One look at Zev Isgur sitting on his couch at his Tanglewood estate in Houston, Texas leads to a myriad of miscalculations. Zev is a healthy, 24 year old Jewish man enjoying a life of premature affluence. But Zev did not just graduate from an Ivy League business school. He is a product of the streets, Jewish day school, a society that scorned him, and finally, the Texas prison system. Zev survived two years of a maximum security nightmare in Huntsville, Texas’ infamous state prison. He survived on his wits, but wits alone were not enough. Within the walls of the Huntsville penitentiary was a very special community that watched over Zev and made sure he stayed alive. “Prison society is like a mirror of real society,” Zev says between drags of his cigarette, the smoke clouding over the large streaks of natural gray in his black hair. “Just like in the world, it takes all kinds. And just like in the world, people tend to stick with their own kind. There is a definite tight-knit Jewish society behind bars. We took care of each other. Ain’t much love for Jew boys in jail, I can promise you that.” Zev continually refers to his Judaism as the guiding factor that kept him sane during his incarceration. But if the tiny misfit community of Jews in the Huntsville prison saved Zev, the Jewish community in which he grew up failed him. Zev’s early days as a criminal began about the time that most kids are taking the training wheels off their bicycles. He went to a Conservative Jewish day school but still managed to fall in with the wrong crowd. Zev recounts, “Yeah, we were wild. Runnin’ master plans at an early age. Smoking weed, stealing, whatever.” Smoking weed? Stealing? I went to the same elementary school and the most serious mischief I ever engaged in was getting caught throwing cheese on the walls. How could this have happened in the middle of an average, uptight Jewish community? “It’s true, man,” Zev says, lighting another cigarette (chain smoking is another habit he picked up at Houston’s Beth Yeshuran Day School). “The teachers just didn’t have a clue, or didn’t care, or some such shit. Hell, outta all my boys from those days I’m the only one that is doin’ O.K. One of them is dead. He got his head shot off in a drug deal. Another got caught taking bets by the FBI, and he got put away too. Federal though. No parole. Good Jewish boys gone bad.” After elementary school, Zev attended a public junior high school where his criminal activities only escalated. The few times the police caught up with him, he was quickly released on probation. Zev dropped out of school after his sophomore year and began working in fast-food restaurants, from which he was often dismissed for stealing from the register. Finally, at age 22, Zev was caught selling cocaine and sent away to the Huntsville penitentiary. The prospect of hard time naturally scared him. Zev got off the prison bus in Huntsville shackled, not knowing what to expect. “They say that your first day in prison defines your entire sentence, and it’s true. Motherfuckers come up to you, look you up and down. Size you up. Of course I’d heard all the stories about prison. How it was one big rape-fest for overgrown, violent homo-predators, so hell yeah, I was scared. But you can’t show it.” At 6’1 with a thick frame, Zev thought he could keep to himself by looking tough. But like it had for so much of his life, trouble sought him out. “My first day, my first meal, I’m sitting there alone eating, y’know. Minding my own business. Out of the blue this gigantic skin head looking type sits down next to me and starts explaining to me ‘how it is’ in prison.” Zev’s new lunch companion turned out to be an Aryan Brother with an invitation for Zev to join the struggle. Not knowing what to do, Zev sat in silence as the man told him he would come to talk to him in his cell later that night. “I knew I wasn’t down with that Nazi shit, but I needed someone to watch my back. I sat in my cell for hours just wondering what to do till I finally just said ‘fuck it.’ Homeboy never did come by my cell, and I learned later that he was all hot air. But anyways, in case he was gonna come by my cell, I drew my answer onto my prison uniform.” The answer? “A big Star of David, just to let ’em know.” Zev was scared that the star might get him into serious danger. “I don’t know why I did it, but I did. It was like I realized for the first time that being Jewish is something so different, alien, but special. Now every step I took was the step of a marked man. Literally.” Surrounded by hostile neighbors who held an arbitrary hatred for his religious identity, Zev took refuge in that identity, asserting his Judaism with a passion he had never felt before. Prison for Zev was not just a lesson about the realities of a criminal life, it was also about identity politics, about what it meant to be a “marked man.” It wasn’t long before the giant Star of David on his shirt garnered him attention: “Most convicts figured it was just another gang sign. I met my closest boy in the pen because of it though. Soapy. Soapy Weinstien. He saw me wearing that big star one day in the rec room and immediately came up to me. Soapy was in for some kind of gambling shit. He was an odds maker for Vegas. He was still doing that in prison. His outside connects kept him posted with about a million sports periodicals. Our Jewishness was really all that we had in common, but it was enough. Soapy showed me the ropes and every Shabbat that I was in prison we went to Shabbat services together. See, a rabbi would come once a week. Some people do care--I guess.” The first time they went to Shabbat services Soapy introduced Zev to the other Jewish inmates in the prison. Zev immediately noticed that one of the prisoners was wearing a Rolex, something extremely rare in prison. This man was an Israeli named Ruby. He had been caught trading food stamps for cash at a discounted price. The other Jew at services was Butch, a convicted murderer whose mother was the director of the JCC in Dallas—another middle class Jew boy gone bad. Butch had been incarcerated for fourteen years, and got out the day after Zev met him. The last Jew in the Huntsville penitentiary was perhaps the most intriguing character. A former medical doctor known simply as “Doc,” he supplied the cell block with pornography and prescription painkillers he was somehow still able to get his hands on. Suddenly Zev, who had always felt alienated from the Jewish world, found himself embracing the idea of community. The more Zev talked, the more his prison experience began to seem to me like a metaphor for the Jewish experience in the Diaspora. Like Diaspora Jews for 2000 years, Zev was banding together with his fellow Jews to form a world within the larger world that was more caring, more prepared to treat with him with the dignity he deserved. When the time came, the Huntsville Jews were there for one another. “Soapy was addicted to pain killers, and the only time he got to see Doc really was at services. Soapy had cut a hole in the pages of his prison-issued prayer book and every week Doc would fill it up with painkillers. Soapy had connects on the outside that would give a little bit of money to Doc’s family on the outside, who were basically destitute since his incarceration,” said Zev, stopping to ponder a second. “Soapy didn’t care about Doc’s family or anything--he just needed those pills. I guess our reasons for helping each other weren’t always altruistic, but it was our Judaism that brought us together initially.” O.K., so it wasn’t always traditional heart-felt tzedakah. But it was a group of Jewish men watching out for each other. Ruby, in particular, put himself on the line for his Jewish buddies behind bars. “Ruby put word out that nobody hurt us just because we were Jewish. People seem to listen to some one wearing a Rolex in prison. That made my stay as easy as it possibly could have been. A little brotherhood from an Israeli gangster.” Zev and Soapy passed their time in prison playing poker for cigarette cartons and commissary money. “There wasn’t much else to do,” Zev reminisced. “By day you sit in a state of apathetic wakefulness and at night the bars get closer and the walls get tighter until it feels like there’s a shackle on your mind.” Without his Jewish cell block mates Zev cannot imagine how things would have been. “No one ever bothered me because I was under Ruby’s protection. Without that backup who knows? I may not have made it. Soapy sure wouldn’t have.” Today Zev is fully reformed. He is married and living the good life in a gigantic home. He works hard for his money at one of the largest law firms in Houston. Though he no longer attends services every week, he regularly has Shabbat dinners with family and still feels strong ties to the religion. Jewish life, to his surprise, can flourish outside of jail.
Mason Lerner is a senior at the University of Houston