“Good boy,” I said to Rochester, even though it was going to be a pain to clean up all the paperwork. “This is just what I was looking for.”
He slumped down on the floor beside me, his back resting against my thigh, and I began to read. The first papers were programs from High Holy Day services at the old shul, where he’d been asked to read from the Torah one Yom Kippur. Beneath those was a series of articles from the Trentonian, the old morning paper, and the Trenton Evening Times.
We’d gotten both papers delivered when I was a kid, the Trentonian a tabloid that came before breakfast, while the Trenton Times showed up in the afternoon.
The first mention of Rabbi Sapinsky came on a March day in the Times. The headline of the short article was “Rabbi Found Dead in Jewtown.”
The body of Rabbi Jacob Sapinsky, 50, was found in the sanctuary of his synagogue, Shomrei Torah on New Street, late yesterday evening. The rabbi was not known to be in poor health, though according to a police source he had been very involved with the Hebrew Sheltering Home. This facility, which has brought many Eastern European immigrants to Trenton, has been cited as a hotbed of contagious diseases including lung disease, influenza and tuberculosis.
The paper didn’t mention whether the rabbi had died of natural causes or something more violent, just inferred that because he had helped immigrants he might have caught something from one of them. It was the kind of xenophobic attitude I expected from certain right-wing publications even today.
The next morning’s article, from the Trentontian, was much more inflammatory, with a big headline that read “Second Murder in Jewtown.”
According to the writer, the police had revealed further details of the rabbi’s death; he had been shot at close range, his body discovered at the shul an hour after the end of the evening service.
The article went on to imply that crime was rising in Trenton because of an influx of Jews and other refugees from Eastern Europe. This was the second homicide in six months in Jewtown, the reporter noted, and he believed that the rabbi’s murder was a symptom of discord between established residents and new immigrants.
A second murder, before Rabbi Sapinsky? Who was the victim? There was nothing in Epstein’s archive about that earlier crime.
There were a few more articles on the rabbi’s death, but no new details were revealed, and it appeared that no one was ever charged. Beneath the articles was a single sheet of paper that reminded me of the mimeographed newsletters that were common when I was a kid, before everyone had access to copying machines. This one was headlined “To the members of Shomrei Torah,” and the blue printing was fuzzy and fading. At least it was written in English so I didn’t need anyone to translate it for me.
“Our rabbi’s death was a tragedy,” I read. “But members of Shomrei Torah are cautioned to avoid agitating with regard to the cause of his death. The Jewish position in the United States is still tenuous, and as a minority it is in our best interest to retain a low profile. Calls for further investigation by the police can only cause our community to be in the spotlight in a negative manner.”
The message was unsigned, and I wondered if it had come from an individual member or from the office of the shul.
When I was young, my grandmother and my great-aunts viewed everything that happened through the lens of “is it good for the Jews?” When a Jewish actor or musician won an award, they kvelled. When a Jew was arrested for theft or accused of some other crime, they agonized over the larger implications for us and our people.
Statistics I had found noted that the Jewish population of Trenton during that time comprised about six percent of the total. Was this is a case of fear of xenophobia? Or was someone trying to cover up the rabbi’s murder?
I went downstairs with a pile of material I wanted to take a closer look at. Daniel Epstein was dozing in an easy chair, but he woke at the sound of my footsteps on the wood floor. The poor guy looked ancient, and I hoped that he’d be able to get back to sleep after Rochester and I left.
“Do you mind if I borrow this material? I’ll bring it all back when I’m done.”
“Have you found something interesting?” He sat up in his chair and pulled on his glasses, and he looked a decade younger, and more vibrant.
“I read the articles you saved from the newspaper. But there was never any mention of a solution to the rabbi’s murder.”
“It was a shonda, that,” he said, using the Yiddish word for a sin. “People in the Jewish community wanted the murders hushed up because they were afraid the goyim would rise up against us if they thought we were criminals.”
“You said murders,” I said, remembering the brief note I’d read about a second death in Jewtown before the Rabbi’s. “There was another?”
“A cousin of the Namias family, I believe. At least, he stayed with them for a while. He worked at the junkyard they owned on New Street.”
“Do you know what happened to him?”
“He was found dead in an alley beside the junkyard. But Henry would know more.”
“Henry Namias? From the rabbi’s Talmud study group?”
“That’s the one. You should talk to him. I’ll call him if you want, introduce you.”
I said that would be great, and he made the call. “Henry, it’s Daniel Epstein,” he said. Then he looked confused. He looked up at me. “Awful things, these answering machines and voice mail. I never know if I’m talking to a person or a machine.” Then he turned back to the phone and left a message for Henry to call him.
Daniel already had my phone number, and he promised to call me once he’d spoken to Namias. “He’s an alter kocker, that one,” he said, using the name for a cranky old man. “But don’t you worry, I’ll soften him up for you.”
By then, Rochester had his head in Epstein’s lap. “As if anybody needs to be softened up for you, you sweet boy,” he said, scratching behind Rochester’s ears.
I had long ago accepted that people often liked my dog better than they did me. I hoped that might be the case with Henry Namias, too.
I wasn’t sure at all what I was looking for, but it seemed that the more I dug, the more unsolved murders in the past I came up with. Had Joel figured something out about those crimes? There was no statute of limitations on murder, but it was doubtful that whoever had killed Rabbi Sapinsky, and Henry Namias’s cousin, was still alive and able to have killed Joel. I’d have to look back at the time line to be sure, though.
17 – Relevant Information
It was nearly noon by the time we left Daniel Epstein’s house, and I drove too quickly up the twisting, turning River Road to Friar Lake because I felt guilty about taking so long away on a work day. I swerved to avoid a family of ducks crossing the road on their way to the river, a big brown Muscovy hen leading a parade of chicks behind her.
Rochester sat up and woofed at them but the ducks were focused on their mission. I had a commitment, too, to my job, and if I didn’t pay attention to it, everything I had built over the past two years might be torn apart.
Before I began working at Eastern, I had only an ordinary sense of alumni affection for the college. I had spent four years there, learned how to apply my brain to problems, fallen in and out of love, made friends and gathered mentors. But then I’d moved on, first to Columbia, where I got my master’s, and then to California, where my dreams of creating a family of my own bit the dust.
The community at Eastern had become a second family to me over the last two years. I’d made friends on the faculty and staff, attended events, bonded with students. Though I was working off campus, I still felt connected to those old buildings at the top of the hill in Leighville and the way that a college education can shape a life. I felt very lucky to be part of that community, to be able to give back in return for so much that had been given to me.
I carried Epstein’s box into the office with me and left it on the coffee table in the reception area of the gatehouse, beside the pile of brochures advertising Friar L
ake’s conference facilities.
Fortunately, nothing had happened in my absence other than the receipt of a flood of emails in my inbox. I ate the sandwich I’d made for lunch as I skipped through them, deleting the irrelevant ones and reading the ones I had to. Professor Del Presto had sent me a draft of her ideas for an immigration program, focused on the way that hashtags like #shutthedoor and #immigrationreform had their roots in historical attitudes of isolationism.
I was reminded of that bumper sticker in the shape of the continental U.S., and the belief it represented that we ought to close the door to outsiders. What if my own grandparents hadn’t been able to enter the U.S. when they left Russia and Lithuania? Would I have been born in Cuba like Lili, in Argentina like Akiva the librarian? What about all the accomplishments of immigrants, and those descended from immigrants?
Those thoughts reminded me I had to check the college’s learning management system to see if my students in the Jewish American Lit class had sent me any messages of made any new discussion posts.
With Rochester sprawled on the floor beside me, I began to read and grade posts. I loved the way students came up with oddball ideas that had never occurred to me, took the work in different directions or went off on tangents.
Jessica, the girl who looked like an extra in Fiddler, had written that she was interested in the ways that the authors we were reading had reinterpreted Bible stories to fit their lives. “So far I’ve recognized allusions to Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and King David and the way he stole Bathsheba from Uriah,” she wrote.
Interesting that she’d found references to three different stories that revolved around family—the very first family, according to the Bible, and the way it, and the marriage of Uriah and Bathsheba, had fallen apart.
I wished she’d been more specific—which work had referenced which story? I responded to her comment congratulating her on her insight and asking for more details. Other students had shared their observations about the insularity of immigrant communities, that perhaps when they stayed so close together they prevented assimilation and that might lead to prejudice against them.
Noah, the student whose family came from Trenton, had written, “If you focus only on your family and not your neighbors, who can blame those people from suspecting you? We’re always frightened of what we don’t know.”
I wrote back that at least in Kaplan’s book immigrants from various countries all bonded together in common pursuit of English fluency, and that perhaps that kind of joint effort would lead to more understanding.
When I finished, I looked around for Rochester. He’d gotten up and left my side, and taken up a position by the coffee table, beside where I’d left Epstein’s box. Did he remember the smell of the man who’d been nice to him? Or was there was a clue in the box he wanted me to find?
I sat on the floor with the box on one side of me and Rochester on the other. I picked a folder at random and began flipping through it, until I stopped suddenly at the mention of my mother’s name at the top of a form—and right beside hers was the name Victor Namias.
Every now and then I’d be surprised at the realization that my parents had lives before I was born. Letters my father had written home when he was in the Navy. A photo of my mother as a young woman, like the one I’d discovered online. And now this file.
In 1964, Shomrei Torah had launched an oral history project. Young volunteers were dispatched to synagogue members to ask them questions about old Trenton, about their younger years, and if they’d come from Europe, how they’d arrived in central New Jersey.
As I’d seen in that earlier picture, my mother was a member of the Young Judea Group at Shomrei Torah, and she’d volunteered, or been dragooned, into helping with the interviews. The document I’d found was a transcription of her conversation with a man named Victor Namias, who I eventually figured out was Henry’s father.
It didn’t seem like a coincidence to me – after all, the Jewish community in Trenton was relatively small, and I still knew a few of the people my mother had known when she was younger. If she was still alive, would she be able to fill in some of these blanks?
As I read through the document I recognized some of the same facts I’d found at the Jewtown blog.
My people come from Salonica. It was Turkey when they lived there, but now it’s Greece. They call it Thessaloniki, but it’s the same place. What can you do, the borders change all the time. In 1917 there was a big fire, fifty thousand people burned out of their homes. My parents decided it was time to leave and they came to America.
My family was Sephardic, from Spain long ago, and they spoke Ladino. I didn’t even speak English until I went to school for the first time. We lived in this town outside New Brunswick, Highland Park. Lots of Sephardim there, we had our own shul, our own community. We looked after each other.
When I finished high school a friend of my father’s from the shul got me a job with the same company he worked with, delivering baked goods. The only route they had was in Trenton, so I used to get up before the sun and drive the truck to the warehouse, load up the goods and then take them to stores around the city.
I met this beautiful girl, dark hair and dark eyes, named Esther, after the queen from the Bible. She worked at one of the stores down by the river in Jewtown, and I courted her for a while. She was only in this country a few years and she spoke mostly Yiddish but I taught her enough English that we could talk, and I could ask her to marry me.
I moved down to Trenton for good then, so she could be by her family and I didn’t have so far to drive. Then her cousin got me a job in his junkyard, and eventually I became a partner. My wife would get pregnant and then lose the baby. Three times this happened, until finally our Henry was born. I said basta then, enough, because I was afraid if we tried again I would lose my Esther, too.
Esther is a real balabusta, they call her in Yiddish, a good wife and a good woman. My queen. She’s always taking in stray relatives. After the war we had one cousin after another staying with us until they could get their feet under them. Terrible things those people went through, worse than even my parents, losing everything in the great fire.
The narrative continued for another page, but I stopped paying attention, thinking of my mother, twenty-two years old, listening to these stories. She was still living with her parents, working as a bookkeeper for a furniture store in Jewtown owned by neighbors. She had certainly known of the camps, and I knew that she’d lost some distant cousins, so surely the Holocaust had loomed in her consciousness.
Not for the first time, I missed my parents. I wished I could sit down with my mother and hear her talk more about what it had been like for her, growing up in Trenton after World War II.
Had she known Myer Hafetz, too? I did some quick calculations and realized she’d been a child when Hafetz died, so it was unlikely. But my grandparents probably knew the Namiases, and through them Hafetz.
It was curious how my own family history kept popping up in this investigation. What else would I discover—and would it be something I wished I hadn’t?
I thought it would be a good idea to learn what I could about Henry Namias before I spoke with him, so I did some searching online for him.
He had no profiles on social media, though I found one of his grandchildren had mentioned him in a Facebook post. His family had donated an exercise room at Greenwood House, the Jewish home for the aged, and I found a few mentions of that gift. When I searched for “Namias” and “junkyard” I found an article on a blog dedicated to old Trenton.
The Namias family owned a junkyard on New Street in the heart of Jewtown. Victor Namias was from Turkey and spoke no Yiddish, so he focused on collecting used goods, cleaning them up and repairing them and his wife Esther, from Germany, spoke with customers and handled the books. Esther often took in refugees from the Hebrew Sheltering Home and there were always lively conversations going on in the office.
Interesting. That matched what Daniel Epstein told
me, that Myer Hafetz had been taken in by the Namias family when he came to Trenton. The mention of the Hebrew Sheltering Home echoed what Rick and I had found in the police files on Hafetz’s death.
I sat back and thought about all that I’d discovered with relation to Joel Goldberg’s death. It all seemed to circle back to the Holocaust.
Joel had found the photograph of those two boys at the old shul. Had he also found the testimony by Myer Hafetz and recognized the Hebrew characters that formed Yad Vashem? Maybe there was an English translation there, too, which Joel had taken away, leaving behind the one that he couldn’t read.
If he had been able to read a translation, that might have refueled his obsession with the Holocaust and his need to speak with his brother, bringing him to Shomrei Torah on the Sunday morning of the Blessing of the Animals.
Why hadn’t he brought the document to his brother, if he had seen it? He had the photo of the two boys folded up in his shoe. Did his killer take away the English translation?
These were all just theories, though. Since Joel’s brain was affected by his schizophrenia, there was no way to know what he’d found or thought.
Something had driven him away from Shomrei Torah that Sunday, before he had a chance to speak to his brother. What was it? The rabbi thought Joel had been using his computer, reviewing the members of the temple’s board of directors. Because he was angry that Feinberg and his cabal had tried to chase him away?
As Buddha McCarthy had mentioned, Joel had a hard time following through on things because he’d get distracted. I knew one of the symptoms of schizophrenia was paranoia, though I didn’t know if Joel suffered from that. It was reasonable, however, that he’d gotten sidetracked, thinking someone at the temple was out to get him.
Then something had happened over the next couple of days. Where was he living? He hadn’t gone back to the Rescue Mission after his altercation with John White. Had he returned to the old shul? He had a backpack with him when he showed up on Sunday. Where was it? Had Rick found it on the temple grounds? I hadn’t seen anything like it at the old shul when I went to investigate, and found the testimony from Myer Hafetz.
Dog is in the Details Page 12
