It’s race day, and it’s freezing. Connie doesn’t have gloves or a hat. She wears black yoga pants and a cotton sweatshirt. On her feet are a pair of bulky five-year-old white Nikes she bought at a Foot Locker. The crowd around her buzzes with strange talk of Garmins, and racing flats, and PRs, whatever those are.It’s 2013, and Connie is 24.
Connie knew nothing of either world as a child, nor of any other worlds beyond South Williamsburg, where she was born in 1988. She knew only what she caught glimpses of; her imagination did the rest. From her third-floor apartment on Lee Avenue and Heyward Street, she would sit at the window staring out—“especially on the weekends,” she says, “because there’d be less Jewish people out on the street.
As her mother and sisters clean and scour and scrub, Connie slips down the narrow hall to her bedroom. She closes the door and lays towels on the creaky wood floor to muffle the sound. She begins: first jumping jacks, then high knees, then running in place as hard as she can, nearly passing out from the effort. She repeats the cycle for 20 minutes, and again the next day. And the day after that, until it’s time to go back to school.
Connie looked forward to holidays, because on holidays, she and her sisters got to help Devorah make rugelach, a traditional Jewish pastry filled with chocolate or cinnamon. It was the only time they were allowed to have sugar. The family spoke only Yiddish and dressed in dark colors. The girls wore their hair in one or two braids; the boys in traditional payos, or “side curls.
When Connie and her sisters turned 12, their father stopped looking at them or speaking to them directly. Connie went to see her uncle three times. They met in a dimly lit room in his house. There was an old-fashioned dinette against one wall, a couch against another. He sat at the head of a long, wooden table, stroking his long, dark beard. She sat at the side, her eyes cast downward, her hands folded in her lap. He assumed she’d been sent to him because she was pregnant. “He talked about sex the whole time,” she says. “I didn’t even know what sex was.
Then she’d go to a larger room with a small pool. They’d be the only two people in the room. Connie would submerge herself entirely six times as the older woman sat on the side and watched. After each submersion the older woman would offer a simple, two-syllable affirmation: “Kosher.”
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