walked out of that dressing room (it was really
a utility closet with boxes and brooms and a
mirror stuffed against the wall), and I felt like
the ugliest, most pathetic creature. My mother
said, “It’s perfect.” And that was that.
The next place on our list was a kosher
lingerie store. Religious people don’t sleep
naked. The walls of your house aren’t even
supposed to see your uncovered hair if you
wanted to have righteous children. Just as my
wedding dress had swallowed me whole, sodid my wedding nightgown. It was meant to
be white (easier to spot the blood that way)- and then, for the seven impure days after
my period, I had to wear white nightgowns
as well, until I reached the mikvah, the bath
I would have to dip into again to achieve
purity. And then, for the next few weeks until
your following period, you were supposed to
wear only coloured underwear and nightgowns,
and even your sheets were supposed to
be coloured, so that some small discharge
wouldn’t invalidate your “clean days”.
Oddly enough, I wasn’t afraid of the
wedding night. I was excited. I was also dying
for my first real kiss. This was going to be it.
This man – who I had now convinced myself
was a supertzaddik (super-righteous), and with
whom I was supposed to be one – was going
to kiss me, and it was going to be magical and
we would live happily ever after.
The day of the wedding arrived amid the
outbreak of the Gulf War, with Scud missiles
exploding all over Israel. People brought radios
to our wedding, because most had relatives in
Israel and they were worried for loved ones.
I would start the wedding with my own
hair, but after the chuppah, the wedding
canopy where the marriage ceremony would
be performed, and the yichud room, where
Yosef and I were supposed to go for a few
minutes after the ceremony and touch one
another for the first time to show we were
truly married, I would have to put on my wig.
Those two hours before the chuppah would be
the last hours ever that my hair would feel the
wind or get kissed by the sun.
The woman who did my make-up would
have done well as a make-up artist on a set of
Star Wars. She painted two bright streaks of
neon pink across my perfect 19-year-old skin,
and my eyes were covered in so much green
eyeshadow that it was difficult to blink.
Between the puffy-sleeved gown and the
bizarre face paint, I looked like a mad Wes
Craven version of a child bride.
As I sat trembling and praying under my
veil, hearing the tide of male voices coming
toward me, I have never been so afraid in my
life. When they lifted my veil and I saw the
weak, pale face of my soon-to-be husband,
I was filled with dread. It hit me then: the
realisation that I was putting my life, my
future in the hands of a complete stranger.
And this was it. Too late to change. He was
my future, and I would end up following his
command and his rule for the rest of my life. n
Extracted from Brazen by Julia Haart, published
on April 12 by Endeavour (£18.99)O
JULIA HAART IN HER OWN WORDS
‘FORGET ORGASMS.
MOST GIRLS HAVE
ZERO CLUE HOW BABIES
ARE BORN’
‘I sat trembling under my veil. I was filled with dread’