Dear Reader,

My brother Danny died of AIDS in March 1994. He was thirty-nine. Six years before that, our older brother Moshe died of cancer. We were four kids, the children of a rabbi, raised Orthodox on Staten Island. Danny and Moshe left religion in their late teens and left home for Manhattan. I stayed religious, married, and moved to Israel.

Our sister Geula stayed religious and she was with Danny in his last days. At that time our parents were visiting me and my family in Israel. When Danny died, we were six thousand miles away.

For years I believed that was the whole story. Two brothers who lost their way, one brother and a sister who didn’t.

Then my own life shifted. I lost my balance, and I needed something. Someone. Maybe my brothers.

I went back to the photographs, the letters hidden in drawers, Danny’s journals, the things our family never said out loud. I started writing to him.

Those letters became a memoir, A Ferry Going the Other Way. It is finished, and I am now sending it out to agents.

This Substack tells the story in parallel, from angles the book couldn’t take. A photograph and what I see in it now. A page from a journal. A letter never sent. A secret. A confession.

You can start with the posts below.

— Eli Jacobs

Our Last Photo: What We Don’t See

Did I Ever See You? A Letter to Danny

You Gave Me Little Kisses on My Head

How Did You Get It?

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Dear Danny,

I asked Gary more than once how you got HIV. He didn’t know, but he told me other things. That you were having “a lot of crazy, crazy, crazy sex.” That you told him you once woke naked and alone on the grass in Central Park, empty whiskey bottles around you.

I don’t know why I needed to ask. Maybe I wanted a story with specifics. Maybe something to regret.

Seven months after you died, a few days before what should have been your fortieth birthday, I had a car accident in the first rain. The road was oily. I was driving too fast, just a little. There was a moment before the skid when I could have slowed down. Then the brakes locked, the car crossed the wet pavement into the opposite lane, and there was an oncoming car.

The surgeon who worked on my knee promised that it would heal completely. But when it rains, the pain is unbearable. Sometimes, I limp.

For years I have gone back to that earlier moment, not exactly blaming myself, but maybe wanting a different ending.

Maybe that was what I wanted to know. Did it matter to you how or when you got it? Was there a black-and-white moment when you could have hit the brakes?

If there was, then I could look out for such a moment in my own life.

Or perhaps there was no point to my question.

Maybe it was just life, a never-ending field of grays. Maybe that is what I could not bear.

When I saw Gary, my brother Danny’s partner, wearing this t-shirt, I got it. It was a political message and an outcry. Reagan, the press, and the country in general did not talk about AIDS, funding was not made available, motivation to deal with it was absent, and people died.

Including my brother, Danny.

But I find myself confronting a different silence. In our family we didn’t talk about Danny. He was not outcast or rejected. But his homosexuality was a kind of unfortunate issue to be glossed over.

And by the time we knew about his HIV, I was living in Israel.

In 1991, when my parents arrived for their annual visit, my father asked me to go for a walk. This was unusual. He asked what I knew about Danny’s medical condition. I said, What, does he have AIDS?

I was right.

I didn’t talk to my parents or my sister about it. I don’t know if it came from them or I just sensed that was the right thing for them. Or maybe it just felt right to me. Maybe I felt safe in silence.

And now, decades later, I don’t want to keep quiet. I want another chance. I want to shout. I want to make noise. I want people to know about Danny.

A couple of years ago, my cousin Jennie went on a search for her two gay uncles who died of AIDS and whose existence she only learned of when she was in her thirties. She managed to track one down. He died as a John Doe in a hospital on the other side of the country.

I want people to know about the thousands of men who died alone, without their families.

I want to shout for my friends and hundreds like them who became infected with HIV around the same time as Danny and somehow survived.

Yes, Silence = Death.

The world has made serious progress against the physical death caused by the silence of the plague years.

But what about the other kind?

Note: Gary died of a stroke, HIV-free at the age of seventy-three.

Over the years, my brother’s presence in our family grew dark. But it was not always like that.

Dear Danny,

When I was very little, you taught me that we say pregnant, not pregmant; my socks were in a drawer, not a draw. When Mom sat cross-legged on the floor she was doing yoga, not yogurt.

When I was five and you were thirteen you took me to Brighton Beach to spend a night with our grandparents. The trip, by bus, ferry, train, and then a walk in the shadow of the elevated railway, was an hour and a half each way. You took me to the beach and swam with me. When I dug in the sand, you sat on your towel and then you leaned over and gave me little kisses on my head.

When I was nine, I came home and reported that I’d won the school spelling bee. You corrected me: You mean you won for your class, just the fifth grade, not the whole school. When I managed to convince you that I was indeed the school champion, that I had even beaten the eighth graders, your face lit up. You drove me, that year and the next, to the city-wide competition in Manhattan and afterward took me to eat chicken on skewers at Yahalom on 47th Street.

You watched The Wizard of Oz with us and told us when it was safe to uncover our eyes because another scene with the Wicked Witch had ended. You explained that Dorothy and her friends fell asleep in the beautiful field of flowers because poppies are the source of opium.

You took us to classical music concerts in Silver Lake Park and animated film festivals in Clove Lake Park. Sometimes you babysat when our parents went out and, on those occasions, you baked with us. Toll House cookies from the recipe on the chocolate chip bag and bundt cake with a fluted pan.

One summer night, when I was eight and you were sixteen, you used a challah recipe from a big red book that came in the mail. I can see the three of us at the kitchen counter. Geula, in a flowered dress, brown eyes, brown hair pulled back in a braid. Concentrating on the challah strands. Me, roundish, covered in flour, reaching my fingers into the dough when I shouldn’t, smiling. And you above us in an apron, consulting the book, orchestrating, a teacher — a teenager playing school.

The recipe said to let the loaves rise in a warm, dark place, so you put them under the blanket in Geula’s bed. We tiptoed in and out of the room to check the progress.

Mom often spoke of her desire to travel, to go to Israel or France. But we all knew that we didn’t have the money for that. And even her most modest fantasy, a trip to New England, was impossible. Dad didn’t drive, and Mom, whose right leg had been crippled by polio when she was two, wore a prosthesis to the knee and tired quickly; she couldn’t drive more than an hour or so without rest.

She longed to see the trees in Vermont, the mountains in New Hampshire, and the shorelines of Cape Cod.

When you returned from your year in Israel in June 1972, you offered to make Mom’s dream come true. We were going to Cape Cod. You drove and I helped navigate with a set of TripTiks from the AAA. I will never forget that week.

At night, Mom and Dad sat in Adirondack chairs on the grass patch outside our bungalow, drinking Bloody Marys that you made for them. And they smoked — Mom a Parliament, Dad his pipe. Bees hovered and hummed in the honeysuckle that covered the hedge along the bungalow’s perimeter. The air was sweet with Dad’s pipe tobacco and the nectar of the brilliant little white and yellow flowers, and sour from the tomato juice and cigarettes. As the light dimmed, the smell of the sea and a soft mist covered us like a blanket.

In the bungalow’s kitchen we cooked with whatever we had — cans of kosher food, Hebrew National hot dogs, a dusty square electric pan you’d rescued from a shelf above the washing machine. You browned the hot dogs. I dumped in a can of Dole pineapple, juice and all. The bungalow filled with syrupy smoke. Hawaiian frankfurters.

During the days, at a nearby lake, we swam out to the floating wood docks and bathed in the sun. Now and then, you leaned over and gave me little kisses on my head.

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Dear Danny,

You loved me. You told me so on our last phone call, from your hospital bed in New York. I replied, I love you too, Danny.

You asked me to forgive you. I said, For what? You said that you used to resent me, your bratty baby brother, because I got more from our parents than you ever did. I forgave you. Then you died.

I said I loved you. I guess I did. We were brothers. That’s what you do.

No?

I never saw you looking like you do in this picture with Gary: happy, at ease, in a tank top.

Or is that disingenuous? Danny, I never saw you. Full stop.

I saw our mother’s words when we came to watch you star in Chicken Little. Danny is self-destructive.

I saw what made us different. You left religion. That made it all simple. That was why you were distant and awkward and sometimes even nasty.

The religious self is the true self and you were alienated from your true self. Of course you were unhappy.

I never saw you because I was busy looking away. Away from Staten Island and its grayness. Away from the unspoken rage in our house. Away from Mom, her screams of pain, her screams of anger.

Away from the letters hidden in drawers. Away from the silence.

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The last picture of the three of us was at my wedding. Moshe was thirty-three and Danny thirty-one. And I, the successful one, the groom, the first boy in our family to marry, was twenty-three.

Even though we looked like we came from the same place, the same family, even though we looked like brothers, we were vastly different. Or so I thought.

Two years later, Moshe would be dead and we’d be down to two. Six years after that, Danny would be dead and it would be just me. In the first years, I would still feel I was nothing like them, even a different species. And because of that distance, even though I felt loss, it was okay. I could contain it. Their tragic lives had nothing to do with mine.

Then something changed. The distance began to disappear. And without understanding why, I needed to connect to them. I didn’t know how that could happen or what it even meant to connect to dead brothers, but it was urgent and total.

On my wedding day in March 1986, and in the years that followed, I was so very different from them. They had challenging, complicated relationships. Unlike them, I was married, not to a man, not to a non-Jew. A Jewish woman. And we had kids and a house, and I had a job and a master’s degree and had even moved to Israel.

Unlike them, I was still and would always be religious.

And then when I was forty, nine years after Danny died, I was divorced and dating a woman who knew almost nothing about Orthodoxy, and soon after that I too stopped being observant.

My brothers had moved away from our cozy small-town life on Staten Island to Manhattan, the big city. Without realizing the parallel, I moved out of my cozy life in an upper middle class West Bank settlement and into the big city, Jerusalem.

Until I was in my early forties, I was driven by an unspoken need to be different from my rebellious, lost brothers.

And then, without noticing, the most important thing became to be like them.

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