What could Joel have been looking for in the historical archive? As far as I knew, the Goldbergs hadn’t lived in Trenton in the 1940s. Did his search have something to do with the photo of the two boys that had been in his shoe?
“Why are you looking for him? Did he do something wrong?”
I shook my head. “He was killed at the synagogue a few days ago, and his brother wants to understand what he was doing here.”
He wanted to know who had killed his brother, too, but that wasn’t why I’d come to the library.
“That’s sad,” Akiva said. “There’s one more thing. He recognized my name as Jewish, and asked me if I was named after Rabbi Akiba from the Bible. And if I was, why was my name spelled with a V instead of a B.”
“I assume you are,” I said. Something in my brain clicked. “Are you from South America?”
“I was born in Argentina. My great-grandparents came from various parts of Poland and Russia, and when they were fleeing the Holocaust they couldn’t get into the US. So they landed in Buenos Aires. There was a bombing at the Jewish Community Center where I went to nursery school, so my parents decided to pick up and move here.”
Akiva frowned. “I told him a little bit about my family history, which turned out to be a big mistake. He started rambling about how he knew that there were Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers, living among us. That he had come to Trenton to warn his brother, who’s a rabbi.”
“I’ve spoken to his brother,” I said. “We’ve been trying to figure out why Joel came to Trenton in the first place, so that fills in a blank for me. But he didn’t go directly to his brother.”
“Yeah, he told me about his schizophrenia, that he has trouble following through on things, that he got distracted easily, and that it took him a couple of days to remember what he was planning, and by then he was on to something else.”
That explained why Joel had hung around Trenton for a few days, staying at the Rescue Mission and the old shul. But what finally motivated him to speak with Rob? And why had he been looking up temple elders on his brother’s computer?
14 – Man of Honor
When I got home, I took a closer look at the members of the board of directors on the synagogue’s website, but nothing jumped out at me. I knew all those people, some of them since I was a child, and it was hard to see them as an outsider would.
Eventually I gave up, heated up the leftover lasagna and sat at the kitchen table, surfing through the New Jersey state archives on my laptop. Though some microfilmed materials were available online, most of the material in the searchable databases dealt with the early history of the state. All I could find was general information and census data of the Jewish population in Trenton in the 1940s and 50s.
I spoke to Lili for a while, letting her vent, but I could tell that she was starting to figure out how she could fit into the equation down there, what she could do to help. “I wish I’d insisted that she get long-term care insurance,” Lili said. “Back when she was young enough and healthy enough to qualify. She always insisted she had enough money to carry her through, but now that I look at the cost of rehab facilities and in-home nursing care, I’m not sure. At least Medicare will pay for what she needs now.”
“Do you think we should have long term care insurance ourselves?” I asked. “Health care power of attorney and all that? You and I don’t have any no legal ties, so what if one of us were to get into an accident or get sick, and someone like Fedi comes in to take over? I don’t even have any close enough family.”
“Dios mio, Steve. Don’t you think I have enough to take care of down here?”
“Sorry, sorry. I was just thinking.”
She sighed. “I know, and you’re right. Just let me get through this, all right?”
“Of course, sweetheart. You focus on your mother right now. Everything between us will work itself out. Everything all right in your office?”
“So far, so good. You’re not taking Rochester over there tomorrow, are you?”
I usually left Rochester at Lili’s office when I taught my Tuesday class. “No, I was thinking I’d take him to Rick’s. He and Rascal can play together, and Rick has a guy who comes over to let Rascal out into the yard in the afternoon.”
That night, Rochester slept beside me once again, and I woke up to see him sitting on his haunches staring at me. “What?” I grumbled. I looked over at the clock. It was barely seven in the morning.
He stepped over me and settled down on my chest. “Get off of me, you beast,” I said, shoving at his side. “You’re cutting off my circulation.”
He just looked at me.
“Fine, I’m getting up.” I pulled the comforter and over his body, tucking it around his head like a bonnet. “Little Gold Riding Hood.”
He wriggled out from underneath and jumped to the floor, barking once. I stumbled to the bathroom then put on a pair of sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt and we were out the door.
An hour later, we were at Rick’s, and he yawned as he opened his front door. Rochester nearly bowled him over in his eagerness to get to Rascal. “Good morning to you, too,” Rick said to the dog’s departing behind.
“I thought you’d be up and on your way to work by now.”
“Usually would be. But I was out late last night, interviewing people on the bus route that goes past the synagogue. No one I spoke to can remember anything from last Wednesday. Nobody noticed Joel, or the skinhead he had a beef with at the Rescue Mission. I’m still working on tracking the guy, though John White is not exactly a unique name.”
I called Rochester to me and told him to be a good boy. I tried to pet him, but he skidded away again to play.
So much for doggie love.
Maybe it was Lili’s absence, or not having Rochester with me, but I was glad to escape Friar Lake and drive the few miles to the Eastern campus for the Jewish American Lit class.
I was looking forward to some great discussion, and I wanted to introduce the ideas that I’d come up with while searching the immigration databases, but before I could get started, Jessica demanded, “Why aren’t we reading Elie Wiesel’s Night? Isn’t the Holocaust important enough for this class?”
I was surprised by her hostility but I tried to diffuse it. “Weisel’s book is a literary classic, and one that is deeply connected to the Jewish experience of the twentieth century,” I said. “To answer your question, we can look at the title of this course—it’s called Jewish-American literature, and the focus of the syllabus and our readings is to examine the experience of immigration and assimilation.”
“But how can you look at the Jewish-American experience without considering the effect of the Holocaust?” she said. “A whole branch of my family was wiped out by the Nazis, and my great-grandparents had to struggle to escape. That has to color everything that my family, and by extension, American Jews, go through.”
“I empathize with you,” I said. “But I’ll posit that perhaps that experience, while traumatic, means less to certain people. Remember, there have been Jews in America since before the Revolutionary War. And while their descendants may have been moved by the Holocaust, it isn’t their primary narrative.”
Noah jumped in. “It’s like ancient history already,” he said. “Yeah, my family lost people then, too. But they weren’t people I knew. Like I’m going to get all stressed over my grandmother’s second cousin? I’m more interested in how my grandfather couldn’t go to the college he wanted to because they had a Jewish quota.”
“Well, you’re just selfish,” Jessica said.
The class erupted in argument, and it took me several minutes to get them all calmed down. We ended up talking about different paths to citizenship, and I used Lili’s family as an example of Jews who weren’t able to gain admittance to the US due to restrictive immigration policies. “And isn’t that something we see today?” I asked.
We did finally get into a good discussion—connected more to current events than the literature we’d been read
ing—but I figured any time I could get students thinking and talking I had done my job.
Since I didn’t have Rochester with me, I decided to go back to Trenton and look through the archives again, and see if I could figure out what Joel Goldberg had been looking for. Unfortunately, the librarian on duty at the New Jersey State Archives wasn’t as helpful as Akiva Teitelboim. She couldn’t remember anything about a homeless guy coming in to look up information on Jews in the city, but she directed me to a collection of microfilm called the Trenton Jewish History Project. I confess that I forgot all about Joel as I read about Jewtown, making connections to streets and family names from my childhood.
One article called it a closed community – the streets rang with the sound of Yiddish, and kosher butchers, stores, milk dealers, and a synagogue and a mikveh ritual bath provided everything that residents needed. Rents were inexpensive, and sidewalks, street lights and indoor plumbing eventually appeared. A trolley car ran down Broad Street, providing a connection to the rest of the city.
I relished the list of names of early residents – Lavine, Feinberg, Haveson, Silverstein, Levy, Kohn. Many of those reminded me of kids I’d gone to Hebrew school or Sunday school with, or people my mother had grown up with. This truly was my home, I thought.
But I wasn’t at the archives for a stroll down memory lane. I was trying to figure out what Joel Goldberg was looking for. I moved more quickly through the microfilm, scanning for the names Aaron and Kalman.
I found a butcher named Kalman Horowitz with a store in Jewtown called Liberty Meat Market. Was he the Kalman of the postcard? Not if the photo had been taken in Europe around the time of World War II.
I found several albums of digitized photos that had been uploaded by community members. I didn’t recognize much, because most had been taken in that area of Jewtown that had been destroyed by urban renewal. The people in the photos were all strangers, too, until I saw my mother’s face, smiling from a photo of members of the Young Judea group for members in their late teens and early twenties, organized by Shomrei Torah.
It was surprisingly poignant to see her image when I wasn’t expecting it. The occasion was a lecture by Kalman Feinberg, a Holocaust survivor. He had been lucky enough to avoid the camps, and spoke to the group about the years he had spent in hiding. Feinberg, a slim, dark-haired man in a business suit and black fedora, had then been given an award by the club’s officers. My mother, Sylvia Gordon, was the club secretary. From the date on the picture, she was about sixteen.
Was he the Kalman I was looking for? He appeared to be in his mid to late thirties, so about the right age to match the boy in the photo. But I couldn’t find any other references to him in the database.
I sat back in my chair. If he was the guy I was looking for, then he had a brother named Aaron Feinberg. Clearly his brother wasn’t the current president of Shomrei Torah—he was much too young. But suppose Kalman’s brother had died in the Holocaust? It made sense that he’d name his son after his late brother, in the Ashkenazi tradition.
But then I remembered something my mother had told me, long before, when we were visiting graves in the cemetery in Trenton where my grandparents were buried. I was probably about seven or eight at that time, and I had pointed out a gravestone in the shape of a tree trunk, cut off with a horizontal slice. “That one’s pretty,” I’d said. “When I die I want a tombstone like that one.”
“Don’t say that,” my mother had said. She spit twice on the ground in a gesture that frightened me. She explained that stones like that were erected to memorialize children whose lives had been cut short. “And that’s their only memorial. It’s bad luck to name a baby after a child who died young, so their name is never carried on.”
If Kalman Feinberg’s brother had died young, then it was unlikely he’d have given his son the name. I still made a note of it.
I read as much as I could about the history of Shomrei Torah. The rabbi in the 1940s was named Jacob Sapinsky, and he was involved with the Hebrew Sheltering Home, which provided a refuge for Holocaust survivors. He had died in 1948 at the age of fifty. I found only one reference which indicated that he had been murdered; most of what I read were tributes to him as a man of honor.
Was his death connected to what Joel had found? Could Rabbi Sapinsky have been the one who secreted those documents behind the Belgian block wall? He was the rabbi of the congregation, and he had access to the area. But then, so could anyone else who belong to the shul at that time.
The question was why hide those papers? And what did they mean?
15 – Call Me Al
I needed to speak to Rick about what I’d found, so I called him as I left the library in Trenton. “How would you feel about me bringing over pizza when I come for Rochester?” I asked.
“That would be awesome. I’m just wrapping up here at work and I don’t have the energy to fix anything.”
Rick had just gotten home when I arrived with the pizza, and he quickly pulled out the last two Dogfish Head Firefly Ales from the six pack. The dogs circled around us as if they hadn’t eaten in days, and as we ate we both fed them pieces of crust.
I told him about speaking with Akiva the librarian. “So that might explain what brought Joel to Trenton. But something sidetracked him and I think it has to do with the documents he found at the old shul.” I munched a slice of pizza, the crust chewy, the toppings as gooey and delicious as I remembered. “You find anything interesting today?” I asked after a while.
“I did some research on the bus ticket in Joel Goldberg’s pocket,” Rick said. “I wanted to see if I could figure out where he’d been. I called a buddy of mine on the Trenton PD and he told me that the police stopped Joel in Hiltonia because he was making a racket and banging on the door of a house in the neighborhood. He told the officers some story about needing a way to get to the train station and so they took him to the station in West Trenton and dropped him there.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “He had looked up bus schedules at the library, so he knew there was a bus from the station that would take him to Shomrei Torah. Do you know the address where he was banging?”
“It was a neighbor who called, and by then Joel had moved down the street, so they don’t have an exact address.”
“But they have the neighbor’s address, right? You could contact the neighbor and find out who was being harassed.”
“I can get it from my buddy but it means calling in a favor.”
“I do. You ever track down that skinhead that Buddha McCarthy mentioned?”
“Yeah. He ripped off a convenience store in West Trenton the day after he had his fight at the Rescue Mission. Been in jail ever since. And surprisingly enough, his name really is John White. At least that’s what’s on his ID.”
By the time we were finished the dogs had eaten so much crust, and bits of sausage, that they weren’t interested in kibble. We took them out for a long walk around Rick’s neighborhood. Rochester was eager to investigate all the different smells and I kept having to tug him along to keep up with Rascal who was, as my father would have said, on a “mission: pishin’.”
I took Rochester home soon after that, stopping at the mailboxes to pick up my mail. There was a letter from Daniel Epstein, and when I got home I opened it to find the original document I’d given him as well as his rough translation.
As he had said, it was a testimony from a Holocaust survivor named Myer Hafetz, about the fates of the people from his neighborhood in Berlin.
At last, I found the Aaron and Kalman I’d been looking for. They were brothers who had lived a few blocks from Hafetz. He described their childhood, how he and Kalman had celebrated their bar mitzvah the same year, 1938, right before the first round up of Jews.
As teenagers, he and Kalman, and Kalman’s younger brother Aaron, had survived the increasing roundups that followed Kristallnacht when Jewish shops and synagogues were vandalized. They had tried to lay low, but in 1941, after Jews were forced to wear th
e yellow Star of David badges, they had been sent to Auschwitz. Aaron, who was a skinny youth, oysgedart in Yiddish, had been immediately sent to the gas chamber, while Kalman Feinberg was put to work at a nearby factory.
Hafetz had been assigned to the camp’s kitchens, and his skill at creating the traditional German dishes he had learned from his mother kept him alive as he saw his old friend gradually decline. He tried to slip extra food to Kalman whenever he could but it was no use. Three months before the camp was liberated in 1945, thousands of internees were massacred by the camp’s guards, including Kalman Feinberg and many others from Hafetz’s neighborhood in Berlin. Hafetz only survived because he was needed to cook for the staff.
The sheer volume of names was chilling. Hafetz had brought to life his family, friends and neighbors, listing their approximate ages, their jobs, even physical details like red hair or a limp. I couldn’t imagine the strength that had been required to survive Auschwitz, let alone recreate the experience, and the deaths of so many.
But how had that document, and the photo of the two boys, ended up at the old shul? I went back online to the immigration records and searched for Myer Hafetz. I discovered that he had spent two years after the liberation of Auschwitz in a camp for displaced persons and eventually been connected to a distant cousin in New York who had sponsored him to come to the United States.
There the trail disappeared. What had happened to Hafetz? And how did what he wrote connect to Joel’s death?
Lili called later that evening. “Hallelujah,” she said. “They released my mother to rehab this afternoon. A very nice facility not far from where Fedi and Sara live. Medicare will pay a hundred percent for the first three weeks.”
“I’m delighted,” I said.
“I’m going to stay at least another day, make sure she’s settled, then I’ll come home. Though I have to admit it’s been nice here, aside from the problems with my mother. It’s so warm and it’s always sunny. And there’s some kind of alchemy going on. Every time I walk into a store the clerks start speaking to me in Spanish. I like it.”
Dog is in the Details Page 10
