Part Four Facts on the Ground
12 Ghosts NEW YORK — JERUSALEM — TEL AVIV, 2011–12
I have here the first letter Gila sent me back in 2010, before we met that one afternoon for lunch. The letter is still in its envelope, pressed between the pages of a book on Jewish mysticism by the rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. Steinsaltz writes:
For everything man does has significance. An evil act will generally cause some disruption or negative reaction in the vast system of the Sefirot; and a good act, correct or raise things to a higher level. Each of the reactions extends out into all of the worlds and comes back into our own, back upon ourselves, in one form or another.
I look back now over some of the sentences I wrote in 2009 in my piece about David Bellen’s murder, thinking of what Steinsaltz says about “reactions”:
I had never cared much about Israel — my lack of interest was so long-standing that perhaps I should have wondered more about it. On a deeper level, I might have realized, I had never wanted to face too directly the idea of myself as a Jew.
Perhaps the reason I have never wanted to face too directly the idea of myself as a Jew is that all roads seem to lead to the Holocaust memorial, as if it is the Holocaust that makes one a Jew.
I wrote these sentences almost unthinkingly, as much for the way they sounded as for what they meant. It is in this way that we end up in places we hadn’t meant to, the act of the sentences ramifying out and coming back to confront us, “in one form or another,” as Steinsaltz puts it, in my case in the form of Gila’s first letter. Out of that letter came our meeting. Out of that meeting came this book. This will interest you, Bellen’s editor, Galit Levy, had written me in her brief note accompanying his long, unpublished essay, “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” Hope you are well. When I read “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” for the first time, it reminded me of what Gila had described to me during our lunch with the word yored, “the sense of going down, of descending, of being corrupt.” I recognized this feeling in Bellen’s essay and I recognized it in myself. Hope you are well.
We would both always be yordim, Gila had told me, never olim. That was one of the things we had in common.
What she and Lansky had in common.
What she and I had in common.
In writing this book, I have come to feel like a kind of immigrant in my own life, inhabiting a world of reflections and images of people I can’t fully know, some of whom are dead, and I see now that my life has been shaped by this network, in ways I didn’t always perceive.
My father was the subject of, and not just a secondary figure in, a newspaper article in the summer of 2011:
Lawrence Groff, 76, brother of well-known jewelers Jacob and Beryl Groff, was indicted in federal court yesterday on three counts of conspiracy to commit fraud for his role in an antiques scam that prosecutors say involved a chain of dealers in Britain and Switzerland. The indictment is the latest development in a scandal that has shaken confidence throughout the antiques world, which had already been hard hit by the economic downturn of recent years.
According to prosecutors, Groff partnered with London dealer Dennis Lynne, a leading figure in the global antiques market, to sell items of purportedly eighteenth-century English furniture valued at $3 million to buyers in New York and elsewhere. The furniture, according to documents and photographs issued to the court by Lynne’s restorer, Martin Briggs, was in fact fabricated by Briggs himself in his Croyden workshop. Briggs claims he made the furniture out of old wardrobes and other items, which he then painstakingly refinished and appointed to look like rare and valuable antiques. In the court documents, Briggs includes invoices submitted to Lynne for about £100,000 (Briggs also asserts that he was never paid for his work). Months later, he learned that Lynne had sold the allegedly eighteenth-century furniture to a dealer in Switzerland for more than ten times that amount. Groff has been charged with arranging for the sale of these forgeries to longtime clients of his in New York and other parts of the U.S.
“This is a business based almost entirely on trust,” said Candace Ross, an interior decorator in Darien, Connecticut. “Trust in a dealer’s integrity, his eye, his taste. So not only are we talking about a specific case here, we’re talking about the reputation of the antiques market in general.”
Ross points out that it can be extremely difficult to ascertain the true value of an antique. Unlike works of fine art, for example, furniture does not usually accrue a paper trail of ownership, or a provenance. A skillful restorer can embellish a legitimately old piece, making it appear rarer and more valuable than it is. A shrewd dealer can then make exaggerated claims about a piece’s historical significance.
“It’s not so much that Lawrence Groff didn’t know what he was doing,” said Christian Nabel, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s more that nobody in that business knows exactly what he’s doing. More precisely, people in that business don’t want to know exactly what they’re doing.”
Groff was released on a $200,000 bond. If convicted, he faces up to ten years in prison.
“I knew he was in financial trouble,” a friend of Groff’s said, “but I didn’t know it was serious. If the allegations turn out to be true, and I don’t know if they will, then the story will be one about panic, I think. Panic about protecting the kind of life he had built up over many years and was afraid of losing.
“What is the line from Eliot?” the friend continued. “ ‘The awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence can never retract’?”
I went to see a friend of mine, Ellen Teague, a few days after this story ran. I don’t have a lot of people in my life, Gila had told me that day we’d met for lunch. It occurred to me that I didn’t have a lot of people in my life either, at least not people I could speak to about my father. Ellen and I have known each other more than twenty years — through her marriage, the birth of her daughter, her divorce, her various boyfriends. During all that time I’ve been trying to reconcile the way Ellen looks and thinks and speaks with the diminished way she seems to perceive herself. She’s a tall woman with a perfect face that she doesn’t experience as quite her own, as if the face is a mask. We sat in her office in Carroll Gardens, a room she shares with three other therapists, and drank wine in the late afternoon, chilled white wine on a hot day with the blinds half opened, the still light on the ficus tree and the lime-green sofa and chairs. My father had stopped talking to me a few weeks before this. I told Ellen that although I wasn’t surprised by my father’s silence, the reality of it now was more powerful than I’d expected. It felt like a verdict. What I meant by that was that it was as if my father was declaring that whatever in our relationship hadn’t been my fault before had now become entirely my fault. I felt this, even if I disputed its fairness. I had always been more accusatory than forgiving — I couldn’t blame him for this failing of mine. I understood that, even if I saw his silence as most likely a tacit admission of his own guilt, a product of his shame.