Eli Jacobs
Writer and Contributing Editor at Witness Magazine

Unhiding

We didn’t speak about my brother Moshe’s rebellion and rejection of religion, or his alcoholism, or his drugs. We didn’t talk about my brother Danny’s turn away from orthodoxy or his apparent homosexuality. We didn’t talk about Moshe’s cancer or his death when he was thirty-six. We didn’t talk about Danny’s AIDS or his death at the age of thirty-nine.
Instead, we wrote. In diaries and notebooks and on scraps of paper that we hid away in boxes and drawers. 
As the youngest child, l learned what may be spoken and what not. And I learned, in wordless lessons, that I must make things right. I fortified myself by attending ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, marrying young and moving to Israel.
Decades after my brothers’ deaths, I divorced, moved out of the West Bank settlement that had been home for 17 years and left religion. It was as if an unseen force was upending my life.
Looking back, I began to understand the cost of silence. Alienation had inflamed my brothers' diseases. And the never-spoken, never-resolved conflict had robbed me of the simplicity of loss.
Seeking comprehension, I retrieved the diaries and notebooks and scraps of paper. My family archive. Our unspoken words. Surely I would uncover a secret, a missing fact, perhaps a betrayal, that would shed light on the darkness. Stumbling along, I established and then refuted one neat narrative after another.
Rather than order, I found contradiction and enigma, pain, suffering, confusion and humanity. The only constant, true for all of us, across all times, was the silence.
My writing is an act of speaking the unspoken and a call for unhiding.