by Julia Dahl
As soon as we get upstairs, I open my laptop and Google myself. The first page of results is all stories from the Trib, but halfway through the second page there is a post on a Web site called FarFrum.com with the headline “Who Is Rebekah Roberts?” The author—whose name is simply “Administrator”—links to my articles about Rivka Mendelssohn and writes:
You’ve by now read all about the murder of Rivka Mendelssohn. We at FarFrum applaud the reporter who apparently risked her own life to get justice for Rivka—but WHO IS REBEKAH ROBERTS? A quick Google search reveals she is from Orlando and is a graduate of the University of Florida’s school of journalism. Is she a Jew? And what do you think of her reporting on the charedi? We suspect there are some unhappy heebs out there.…
There are thirty-three comments. The first is from username “davenDan”:
this woman has blood on her hands. the goyim will use this to hurt us. she should be stopped before she brings death to us all.
Username “Ruthie718” posted beneath davenDan:
she is not jewish. no jew would do this.
Below that is “Heblow”:
Slut. I heard she fucked a cop to get her story.
Further down, username “Bodymore666” posted:
just like you chassidish puppet-bitches to hate on someone speaking the truth instead of actual MURDERERS! no wonder everyone wants to kill you all.
There are multiple blog posts on multiple sites with hundreds of comments, all devoted to me. The comment threads routinely devolve into personal spats and general complaints. Some people say that I should be thanked for exposing the ugliness in their secretive community. They post about how my stories, and the recent sex abuse trials and the New Hope lawsuit, are bringing attention to problems they want solved. Most, however, post that I probably have ulterior and sinister motives and should not be trusted.
“I can’t believe we didn’t know about this,” says Iris. “Does it freak you out?”
It does. It freaks me out so much I don’t really know what to say. I feel stuck to the sofa, like my body is made of hot, wet sand. They see right through me, I think. They see I’ve just stumbled into all of this. They see I’m just a little girl looking for her mommy.
“I’m surprised you haven’t gotten, like, hate mail or something,” says Iris. “Oh God, do you think they know where we live?”
“Anybody can find out where anybody lives,” I say.
“Okay, I can’t think about this anymore,” she says, standing up. “You should close your computer and go to bed.” She looks down at me and offers her hand. I should take it.
“I’ll go in in a minute.”
She doesn’t protest.
“Thanks for coming with me,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” she says.
She uses the toilet and I hear the sink running.
“Good night,” I call, when she comes out.
“Good night,” she calls back.
After she closes her bedroom door I turn on the TV. NY1 says it’ll be warmer tomorrow—if you can call forty-five warm. The computer is still open on my lap. I close my eyes and take ten deep breaths. My old therapist recommending breathing to “soothe” myself and return to reality. Usually, whatever ease the breathing brings is short-lived—a few seconds of relief from the pain in my intestines or the weight pressing down on my chest or the crackling heat in my face that makes it hard to see. But I can almost never do the one thing that would really help: refocus my attention away from the disaster my mind is racing toward. When I started at the Trib, one of he reporters warned me not to read the comments on any of my stories, which of course meant I had to do it. In college people rarely commented on our student newspaper articles. The residents of New York City, however, do comment. And most of the time, they are vicious, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, sexist haters, and the “dialogue” usually devolves into ranting about Obama. The people posting on FarFrum and the other blogs seem split into a similar ratio of reasonable to crazy. There is, however, a legitimate question buried in the responses, and it’s that question that is making my anxiety come alive: what do I think of what I am doing? Have I seriously considered the fact that exposing Jews to scrutiny from the gentile world is a potentially dangerous thing? That for, oh, all of civilization, pretty much every generation has persecuted or slaughtered the wandering chosen people? Have I internalized the number six million? Can I defend the fact that I am reporting on the darkest corners of this community, writing about their deaths, not their festivals or small businesses or artistic endeavors? I didn’t ask this question when I was reporting about Rivka Mendelssohn, but now I have to. And, even though the terror has me practically bolted to the futon, I know the answer is yes. In college, one of my professors did a lecture on the theories of journalism’s “role” in society. One of those theories was called the “wandering spotlight”—the idea that the light of scrutiny spins, resting on people in power and instances of injustice. And you never know when it might land on you. In January, I landed on Borough Park. Now, it looks like I’ve landed on Roseville.
I click into Facebook and search for Sam Kagan. More than a dozen profiles pop up, but one catches my eye immediately. The photo is of a young man holding one of those AK-47-looking rifles. His head is shaved and he is wearing a white “wife-beater” tank top. Facebook says he is “in” Cairo, New York—which according to the Google map is about sixty miles north of Roseville—and “from” Brooklyn. The page is set to private, which means I can’t see any of his friends or what he’s posted, so I click the profile picture to get a closer look. When this photo was taken, Sam was thin, with knotty, defined muscles, and strawberry-blond hair. The only thing that might tip you off that he is Jewish is his slightly long nose, a nose very much like mine. The photo was taken on September 14, 2008, by someone named Ryan Hall.
I click the message button and begin typing.
Hi Sam. I’m a reporter with the New York Tribune working on a story about Pessie Goldin. I know it sounds crazy, but I think it’s possible that you and I are related! Shoot me a message if you get this—I’d love to chat.
Sam’s page doesn’t list any family, so I click on Ryan Hall, whose page is also set to private. His profile picture is a faraway shot of a male in a canoe on a lake. Ryan, according to Facebook, is “from” Greenville, N.Y.
I decide to message him, too:
Hi Ryan, I’m a reporter for the New York Tribune and I’m trying to get in touch with Sam Kagan. Any chance you could pass my info along to him? Feel free to message me back… Thanks!
I send an e-mail to the Trib’s library asking for a background search on Sam Kagan and Ryan Hall. I add that they likely live—or lived—upstate. And then I go back to Facebook and do what I have done several times over the past five years: I search for Aviva Kagan. But none of the Aviva Kagans that come up match. They are too young or too old. Probably, I know, she married, and has a new last name. Or maybe she never joined Facebook. I pick up my phone and scroll to the number I’ve been told is hers. I know it by heart now. I will die with this phone number planted, roots deep, in my brain. Maybe it is all I will ever know of her. I press CREATE NEW CONTACT and enter just a first name: Mom.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AVIVA
When I returned to Borough Park my mother had been dead for almost half a year. She was forty-seven and Sammy was breach. Something went wrong during the delivery—no one ever told me what, exactly. She never got to hold her ninth child. Eli and his new wife were already living in the apartment above my mother and father, so they took the baby. My father was not equipped to care for an infant. My sister Diny was engaged, and my two teenage brothers were studying in Israel. Only Sara, who was eight, and Chasi, who was twelve, still needed looking after, and Chasi could mostly look after Sara.
I took the bus from Ocean City to Philadelphia and then to Manhattan. Eli came to meet me at the house in Coney Island where I’d spent nights with your father. I tried to hu
g him when I answered the door but he stepped back. He was furious that I was wearing pants. He lectured me for a long time. He said making shidduch for Diny had been nearly impossible because of me. He said her fiancé had no sense and that we would have to support them because his family was poor and that Diny’s job at the grocery would barely pay their rent. He said the only way for my sisters, and now little baby Sam, to avoid the same fate was for me to move away and marry as quickly as possible.
I think of it now, and I see that Eli was still practically a boy then, just twenty-two years old. But he was also a man with a pregnant wife, a dead mother, and an infant brother to raise. He told me that after I called he’d hoped I would come home and help him take care of the family.
“But I see now I was mistaken,” he said. “You disrespect me the moment you see me. You disrespect Hashem.”
I looked down at my hands in my lap, at my pants, and tears began to form in my eyes. He had no idea what the past year and a half had been like for me, and he had no desire to know. He just wanted me to help him make his life easier. I asked if he had told my sisters that I telephoned. He had not.
“How do I know what kind of ideas you are going to give them, Aviva? How can I let them see you?”
I remember thinking, I should be very angry at the way he is treating me. I wish now I had shouted back, Let me?! Let me see my family? The outrage rose inside me, but it was not a rocket like it had been before. I was so tired, Rebekah. So much had gone so wrong. I had failed at creating a life away from Borough Park. This, it seemed in that moment, was what mattered. What I really thought about his stupid hat and beard or my sisters’ shidduch or dressing tznius didn’t matter if I could not survive without them. And when I think back now, I know it did not matter to Eli, either. Now I know he did not expect me to believe everything we did was meaningful. He did not believe it all himself, but he couldn’t tell me that. He couldn’t tell anybody. That was part of how it worked.
I asked him what I had to do. He said I should stay by Coney Island until he made some calls.
“Can I see the baby?” I asked.
Eli said he would be in touch. The next day, he called and asked me to come watch Sammy while his wife, Penina, prepared my family’s apartment for Shabbos dinner with Diny’s fiancé’s parents. I borrowed a skirt and stockings from one of the girls staying by the house and took the subway to Borough Park. It was noon, and the streets were full of people shopping and running errands before sundown. I felt like I was watching them from far away. It was so familiar—the sound of men and women speaking in Yiddish, the train rattling above New Utrecht Avenue, the Hebrew lettering in the store windows—but it was as if I wasn’t really there. I was almost surprised when a woman ran into me with her stroller. I felt as though she should have been able to pop me like a soap bubble and keep walking home. You do not matter, Aviva, I told myself. This all goes on without you.
Eli met me at the end of our block and secreted me up the back staircase to the third-floor apartment. For as long as I can remember, the apartment was used as temporary housing for family visiting from Israel. My father’s cousin Ezra stayed there by his wife and their twin sons for several years when he and my father were starting their business. After that, my mother’s cousin Yankel stayed for a year while he worked for a company that exported Torah scrolls. Now, the apartment was my brother Eli’s. Penina greeted me with a shy smile. She was nineteen years old, and eight months pregnant, padding around in wool socks. Penina and I had been in the same school, but she was a year behind me and I did not know her well. She was cooking chicken soup and the apartment smelled wonderful. She took me into the bedroom where Sammy lay in the same white crib all the children in our family had slept in. He was just a little bigger than you were when I left and I felt that same squeeze in my heart when I looked at him. Could I start again, I wondered. Could I take care of little Sammy? Could I give him what I could not give you? Eli left and Penina went downstairs and I spent the day with Sammy. He had more hair than you did, and his was lighter. He had a pink birthmark on his left shoulder blade in the shape of a smile. I fed him and held him and sang to him all afternoon. In Florida, I read you the books your father and your grandparents said were “classics,” books about bunnies and moons, but there were no baby books in Eli and Penina’s apartment. I told Sammy about you, and I asked him if he thought it would be better for him if I stayed in Brooklyn or went away. What is better, I asked him, a sister who is absent, or a sister who is a problem? Because even then, I knew that if I stayed I would never be able to do what Eli wanted. Not for long, anyway. What kind of man will you become? I asked Sammy. Will you be pious? Will you be afraid? Will you be wise? I remember thinking that I did not want him to become like Eli and my father if he didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to spoil him for this world, either, if that was how he wished to live.
I was not invited to Shabbos dinner, and Eli insisted on telling my father that I was home himself. I stayed in the apartment and helped Penina put Sammy down while Eli went downstairs after the girls had gone to bed. He returned an hour later with my father. My father is a big man. Broad shouldered and tall, but he had shrunk significantly in the time I was away. He looked older. He had dusty brown circles beneath his eyes and his beard was whiter and unkempt without my mother’s attention. Neither of us said a word. I didn’t run to him and he did not reach for me. I had missed my mother’s death, and he had missed his first grandchild’s birth. The gap between us was enormous, and I knew immediately that it was unbridgeable. Or rather, that it would never be bridged. Penina went to the kitchen to bring tea. I sat on the sofa and my father sat in the armchair with Eli standing beside him. They both looked at me as if they expected me to begin speaking.
“Diny is engaged,” I said.
My father nodded.
“When is the wedding?”
“The wedding is in the spring,” said my father.
“I would like to help,” I said. Diny would need to shop for a sheitel and a dress and new clothing for her married life. We would need to reserve a hall, send invitations, select a caterer and decorations, create a seating chart. My brothers and uncles and aunts and cousins would fly in from Israel and we would need to arrange for their stays. I wondered: had the family come for Mommy’s funeral? She did not live to see any of her daughters married. But I would make sure that Diny’s wedding was beautiful, just how she would like it.
“I do not think that is a good idea, Aviva,” said my father. “I think it is better if Penina helps Diny make preparations. Your tante Leah has offered as well.”
I did not object because I knew he was not going to change his mind. He spoke without emotion in his voice, but I could see he was struggling. He did not look me in the eyes. I wanted to ask him about my mother. Did she know I loved her? Did she know I had not imagined for a moment that when I said good-bye that late August morning, when I told her I was going to Crown Heights to buy new shoes, that I would never see her again. I knew it would be a long time. Years, perhaps. But what is a few years when you are eighteen and wild with ideas? What is a few years in a world suddenly a billion years old? If man came from monkeys, maybe I would live to be one thousand. Maybe we all would. I hadn’t written because I assumed they would throw my letters away, like Tante Leah threw Gitty’s away. I had not even known Mommy was pregnant again.
When Penina came back into the living room, my father rose. I did the same.
“I am very tired,” he said. “We will talk more tomorrow.”
I had not expected to be welcomed home with a celebration, but I had also not expected the coldness. My father was never a cruel man. He was strict, but loving. He told us stories around the dinner table. He fished with us in the Catskills. On Purim, he helped us create our costumes—assisting my mother with face-painting and hairdos and hat-making. He walked us to parties up and down the streets, smiling, stopping to chat with whomever we encountered along the way. When Rivka died, he cried m
ore tears than my mother. He held her swollen eleven-year-old body and shook. I wished I could have told him that I named you for her. Two years later, Diny named her first daughter Rivka.
After my father went downstairs, I began to cry. Eli was unsympathetic. He said that gossip about where I’d been and what I planned to do would upstage Diny’s day of joy. I did not ask what Diny thought because I was afraid she might agree with Eli and my father. And anyway, it did not matter what she thought. She would go along with what they wanted.
“Why did you ask me to come home?” I wailed.
“Because you can still find your way back to Hashem,” said Eli. “But not here. Tatty and I think it is best if you go Israel to live with Feter Schlomo and Tante Golda. They have a new baby and you can help care for her. They have offered to arrange shidduch. Finding a match will be easier there.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, Rebekah, but I was. In one hour they had determined I would not be allowed to rejoin my family. My father made the decision without even looking at me.
“Is it so easy for you to send your sister away?” I asked Eli, tears falling down my face.
“You already left!” shouted Eli. The boom of his voice startled Penina. She put her hand on her protruding belly, as if to shelter the child inside. “You thought nothing of us! We searched for you, Aviva! We thought you were dead! And when we found out you had run off with a goy…” He was so enraged he could scarcely speak. He was spitting into his thin copper beard. “You killed Mommy, Aviva.”
“Eli!” whispered Penina. But her protest was weak. She only wanted calm. And Eli barely heard his wife.
“She loved you! And that meant nothing to you. But you question why we do not welcome you back? You are a selfish girl. You are dangerous to this family.”
I stared at him, my mind knocking like a pinball between anger and despair and longing, hitting each feeling with a force that shook me. I held my head in my hands, but I couldn’t stop it. I sat back down on the sofa and rocked myself. Forward, forward, forward. Eli and Penina exchanged a look. A look like the look the rabbi in Orlando exchanged with the woman who didn’t know the mikveh. In their faces I saw that my physical reaction to their decision to send me to live five thousand miles away told them they’d done the right thing. I was dangerous; I was to be managed. I grabbed my hair and rocked harder. A long stream of clear liquid hung from my nose, swaying as I moved. I saw it and didn’t care. I liked it. Let him see my sadness pouring out of me.
