“What’s there to know?” my father answered. “She’s a girl. She’s eighteen. Erlich and tzniyusdig. I know her father. A good shidduch”
The first I heard about a pair of pants and a skirt being the only criteria for a match was the summer before I turned eighteen.
“Nu?” my father said quietly on my seventeenth birthday. “It’s time to rebuild, and to bring us nachas.”
My life was a pile of bricks I needed to build into something, the quicker the better.
If he could, my father would’ve made me a bar mitzvah when I was eight, just to get things moving. Another brick added to the edifice of Yiddishkeit slowly blossoming in Williamsburg. He would’ve plopped a yarmulke on my head before I let out my first wail and put me straight into yeshivah gedolah at my bar mitzvah.
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