Part I.  The Deviant (1938-1958)

The moment he came home from university I knew that he had done something unspeakable, that he had broken the most important of our rules. When he brought her home all I could think was that the schmuck was asking for trouble, defying everything he had been brought up to know.  But this is Howard Mordecai we are talking about, and Howard had a knack for getting away with even the most horrific of crimes.  As can be expected, he came out of the ordeal virtually unscathed.  It was the girl who really got screwed over.

A Brief History of Our Genius
Howard was a genius child, not like the kind every parent claims they possess, not the kind that just has a calculator for a brain—though Howard had that too.  Howard was a mathematical mastermind.  There was no equation, theory, or idea he encountered that he could not comprehend .  Growing up as a genius child in a tenement with a million other Israelites was not uncommon, but he was treated as if he was the long lost Messiah.  Granted, he was not your average yiddisher kop.  He had one of those impossibly large heads, which always seemed to weigh him down when he tried to run.  Despite his intellectual talents, Howard had a knack for being the absolute worst in the pathetic physical education class the state of New York required our Yeshiva to include in the curriculum. (Let’s be honest, making a bunch of gangly Jewish boys attempt to run the mile was like asking a grasshopper to turn into superman.  We had neither the drive nor the athletic ability to ever break eight minutes.)  
Apart from gym class, Howard was pretty much incredible at everything school had to offer.  He soared through his classes: Science, English, Hebrew, Geography, (he had a photographic memory so the schmuck had a map of the entire globe virtually etched into his thick skull).  While he was the pride and joy of all his teachers, his true passion was Math, specifically as it applied to writing proofs, concretizing an idea into logical steps.  Howard was fascinated not by a2+b2=c2 and boring stuff like that, but by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. 
To me it all looked like mumbo-jumbo, like a bunch of random squiggles, but to my brother, equations like this one had aesthetic value.  To him, they were the most beautiful creations on earth.  Though I never really understood the subject, math for Howard was a religion.  He was obsessed with the idea of a constant, an unchanging, faithful, and eternally dependable element in a world full of variation and unpredictability.  
You have to understand that Howard saw the world differently from you and me.  He was not even your average genius.  His brain simply moved faster, could hold more knowledge than that of any normal human being.  His teachers loved this.  I loved it too. I thought he was amazing, my genius big brother.  But most people hated him, especially the other neighborhood guys.  In retrospect, he was a bit of an arrogant schmuck, knew how to push buttons and was constantly showing off.  His unrelenting pomposity tended to get us in trouble with the neighborhood kids.  The Italian gangs who lived down on the first floor of the building were not fans of Howard’s number theory spiels, and after identifying us as easy targets, they took great pleasure in pummeling us to the floor.  I dreaded encountering those guys, peaking out into the hall before leaving our tenement, clutching my journal and hurrying to catch up with Howard who would plunge fearlessly down the stairs with his trusty protractor in one hand some linear algebra textbook in the other.

Refusing to Comply
By high school Howard started to get restless.  Both school and life were becoming exceedingly boring for him, like he was moving at hyper speed and everything around him was proceeding in slow motion.  He started arriving at the yeshiva three hours early so he could use the classrooms for his experiments and the blackboards for his calculations.  Imagine the anger of our reb when he entered his classroom one morning to find all the digits of pi written out on the blackboard, spiraling around the room, covering his neatly printed Alef Bet Gimel Dalet He. 
I would come willingly with Howard each morning, excited to be included his little experiments and latest hypotheses.  I would drag myself out of bed at 4:00am, grab my journal, and begin the long walk through the dark, sleeping city, hurrying to keep up with the annoyingly long strides of my big brother.
Eventually Howard’s teachers had a meeting with the rabbis of our synagogue and decided Howard was not fit for normal schooling and his intended fate as the first-born son of his house.  Though he was expected to be a good Yeshiva bocher, Howard never hid the fact that all he wanted to do was study math. Feh!  The guy had more chutzpah than anyone I’ve ever known.  To Howard, things like pleasantries, manners, and respect for elders were all just gehockteh leber in comparison to the innumerable proofs, discoveries, and hypothesis swirling around in his oversized brain.  Disregarding his responsibilities to his family and community, Howard refused to study to become a rabbi and insisted on attending a gentile university instead.
This decision was one our parents took a long time to accept, for they were the epitome of traditionalists. They played by The Book of Moses, didn’t believe in deviation, which was logical as they both worked the assembly line .  Attempting in vain to pull him out of his equations and into the synagogue, our mother had to practically drag her kvetching son out of his room every Friday night for Shabbat services.  Since they could barely stand dumping the responsibility of the family rabbi onto my shoulders, you can imagine the chaos that erupted when Howard, the firstborn deviant, brought home a gentile.   Let me tell you, the scene wasn’t pretty.
The Unforgiveable Sin
Honestly, I couldn’t believe he had the chutzpah to do what he did, but he marched that blond head right into our living room and introduced her: Mom, Dad, I would like you to meet ______. 
For a moment the silence was deafening, for the unspoken rule had been broken, the peace undeniably disrupted. That silence was so strong, so palpable that Howard would later swear that during those few seconds an invisible barrier formed between him and the traditionalists.  No one could believe what was going on.  ____ wasn’t just a gentile, she was the gentile, the gentiliest gentile I had ever seen. 
After recovering from the blinding flash of initial shock, our parents were polite enough.  They exchanged pleasantries with Howard’s girl and offered her something to eat.  Then our guy blurted out that he was in love and was going to get married.  My boytshik, our mother exclaimed, how wonderful! 
For the next few moments the entire room was a blur of hugs, kisses, and blessings. Everyone forgot about the blond head hovering just a few feet away.  But once the ruckus died down my mother said, to whom? 
To _____. 
At first I though he was just saying this af tzu lochis, to p*** everyone off—which would have been a very Howard-like thing to do—but once I saw the look of determination on his face and the way he looked at her, I realized he was serious.
All the relatives however, were completely fartoost.
What?
I don’t understand. 
Far vus?
Howard, are you feeling all right?
I think he needs some soup.
Once all the aunts, uncles, and cousins had all come to the consensus that Howard needed to rest his big head and had been overworked at the university, they calmed down and retired to their respective rooms, attempting to comfort my mother, who was frozen into a state of seemingly perpetual shock. ______ went home and it was just my father and Howard left, staring each other down like only a father and son can.
Bist meshugeh Howard, what are you thinking?
I love her.
You are too young to know what love is. 
I love her.
You cannot do this.  You know that.
Yes I know but—
No.  This will not stand.
I will figure something out.

Turns out Howard did figure something out.  Unfortunately his solution involved a fate not so great for his girl.
Part II. The Romantic (1955-1959)

Nobody ever told me how hard it would be to fall in love.
You really don’t choose.  Trust me, if you could have your life would have been so much easier. If you could there is no way in hell you would have picked a genius orthodox Jew with a severely limited emotional IQ.  You know how everyone says their life begins when they fall in love? Yours didn’t.  It ended. 
Falling in love for you was a complicated endeavor.  It wasn’t like the movies where you get swept up in his handsome, muscular arms and ride off into the distance with the promise of happily ever enveloping you in a blanket of warmth, security, and lighthearted elation.  No. Falling in love is a grueling and strenuous process, and happily ever after is never a guarantee.  You are drained of all vitality and left a lifeless, empty shell of the person you once were.  You are stretched until your limits have been extended, and you are pushed until all you can do is hang limply from the strings of the puppeteer that is life.  Happily ever after is a myth that exists only in the minds of those who believe in fairies, magic, and the whimsical happenings of dreams.
You had fantasized your entire life about the moment at which you would meet your future husband.  Your mother—who read way too many romance novels—promised you it would be a moment when time would seem to stand still.  She told you your heart would stop and you would know in an instant that he was the one. That’s not exactly what happened.

Back When I Was ______

When I first laid eyes on Howard I knew there was something different about him, just not something that swept me off my feet.  He was sitting in the quad with an impossibly large stack of textbooks beside him, holding a notebook, and a protractor.  His glasses were so undeniably crooked and looked as if they were about to slide off the edge of his impossibly long nose.  Looking back, I think the fact that the first thing I noticed about the man I ended up marrying was the screwed up nature of his spectacles was a sign, an indication from the heavens that nothing about us was meant to be.  Additionally, who looks at the future love of their life and sees a gangly, geeky, nerd?
Though eventually I learned to see something in him, at that moment I was a superficial college freshman on the search for my prince charming.  So, did I go talk to the guy, NO!  I shouldered my bag and walked away.
Unfortunately, that day I walked past him in the quad was not the last time I saw Howard Mordecai—he was like the infernal gopher on the whacking game I used to play at the county fair, he just kept popping up.   First it was at lunch, then I found out he lived in the same building as I did.  I saw him most frequently in lecture halls.  Since we were both math majors, we took a lot of the same classes.  Sometimes he would even appear in my dreams—ridiculous, right?  He was almost always sitting down beside a stack of books, his trusty protractor lying near by.  Maybe it was the ubiquitous nature of his presence in my life, or maybe something about us was fated to end up together. I don’t know, but for whatever reason, that skinny weirdo kept materializing in my life.  While I would like to say that he was stalking me, I have to admit that a force of nature I cannot explain inadvertently drew me to him, as if we had this subconscious, magnetic attraction.  I started to find his appearance surprisingly endearing, the sharp angles of his face running perpendicular to the square rims of his constantly filthy eyeglasses. (Girls, don’t ever associate with a math genius, he might just find a way to manipulate your heart.)
Eventually we started dating and though he was insufferable ninety percent of the time, I grew to love him.  Something about the way he talked about math, about numbers, was unequivocally beautiful. The facility with which he interacted with equations and manipulated variables was almost surreal.  Obsessed with Fibonacci and Euler, he always appeared to be doing what, to most people, looked like scribbling furiously in his notebook.  But I knew these scribbles were more than futile marks and ugly scratches.  They were series of eloquent lines and smooth curves.  That notebook had a certain allure about it, with all the numbers and Greek letters swirling about in a whirlwind of intricately crafted models.  Graphs of functions I could not even fathom fluttering across the pages, glinting in the sun; to me they looked like those French paintings I always dreamed of going to see.  That notebook was the closest thing I have ever found to magic.
We stayed together all the way up until graduation, and when he proposed, I accepted.  The moment was memorable enough.  Him awkwardly shuffling into my dorm, bending his impossibly long legs to get down on one knee, fidgeting with anticipation during the seconds before I said yes.  Anyways, he brought me to meet his parents the day after graduation, and that is when the real trouble started.
I had a feeling his parents would not take kindly to the fact that I was not the orthodox Jewish girl they imagined for their son, but I could never have anticipated the fate they had in store for me.  I tried to be polite, but nothing I said or did seemed to have any impact; everyone kept sending me dirty looks. Howard started arguing with his relatives; he seemed to be pleading, but his father was firm and uncompromising.  The entire scene was a blur; all I remember was lots of relatives yelling in Yiddish and Howard yelling back in English, refusing to let go of my hand.  When Howard’s father, enraged, smashed a glass on the floor, the relatives started to clear out.  I wanted to stay but Howard told me to leave, so I did.
The next morning he called me and we met for coffee at our favorite place.  He told me that the only way we could ever be together was if I converted to Orthodox Judaism, if I forsake my name, my past and my identity, and transformed myself into the mold of what his parents envisioned.  At first I could not believe what he was saying.  It all seemed so cruel, so utterly heartless.  I was astounded.  We were twentieth century intellectuals.  We were math majors.  We were the future, unbound by the constraints of our parents and the past.  I knew Howard came from a religious family, but he never seemed extremely invested in his faith.  We have logic, reasoning, and equations, he would always say.  We don’t need some higher power to back us up. 
Howard assured me that I would be ok, that everything would be fine, that it wouldn’t be too bad, that I would survive this.  He said that we would get through this together, that it would be us against the world, two mathematicians fighting the battle against religion.  I remember now that at that point, I was seriously thinking of walking out, of leaving Howard, sullen and depressed at that coffee shop.  Looking back I can see that leaving him would have made my life a whole lot easier.  But I didn’t, I couldn’t, I loved him. 

Deborah

Though he promised me that we would conquer this obstacle together, it turns out that the burden was one I had the privilege of bearing alone.  I was cut off from the outside world for 14 months while I lived in the synagogue with no one but a rabbi by my side.  I was in complete isolation, learning Hebrew, memorizing the Torah, denouncing my previous beliefs, and giving myself over to Adonai.  Howard never found out what exactly happened to me during those months because I was never allowed to talk about my experiences.  Not knowing what they had done to me killed Howard, causing his mind to drift through conspiracy theories of beatings, forced silences, and other acts of submission.
Deborah Hephzibah.  That’s what they called me when I emerged from seclusion.  They cut off most of my hair and died it black.  Seeing me so changed, so utterly transfigured, sent Howard into a state of shock.  I never knew until that moment how much he really loved me and how sorry he was for what he had put me though.  He wanted to know where his girl had gone, what they had done with her, but I convinced him I was fine, that I was still myself, and that I still loved him.
Despite my assurances, I knew had changed.  It was as if someone had taken a template of one of them and attempted to squeeze me to it, shoving me into a mold that just did not quite fit.  Of course I put on a brave face for Howard, but I think he knew deep down that I was no longer the girl he fell in love with.  I had been transfigured into a boleboosteh, the ideal homemaker.  I replaced math with cooking, a passion for equations with a love for housework.  Howard even tried to get me to work on a project with him, but I told him I had written my last proof and drawn my last graph, convinced him that I was content with simple, menial tasks.  I almost convinced myself that I was happy with my new situation, but during those 14 months they broke something inside of me.  They took out my spirit and replaced it with something artificial, devoid of authenticity, vitality, and spark.
We were married a few weeks after my release.  Of course no one ever mentioned that the bride had been a gentile.  I doubt most of the relatives even made the connection between the blonde girl Howard brought home on that memorable afternoon and the sullen, dark-haired figure standing up on the altar.  My past had been whipped from existence. I was Deborah Hephzibah.  I had never been a blond.  I had never been a mathematician.  I was Howard’s perfect wife.  I was a Jew.  I was Deborah Hephzibah.  ______ was gone.