Effi
Recap from last week: Chani bitterly regretted that she allowed her elders to break off her shidduch with Effi Weinberg eight years ago.
Effi Weinberg was packing up the last of his office. There wasn’t so much to pack; as a software entrepreneur, most of his files were digital. His office had a sleek, bare, modernistic feel broken only by the view of gentle hills and majestic palm trees outside the plate glass window. He liked Palo Alto, had enjoyed spending eight years here building his career. He’d come out to Silicon Valley on the invitation of his brother-in-law Avraham, who was expanding a small but promising startup company.
“Effi,” his brother-in-law had said in his booming voice, “What would you think about coming out to Palo Alto for a spell? Shiffy tells me you’ve learned coding in your free time, and we really need some help!”
Avraham was a smart developer and a talented businessman, and Effi’s sister Shifra was a crack marketer, but they needed someone talented to head the development team.
It had come at exactly the right time, shortly after Chani Elman had ended their shidduch for reasons that still were unclear to him. All he knew was that the breakoff had felt like a sucker punch to the gut, and he jumped at the chance to get away from the East Coast.
The invitation turned out to be a stroke of genius for all concerned. Effi led the team in producing a real estate app so sleek and user-friendly it went viral, making them all rich beyond their wildest dreams—so rich, in fact, that now he and Avraham were going to spend a year in New York just to set up an East Coast branch. Once the app was stable and profitable, then just for fun—and to help the shidduch crisis—they invented a frum dating app. The irony was that Effi, now 29, was still single despite his self-made wealth and the wickedly charming dimple in his smile.
Global market or not, Palo Alto was not much of a place to find shidduchim. The community was tiny and most of the singles moved away to date. He’d thrown himself into his work and helped the local rabbi build up the community by leading a daf yomi shiur and getting involved in outreach among the secularly overeducated but Jewishly undereducated Jews who worked in Silicon Valley. It was a point of great pride for him to be able to say that one person became shomer Shabbos because of his teaching, and a couple more were on the way.
Effi’s phone buzzed, and he paused to open it. A text from his sister Shifra. “Avraham and I found a gorgeous place to rent in Flatbush,” it read. “We took a year’s lease to give us time to find something to buy. Lots of bedrooms for when Debbie and her family come in for the chagim and our boys come in from Israel. Lots of room for you too, so just come straight to us when you get to New York for as long as you want. When’s your flight?”
“Sunday,” he typed back.
“Great!” she responded. “We should be in the house by then. Here’s the address.”
Effi looked at the address and blanched.
Of course he knew that address. It was permanently imprinted in his brain. That was the address he used to go to, eight years ago, to pick up Chani Elman for their dates. His sister was renting the Elman place? Where had the Elmans gone to? Had Chani gone too? Was she married?
He sat down for a moment to process this. Chani Elman, the girl he was so sure he was going to marry, until her father and the lady who was a sort of stand-in for her deceased mother had called the shadchan and broke off the shidduch. They refused to say why, beyond a duplicitous, infuriating, “We just don’t think it’s for her.”
Reading between the lines, he was sure it had to do with his lackluster situation in life back then. Effi’s parents were simple middle-class people, a high school teacher and an art therapist, trying to make their modest income cover the enormous expenses of yeshiva tuitions and necessities for seven children. They could never go halfsies on support—he’d be lucky if they could handle an engagement ring and FLOPs. On top of that, in the eyes of the Elmans, he clearly had no yichus. He had seen Mr. Elman’s pride in his descent from Rav Elimelech of Chelminsk.
Effi’s credentials were even worse than having no yichus. He was the child of baalei teshuva from Merrick, Long Island, now living in Passaic. Effi was sure that didn’t fly for an old established frum family in Flatbush.
How had they even been allowed to go out in the first place? Effi’s yeshiva pal Baruch, who did come from one of those old Flatbush families, dated Chani exactly once and decided she wasn’t for him. (Baruch needed a girl with a strong personality, and boy, did he get one—the girl he married was a real piece of work.) But they were chavrusas at the time, and Baruch thought Chani would be good for Effi, and apparently the shadchan was so persuasive telling Mr. Elman and Mrs. Rosner that he was a top learning boy that they deigned to let Chani try it. Still, when he picked her up at their palatial house in Flatbush—so different from his parents’ humble frame house in Passaic—he felt like a peasant come to court the princess.
And a princess she was, in his eyes: refined, gentle, beautiful inside and out. She had all the middos he was looking for—sweet, giving, tenderhearted, smart.
Effi had never understood why this shidduch failed. He and Chani had great chemistry, he thought. They laughed at the same jokes. Their conversations had an easy, comfortable rapport. Had the king and queen decided the peasant suitor was too lowly and impoverished after all, that he could never fit into their aristocratic world? Why hadn’t they said no from the get-go? If Chani truly liked him, as he thought she had, why didn’t she fight harder to keep him?
He was deeply confused and hurt when it ended—so hurt, in fact, that when Avraham proposed him the job in California, he leapt at the chance to put distance between himself and his disappointment. He immersed himself in a new fast-track programming class while doing his best to keep up his Torah learning. He didn’t sleep much in those first years in California. He was determined to drown his sorrows in work, and threw all his energies into his career.
It turned out he was good at programming. Like, really good. He surprised even himself. He’d always been quick with math and logic, and in high school he and a buddy once won a science competition with a robot that picked up trash from the playground. But who’d have thought he could have created an app that made him rich at such a dizzying speed?
How the tables had turned! The peasant was now richer than the king, and to pile irony upon irony, his sister and her husband were now going to live in the Elman house. And so, at least for the time being, was he. Oh well—if the Elmans had packed out, at least for the year, there wouldn’t be much chance of his running into Chani. Or would there?
To be continued.
