Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  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.

  I called Rick and asked. “Nope, haven’t found it,” Rick said. “The rabbi mentioned it, too.”

  “Do you think whoever killed Joel took the backpack?” I asked.

  “Reasonable guess, since it was a remote area and the rabbi said his brother carried the pack with him everywhere. If we ever come up with a suspect I’ll get a search warrant, but right now I’m low on clues and don’t know where else to go. This is looking more and more like one for the cold case files.”

  I hung up, and since Rochester was restless, I took him out for a walk. Where could Joel’s backpack be? What could he have been carrying that his killer might have wanted to take away? An English translation of the Yad Vashem document? More evidence that related to the boys in the photograph? Or something else entirely? Joel had been looking up the synagogue leadership at his brother’s computer before he ran off—did he have something with him that connected to one of them?

  I could see why Rick was baffled. I was, too. But I kept feeling that everything circled back to something that had happened in Trenton after the Holocaust. There were those two unsolved murders, after all. The Trentonian article I read mentioned only that Rabbi Sapinsky was the second victim. Who was the first?

  I remembered what Rick had said about cold cases. Was it possible that there were records in Trenton of unsolved murders? Would they have been digitized?

  As soon as Rochester and I got back to my office I started searching, and after a couple of false starts I found an article from the Trenton Times a couple of years before. The popularity of TV programs chasing down old homicides had led to pressure for a cold case squad to be formed in the Trenton Police Department, and old records dating back to the 1920s were being digitized.

  My fingers tingled. Had the case file on the rabbi’s murder been among those digitized? How could I find out? My first instinct was to wonder how good the security measures were around that data—could I hack into the database, with the tools I had?

  Rochester nosed me then, and I realized I was standing at the top of a slippery slope. Hack into a police database? That was a sure road back to prison.

  Time to shut down the computer and head home. I locked up my office, raced Rochester to the car, and settled down for the drive along River Road. I had downloaded an app from my insurance company that tracked my driving performance and could result in a lower rate, which meant I had to keep Bluetooth enabled on my cell phone so the app could communicate with a little gadget under my dash. I’d discovered I could play music from my phone through the car’s speakers that way, too, and Rochester and I were enjoying a little Springsteen, the windows open and the music blasting.

  I was startled as Bruce’s voice was interrupted right in the middle of “My Hometown” by the theme from Hawaii Five-O.

  It took me a moment to realize the car was channeling incoming calls, and then another to figure out how to accept the call. “Hello?” I asked a couple of times, before Rick responded.

  “The ME has established that Joel Goldberg died sometime between eleven PM, when Mr. Paca saw him get off the bus, and one AM.”

  “Does that mean that the person in the car Al Paca saw was Joel’s killer?”

  “It’s a hypothesis,” Rick said. “But right now there’s nothing more than coincidence, so I’m not jumping to any conclusions. Paca didn’t notice anything about the car, and without a description or a license plate there’s no way to track it.”

  “But it is a piece of the puzzle.”

  “That it is.”

  I told him about going to Daniel Epstein’s house and the files he’d kept on the death of Rabbi Sapinsky, and what the document Epstein had translated had contained. “Can you ask your friend at the Trenton PD if the file on Rabbi Sapinsky’s murder was digitized?”

  “This is all irrelevant, you know,” Rick said. “I’m trying to solve a murder that happened last week, not sixty years ago.”

  “I think it is relevant,” I said. “I think Joel found something that ties to those old murders. And that information got him killed.”

  “I’ll give it a try but I’m not making any promises,” Rick said.

  He ended the call and it took the Bluetooth a moment to recognize that, so suddenly my car was telling me that if I wanted to make a call I had to hang up and try again.

  “Irrelevant information,” I said to the disembodied voice.

  18 – Unusual Agency

  Lili called as I was fixing dinner. “I got a direct flight tomorrow that gets into Philadelphia at 3:30. Can you pick me up or should I take the train from the airport, and then connect to the one to Yardley?”

  “Things are slow at Friar Lake, so I can pick you up. Text me your flight information. How’s your mom doing in rehab?”

  “Surprise, surprise, she likes it. She has a roommate, which I thought she’d hate, but she has someone to complain with about the food, the temperature, the therapists. The roommate doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, which my mother would hate, too, but she loves, because she can say whatever she wants to me or Fedi and the woman doesn’t understand.”

  “She’s probably lonely,” I said. “Living by herself. It will be good for her to socialize.”

  We talked for a few more minutes and then hung up. When I checked my email, I found that the rabbi had sent me his brother’s address and password. I hoped that maybe there’d be a message there that would connect to what I’d previously found online, something that would give me an idea of what it was Joel was looking for.

  Joel’s email account was chock full of sent and received messages, many of them having to do with the Holocaust. He had emailed back and forth with a number of individuals he had met in forums online, often mentioning that it might be a while before he got back to them because he had to rely on public internet access. He had found someone whose family had emigrated to Trenton after leaving a camp, and he was trying to get that person to open up about his family background and what he knew, but the person was very cagey, always asking Joel more questions and never revealing too much.

  Joel seemed obsessed, but I had to admit that I could be that way myself, particularly when it came to following a trail of evidence or justifying my need to hack into some protected spot online.

  I was quickly overwh
elmed by the emotion Joel’s messages represented. Though his sentences were long and often wandered from topic to topic, the passion he felt was clear. No wonder Rabbi Goldberg hadn’t been able to get through too many of the messages. I didn’t have the same connection to Joel that the rabbi did, and even I couldn’t read for more than an hour before I had to stop. Joel’s passion and his intelligence were evident in his interactions, and it was painful to think of all that cut short.

  I played tug-a-rope with Rochester for a while, then went out for a long walk around River Bend with him. When we got back, I sat down for a longer look at Joel Goldberg’s email account. I needed to be organized if I was going to learn anything from this mass of data, so I created a spreadsheet to track it all. All those years in business had trained me to put information into columns and rows, looking for connections between bits and bytes.

  I listed the email addresses, and where I had them, the real names of the people Joel had corresponded with. I created columns for people who were descendants of survivors, and others who were tracking family trees, and a third for people who were just curious, like a high school kid who went under the handle JohnnyBeBad, whom Joel had helped with a class report.

  One of the problems I’d found in teaching at Eastern was that students weren’t able to make judgments about which sources were most valid. I tried to teach them to look for credentials—was the person they were quoting an expert in the field? Did he or she have a degree or a job with a publication?

  Too often they took what they found online as the gospel truth, often with bad consequences for their own work. One of my favorite examples was a student who’d written a paper about the Vietnam conflict, and his only source was a website called Marxism.org. Even though I tried to explain that this group represented the ideology on the losing side of the war, he never understood why their work could be biased.