We’re trading Brooklyns, moving from the thriving, throbbing 24-hour Crown Heights – where the noise of blasting reggae at 3 AM is matched only by the noise of blasting cantorial music at 3 AM – trading it in for the placid, tree-lined, and, yes, backyard-filled streets of Flatbush. My Hasidic friends think I’m selling out and moving to a Modern Orthodox neighborhood. My non-Hasidic friends think I’m selling out and moving to the suburbs.
The way some writers obsess about relationships — whether it’s poets reading poems about how they want to sleep with another poet in the audience, or novelists writing thinly-disguised (or not-disguised) accounts of their trysts/flings/marriages — I obsess about cities.
There was a crazy Nor’easter over the weekend, and we had to go to Jersey – an activity rarely on any Brooklynite’s top ten list, and especially not on a rainy Saturday night. But there was a family bar mitzvah, and we are nothing if not devoted to the family.
Hasidic Jews might not be the number one most-fetishized religious group by the media – my Muslim punk rock friends would probably win that particular medal – but, dammit, we get our fair share of attention.
