It’s September 2018

and I am hearing the same phrase (at least, I think it’s a phrase) everywhere. In the hallways and in the classrooms, in the front office and in the stairwell, in the library and in the teacher’s room—it’s there I hear it most of all.

It sounds like bah-ruh hash-him. It starts, ends and interrupts sentences. It is a complaint, a punch line, and a sigh of relief. Bah-ruh hash-him. When some say it, the “ruh” ends with the same guttural “huch” sound that I once spent weeks learning to perfect. But that was for speaking Czech and, everyone saying bah-ruh hash-him is speaking English. So this is an English phrase I have somehow missed learning (or am now mishearing) and I will not, as the new English teacher no less, announce my inadequate vocabulary.

“Bah-ruh hash-him,” they say.

“Mm-hm,” I respond. If they’re laughing, I smile. If they’re shrugging, I frown. The one thing I don’t do, that I’m careful not to do, is to attempt my own “bah-ruh hash-him” back.

Months earlier, it’s April of 2018

and I am a graduate student slipping fast down the muddy hill of my final semester when a visiting speaker comes to our Student Teaching seminar. His smile stretches as if to tear off his face.



“Don’t worry about getting a job right away.” The smile stretches wider. “The important thing is to make the right choice. Be picky. No job is better than the wrong job.”

Oh, is it? I hadn’t realized I could cover next month’s rent with my high professional standards.

With a desperate, and admittedly bitter, need for a job, I email every professor I know. If they know of an opening, I want an interview. If the school is on Staten Island, if it’s for a hybrid English-History course, if the curriculum is entirely subaqueous and I would need to obtain a professional scuba diving license, I want an interview.

Weeks pass and, relief of all reliefs, my professor, Dr. Adele Bruni-Ashley, invites me to her office. She describes an open English teacher position at the Manhattan High School for Girls.

“Do you think I could get an interview?”

“Yes, but before you ask for one—”

“I want one.”

“But before you ask for one, you should consider some of the school’s restrictions. It’s a religious school so…”

She talks about a dress code and literary constraints, but I’m not listening. I’m mentally drafting demo lessons and emails of introduction. I vaguely register the words “Orthodox” and “Jewish.”

“Are you okay with all that?”

“What? Oh, sure. I love the Jews.”

Adele grimaces. Right, I remind myself, it’s off putting to say you love an ethnic group that you yourself don’t belong to.

But I’m not lying. I love the Jewish people. I love their writers, their food, and, in 7th grade, I loved to be invited to their thirteenth birthday parties. As a citizen of the world, I love studying their history and, as a Christian, I love studying their scriptures.

In the summer before my senior year of college, I was awarded a grant to conduct research on a subject of my choosing. Without hesitation, I selected the notion of Diaspora within American Jewish fiction. After weeks of meetings, the professor monitoring my work asked,

“Did you have a bat mitzvah? Or were you not religious?”

I blinked. “I’m Methodist,” I told him.

“So…” He, a Jewish man, blinked a few times. “Why are you studying this?”

What could I say besides that I love the Jews? Though ‘love’ might be the wrong (and, I recognize, still off putting) word. Do I love the Jews? How would I measure that and with what, or whose, credibility? But, without question, I am drawn to the Jews. I am drawn to the intellectual, spiritual, and historic relationship Jews have with the world.

In the fall of 2013, I spent a semester studying in Prague. I alone registered for a course titled, “Modern Jewish History.” The assigned professor said she would not be offended should I choose to drop out.

“But,” she offered, clearly hoping I turn her down, “if you feel like meeting once a week… with just me… to go through the material… then I guess we could…”

We did. It was not my intention to spend three months combing through the literature of Jewish scholars, artists, politicians, and rabbis with an esteemed professor all to myself. It just happened this way.

It was not my intention to work at an Orthodox Jewish girls’ school. It just happened that way. Drawn to the Jews.

It’s May of 2018

and when I first tell my friends about being hired to work at Manhattan High School, they all ask the same thing:

“Do they know you’re not Jewish?”

Do they know I’m not Jewish? My name is Caroline Drew. If you’re familiar with Jewish scripture, you’ll remember how many times “Caroline” comes up in the Hebrew Bible: zero. A giant, Gentile goose egg. As for “Drew,” its origins are in the name “Andrew” a name first popularized by its appearance in the Christian Bible. They could tell from my email address that, no, I’m not Jewish.

Do they know I’m not Jewish? Theological evidence aside, of course they do. Consider this: maybe I can’t taste the difference between dried and fresh parsley, but an experienced chef would know by smell alone. The women (and select men) of MHS know a Jew when they see one.

Do they know I’m not Jewish? Some of my friends follow that first question with, “Did you tell them you’re not Jewish?”

This reveals two perceptions those friends’ hold of me:

That I’m a liar. That I’m an idiot.

Only a lying idiot would attempt to pose as a Jew while being surrounded by the most Jewish people she had ever met in her life. The Jews in Birmingham, Alabama—the ones in my neighborhood any way—looked, dressed, and ate like anyone else. For all I know, pretending to be a Jew could be accomplished by bringing latkes to the lunchroom during Hanukkah.

Yes, they know I’m not Jewish. They hire me anyway. After all, in the next year, it’s not them who will be surprised at how little they know about me.

It’s September of 2018

and I am fanning myself with one of my 10th grader’s syllabuses. It’s my fourth September in New York City, but my first September dressed in a blazer.

The basics of dress for a teacher at Manhattan:

Shirts must cover the collarbone.

Sleeves must cover the elbows.

Skirts must cover the knees.

No pants allowed.

The collarbone is trickiest. I forget about the collarbone.

I can’t take the blazer off because of the sweat stains I feel spreading on the underarms of my button down. My pencil skirt is sticking and sucking to my legs like a parasitic tape. It’s my first day teaching at the Manhattan High School for Girls and I look like a bank teller who just finished a 400-meter dash.

The teachers’ room is filled with women whose faces I somewhat recognize from a faculty meeting the day before. Their clothes are sweat-free. Even their hair is impossibly neat. I look closer at some of their hair. Is that…are those…

Are they wearing wigs? I look from head to head and wonder how I didn’t notice this before. Wigs everywhere. Am I supposed to wear a wig? Where would I get a wig? Wouldn’t a wig make me even sweatier? Would a hat work?

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Something familiar – a bell signaling the start of class. Like at any other school, the bell doesn’t ring. It pokes you in the side and goes on for one moment too long. I don’t know it now, but this will be the balance of working at Manhattan:

Unfamiliar scenes playing out on a familiar backdrop. What I’ve known since kindergarten around what I’ve known not at all.

It’s September and then October, then November

and I still don’t know the meaning behind the oft repeated, bah-ruh hash-him. Too embarrassed to ask but too curious to let it go, I turn to the internet. I do some phonetic searching and find the following:

Baruch Hashem. A Hebrew phrase meaning, literally, “Thank the name,” but, more accurately, “Thank God” or “blessed is God.”

I feel relieved that it’s not something I should have known—the Jews where I’m from are more likely to say “Bless your heart” than this—but I am also feeling something else. Disconnect. Separation. A bird believing it’s going to fly in the house, but, instead, thumping against the glass. I don’t belong here. The outfits, the holidays, the dietary practices, the religious beliefs, and even the words are not mine. My students must be exhausted by me. I get frustrated when they come to class late, only to find out the have longer prayers at the start of the month. I either can’t remember their names or I mispronounce them. Online work is assigned for Friday afternoons but, because of observing the Sabbath, they’ll be offline until sundown Saturday. What a relief they must feel to leave my class and go to a teacher who understands their world. Baruch hashem, they only have to put up with me for 38 minutes at a time.

On a normal day, communal prayers happen twice. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon, all of the students gather in the library to pray. The prayer, I don’t have a problem with. No matter your religious beliefs, scheduled school-wide quiet is something sacred of its own. My problem is with my own awkward timing. The only way to the teachers’ room is through the library. So, twice a day, every day, it seems that I’m shuffling and stumbling my way past my praying students. I tell myself, “Go a little earlier tomorrow,” and “tomorrow, wait a little longer,” but then tomorrow comes and there’s something in the teachers’ room that can’t wait—some printing, some copying, some lunch—and I’m inching around students like someone coming back to their seat in the middle of a movie. I’m not the only teacher who does this; in fact, I think all the other teachers do this. But when I do it, it seems louder.

I should be too preoccupied with the business of teaching English to worry about how my non-Jewishness grates on my students’ and coworkers’ sensibilities. This is my first year of leading classes without a cooperating teacher watching over my shoulder. Questions of “How do I teach topic sentences in a way that’s engaging but authentic?” and “what is an accurate but modern activity for learning the Aristotelian Appeals?” and “when am I going to grade the 200 essays the students wrote two weeks ago?” are thrown at me like rocks. I go home each day bruised.

I should not be concerning myself with walking through a crowd of praying teenagers. It’s those same teenagers who, in just a few minutes, will be asking me if Mary Shelley actually meant for there to be symbolism in Frankenstein or if that’s just something we English teachers make up.

“Girls, it doesn’t necessarily matter what Shelley meant – it’s what we find in the language.”

“So, all this is just about my opinion? Okay…”

But walking through those prayers feels loud. It feels louder, still, when I try to shake a rabbi’s hand. Even louder when I put my lunch in the kosher microwave and my coworkers have to spend the rest of the day wrapping their food in plastic bags before heating up their lunches.

“Do they know you’re not Jewish?” I laugh when my friends ask this. If only they could see me at work, they would ask, instead, “Do they know why they’re keeping you around?”

It’s November, then December, then January

and I hear more unfamiliar phrases. Realizing there’s nothing more I can do to separate myself, I start to ask my coworkers to decode the Hebrew and Yiddish lexicon. A rebbitzen is a female religious teacher. Nachas is the pride you feel for someone else’s accomplishments. And chas v’chahlila is “heaven forbid” (I first heard this from students when I threatened a pop quiz).

There is hardly a teacher or administrator at Manhattan who has not answered a question from me at some point or another, but I feel especially indebted to Rebbitzen Peshi Neuberger. She is a small woman with a soft voice who wears beautiful sweaters. The first time she spoke to me was on a morning during the first week of classes. While she did her morning prayers, I fought to free the copier of a paper jam (this churning, chewing machine was going to print or I was going to kick it). At the end of the struggle, I used all my strength to thrust the copier away from the wall so that I could reach some mythical Door H or other, disappear my hand into its guts and wrench free an inch long scrap of paper.

Reb. Neuberger said, “I have to tell you, you’re very determined.” She explained that she would have helped, but it’s not permitted to interrupt what was her now-finished prayers. This would not be the last thing she explained to me.

I ask her to explain theology and Hebrew phrases and, most often, holidays (a word of advice to any non-Jew working in a Jewish space—find someone to explain the calendar to you. You’ll never keep up on your own). I interrupt her from her reading, her emails, and her grading to pester her with my confusions. But if she minds, she doesn’t show it. She is the best sort of teacher: asking her questions makes you want to ask (and, thus, learn) more. If I could repeat my Modern Jewish History course on American soil, I would be so lucky as to have it taught by Peshi.

“I have to tell you, you’re very determined.” This structure of giving compliments is one I have not known before Manhattan, but come to take delight in.

“I have to tell you, your lunch smells incredible.”

“I have to tell you, the students say they’re enjoying your class.”

“I have to tell you, you look nice today.”

And if one of these is directed to me, and if I say thank you, I hear back,

“Why ‘Thank you’? You look nice—I had to tell you.”

When I tell my mom about this, she laughs and laughs. Partly because of the exaggerated New York accent I use in my retelling and, partly, I think, because it is so unlike the Southern way of speaking. Where I’m from, a compliment is a pretty thing. But in this style, a compliment is offered, not as a neatly wrapped gift, but as something that already belongs to you. Here, take it, I had to tell you.

It’s March,

and I am walking around the nation’s capital with two other adults and 50 odd 11th graders. My coworker and friend, Tova Szenberg, is walking at the front of the group with our tour guide. Weeks back, Tova had mentioned needing another chaperone for the field trip and I accepted in a second. She reminds me of the women I grew up around in Birmingham—quick to listen, quick to laugh, quick to share about her weekend, her diet, her family. Talking to Tova feels like home in a way that I don’t experience much anywhere in New York City. She doesn’t keep a guard up and, as a result, lets others put theirs down as well. A trip with her to D.C.? Of course, I accepted.

But the trip, of course, is not with Tova alone. It’s not two minutes off the bus before I’m wondering, who trusted me to do this? and why did I trust me to do this? The girls seem excited to be in another city, but, more than that, they seem absolutely thrilled to have their phones with them during the day. Back at MHS, their phones are sequestered to a rolling cart with individual dungeons for each device. But in D.C., the phones don’t leave their hands and, for every five steps they take, they take ten photos.

I’m tasked with keeping the more picture-happy girls moving (“Let’s go!” “You already took a picture with that statue!” “There will be more buildings to get selfies in front of, I promise.”), but behind the scolding, I am looking at them and seeing myself. The giggling. The posing. The “wait, can you take it again? I look so bad!” My high school was coed but, for the most part, my friends and I were oblivious to the boys. Even though we played sports with them, took classes with them, and, sometimes, dated them, our high school years were defined by the relationships we built with each other. I look at my students taking picture after picture and know that they don’t care that much about the monument behind them. It’s about the girl leaning her head against her shoulder and the other girl wrapping her arm around her middle. For what is not the first, nor the last time, I see how MHS allows female friendship an uninterrupted space. And I am grateful my students have this. Every girl should.

Our final excursion on the trip is to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Ladies,” Tova says before we get off the bus, “it will be obvious to everyone else there who we are.”

She is saying that their visual Jewishness will act as a spotlight. However they behave, people will look and think, “That must be how Jews feels about this history.” I try to imagine the weight of this expectation. I try to remember the aching almost-ness of 17. These girls (these almost-women) understand the tragedy of the holocaust, but these girls (these almost-children) might have a moment, just a moment, when they slip into immaturity. One moment and strangers’ eyes will not likely see a 17 year old girl. They will see a Jew disrespecting the massacre of her people.

I wish I could take this weight from them. But it’s not mine to take.

I’ve been to the Holocaust museum in D.C. before. While living in the Czech Republic, I visited the Theresienstadt concentration camp and countless other holocaust memorials around central Europe. Like others brought up in the American public school system, I was taught holocaust novels from 3rd grade on. But none of this prepared me for the museum that day.

My girls—the laughing, singing, picture-snapping, coffee-chugging girls—are silent. Some walk through the exhibits with a friend or two, some alone. They read the plaques. They watch the videos. They listen to the interviews. Nothing is rushed. The longer we are there, the more I find myself watching them. I don’t want to look away. It’s as if, in my mind, their aliveness will counterattack the history behind the glass cases. 6 million lives. 6 million deaths. Their shoes in piles, hills of stolen, empty shoes.

I look at my girls just to watch them breathe. When I start to cry, I brush the tears away. Whatever I’m feeling, this is not my weight. It is theirs and they bear it with grace.

It’s later that same March,

and, unbeknownst to me, a storm is building. During Hurricane Season in Alabama, weathermen and women stand bracingly beside an image of an ever growing, ever approaching swirl. On most stations, the swirl has a threatening dark red center. If the red of the swirl crosses over your dot on the map, it means trouble.

Storm Purim is coming for MHS, we are going to be caught in its dark red center, and I alone am not prepared. For those unfamiliar, Purim is a Jewish holiday that technically lasts just from sundown of one day to sundown of the next. Technically, it celebrates how Esther saved her Jewish people from a massacre attempted by an adviser to the Persian king.

This is all true, but it is not why I refer to it as Storm Purim.

The week of Purim (I don’t know what this sundown to sundown business is about, Storm Purim stayed with us for at least seven days), is like Mardi Gras mixed with Halloween mixed with Homecoming. There are costumes and skits and decorations. Classes are interrupted and cancelled for different Purim-themed parties, each of which I hear about only as they are just about to happen. Once, in the early afternoon, another teacher asks me,

“Are you even going to try to teach next period?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, with the wedding, the girls will be so distracted—”

“Wait—who’s getting married?”

No one. And, yet, everyone. There will be a mock wedding, and credit where credit’s due, the students go all out. It’s not just one girl in a white outfit and someone else in a groom’s hat. There is a full wedding party and a chuppah and a hired keyboardist to play music. At one point in the “reception,” girls grab my hands and pull me into one of those Jewish dances that is less dance, more tug of war with each of our arms in place of the rope. In and out, around and around, sweat beads on my forehead and the keyboardist flings his fingers against the keys. I am in the dark red center of Storm Purim and I am exhausted but I’m laughing.

At the end of the week, two of my sophomores bring me a box filled with sweets. They had gone to a grocery store in their neighborhood and found all the classic Jewish candies and cakes wrapped in plastic that money can buy. I keep the box in my locker and, in the weeks that follow, I take bites of kosher chocolate between classes and think, maybe, I wouldn’t mind being around for this Storm again.

It’s the school year of 2018-2019

and people are always asking me what it’s like to work at an Orthodox Jewish school. My family, my fiancé, my friends, my parents’ friends, my pastor, my cab driver—everyone is asking. It makes sense. As people, I think we are attracted to contrast and how it creates stories. We want to hear how the outsider sees things, how the house looks to that bird outside the glass. Is it that an outsider might see, or even reveal, something about the insiders that they themselves aren’t able to face? Or is it that the outsider, away from what she knows and understands, will see or reveal something about herself that she otherwise would have avoided?

Or maybe it’s none of that. Maybe people me ask this just because it’s an easy conversation starter. That would be the simple answer. But I am an English teacher and we are not known for settling for the simple answer.

My students and coworkers are also curious about my experience. I keep the same response ready: a sentence or two about how I’ve always been comfortable around religious people and how welcoming everyone at MHS has been to me. I’m not lying, but I’m not telling nearly the full truth. It’s like being asked what it’s like to walk through a field, and holding up a few blades of grass.

I wish I could tell it all. There’s so much I don’t say. So many details, moments, and people that create my experience at this school, but don’t fit into a quick, conversationally appropriate response.

For example,

My students have two sets of core subjects – secular and religious – that they take in addition to extra-curriculars and electives. They commute from the Upper West Side, Brooklyn, Washington Heights, and New Jersey. Some don’t get home until 7:00 at night.

Multiple times a day I’m asked, “How’s the wedding planning?” because there is no better place to be engaged than at an Orthodox Jewish school.

These are the teachers, in addition to myself, who most often come to school before 7:30 am: Ettie Cohen, Batsheva Badrian, and Penina Manies. We come to prepare and print in peace. They are excellent people to share the morning with—if you want to talk, they talk. If you need silence, good, they need it too.

It is a rule that, as a new teacher, principals terrify me and at MHS, there is not one, but two. Mrs. Tsvia Yanofsky, the menaheles (see: religious studies) principal, and Mrs. Estee Friedman-Stefansky, the general (see: secular) studies principal. Mrs. Yanofsky is polished and poised. She always smiles before she speaks and uses many adjectives—“We would love to extend a deserved, most sincere thank you to our excellent, esteemed faculty.” In her presence, I feel like a cowgirl next to a princess. Mrs. Friedman-Stefansky has the constitution of a supreme court justice who is also a five star general. If she wasn’t tall, you would feel like she was. As a general studies teacher, I meet with her frequently to discuss my work. She treats me, always, with marked kindness, but I still find myself stammering under her gaze.

There is one wrapping stairwell that travels between all the floors with classrooms. This means that, during the two—yes, two—minutes between classes, the entire school pours into one stairwell. I start the year politely waiting for students to move. I’m ending it with more of a linebacker-style approach.

In one week, I am gifted two loaves of challah bread. One from Penina, another from a student. I “share” them with “my friends” and I don’t “forget that most brides try to lose weight before their weddings.”

Our school operates out of a nondescript stone building. It’s unmarked. Others explain to me that if someone is looking to hurt the Jews, there won’t be signs to guide their way. We sit in an Upper East Side neighborhood, the kind of neighborhood where doormen and security guards hose down the sidewalks each day. Elegant trees arch over the street and, in the spring, tulips bloom in boxes like dancers lined up for a recital bow. It’s strange to imagine anyone hurting anyone here. But then people are shot in Pittsburgh and people are shot in Poway and I am reminded that the sidewalks and the flowers are a backdrop, not a shield.

It’s the last day of classes,

and a student hands me a letter. She compliments me much too freely on my teaching and, at the end, asks me not to forget her. It is a fact of teaching that you cannot remember all of your students. You spend nine months planning for them, working with them, and, in the case of English teachers, reading their thoughts for hours and hours. You know their handwriting on sight. Their parents come to conferences and ask you about their child. How could you forget them? Considering the time you spend either with them or thinking about them, they are your life.

But you do forget. I will forget. Some of the Sara’s, the Shira’s, the Shoshanna’s, the Chana’s, the Chava’s, the Chani’s, the Esther’s, Etta’s, Ettie’s and Yael’s will fade, then blur, then dissolve from my memory altogether. Some won’t. But I don’t get to choose.

When people ask me what it’s like to work at Manhattan, I want to tell it all so that they can understand. But I also just want someone else to have these memories. As if I’m trailing breadcrumbs behind me so that, when I need to, I can turn back and remember everything and everyone of this year.

I don’t get to choose what exactly I remember, but I will not forget what it felt like to work here. At a place that was entirely school and entirely more than school. A place that folded me up and called me its own, and, now that I have to leave, I’m sad to let go.

It was only a year, but it was so much. And for all of it I say, with all sincerity, baruch Hashem.