Normal Like Me: Chapter 21
| November 28, 2017A t 8:30 on Thursday morning the six Krinsky children were all in school or on their way there and Faigy quickly started lifting the dining room chairs folding the laundry and otherwise removing the clutter.
“Bernadine’s coming today?” Ari asked barely looking up from the weekly paper. He disliked having his turf invaded by cleaning help and was instinctively antagonistic to all the fuss surrounding the intrusion.
“Yes ” Faigy replied. “At five.”
“But she’s almost a qualified nurse already. You told me she’s been getting offers for more hours of internship at the hospital. Why would she want to clean houses?”
“Because she makes almost twice as much money cleaning and it all goes straight into her pocket no deductions. And she needs the money.”
Ari turned the page and looked at the headline. “What’s doing with your brother Itzik?” he suddenly asked.
“He’s getting over the shock I hope. They released him right after questioning. They believed him when he said he wasn’t involved.”
But Ari’s expression seemed to tell a different story. Just then her phone rang and Itzik’s name and number appeared on the screen.
“Faigy?” said her brother’s voice. “Did you see the newspaper? Your newspaper the one you write for?”
“No. I’m busy getting the house ready for the cleaning help while my husband relaxes with his coffee and hogs the paper. Why? Do you need something from there?”
“Pick up the paper and you’ll see ” he said. His voice was shaking.
“Why? What happened?”
“Just read it.”
“Where? What page?”
“You can’t miss it.”
“Nationalist Extremism: A Homegrown Disaster ” read the bright-red headline on page one. “Stop the Hatred.” Below that a note directing the reader to pages 2–9. Faigy turned the page impatiently. The first story there was a report she herself had written full of quotes from the hospital’s spokeswoman and relatives of the injured Arabs. It was a good piece of work if she said so herself.
“Did you read it?” asked Itzik.
“What my own article?”
“No the one by Chanita Weiss.” His voice sounded hollow like a voice from the grave. Faigy’s heart skipped a beat. She turned to the next page.
Were they normal those editors? “The Murderers Downstairs ” read the headline. The subhead was “Neighbor of the youths charged in East Jerusalem arson: ‘They told me they were going to take revenge.’ ”
Faigy’s eyes hurriedly scanned the article. “The irresponsibility of the neighbor who offered these wayward teens detailed guidance on their weapon of choice instead of reporting them to the authorities cost the lives of ten East Jerusalem residents and severe injuries to dozens more as well as triggering severe disturbances throughout Judea and Samaria... Neighbors say that the suspect is an older single man with eccentric ways… He hardly has anything to do with the other tenants in the building… The halachah is that anyone who knows that Jews are planning to commit an attack on Arabs is obligated to report them to the authorities — and he is not considered a moser.”
“They’re making me out to be some kind of monster ” Itzik almost yelled. “You’ve got to call them!” (Excerpted from Mishpacha Issue 687)
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