By Yochanan Gordon
People appreciate vulnerability. In a sense, the uniqueness of this newspaper has always been in our willingness to give readers a glimpse into the goings on within our family. I personally have no issue with being vulnerable, it’s just that I am naturally more introspectively disposed, which is why I seek, on a weekly basis, to give our readers a view of the ideas that are swirling around the contours of my mind. I have, in the past, retold stories of myself, divulged certain fears and insecurities, and expressed my thoughts and feelings both during good times and the seemingly otherwise.
Here, I wanted to reflect on what it was like growing up on the shorter side and to expound upon how this detail of my life has been somewhat of a continuous theme throughout my life as a young child really up until today.
A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the average height for a grown man in the U.S. is 5 feet and 9 inches. That is in contrast to the worldwide estimate, which puts the average height for an adult male at 5 feet and 7½ inches.
Suffice it to say that by U.S. standards I am short by about an inch or so. Now this comes as no surprise because my parents are not particularly tall and by the law of averages, most of my siblings are on the shorter side as well. My parents sought to take me to an endocrinologist as a child in order to try to speed up my growth, but my finickiness to medication didn’t allow me to make it through the initial visit. However, my childhood doctor had always predicted that I would end up being normal height, which they were more or less right about, based on worldwide standards; however, by U.S. standards I remain a little short.
I arrived at my bar mitzvah age a whopping 4 feet and 6 inches. We needed to erect a makeshift stage in order for me to see comfortably over the bimah in order to lein from the Torah properly. And although I never needed to sit on a phone book while driving like the sister beneath me did, when it came to pictures I was always on the short row. To this day it’s always a little odd when someone asks me to grab something for them that is out of their reach in the grocery store, because after all I’m supposed to be the short one.
Being short can lend itself to being bullied, which is something I thankfully was never subjected to. There are other inconveniences such as not qualifying for certain rides in amusement parks, which for a kid can certainly be humiliating. I hated roller coasters so that was never really an anxiety that I had to deal with.
Shopping for clothing is another area that can present as difficult for someone who doesn’t fit into the generic clothing sizes. You can ask my mother to be sure, but from what I remember I was from the easier ones in the family when it came to trying on clothing. We always found ourselves at the seamstress with the need to shorten and take in almost everything that my parents bought for me, but that was regular for me, so it was not disorienting in any way, shape, or form.
However, only lately, in the last ten years or so, short people would have something to brag about with the birth of clothing stores such as Under 5’10”, which was started by Elie Robinson, who sought to capitalize on the tens of millions of short people in the U.S. For the first time ever, men can walk into a store and find sleeves and pants legs shorter than the run-of-the-mill average, so that they can for once wear clothing with the confidence that it fits the way it is supposed to.
I brought up the anxiety of being pushed off the line in the amusement park. Now, while that was something that I never had to endure, due to my dislike of rollercoasters and practically all water rides, I could relate, as a short person, to the insecurity of a fellow short person who had to live with that consciousness. I suggested to my friend, Elie Robinson, Under 5’10” Owner, who is himself a short man, that the doorway to the store should measure at 5’9½”, causing anyone 5’10” and taller to bang their heads on the way in. That would be a welcome dose of schadenfreude.
For years, I would go into the shop and store up on all the pants and shirts for each season that would fit just right, until one day I went in and realized they had cut 29-inch inseams off of their production. And then they introduced a line of sweat wear that would top out at 27- or even 26-inch inseams. All of a sudden, after a lifetime of seeing myself as a member of the short club I was being told that I was no longer allowed to shop there.
Although by U.S. standards I am still on the short side, the height that I had gained in my extended growth period up until the age of 20, long after most people had already stopped growing, was in my legs rather than in my torso. The funny thing is that Greg Grinman, Chief Marketing Officer of Under 5’10,” is over 6 feet but has shorter legs and a longer torso and he could fit into the pants while I can’t. As a short person that is rather unnerving.
What happened as a result of that is that I had become a hybrid of sorts between shortness and the average, making me not fit squarely into one category or another. This would seem to be a trend in my life that manifested itself when I started to date.
I have expressed this previously in an article on Gimmel Tammuz and my own story with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, but it bears repeating here. I am the product of a mixed marriage. My father grew up in Crown Heights and hails from a prominent Lubavitch pedigree. While from my father’s patrilineal side, they were Chabad going back many generations, my paternal grandmother was born in the Bronx into a non-Chassidic family. My paternal grandfather, while he maintained a very warm relationship with the Rebbe and was always known to be a prominent journalist among the Yiddish-speaking community, which was in the majority back in those days, he kind of charted his own path, as someone who was clean shaven and did not necessarily follow to a tee all of the Chabad traditions.
My mother grew up in Boro Park to parents who were both of Polish descent. My matrilineal grandmother survived the war by hiding out in the basement of their family’s housekeeper for six years from the age of nine and my grandfather spent those years in Siberia together with the Novardok yeshiva. So while my grandfather descended from a Chernobyl chassidic home, he cut off his chassidic peyos at a young age to fit into the image that was prevalent in the Novardok Yeshiva, which would become his home away from home.
So, when deciding where to educate my siblings and myself, who first lived in Flatbush and only later in 1994 would make the move to the Lawrence neighborhood, the decision was made to enroll in non-chassidic yeshivos, which would kind of set the trajectory for us going forward.
As a young boy of just eight, in December of 1989, my paternal grandfather suffered a heart attack on the sixth night of Chanukah and passed away in his sleep. Our family marked the conclusion of the shivah by filing past the Lubavitcher Rebbe by Sunday Dollars to receive a dollar and the traditional consolation blessings over the loss of my grandfather. On a video that was shot from that day, you can see my uncles, aunts, and their kids walking solemnly by the Rebbe, receiving a dollar and continuing on their way. For the most part the interactions were swift without more than the traditional pleasantries being expressed. Then, I as an eight-year-old walking beside my mother began to file by the Rebbe, the gabbai I guess seeing the both of us gave my mother two dollars, which she took and then continued to move forward, at which point the Rebbe noticed this short eight-year-old and asked my mother to introduce me. She said, “This is Yochanan.” The Rebbe responded, “I assume you took the name from his great grandfather.” “Yes,” my mother replied. The Rebbe then continued, “You should see to it that he follows in the footsteps of his elter zaide.”
Although I had always grown up with a great appreciation for Chabad and always loved visiting my grandparents and cousins in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, the path that we were brought up on was anything but Chabad. As such I was a product of the Litvish yeshiva system while becoming increasingly interested in Chassidus in general and reconnecting with my deep Chabad roots in a milieu in which there was great tension between Chabad and the yeshiva world.
This identity crisis would reach a boiling point for me when I would start to date for marriage. At first the decision was made to pursue shidduchim from within the Bais Yaakov system, which was in line with my Litvish upbringing. However, my increasing pursuit of the Chassidic philosophy would create a distance in interests between me and many of the girls that I had gone out with initially. It was a rude awakening for me when I began to realize that I was seeking my match in all the wrong places. However, I couldn’t easily just broaden my search base because I was too Litvish for many of the Lubavitch girls and too Lubavitch for the Litvish girls.
As I’m retelling this story, I can easily recall the time when I would turn heavenward and express in prayer form how the blessing that I had received from the Rebbe was certainly not meant to make my life more difficult. As such, although I wasn’t sure how I would navigate this path forward, I had prayed that the right person be presented to me, which would thankfully ultimately happen.
But here again you see this trend of my life finding its way into a proverbial gray area where I didn’t neatly fit into one category or another. I wasn’t Litvish but I wasn’t fully Lubavitch; I wasn’t tall but I wasn’t really short either, rather somewhere in between.
Up until here I’ve explored height and ideology, and now we move on to social status. When a young couple marries and enters the workforce, living in a well-established, affluent community there are built-in pressures of doing well to try to keep up with the Joneses. However, for many the rat race lands them in a financial bracket known as the middle class in which after rent/mortgage, taxes, tuitions, insurance, camp fees, and the long list of obligations—shul dues, yeshiva dinners, and so on and so forth—there is not much left for savings. In fact, I was watching a segment from this year’s Agudah convention where they featured a panel of yeshiva administrators and the difficulties of a young family making $350,000 a year putting up full tuition without living a lavish lifestyle.
So for us, after 18 years of marriage and thankfully six children, all of whom are in wonderful local yeshivos and attend fine camps, we have lived upwards of 10 years in a starter home on a block that I never knew existed and the last eight years in an old home on a great block in Cedarhurst, which we knew would need to be updated when we initially bought the house and moved in.
We bought the house that we currently live in back in 2015 knowing we’d have to update it because our starter home was getting too cramped for our growing family, but we had to look for something on the lower end of the market. I remember then making an inquiry with one of the local developers to see how much it would cost to get into a new construction and at that time in 2015 we were told $1.4 million. The house that we would end up buying was $875,000 and so as you can see, we were once again a little short.
Today, almost 10 years later, under a faltering economy with record high inflation rates, the new construction that would have cost us $1.4 million back in 2015 is going for $2.6 million today. However, anything that you’ll buy in this area for $1.5 million will need a million-dollar renovation to make it livable over the long haul. We have reached the point that we inevitably knew would arrive back in 2015 and whether we decide to build from the ground up or sell and buy something else we are looking at the same amount of money. Here we are again not tall enough, not short enough, and not rich enough. It may not be a unique situation, but I have thankfully been given a platform to express it on.
Ironically this is a very long article about how it is being short. Apparently, I’m a short guy with a long thought process. Anyway, let me conclude with a prayer that anyone who has found that these ideas resonate in their own lives should be blessed with the beneficence necessary to allow them and their families more permanent lodgings. And Chazal state famously, “Anyone who davens on behalf of others for things that they themselves are lacking will be answered first.”
Yochanan Gordon can be reached at ygordon5t@gmail.com. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.
