Dena Schusterman grew up in Northern California and New Mexico as the daughter of Chabad shluchim, or emissaries. Her father started the first Chabad house at UC-Berkeley. Now the mother of eight, Schusterman has also spent her adult years as a Chabad shlucha, in Atlanta, along with her husband, Eliyahu. Schusterman’s memoir, Stories Carry, provides a fascinating look at Chabad-Lubavitch life in the United States in places far from the Hasidic Brooklyn hub.
At the beginning of her book, Schusterman writes that her favorite childhood memories — and the sustenance of her formative years — were stories her parents told her that were passed down from their own parents. Her maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors from Poland while her father’s parents fled Stalin’s USSR for Israel a year before its independence. Schusterman’s writing is vivid, even in parts of the book that take place decades before she was born. She describes her grandparents’ desperation to leave their home country for good: “Russia is no longer their home. Although their families have lived here for centuries, and Mother Russia is the blood coursing through their veins, through revolutions and pogroms alike, they will stay no longer. They are done being marginalized and forced into submission. Whatever it takes, they are getting out of hell.”
As for her own story, instead of starting with her childhood and progressing chronologically, she structures her memoir in alternating timelines, one about her childhood in California and New Mexico and the other about the last fifteen years in Atlanta. The two narratives flow well together, culminating in life-changing episodes for her parents and for her and her husband.
Her father was something of a free spirit in his community. For his first assignment as a Chabad shliach, he was sent to the San Francisco Bay Area at the height of the hippy era. In such an environment, Schusterman’s childhood was different from that of most frum girls. She felt that she was “not quite Berkeley, not quite Crown Heights. It took me a while to realize that for many Jewish Californians, Judaism wasn’t inherited — it had to be actively found. Especially when, for some, their families had come to California explicitly to get away from the Jewish world.”
She describes the Berkeley Chabad House as a mixture of chicken soup, psychedelic music, and marijuana (one border grew it on the house’s rooftop until he was caught). For Schusterman and others who frequented the Chabad House, her parents provided a sense of stability in a confused world. Yet her parents left California for New Mexico when Schusterman was still a young girl. That part of the story is addressed late in the book, coinciding with Schusterman and her husband’s own reexamination of their place in the Atlanta Chabad community.
Schusterman’s memoir shows that Hasidic life is more varied than outsiders may imagine. Her book is also timely, as Chabad houses in universities across the United States have become a home away from home for many Jewish students.
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of three books, including Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, and co-editor of the anthology Hong Kong Noir. She is working on a biography of Golda Meir’s childhood and teenage years in Milwaukee and Denver.
