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