Chapter 1: What discovery did Deborah make at 101 years old?
Okay, so about a decade ago, I wander into the wrong Chicago Hilton conference room and there's this guy. He's shaggled, bespeckled, sort of surrounded, speaking to a group of young writers, audio producers and makers. He's talking to them about how to speak to people. And he says something to the effect of, Whoever you are, just be there. Just do that.
And really, since then, I've marveled watching him do that. This unfolding, evolving, stretching into his own singular voice, now lauded as one of the most celebrated storytellers of our time, Jonathan Goldstein. His podcast is called Heavyweight.
And on it, on Heavyweight, and you're going to want to subscribe immediately, Jonathan sits down with people to help them solve one of those problems they don't know how to tackle any other way. Maybe a lost connection, unsolved mystery, perhaps a friendship that ended without closure. Whatever it is, Jonathan digs in and tries to help them make it right. And I kid you not,
What you're about to hear, I'm in a grocery store, and this episode stopped me, stopped me in my tracks, and I think it's going to stop you too. I saw the setup there is. Snap Judgment proudly presents, very proudly presents, Heavyweight.
Hello? Hello, is this Barbara? No, this is Deborah. Uh, how are you related to Barbara?
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Chapter 2: How did Deborah's daughter influence her to revisit the past?
I don't know who Barbara is. Although this might sound like a classic Cheech and Chong routine, it's actually me phoning Deborah. Deborah, you should know, is 102 years old. Yet, it is I who is having the senior moment. Oh, my. I'm so sorry. For some reason, I think I thought your name was Barbara. It's okay. I've lived long enough. I could take any name. I'm phoning Deborah. Her name is Deborah.
Because she made a discovery recently that has turned her life on its head. It all began with a phone call from her daughter, Lee. She called me several months ago. And she said, Mom, given your age, I'd like to help you clear out your storage room. So I said, fine, when are you coming? She said, now. The storage room is a room in Deborah's Bronx apartment.
She affectionately calls it the snake pit. It's where expired vitamins and broken kitchen appliances collect. While cleaning it out, her daughter Lee saw something that caught her eye. And she walked out of the storage room with a cardboard box. Written across the top of the box were Deborah's initials. And beside those initials, underlined in black ink, were the words, Go Through.
When Deborah lifted the lid, she uncovered something she'd stashed away long ago and had never gone through. 256 letters. written to me when I was 21. The letters, tied up in ribboned bundles, were from Deborah's first love, a man named Jerry Robbins. We were engaged to be married. Wow. He... Okay, I'm sorry. Jerry was killed in World War II on Christmas Eve, 1944.
My future was shredded, as well as the man that I loved. And had you forgotten about these letters? I didn't forget. I just found his death so disturbing, I couldn't take it. So I sequestered that aspect of my prior life away. I never looked at it again.
She has a really powerful ability to flip the switch, as she calls it.
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Chapter 3: What emotions did Deborah experience while reading the letters?
This is Deborah's daughter, Lee.
Put it away, not think about it.
And that's just what Deborah did. To escape the grief of Jerry's death, she threw herself into graduate school, got a master's degree in social work. And from there, life just kept on spooling. She married a man named Irving, who was an attorney and a good provider. And together, they raised three kids.
But all the while, through 64 years of marriage, through every move, every new chapter, Deborah kept the box with its lid closed shut. Until recently. Nearly 80 years after Jerry's death, and over a decade after the death of her husband Irving, Deborah was finally ready to open the box and start reading. Every letter, every postcard, and every e-mail. E-mail? V-mail. The letter V as in victory.
Right. Right. Will you listen to me? V-mail, as I only later learned, was a method the government used to get soldiers' letters to their families. And as Deborah read these letters, something began to happen. I fell in love with Jerry again. Not only did the box contain Jerry's handwritten letters, but also a number of his poems and short stories.
Jerry, Deborah tells me, was an aspiring writer with big dreams. His absolute motivation was to write, write, and compose. If he had a pencil or a pen in hand, he'd seek out paper to write on. The sheer volume of letters, their depth and detail, attest to this. And each day, sometimes all through the day, Deborah would read and reread Jerry's words. And as she did, she felt him return to her.
It was like time had collapsed. How can a 101-year-old woman, whose hormones have long since shriveled, fall in love again. Deborah's daughter, Lee, noticed the change that came over her mother, how re-energized she'd become. And Lee thought that was wonderful, to a point.
There's a thin line because she started slipping into what we would call Jerry land.
Oh, what is that?
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Chapter 4: How did Deborah cope with the loss of her first love, Jerry?
Yeah.
They're just drawing like the person's name and heart, you know, in their notebook or something.
Yeah. You just can't help but talk about it all the time.
Lauren says their mother stopped watching movies, reading books, attending the classes she took online.
I was concerned about it. Lee was concerned about it. We all kept saying, here, mom, here's a great book. Read this. Watch this. Why don't you invite people over? And it was truly like she was in a bubble.
Also concerning to Lauren is how, since the discovery of the letters, Jerry has threatened to eclipse her late father, Irving. For proof, you need look no further than Deborah's living room. On an entry table by the door is a photograph of Irving, but beside her favorite chair is one of Jerry.
Sitting right next to her, and my father is off to the side. What the hell?
How does that make you feel?
Weird. Strange.
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Chapter 5: What impact did the letters have on Deborah's current life?
Yeah.
As it happens, Lauren's husband is the award-winning documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger. Among his work? Some kind of monster. An exploration of Metallica's experience in group therapy.
He just got nominated and my whole family is like, yay, that's great, congrats.
Good for him. But you know what's also good? As good, if not better, than being nominated for TV's most prestigious award? helping people. And right now, I'm going to help Debra with something she's taken to calling her mandate. When I was a daughter, I had an obligation to my parents, as a student, to my teacher in my school, as a wife and a mother to my family.
But now that I've lived this long, My mandate is to do something with these amazing letters. Deborah hopes to honor Jerry by giving his writing an audience. It occurs to me that I have an audience, and perhaps if Deborah and I read through the letters together, it would fulfill her mandate and allow her to move on. I put the idea to Lee.
Do you think getting something out there into the world would allow her to leave Jerry Land forever?
Yeah, I do. Because he'll always be 21. He'll always be a writer who never got to live his potential. So there's this quality of stuckness or stasis getting his work out there. It's almost like she gets to the end.
Can you come to my apartment? Well, I'm in Minnesota. I wouldn't fly out where you are, but if you can come to my home, I would be eternally grateful for as long as I last. Well, I mean, I would love to see the letters, and it would be really nice to meet you in person. Okay, Mr. Goldstein, so come look, said the old lady to the young man.
And so, it looks like this 56-year-old young man is heading off to New York. Because like the writing on the box says, maybe the only way out is to go through.
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Chapter 6: How did Deborah's family react to her renewed feelings for Jerry?
Oh, yeah. So let's, why don't we just start off by reading the first letter. Here goes. Dear Deb, Finding myself with a few spare moments Jerry's first letters are from the spring of 1940, nearly four years before he enlisted. My mother advised me that she doesn't mind my staying in your house till all hours of the night. She likes you quite a bit, which practically makes it unanimous.
Deborah and Jerry had been friends since their elementary school days in Brooklyn, but their friendship was beginning to blossom into something more. What were you guys doing until all hours of the night? Talking. As passionate as it was, it was never consummated, which is my regret. It is a regret. Oh, intensely so. Deborah says she was waiting for marriage.
But we would have had a hot time together. I forgot that I'm being recorded. Jerry lived over an hour away by subway, and before texting, emails, and the prevalence of phone calls, weekend rendezvous were planned out over letters. Jerry's writing is clever. In one missive, he invites Debra out to a show for New Year's Eve. When she doesn't give him a straight answer, he sends a follow-up.
To help you make a decision and for your convenience, you will find on page four of this letter a ballot. Just check one and mail within the next week. The ballot shows two options, yes and yes. Be it in his letters or his short stories, Jerry had a way with a closing line. His fiction often showcased an ironic reveal in the final sentence.
In one story, the peacenik babbling in the mental institution turns out to be a former war commissioner. In another, the motorist who stops to help a stranded woman turns out to be an executioner on his way to put the woman's son to death. They were like Twilight Zone episodes almost 20 years before the show went on the air. Jerry shared drafts of these stories along with poems.
Deborah appreciated his lyrical turns of phrase. I call them Jerryisms. Instead of war, he says man-made madness. As a student at Columbia studying to be a writer, Jerry was exempt from the draft. But in the winter of 1943, he decided to leave school and enlist. Aside from his parents, Deborah was the first person he told.
Since one of my guiding rules, he wrote, has always been, to thine own self be true, I feel I can't stay out any longer, just paying lip service to my beliefs. From boot camp, Jerry's letters arrived in Deborah's mailbox every day. His clever short stories with the tidy Twilight Zone endings gave way to reportage.
Jerry detailed the eccentric characters he met, the sergeant with a jaw like a rock, the chaplain who was a secret lush. But he also shared his feelings.
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Chapter 7: What was the significance of Deborah's visit to Jerry's grave?
In one letter, he described the first time he stood before a mirror and saw himself in uniform, how it gave him chills. As training became more grueling and the thought of war more present and real, Jerry sought refuge in Debra, summoning her presence during lonely evenings at camp or long marches in the heat. "'I didn't mind walking because I wasn't alone.
You were with me, walking by my side and keeping me company all the time. We spoke about a thousand things, my furlough, the invasion, what we're going to do together when I come back.' I recited poetry to you, and when no one was watching, I put my arms around you, held you close to me, and whispered, I love you, into your ears.
Jerry and Deborah created a ritual which they enacted at 10 o'clock each evening. Jerry called it their nightly meeting. When the hour struck, they dropped whatever they were doing, and in the absence of a telephone, each would simply think of the other. I close my eyes, Jerry wrote. The world fades away, and then it's now. Now was one of our secret words.
The only thing that was real was here and now. Through the ebony of night, I reach out for you. And from across the wide expanse of sea, you come. Your eyes flashing, your body warm and curved. This is the only place. This is the only time. Here and now. Do you want to read another letter? This one will be a special one. Sure. So here I go again, doing things crudely and probably very badly.
Honey, I want to get engaged on my furlough. I needn't add that I'm anxiously and eagerly awaiting your reply. Just say yes. And here, Deborah recites from memory her reply from over 80 years ago. My answer to you is yes, yes, yes. Back at boot camp, time marched on. And in the fall of 1944, Jerry received notice. He was going to be deployed.
But before his deployment, he was granted a final furlough. So he went home to see Deborah, where he gave her a ring. Together they made plans for the future, talked about everything that lay ahead once he was home for good. Then, standing on the subway platform in Washington Heights, they said their last goodbye. I can almost feel it. I remember kissing him and saying, this isn't good.
I don't know what's happening. And I went into the train and I cried hysterically all the way till the last stop on that train. Jerry's company was shipped off to England, where American soldiers were preparing to join the fight in mainland Europe.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from Deborah's journey of love and loss?
Unbeknownst to them, they were destined for one of the deadliest campaigns of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge. But they never made it there. Jerry was among more than 2,200 men loaded onto a troop ship on Christmas Eve. The ship was bound for Cherbourg, France, just a short trip across the English Channel. But hours later, just five miles from the entrance to the harbor, a torpedo struck.
A survivor described the slender, silver missile cutting through the water and colliding with the ship as having shaken the vessel from stern to stern. Hundreds of men in the lower decks were killed instantly as the sea rushed into the massive gash. Those who made it to the upper decks weren't much better off.
They'd not been briefed on how to lower the lifeboats or free the rafts that might have carried them to safety. That, they were told, was the job of the crew. But the crew, a Belgian outfit, spoke little English and had little loyalty to the American troops aboard. And so it happened that many crew members abandoned ship while the Americans aboard still had no idea they were slowly sinking.
Many soldiers were presumed to have gone down with the ship. Others were lost to injuries and hypothermia. In the end, 763 men died. Jerry was one of them. After six months of training, he saw one day of war. The scale of death was so needless, the failed emergency response so poor, that for decades, the U.S. government covered up the details.
Survivors risk losing their veteran benefits if they talked. And so, when a family was notified that they'd lost a loved one, only the barest details were shared. I was in Jerry's parents' home. His mother and father were in the room. They handed me the telegram. In the months before he died, looking towards the war he was about to enter, Jerry wrote a poem.
All I ask for, God, in the brief second before eternity swallows me up, a glimpse of the world that is to be. where no man need make a prayer like mine, then will I know there is meaning amidst this man-made madness. In a certain way, I've never verbalized this But in a certain way, the discovery of those letters have turned my life upside down because I don't feel as happy as I used to feel.
I really don't. It's the first time I've heard Deborah say this. I thought for Deborah, Jerryland was a happy escape. And it seems it can be. But there's sadness there, too. After discovering the box, Deborah found herself having nightmares. The letters abruptly end in 1944, so in place of an actual ending, Deborah's mind crafted its own. She dreamt of Jerry in the water.
She dreamt of him frozen in the English Channel. And it was like a piece of Deborah was stuck there with him. Recently, though, I learned something that might help Deborah to work herself free. A few months ago, a genealogist friend of the family was doing some digging and turned up something surprising, something that Deborah never knew.
Jerry's body wasn't in the English Channel, nor was it buried somewhere in Europe. Jerry's body had actually been repatriated back to America and interred in a Jewish cemetery called Mount Lebanon. And it turns out the cemetery is not an hour's drive from Deborah's apartment. To move on from Jerryland, maybe Debra needs more than just to revisit the past or honor the past.
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