On Thursday, November 21 at 7 p.m., Federation welcomes Leah Lax, author and librettist whose new book, Not From Here: The Song of America, follows her journey back into society through listening to new immigrants tell their stories.
This free program will be presented via Zoom. Please visit our calendar of events at jewishberkshires.org to register. Part of Jewish Literary Voices: A Federation Series in collaboration with The Jewish Book Council.
When Leah Lax was asked by the Houston Grand Opera to create a piece celebrating local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to accounts of upheaval, migration, and arrival told to her in confidence by people new to this country from around the globe. Material she gathered for the opera project became the basis of Not From Here.
BJV Interview: Leah Lax
Leah Lax’s first book, the memoir Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home, is an inward-looking account of her experience within the Chabad Hasidic community, which she joined in the mid-1970s at age sixteen as a way to escape a dysfunctional home and in which she remained for three decades. Trapped in an unsatisfying marriage and the mother of seven children, Lax was temperamentally unsuited for that life – to carry on, she had to not only suppress her artistic and questioning nature, but also her attraction to women rather than men. While much of the narrative centers on Lax’s frustrations living within the strictures of the Hasidic world – and she can be scathing and specific – the latter sections chronicle her emergence from it and her establishment of a new secular and sexual identity.
Her experience of leaving one life to begin another informs her latest book, Not From Here, which is an outward-looking work of journalism/oral history in which she tells the stories of immigrants to the United States who settled in the Houston area, where she lives. Although some of the stories begin with how her subject escaped perilous conditions in their native lands, Lax is particularly sensitive in capturing their experience of becoming American while retaining a consciousness shaped by the cultures they left behind. As an American who lived within a subculture apart from the mainstream, Lax relates these immigrants’ stories with a distinct empathy. In doing so, Lax shows how an experience that might strike most of us as mundane – resettling in a Texas suburb – can be, for a non-American coming to it, a complex and transcendent life journey.
In October, the BJV caught up with Leah for a wide-ranging conversation about her immigration project and the life and career experiences that inform her latest works. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
In Uncovered, you write about what it was like to be a ba’alat teshuva in the Chabad movement of the 1970s and 1980s. What was that experience like?
It was absolutely at the early beginnings of their ba’al teshuva outreach and they didn't have any organizations specifically for them or their education. The system of shluchim, or emissaries, was really raw. I mean, these guys were basically given not enough money to get bus tickets and schnorrer the few kosher meals they could find across the country. And they would find those lonely old Jews that had landed in little towns who could speak Yiddish. Those young men were often really, really raw in the world, too.
When I joined them, I found a lot of ex-hippies. I'd been enamored with the hippie movement. I loved its disdain of materialism and its secular spiritual side. I mean, the make love, not war, and all that. Those were my formative years, and I found lots of ex-hippies that transferred really naturally right into Chabad. I knew lots of guys that showed up with long hair, and they already had the beard because of the hippie look. They were counterculture people – because that was a sector that they would be successful with.
I was 17 years old when I first joined them, and damaged and insecure, and I wanted to please people, and I wanted to feel safe. I had stars in my eyes about the idealism. I felt this was going to be a safe place for me and for my children. It's like, here, men are never bad to women because there are rules. Here, women never get hurt because everybody adheres to the laws, and the law is kind, and good, and loving. How sad to think about it now, but I believed it. That's why I came up to that conclusion that you never get to grow up in an ultra-Orthodox world. I mean, what is adolescence? It's rebellion. It's saying, let me experiment with breaking rules. Let me reject the ideas of my parents because I have to muck around and figure out what I believe. Nobody gets to do that. It's a whole world of arrested adolescence.
When I was read your book, I realized is that you were being told, as a husband and a wife, and as a Jewish man and a Jewish woman, you were being fixed into some cosmic order, just like you said, where things work out. But what you come to understand is that that life is a human construct in which human beings have to live. And as a human construct, it's inherently imperfect.
There's something drug-like about being told God will love you You can envelop yourself in that sense of being loved. Most people are love starved. I wasn't the only one. And it's not only drug-like, but there's also this very persistent social pressure that is unspoken. We had all kinds of people in our community, but there is this very strong social pressure to conform. Once you have children, you're way more vulnerable to conform. Sometimes you think it's for their sake. Anyway, very often, until people feel a personal and direct conflict, they don't care about the flaws the system.
I did the same until I came to terms with two things that would never fly within the system, two things that were earth-shattering, life-changing, immutable forces – and I realized that I was the only one that was going to acknowledge them. For the first time in my life, I was going to have to overrule that overarching authority and make my own decision, because if I put my life in the hands of rabbis, then I could die, either physically or spiritually. So the first was having an abortion. [Note: After her seventh child was born prematurely, upon becoming pregnant again, Lax determined that trying to have another child could damage her health or end her life.] I was arguing with myself, saying, ‘You're a monster, and this is terrible. How could you even think of such a thing?’ And yet I kept putting that foot in front of the other. It was like, you know you're going to die. You have to turn and run. It's very deeply instinctual. [Note: A rabbi determined that an abortion could be permitted given her circumstances.]
The second thing was that once I took control of my being…once I took control of my body and said ‘no, I woke up. I’d been having insomnia for years and suppressing the dreams or having these erotic lesbian dreams. I would wake up and go, ‘That's weird,’ and just go in the kitchen, go to work.
Once I became that more conscious because of the abortion, I was flooded with a clear sense of where my desires belong and what desire is and who I am. This became something completely irrefutable, immutable part of me. Because I grew up in Chabad, with this very deep belief that I have a precious soul from God, I thought that God doesn't make mistakes. This part of me is essential to my joy, to my ability to be creative as a creative person, to my functioning in the world. Sexuality – again, straight out of Judaism, is not peripheral. It's key. There’s a quote from Talmud that says, If it wasn't for that urge, a man would never build a house or plant a vineyard. In other words, this sexual drive is foundational to society, to our being communal, civilized people. It is who we are. It wasn't something to suppress and say, ‘Oh, trivial.’ It was me. I got that from my upbringing in Chabad.
And then the conclusion – if that system doesn't recognize me, then they're wrong, not me. And my faith came falling down. I knew I was going to have to leave, but I looked at my kids and went, Oh, I can't do this. I just went through the motions. But I very intently potentially allowed myself to fall in love. I had to live. I had to have that experience before I died.
It takes an incredible amount of courage, even if you're leaving behind something that's not satisfying to you, to leave the thing you know and embark on a new journey where nothing is written, nothing is ordained. How did your experience leaving Chabad and orthodoxy bring you into the subject of immigration?
[Lax went to university and obtained a degree in creative writing. She says her first important creative work was as co-creator of The Mikvah Project, a touring exhibit of photographs and interviews documenting the resurgence of the Jewish rite of immersion in a ritual bath. The exhibit toured 26 cities in the US. In 2005, she received a call from the Houston Grand Opera asking if she would like to write an opera about immigration. Knowing nothing about opera, she at first demurred, although she bonded personally with the company’s director and eventually agreed. To research the project, Lax started interviewing immigrants to Houston – a process that took on a life of its own and became not only an opera, but the book Not From Here.]
A really big part of why I caved and said yes was that I deeply felt that I was an immigrant, too, in my own society. I was out of step culturally. It took me years to catch up. And the truth is I will never catch up. I missed 30 years of American culture. Can you imagine? I didn't know how to figure tax on a tip in a restaurant. I didn't know how to pay my insurance or take a mortgage. I didn't know how – my husband did everything. But I also, I found new friends. We could meet for lunch and there’d be a reference to a movie or to something from the immediate past that everyone knew. I would just go, huh? I had a girlfriend at the time who used to call it ‘a Rip thing’ – like I was Rip Van Winkle.
I started that project two years out of Chabad. I was still this stranger, an immigrant in my own country. How must they feel? I would sit down to interview them and say: ‘Please – start with “I was born...” Not From Here has something like 80,000 words in it. The libretto for a 90-minute opera has about 3,000 words. And I collected is just a small portion of the material. I had over a thousand pages of transcripts. So why was I so driven? It's because I needed to understand. It's because I felt such an affinity, because I wasn't going to leave until I got the whole story.
I had this feeling that not only was I finding my community, but that It was everywhere. I saw all this overlap with what we call Jewish and is really immigrant. I'll just give you one example. In Houston, you can find a Swahili school, a Chinese school, an Urdu school, et cetera. They're all connected, except for the Chinese one, to a house of worship. Because this is how you stay ethnically connected. This is who you are. They stay connected, regardless of belief, to their form of a religion that they practice in their area of their home country, with services in their language. I have five sons. I had to take them through learning to chant an entire Torah portion, no cuts, like in the conservative world and after. And it's intense. And they had to learn the maamIer (discourse) that the boys recited, which is just an unbelievable institution. They were 12-year-old boys. It's just an ancient rite of passage that is imprinted on them right at the cusp of adulthood.
Let me ask you to take it back one second. Assimilation in general has been problematic in United States since air travel became more common. People are not necessarily leaving behind the old country – they have a way of getting back to it. The Internet has made it easier for people to stay connected with the culture in another country where they came from, as well. Is an immigrant to the US going to be as successful if they are keeping a foot in both worlds?
Now, you're talking about being a hyphenated-American. What I saw was that everybody was struggling with assimilation and with the sense of their culture waning, but they also had a great need to hold on. The people that figured out that balance and were able to successfully pass it on to their children and that were the most balanced, were the people who are allowed to go back home to their original country to reinforce that connection, even though they were devotedly American. It's like this is who we were, is part of who we are, and this is who we are now. It's a balancing act.
With all the trauma that Jewish people brought to this country, we were people who could never go back home. It is universal that people bring loss when they migrate, and in many cases, trauma, even in the best of circumstances. Otherwise, why would they leave everything and come here? It's rarely just for money. Even if they come for a positive reason, there's such a sense of nostalgia and loss. So they have to adjust to that, and they do that by reformulating that balance. Nobody can erase it. It's the same thing we're talking about. Nobody can erase who they were or who they are. So they have to understand that being a what I call a hyphenated-American is part of being an American.
This idea reformulated my entire sense of myself as a Jew, as an American, my sense of this country, because the constant influx of immigrants is why we are who we are. It's not coincidental. When you have the people around the table, hypothetically, looking at a problem, if everybody's coming from the same place with the same mindset, you get a two-dimensional view of the problem, period. But when you have people around the table and everybody's from a different place. They just have different viewpoints. You put them all together and you get surprising new ideas, and then they feed off each other.
I intuited, because of where I'm coming from, all this incredible, incredible overlap and this understanding of the struggle with assimilation and waning identity and how deeply we all need to hold on to It's not either or. We have to dance on the hyphen and find the balance.