The Devil in Jerusalem Read Online Free PDF Page A

around the dorm room. He patted her shoulder absently, then turned to go.
    â€œDad?”
    He turned around. “Hmm?”
    â€œThe rest of my stuff? It’s still in the trunk.”
    â€œOh, is there more stuff? Well, sure, let’s go back and get it.”
    They worked silently, like two strangers going up in an elevator, each waiting to get off at his or her own stop. His clothes looked unironed, she thought, and there was a distinct stain on his sweater that looked like baby spit-up but was probably yogurt. Where would he find a baby?
    She kissed him lightly. “You take care of yourself, Dad. Even if Mom … even if it doesn’t … she doesn’t … Don’t … don’t depend on Mom.”
    â€œYou know your mother. She can be harsh. But she doesn’t mean it. She’ll come around, she’ll come around,” he murmured, as if to himself, his head nodding as he walked out the door.
    She was alone, her one acquaintance—a large, rather morose girl who’d been in her Bnei Akiva group—having chosen to study art history and live off campus. Her roommate was a polite girl from Idaho named McAllister. Daniella considered switching—there was no shortage of Orthodox Jewish girls like her on campus—but decided there was no point in going to college if you were not going to open yourself up to new experiences. Besides, McAllister was also pre-med.
    Despite her best efforts and intentions, she found it hard. The campus was a Gentile outpost saturated with unfamiliar symbols and loyalties. Even the library, with its opulent windows looking out at the verdant campus, seemed grandly foreign, somehow, a place for the descendants of the Mayflower or the offspring of foreign oligarchs to study about the Pilgrims or the French Revolution. What had it to do with a Jewish girl from Pittsburgh? Brought up to see the world through the binoculars of faith, heritage, and peoplehood, for Daniella Benjamin Franklin and the Founding Fathers seemed distant and small, while Maimonides, Rashi, and Herzl loomed large and demanding.
    She tried joining the vibrant and multifaceted programs for religious Jews on campus. They were a smorgasbord: Shabbat, holidays, Israel, social justice. And for a time, she felt hopeful she might yet find a place for herself there. After all, these people were not so different from those she had befriended in school and camp. But while she had grown to know her school friends over a dozen years, this new crowd felt unwelcoming, her attempts at friendliness strained and unreal. She never considered the truth: that she had become estranged from herself, weaving a bandaging cocoon around the raw wounds caused by her family’s implosion, shutting down protectively, afraid to open up to new activities, new friends, new ideas,
    She might as well be an orphan, she thought with a self-pity that was often debilitating. She was furious at her mother, pitying and a bit contemptuous of her father, neither of whom had time for her anymore. Even her brother, Joel, seemed to have abandoned her, apologetically cutting their conversations short, explaining he was just trying to keep his head above water during his demanding senior year at Harvard. Besides, she thought, beneath his flippant attitude toward the family woes, he was no doubt nursing his own wounds.
    She felt lost and alone.
    It didn’t help that pre-med was as difficult as they said it would be. There was absolutely no time for anything else but study. Calculus with analytic geometry, basic concepts in biology and biodiversity, chemical principles, honors English, and her one elective, Hebrew. That first semester was like walking uphill in a snowstorm, dragging a heavy sled behind her.
    She’d always been so good at science and math and had breezed through her high school courses. But now she wondered: Was that simply because she’d been in yeshiva, among yeshiva girls, a