Just when I thought I was ridding myself of my past, it rushed back at me with a single phone call. It was late evening during the fall of 2012. I had been out of the Hasidic world for five years, now living in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and was making progress with forgetting, moving on. Then the call came.
The man on the other line – call him Mechel — was a member of my old Hasidic group, the Skverer Hasidim. He was also royalty: a junior member of the rebbe’s family. I knew him well, although we’d never spoken. Several years older than I and in a considerably higher class, he and I had had little in common.
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