Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “There’s no indication that Joel could understand Yiddish, is there?”

  I shook my head. “Rabbi Rob says their parents didn’t speak it to them.”

  “So it’s unlikely that could have set him off, isn’t it?” Rick said. “What about the photograph? Aaron is a pretty common name, I guess, but what about the other one – Kalman?”

  “I don’t think it’s that popular,” I said. “But we can look it up.” I got my laptop and did a search for the name. Kalman was a Yiddish given name that came from the Hebrew, and farther back from Greek. It was also a Hungarian name given to children to ward off evil spirits. It had never been a popular first name.

  “Can you search anywhere else?” Rick asked. “I mean, legally?”

  “Sure. I can go into some of the immigration databases. Maybe I can find a pair of brothers named Aaron and Kalman.”

  I sat back in my chair. “I think Joel Goldberg saw something that upset him in the ruins of the old synagogue,” I said. “It made him agitated and sent him off to see his brother.”

  “That’s one theory,” Rick said. “But remember, the guy was schizophrenic. We don’t know what was going on in his brain. He could just as easily have gone there to confront his brother, accuse him of something. I’m still not letting the rabbi off the hook, since he has no alibi for the time of Joel’s death.”

  “Blaming the rabbi doesn’t feel right.” I didn’t want to believe that Rabbi Goldberg had killed his brother – but there was the story of Cain and Abel again, and I couldn’t ignore the possibility. “And speaking of feelings, Lili told me that you picked out a ring for Tamsen.”

  His face brightened. “Yeah, it’s a real stunner. I think she’s going to love it.”

  “When are you going to give it to her?”

  “I was thinking about when I propose,” he said drily.

  “That’s not what I meant, numb nuts.”

  “Not sure yet. I mean, I know I want to do it, but I want the time to be right. I want it to be special, you know?”

  We brainstormed about places and times for a couple of minutes as we played with the dogs, but nothing jumped out at either of us. Eventually Rick and Rascal left, and then, as I had promised Rick, I spent some time online searching through immigration and family history records for a pair of German boys named Aaron and Kalman.

  The sheer volume of records was overwhelming. So many refugees fleeing the conflict in Europe, running from pogroms and other persecution. As I expected, Kalman wasn’t that common a name, but none of the ones I found had a brother, or even a male cousin, named Aaron.

  I spoke to Lili again late that night, just before bedtime. She’d had a confrontation with her sister-in-law Sara, who demanded to know if Lili had a copy of her mother’s will.

  “I was stunned,” Lili said. “It’s a broken pelvis, and it’s serious, but it’s not like she’s going to die tomorrow. And the way Sara said it was like she thought I was conniving with my mother to inherit everything. It’s not like I haven’t gone down there before.”

  “There isn’t that much, is there? Just her condo?”

  “My dad was a very successful engineer,” she said. “He made a lot of money and watched every penny he spent. She probably has a couple hundred thousand squirreled away. I don’t need it and I don’t mind if she leaves everything to Fedi and his kids. But I did not like the accusing tone Sara was using.”

  “I’m sure she’s stressed,” I said. “You said yourself that the burden of caring for your mother had fallen on her and Fedi.”

  “Burden,” Lili said. “Hah. Until she fell, my mother has been pretty self-sufficient. Sure, she gets these obsessions and Fedi or Sara has to go over and calm her down, but she hasn’t had trouble walking or taking care of herself. It’s just Fedi who’s been pushing her to move in with him.”

  “Trying to prevent this kind of problem?”

  “Whose side are you on, Steve?”

  “Always yours, sweetheart. Remember what I said last night? Don’t let them grind you down.”

  “I’m tired and cranky. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  We ended the call with mutual affirmations of love and I went to bed, Rochester eager to take Lili’s place by my side.

  Monday was a slow day at Friar Lake, and it gave me a lot of time to think about Lili and hope that her mother would improve quickly so she could come home. Rochester sensed my grim mood and brought me his squeaky ball. He dropped it at my feet and looked up at me with his doggy grin. I picked up the ball, which was slippery with saliva, then immediately brushed my hand against my pants. “Come on, boy, let’s go outside and play,” I said, and he romped out of my office, his tail wagging madly.

  I called him the golden thiever because he didn’t usually like to play fetch; he’d get the ball or Frisbee or whatever I’d thrown and then settle down with it firmly clasped between his paws. But that afternoon he was willing to play, and I threw the ball several times in the grassy yard beside my office.

  The leaves on the oaks beside the abbey chapel had begun to turn, and there was a crispness in the air that presaged autumn. But I couldn’t stay melancholy because Rochester’s joy was so infectious.

  I spent some time online looking for information about Joel Goldberg. I used a couple of different search engines and a combination of terms, and I found a lot of material. Over the past year, Joel had been a frequent poster to a Holocaust information list serve, mentioning occasionally that he had to rely on public internet access at libraries and cafés, and he engaged in many discussions about how to trace family members and others who had died during the Shoah.

  In my conversation with the rabbi, he’d mentioned that their grandparents had survived the camps, and through Joel’s posts I discovered it was their father’s parents that he’d been talking about. Lev and Rifka Goldberg had been children in Auschwitz for a short time before they were liberated. Joel had apparently pored over many lists of inmates, both those who died and those who survived, looking for their names and those of any family members.

  He had been constricted by the common nature of his last name. Many families from Russia, Poland and Germany shared it, and according to what he’d written, Joel didn’t know the name of the village his grandparents had come from. Some of the databases he mentioned were private, either by subscription or membership, and I resisted the impulse to hack my way into them. Joel didn’t seem to have much of a filter in his messages and posts; if he had learned something I was sure it would be online in a public place. I wasn’t sure if that was naiveté on his part, a side effect of his illness—or just an innocence of the kind of trouble that openness could bring.

  There was way too much material, and I didn’t have enough information to know what I was looking for, so eventually I gave up. I sat at my desk, staring into space, when Rochester came up to me, wagging his tail, with a book in his mouth that he’d picked up from the coffee table in the lobby. “Did you want me to read to you, puppy?” I asked, as I pried the book from his jaws. It was a copy of the coffee table book Lili and I had collaborated on about the history of Friar Lake. She’d taken gorgeous photos of the exteriors and interiors of the old stone buildings, both before and after renovation, and I’d written text about the history of the property.

  Rochester sat up and stared at me.

  “What? You can’t want to go out. We just went.”

  I looked at the book in my hand. Was he trying to tell me something about the abbey? About Lili?

  I hefted the book in my hand, getting a sense memory of all those days I’d ferried books home from the old Gothic-style library in Stewart’s Crossing.

  Of course. The library. Buddha McCarthy at the Rescue Mission had told me that he’d sent Joel Goldberg to the library in Trenton to look up old records. “You think I ought to go to the library, don’t you, boy?” I asked, and Rochester woofed.

  We left Friar Lake soon after that. It was a hot day by autumn standards and I didn’t
want to leave Rochester in the car, so I dropped him at home, gave him a biscuit, and promised I’d be back soon.

  I used my phone to locate the library branch closest to the Rescue Mission and drove along the river through Yardley and then Morrisville, and across the Calhoun Street Bridge into Trenton, taking another of my nostalgic journeys into my past. I recognized the building as I parked nearby – a two-story marble building with big windows and a four-columned entrance portico. Back when I was a kid, my mother had held onto her Trenton library card, and she’d taken me there a couple of times while she looked for something and I got to browse through the kids’ books.

  The librarian at the reference desk, a hipster guy with tattoos and a goatee, remembered Joel. The plaque in front of him said that his name was Akiva Teitelboim, a classic Jewish name, but surprisingly he had a light Spanish accent.

  “He was very well-spoken for a homeless guy,” he said. “We get a lot of the homeless looking for shelter here when it rains or gets too cold.”

  “You remember what he was looking for?”

  “First off, he wanted a phone book, and then I saw him looking through the bus schedules over there.” He pointed to a rack of brochures listing each route.

  The need for bus schedules was evident, if Joel was on his way to Shomrei Torah. “Anything else?” I asked the librarian.

  “He asked if we had anything about the history of Trenton from the 1940s, and I told him about our Trentoniana collection. We have a huge collection of photographs, manuscripts, trade cards, letters, postcards, diaries and maps. Lots of old newspapers on microfilm, too.”

  What could Joel have been looking for in the historical archive? As far as I knew, the Goldbergs hadn’t lived in Trenton in the 1940s. Did his search have something to do with the photo of the two boys that had been in his shoe?

  “Why are you looking for him? Did he do something wrong?”

  I shook my head. “He was killed at the synagogue a few days ago, and his brother wants to understand what he was doing here.”

  He wanted to know who had killed his brother, too, but that wasn’t why I’d come to the library.

  “That’s sad,” Akiva said. “There’s one more thing. He recognized my name as Jewish, and asked me if I was named after Rabbi Akiba from the Bible. And if I was, why was my name spelled with a V instead of a B.”

  “I assume you are,” I said. Something in my brain clicked. “Are you from South America?”

  “I was born in Argentina. My great-grandparents came from various parts of Poland and Russia, and when they were fleeing the Holocaust they couldn’t get into the US. So they landed in Buenos Aires. There was a bombing at the Jewish Community Center where I went to nursery school, so my parents decided to pick up and move here.”

  Akiva frowned. “I told him a little bit about my family history, which turned out to be a big mistake. He started rambling about how he knew that there were Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers, living among us. That he had come to Trenton to warn his brother, who’s a rabbi.”

  “I’ve spoken to his brother,” I said. “We’ve been trying to figure out why Joel came to Trenton in the first place, so that fills in a blank for me. But he didn’t go directly to his brother.”

  “Yeah, he told me about his schizophrenia, that he has trouble following through on things, that he got distracted easily, and that it took him a couple of days to remember what he was planning, and by then he was on to something else.”

  That explained why Joel had hung around Trenton for a few days, staying at the Rescue Mission and the old shul. But what finally motivated him to speak with Rob? And why had he been looking up temple elders on his brother’s computer?

  14 – Man of Honor

  When I got home, I took a closer look at the members of the board of directors on the synagogue’s website, but nothing jumped out at me. I knew all those people, some of them since I was a child, and it was hard to see them as an outsider would.

  Eventually I gave up, heated up the leftover lasagna and sat at the kitchen table, surfing through the New Jersey state archives on my laptop. Though some microfilmed materials were available online, most of the material in the searchable databases dealt with the early history of the state. All I could find was general information and census data of the Jewish population in Trenton in the 1940s and ‘50s.

  I spoke to Lili for a while, letting her vent, but I could tell that she was starting to figure out how she could fit into the equation down there, what she could do to help. “I wish I’d insisted that she get long-term care insurance,” Lili said. “Back when she was young enough and healthy enough to qualify. She always insisted she had enough money to carry her through, but now that I look at the cost of rehab facilities and in-home nursing care, I’m not sure. At least Medicare will pay for what she needs now.”

  “Do you think we should have long term care insurance ourselves?” I asked. “Health care power of attorney and all that? You and I don’t have any no legal ties, so what if one of us were to get into an accident or get sick, and someone like Fedi comes in to take over? I don’t even have any close enough family.”

  “Dios mio, Steve. Don’t you think I have enough to take care of down here?”

  “Sorry, sorry. I was just thinking.”

  She sighed. “I know, and you’re right. Just let me get through this, all right?”

  “Of course, sweetheart. You focus on your mother right now. Everything between us will work itself out. Everything all right in your office?”

  “So far, so good. You’re not taking Rochester over there tomorrow, are you?”

  I usually left Rochester at Lili’s office when I taught my Tuesday class. “No, I was thinking I’d take him to Rick’s. He and Rascal can play together, and Rick has a guy who comes over to let Rascal out into the yard in the afternoon.”

  That night, Rochester slept beside me once again, and I woke up to see him sitting on his haunches staring at me. “What?” I grumbled. I looked over at the clock. It was barely seven in the morning.

  He stepped over me and settled down on my chest. “Get off of me, you beast,” I said, shoving at his side. “You’re cutting off my circulation.”

  He just looked at me.

  “Fine, I’m getting up.” I pulled the comforter and over his body, tucking it around his head like a bonnet. “Little Gold Riding Hood.”

  He wriggled out from underneath and jumped to the floor, barking once. I stumbled to the bathroom then put on a pair of sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt and we were out the door.

  An hour later, we were at Rick’s, and he yawned as he opened his front door. Rochester nearly bowled him over in his eagerness to get to Rascal. “Good morning to you, too,” Rick said to the dog’s departing behind.

  “I thought you’d be up and on your way to work by now.”

  “Usually would be. But I was out late last night, interviewing people on the bus route that goes past the synagogue. No one I spoke to can remember anything from last Wednesday. Nobody noticed Joel, or the skinhead he had a beef with at the Rescue Mission. I’m still working on tracking the guy, though John White is not exactly a unique name.”

  I called Rochester to me and told him to be a good boy. I tried to pet him, but he skidded away again to play.

  So much for doggie love.

  Maybe it was Lili’s absence, or not having Rochester with me, but I was glad to escape Friar Lake and drive the few miles to the Eastern campus for the Jewish American Lit class.

  I was looking forward to some great discussion, and I wanted to introduce the ideas that I’d come up with while searching the immigration databases, but before I could get started, Jessica demanded, “Why aren’t we reading Elie Wiesel’s Night? Isn’t the Holocaust important enough for this class?”

  I was surprised by her hostility but I tried to diffuse it. “Weisel’s book is a literary classic, and one that is deeply connected to the Jewish experience of the twentieth century,” I said. “To answer y
our question, we can look at the title of this course—it’s called Jewish-American literature, and the focus of the syllabus and our readings is to examine the experience of immigration and assimilation.”

  “But how can you look at the Jewish-American experience without considering the effect of the Holocaust?” she said. “A whole branch of my family was wiped out by the Nazis, and my great-grandparents had to struggle to escape. That has to color everything that my family, and by extension, American Jews, go through.”

  “I empathize with you,” I said. “But I’ll posit that perhaps that experience, while traumatic, means less to certain people. Remember, there have been Jews in America since before the Revolutionary War. And while their descendants may have been moved by the Holocaust, it isn’t their primary narrative.”

  Noah jumped in. “It’s like ancient history already,” he said. “Yeah, my family lost people then, too. But they weren’t people I knew. Like I’m going to get all stressed over my grandmother’s second cousin? I’m more interested in how my grandfather couldn’t go to the college he wanted to because they had a Jewish quota.”

  “Well, you’re just selfish,” Jessica said.

  The class erupted in argument, and it took me several minutes to get them all calmed down. We ended up talking about different paths to citizenship, and I used Lili’s family as an example of Jews who weren’t able to gain admittance to the US due to restrictive immigration policies. “And isn’t that something we see today?” I asked.

  We did finally get into a good discussion—connected more to current events than the literature we’d been reading—but I figured any time I could get students thinking and talking I had done my job.

  Since I didn’t have Rochester with me, I decided to go back to Trenton and look through the archives again, and see if I could figure out what Joel Goldberg had been looking for. Unfortunately, the librarian on duty at the New Jersey State Archives wasn’t as helpful as Akiva Teitelboim. She couldn’t remember anything about a homeless guy coming in to look up information on Jews in the city, but she directed me to a collection of microfilm called the Trenton Jewish History Project. I confess that I forgot all about Joel as I read about Jewtown, making connections to streets and family names from my childhood.