Free Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan

run when Flora came after him.
    Her quiet, angry behavior lasted a year or two. Then, suddenly, she was a different person. She started using vulgar language, sexual words. And she began striking dramatic poses, with her back arched and arms akimbo as though she were on the stage of a Greek tragedy or a play by Shakespeare. She became extravagantly verbose. A nice night would start out as, “Oh! This is a lovely evening.” It would turn into “A magnificent evening!” Then, “A celestial evening!” “A stirring evening!” 4
    By the time Flora was fourteen, she was writing as dramatically as she was speaking and moving. Her literary work began earning ribbonsin citywide student essay contests; her name appeared on winners’ lists in the
New York Times.
These accomplishments gained her acceptance into Brooklyn’s world-famous Girls High School. It was a female meritocracy filled with the smart daughters of the city’s salt-of-the-earth neighborhoods: Jewish girls, Italian girls, Irish girls, black girls.
    The Depression was raging when Flora started Girls High in 1930. Like the rest of the country, New York was plagued by joblessness and bread lines, and Flora’s Brooklyn neighborhood roiled with left-wing politics. By 1932, brigades of Communist organizers and housewives with children were surrounding the apartment buildings of unemployed people who could not pay their rent, defending them against eviction by city marshals. Voters were electing Socialists to the State Assembly. People stood on soapboxes, calling for the downfall of capitalism, or at least for the rise of the New Deal. Even the revolutionaries liked FDR.
    Willy Schreiber was the neighborhood’s political oddball. As a civil service employee with the library, he had a steady if modest income, and he was not a member of a union—no civil servants were. He worried that the New Deal would redistribute public funds, including his salary, to the unemployed. He despised Roosevelt, to the great annoyance and even anger of the rest of the family, including his wife. At birthday parties there were heated arguments between Willy and the other adults. Flora listened and felt divided. In her world, being as politically conservative as her beloved father was like being from Mars.
    In school, Flora lacked friends despite trying hard to fit in with the rest of the girls. Her face was not pretty; her jaw was square and her nose too long. She compensated by carefully styling her hair, and shaping her face with powder and bright red lipstick. On a good day of primping she was handsome—a handsome young Jewish woman who looked like her peers. Still, she stuck out when she began broadening her vowels and dropping even more “r’s” than everyone else did in her community. She affected a British accent, speaking the way she fantasized Shakespeare had spoken—mixed with 1930s Brooklynese. Her voice irritated some people at school. It intimidated others.
    But she still had two friends: her parents. After she was accepted to Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1934, her mother and father moved to upper Manhattan so Esther could visit Flora’s dormitory roomonce a week, gather her dirty laundry, drag it to the Schreiber apartment, wash and dry it, then carry it back to the dorm.
    Columbia in the 1930s was full of political ferment. In 1934, Flora’s freshman year, Teachers College was launching an innovative program called New College. Its aim was to push young people into the world. Its curriculum dealt with topics related to poverty, economic inequality, and racism. New College was hardly conservative, and Flora found herself in a unique environment.
    New College had a rural branch, in a part of the nation almost beyond the imagination of people in New York City. “The Community,” it was called. It spanned 1,800 acres of Appalachia in North Carolina, and all New College students were required to spend time there. They studied social sciences and