The Crime Lady: Troubled Waters

Dear TCL Readers,

Over the weekend, The Cut published my latest feature, on the brief life and tragic death of a young woman who, like so many young women half a century ago and now, left a small town, and her original name, behind for big city dreams. She met a man and fell in love and when she learned the romance was built on lies, she jumped from the Queensboro Bridge in the wee hours of a summer night in 1966. She called herself Estelle Evans, but her real name was Gloria D’Argenio. She knew him as Michael King, but he was really Meir Kahane, and would go on to found the Jewish Defense League.

When I started work on this story late last year, I thought it was going to be a subscribers-only newsletter. People had been attacked and killed in Jersey City and in Monsey, and mass shootings in Poway and Pittsburgh still weighed heavily within and upon Jewish communities, as did ongoing assaults in Crown Heights. Divisive discourse bloomed between African-Americans and Jews in a way that sounded uncomfortably familiar.

I found myself wondering if this was a similar brew of conflict and toxicity that led to the formation of the JDL in 1968. This was history I was aware of to some degree; I was eleven when Kahane was assassinated in 1990, and I never forgot the shock and the loathing the news engendered in the Orthodox Jewish community of my hometown. But I’d never done a deep dive because it seemed settled, easier to move past and forget.

Radical-right thinking never goes away, it just goes underground, waiting for the opportune moment to return with the fervor of a fungal infection. And in attempting to understand the roots of Kahane’s philosophy, which seemed scattershot and disjointed, and thus all the more dangerous, I learned of his relationship with Gloria, and asked a question I ask often: why didn’t I, and thus we, know more about her? Her life mattered, so how could the narrative center her while also confronting the ideology that bloomed after her bridge jump?

The more I learned about Gloria the more I realized this was going to take a much longer time to report out, and that it needed a proper outlet, with editing (by the amazing Adrienne Green) and factchecking (by the relentless and incisive Maia Hibbett.) I needed to go to Bridgeport, where Gloria spent much of her early life, and track down the stray bits of publicly available information, as well as surviving family, to help me understand her as a person.

The pandemic closed off some reporting avenues, though. There’s an alternate universe version of the story where Gloria’s roommate, Laura — still alive, well into her eighties now — agreed to speak to me on the record. Her story is fascinating. She holds answers about Gloria that no one else, still living, knows. But Laura had excellent reasons for keeping her story, and those answers, to herself, having witnessed such a traumatic event firsthand. It was far more important to me to respect her privacy. Journalists aren’t entitled to the stories of the sources they seek. If our current situation can teach us anything, it’s that patience remains a great virtue, and we don’t always get what we want.

I wish, too, that there were more photos — and of higher quality — of Gloria during her life. Yet this blurry one, published by the Bridgeport Post in December 1958 to accompany the short article when she went missing, feels in keeping with the spirit of my piece: reflective of her personality, but opaque enough to remain out of visible reach.

**

Passover ends Thursday night, and it turned out far better than I expected. The virtual Seders with family (and friends, on night two) couldn’t make up entirely for the lack of physical togetherness, but it came close. I spoke to CBC Sunday Edition about what it was like to commemorate the holiday virtually with others, and on my own. It was also a real pleasure to attend and take part in the Congress for Jewish Culture’s annual Third Seder — and the first one held virtually (it’s archived here, I’m at around the 15:50 mark.) One big takeaway from this Passover is that I have far more confidence in my ability to prepare for the holiday. Cooking? That will have to wait for next year…

**

Reading, strangely enough (or not?) has suffered in the pandemic. I’m reading less, and more distracted, but I also know this isn’t unusual for now. That said, James Baldwin’s essay collections are a salve -- I’m making my way through the Library of America omnibus, having just finished No Name in the Street (1972) and still thinking of the latter essay on his advocacy of the innocence of Tony Maynard, a story that was the probable inspiration for his 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk. (The highlighted link is a 2019 Time piece by Olivia Waxman that somehow, I’d not read until now, and was excellent.) Nella Larsen’s 1928 debut novel Quicksand was a marvel, near the equal of her masterpiece Passing, published a year later. Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People had been in my TBR pile for eons, and it was worth engaging with her necessary rewrite of world history. But it’s definitely time for some lighter fare for a while!

From quarantine, I remain,

The Crime Lady