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
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 hug 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.