Large family, small space — still thriving

Early in her marriage, Rochel and her husband and baby lived in a small one-bedroom in the Beis Yisrael neighborhood of Yerushalayim. Their upstairs neighbors, who lived in the same apartment layout, had six kids, and cheerfully spread mattresses under the dining room table every night.

“I felt so spoiled that I was dissatisfied with my apartment when they were so happy in theirs,” Rochel says.

Still, cultural norms and different family cultures and temperaments are a real thing; Rochel now lives in Cleveland and is very glad that her home today is large enough that several of her kids have their own bedroom, or just one roommate.

Before they expanded their house, her boys shared a room, and Rochel and her husband tried many different permutations of dividing up the shared space, hoping to cut down the bickering. The boys’ own solutions didn’t always work out so well; Chezky once offered to do the division, and his guileless brother agreed to let him do the hard work. When Rochel next entered the room, she saw that Chezky had constructed a barrier around Avi’s bed, with the rest of the space allotted to Chezky. Since Avi wasn’t allowed to step on Chezky’s turf, Chezky had thoughtfully provided piles of clothing and pillows at carefully spaced intervals so Avi could hop from pile to pile without stepping on his brother’s share of carpet.

She admits that so much of what we perceive as “normal” is based on what people around us are doing. If they still lived in that Beis Yisrael apartment, her boys wouldn’t have the same expectations of personal space.

Words like “crowded,” “tight,” and “snug” are all cultural terms, meaningless in a vacuum. Spacious in Israel is generally cramped by American standards, and a huge condo in Boro Park is a basement starter apartment to a Lakewood family.

While researching this article, people told me about how their neighbors cleverly maximized space in their small 2,600 square foot townhouses, and others told me how much more livable the 85-square-meter rental would be than their current 75 square meters (about 800 square feet). And although all our lives are immeasurably richer than those of our ancestors who shared one-room shacks with their goats and chickens, most of us aren’t buoyed by that knowledge.

Still, although “cramped” means different things to different people, the essential challenges our heroines have to contend with are universal, the specifics merely a question of degree.