Free This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir by Judy Brown

There no one could see her, standing in bloodstained clothes in the refrigerated back room, salting crates of headless chickens until every speck of blood was drawn out and the meat was kosher and pure, and the skin had come off the palms of both of her hands.
    But the butcher was a good man. He gave Savtah Liba drumsticks and chicken breasts to take home to her children free of charge.
    “We were poor, I guess,” Aunt Tziporah would say. “But we never thought about it. Everyone was poor. Sometimes when there was some extra money, we bought wafer crumbs at the shuk. They were sold at the kiosk, right near the licorice and chocolate and things we couldn’t afford. The wafer crumbs were delicious. There were two boxes of them, one filled with vanilla crumbs, the other with chocolate crumbs, and for only a shekel we could fill half a bag.”
    So who complained? Nobody ever complained, and Savtah Liba kept her suffering to herself. Because in the city of Jerusalem there were two sides: the one where the rich lived, and the one filled with the poor. My father lived among the poor—there, with his siblings and his crippled father; there, amidst suffering and illness; there, where the alley cats yowled of their hunger and were chased down ancient lanes by the hiss of old men’s shoes. God’s earth was hard enough. Nobody was interested in hearing about the general suffering too.

Twelve
    A decade and a half later, in New York, my father, already grown and married to my mother, became almost a millionaire.
    My father worked hard in Brooklyn, where he and his sisters moved just as soon as they could. He rolled matzos in the bakery, cut diamonds in Manhattan, and bought houses for cheap to fix and sell. You could do this in America, he said to me, step off the plane with only the shirt on your back and become a wealthy man.
    I asked my father if he had a million dollars, and he said almost, in just a little more time. I told him that I knew we were rich because Blimi had said so. She said that I was the wealthiest of the girls in my class because I had a white house three stories high, and two cars besides, one of them with doors that opened automatically. She also said that I had the biggest backyard she’d ever seen, and that only rich people had a wraparound garden like ours.
    My father said that money was an important thing to have, even if it was less than a million dollars. With money, he could buy us the things he’d never had. With money, a man could repair anything, patch it up or buy it new. He could fix problems that, without money, stayed problems, like the chipped tooth in Rivky’s mouth, Yitzy’s bike that crashed into a tree, the dented car.
    But then there were the things my father could not fix, not even with his money: the sunrise I’d meticulously drawn and Miri had shredded; the antique radio we had found, decades old, that would not work; and my crazy brother Nachum, now seven years old. My father paid psychologists, doctors, and special teachers, but nobody could fix the boy. They could not even figure out why or how he was broken.
    Long before, when my brother was two and three, my mother had thought that he’d grow out of it, that time would fix his strange ways. But then my brother turned four and five and things only got worse, especially in school. In the end, it was his pre-1-A rebbe, Reb Gold, who called my mother. It was he who finally told her that Nachum was crazy, that the parts inside his head were undone.
    Reb Gold hadn’t said it like that. He said that Nachum was different. Nachum wasn’t listening. He was throwing chairs at the other children. He said that Nachum wasn’t hearing. He had stopped speaking. He made strange noises and faces.
    Reb Gold was a good man. He said all this to my mother kindly, telling her that this was more than just strange, that Nachum must be taken for testing. So my mother took my brother from doctor to doctor, and from one specialist to another. She took