On Television: “Roadkill” Offers the Fantasy of Politics as Usual

The British political thriller, full of small-bore scandals and Victorian twists, can hardly compete with reality.

By Alexandra Schwartz, THE NEW YORKER, December 7, 2020 Issue

November 30, 2020

David Hare’s “Roadkill,” starring Hugh Laurie, is comfortingly old-fashioned.Illustration by Mojo Wang

On Election Night, I was on the live-streaming Web site Twitch, helping a French friend try to make sense of the incomprehensible for an audience of his compatriots. It was two in the morning across the Atlantic, then three, then four, and still viewers stayed tuned. “This is better than a TV show,” one commented, as we puzzled through various disaster scenarios that seemed equal parts outlandish and plausible. Suspense, villainy, pettiness, infighting, gimmicks galore: the reality-TV politics of our reality-TV President have had us mercilessly hooked, from slow-rolling attempt at a coup to dripping-hair-dye debacle. Spare a sympathetic thought for television writers. How can they hope to compete with the present?

Such is the challenge faced by “Roadkill” (on PBS’s “Masterpiece”), David Hare’s new political thriller in four episodes. Watching it now is like chasing the double tequila shot of the real with a milky cup of tea. The show is set in England, which Americans continue to imagine as a land of escapist sanity, despite recent evidence to the contrary. “You have to forget about Brexit,” the Tory transport minister, Peter Laurence (Hugh Laurie), tells a caller to the radio talk show on which he regularly bloviates. “It was a national trauma, as you call it, but it’s a trauma we came through. It’s over.” That reassuring fantasy of politics as usual is one that “Roadkill,” with its small-bore scandals and Victorian twists, faithfully upholds. It’s risk-averse in a way that is itself a kind of risk—comfortingly old-fashioned, at the cost of staying one cautious step behind the present that it aims to represent.

As the show opens, Peter has just had a triumph in court. After a newspaper accused him of profiting from his government position—by consulting for an American lobbying group when he was a junior minister of health—he sued for libel and won. Much like Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, the Laurence case seems to have come down to a question of calendars; Charmian Pepper (Sarah Greene), the journalist who wrote a story placing Peter at the lobbyists’ Washington, D.C., headquarters, was forced to recant, after Peter’s team presented an official diary scrubbed of the offending visit. “They’re always the best cases,” Peter’s young barrister (Pippa Bennett-Warner) brashly tells a colleague, as the courthouse crowd spills onto the sidewalk around her. “The ones you win when you suspect your client is guilty as hell.”

Peter’s victory, and the scandal it conceals, is merely the first plot plate that Hare sets spinning. Soon his trusty, bumbling aide, Duncan Knock (Iain De Caestecker), spirits him to Shephill, a women’s prison, where an inmate (Gbemisola Ikumelo) insists that she must talk to him about his daughter. The daughter who doesn’t speak to him, or the other one? Peter asks. No, a third, the heretofore unknown offspring of a youth spent in drunken philandering. Peter has just enough time to take in this dubious revelation before he must rush off to 10 Downing Street, where he squirms before Dawn Ellison (Helen McCrory), the fearsome Prime Minister, who looks like a dyed tulip in her form-fitting powder-blue suit and has the air of a cat about to pounce. A Cabinet reshuffle is planned; Dawn dangles the possibility of a major promotion, and Peter, blinded by ego, steps obligingly into her trap.

“Roadkill” is a stylish show, with a handsome title sequence that calls to mind the great Saul Bass, and a traipsing score, by Harry Escott, that casts a playful, mysterious mood. We get lots of dark wood, dark suits, and dark corporate cars that glide, unimpeded, down glistening gray streets. Much of the show’s appeal lies in its embrace of the familiar. The gruff, macho newspaper editor (Pip Torrens); the fragile, neglected wife (Saskia Reeves); the chafing, unsatisfied mistress (Sidse Babett Knudsen)—we know them well. But Hare, dazzled by the buffet of tropes available to him, can’t keep himself from loading up his tray. It’s not enough for Peter’s illegitimate child to claim his attention after twenty-odd years; his bratty daughter Lily (Millie Brady), resentful and entitled, must be photographed by the tabloids snorting cocaine. Charmian Pepper, her name taken straight from Dickens’s reject pile, is given an alcohol problem to underscore her instability. (One depressing rule of thumb for this sort of show is that the diligent journalist working to uncover the politician’s dirty truth must be a young woman, the better to be objectified by her bosses and prove her worth as a go-getter even as she trades on her sex appeal. A second depressing rule of thumb is that she must be disposed of, preferably by means of a blunt collision—recalling the hurtling subway train that put an end to Kate Mara in “House of Cards.”) We get riots in prisons, vodka glasses thrown at heads in the heat of domestic anger, and vague, faceless foreign calamities. “It’s about Yemen,” a conniving politico tells the Prime Minister. Isn’t it always?

What kept me watching was Laurie, who floats through the action with a bemused, obliging look on his wonderful lean, lipless face. There is something gentle and appeasing about his Peter, who prides himself on his working-class background, and is susceptible to maverick pricks of conscience—he alienates his party, and seemingly all of Britain, by championing prison reform. (“The British like locking people up. It’s in our character,” the Prime Minister tells him—a line that makes an American feel a little less alone.) In the street, Peter is accosted by selfie-seekers, but at home—where Hare, a seasoned purveyor of female melodrama, unsubtly surrounds him with a pack of women who peck and nag—he is merely baffled, wondering what he’s doing neck-deep in this mess.

Political reputations are made to be won and lost. Private disgrace is harder to grapple with, now that it can be turned public with a click and a swipe. The violation of digital exposure is the subject of “I Hate Suzie” (on HBO Max), a destabilizing, off-kilter show created by Billie Piper and Lucy Prebble. Piper stars as Suzie Pickles, an actress who, like Piper herself, found teen-age stardom as a singer and is now entering the career descent of early middle age. (Action shows in which she runs from Nazi zombies are her bread and butter.) She lives in a cozy house in the English countryside with her husband, Cob (Daniel Ings), and their young son, who is deaf. After her phone is hacked, nude photos of her are splashed all over the Web, in flagrante delicto with a man whose cob is visibly not Cob’s. “There is a penis of color in the pictures,” she is informed by an indignant audience member at a sci-fi convention—an absurdist phrase, at once respectful and rude, that typifies the show’s tart tonal mix.

“I Hate Suzie” has a strange, strong flavor, a briny funk with a surprising undercurrent of sweetness, like Scandinavian licorice. At first, I was repulsed. Then dislike turned to craving. Each of the show’s eight episodes is named for a stage in coping with trauma: we start out with “Shock,” “Denial,” and “Fear,” before progressing through “Shame,” “Bargaining,” and “Guilt” to “Anger” and “Acceptance,” but the artificiality of that structure is undercut by the show’s genuine, exploratory weirdness.

Berated by the furious, wounded Cob, Suzie goes off the rails. Woozy camerawork and screeching, witchy strings take us into a mind altered by drugs, alcohol, and anxiety, but it is Piper’s raw, comical performance as a not so smart woman on the verge that stands out. Suzie mumbles, makes excuses, and tells incompetent lies as the camera shows her aging face in merciless closeup; she is a creature of haphazard instinct and ruinous libido. One excellent early episode looks at desire from within, flashing through an array of Suzie’s sexual fantasies as she and her savvy manager, Naomi (Leila Farzad), analyze them together like critics at a screening. “We’ll sort it out like grownups, like in a Woody Allen film,” her oblivious lover (Nathaniel Martello-White) tells her, a reminder that adulthood is itself a performance, however derivative and imitative, that Suzie, like the rest of us, must make her own. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 7, 2020, issue, with the headline “Public Life.”

Alexandra Schwartz has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2016.

Letter from Los Angeles: Using the Homeless to Guard Empty Houses

As the pandemic makes an already terrible housing crisis worse, a new version of house-sitting signals a broken real-estate market.

By Francesca Mari, THE NEW YORKER, December 7, 2020 Issue

November 30, 2020

Augustus Evans, a poet, lives in and protects properties that are being flipped.Photograph by Ricardo Nagaoka for The New Yorker.

Wandering around Northwest Pasadena, I pressed my face against the window of a dingy pink stucco house at 265 Robinson Road. It was April, 2019, and in two blocks I had passed thirteen bungalows, duplexes, and multifamily homes that had gone through foreclosure in the past fifteen years. Twelve of them were still unoccupied. No. 265 had been in foreclosure for a year and a half, and the two small houses on the property had long sat empty. But now, inside the rear house, there was a gallon jug of water and a bag of peanuts on a Formica kitchen counter. The walls were a mangy taupe, but African-print sheets hung over the windows. As I walked away, I heard a genteel Southern accent from behind me: “Can I help you?” A Black man with perfect posture, wearing loafers and a black T-shirt tucked into belted trousers, introduced himself as Augustus Evans.

I wasn’t the first person to wonder what Evans was doing there. A few weeks earlier, two sheriffs had knocked on the door around 11 p.m. and handcuffed him. In his car’s glove compartment, they found a letter of employment and the cell-phone number of a woman named Diane Montano, who runs Weekend Warriors, a company that provides security for vacant houses. Like many of Montano’s employees, Evans was homeless when he was hired. Now he lives in properties that are being flipped, guarding them through the renovation, staging, open-house, and inspection periods. In the past seven years, he has protected more than twenty-two homes, in thirteen neighborhoods around Los Angeles, almost all historically Black and Latino communities. A McMansion in Fontana; a four-unit apartment complex in Compton; a “baby mansion on the peak of the mountain” in East L.A., which had been left to a son who, according to the neighbors, borrowed so much against the equity of the house that he lost it to foreclosure. Before leaving, he poured liquid cement down the drains. Evans guarded the property as the plumbing system was replaced.

Empty houses are a strange sight in an area that has one of the most severe housing shortages in the United States. L.A. has the highest median home prices, relative to income, and among the lowest homeownership rates of any major city, according to the U.C.L.A. Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. Renting isn’t any easier. The area has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, and the average rent is twenty-two hundred dollars a month. On any night, some sixty-six thousand people there sleep in cars, in shelters, or on the street, an increase of thirteen per cent since last year.

The housing shortage was caused, in part, by restrictive zoning, rampant nimbyism, and the use of California’s environmental laws to thwart urban development. In 1960, Los Angeles was zoned to house some ten million people. By 1990, decades of downzoning had reduced that number to 3.9 million, roughly the city’s current population. Then, in 2008, the subprime-mortgage crisis struck, and in the years that followed thousands of foreclosed homes were sold at auction. Because they had to be purchased in cash, many of them were bought by wealthy investors, private-equity-backed real-estate funds, and countless other real-estate companies, leaving less inventory for individual buyers. In the end, the 2008 crash made housing in California even more expensive.

No. 265, along with thousands of other homes in L.A., was acquired by Wedgewood, a real-estate company, founded in 1983, that specializes in flipping homes, managing everything from lockouts and financing to renovation and staging. In gentrifying neighborhoods, empty houses are sitting ducks, so companies like Wedgewood hire Weekend Warriors and other house-sitting services for cheap security. Around Robinson Road, several properties had been broken into. At No. 265, a middle-aged Black couple had recently crawled in through the front window. When Evans told them to leave, they apologized; the man was a jazz musician, and they said that they were struggling with crystal-meth dependency and that they used to sleep in this house before Evans arrived. The three went to the front porch and chatted while smoking cigarillos.

Evans, who was sixty-seven at the time, took me through the two houses on the lot. He’d laid a blue tarp over the cream-colored carpet, and, in one room, he’d set up an inflatable mattress neatly made with a floral fleece coverlet. A Haitian-flag baby blanket was wrapped around his pillow. He liked his room warm; when he woke up, he’d crank up his space heater, then brew a cup of coffee and read and write—poetry, essays, screenplays—at a plastic folding table by his bed. He was contemplating writing a memoir. “This is how I keep my sanity,” he told me. He had the run of both houses, but he kept to this one room, his life contained in several milk crates on the shelves. He showed me his eighth-grade diploma and a picture of a poetry venue that he had opened in Compton in the nineties. (It closed after becoming a target of the Crips gang.) Two of his screenplays were on the shelves, along with a book, “The Thoughts of Augustus the Final Poet,” which he had self-published in 2014: “Hey, Mr. Income / You’re my best friend. / My pockets are empty / Where have you been?” He’d saved a receipt from the Los Angeles Unified School District, which bought two hundred and eighty-five copies for its classrooms.

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He spent most of his time inside, but when he wanted a change of scenery he sat in his S.U.V., a 2001 Infiniti, which he’d bought with his house-sitting savings. Evans dreamed of living in the Robincroft Castle, a seven-thousand-square-foot historic landmark across the street, which sold for $1.39 million in 2016 and three years later was listed for $2.49 million. And he took to caring for a colony of ants under a tree, feeding them chicken bones. The bones disappeared quickly, so he kept watch and spied a cat and a possum come by, and realized they weren’t just eating the bones but the ants and everything else.

Born to sharecroppers in the Arkansas Delta, Evans is the seventh of ten children. He picked cotton until he was eleven, when his family hitched a ride on a hay truck to Tulare, California. In school, the other children and teachers ridiculed him—for his accent, his coveralls, his lunches of fatback and collard greens. He dropped out after the eighth grade. At sixteen, he and some cousins were washing cars at a gas station when a money-green Cadillac Eldorado rolled in and a Black man stepped out. One of Evans’s cousins asked the man how he could afford such a car, and he told them that, if they came to Los Angeles, he could hook them up with a job that paid two hundred dollars a day. That afternoon, the boys took a Greyhound bus to Venice, where they began selling little balloons of heroin out of their mouths for ten dollars each. Not long afterward, Evans offered drugs to an undercover officer. He was arrested and sent to juvenile detention, where he joined the Nation of Islam. His faith estranged him from his Christian family. “The old Muslim people, they brainwashed him, I think,” his sister Ercell Murray told me. When Evans was released, he moved to Compton, the heart of L.A.’s Black activist community. In the seventies, he sold Amway products door to door and taught martial arts. He wanted to open a martial-arts academy, but no bank would give him a loan. In the fall of 1983, when Derrick Stevens, a friend from juvenile detention, asked if Evans wanted in on a bank robbery, Evans said yes. “I never thought of robbing a bank, but I did know that that’s the building with the money in it, and if you got a lot of money you could do anything you want in America,” Evans told me.

On a late October morning, Evans, Stevens, and two other men walked into the American Savings and Loan on Crenshaw Boulevard wearing rubber masks of Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. The men bagged two hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars and several exploding dye packs, in what was then the largest bank robbery in Los Angeles history. (It inspired scenes in the movie “Point Break.”) Three months later, Evans was caught in Tampa, Florida, just before boarding a cruise ship to the Bahamas, where he’d hoped to hide. He spent the next seven years locked up, reading, writing, and preaching. When he got out, it was hard to find work.

In 1998, Evans rented a derelict office in South L.A., across from the Magic Johnson Theatre, to work on his poetry and various business projects, including a short-lived toilet-paper-delivery service. One day, he gave a CD of himself performing his poetry to a woman who worked in the salon downstairs; he’d noticed her singing to herself as she braided hair. “She was a vocalist out of this world,” Evans told me. “I mean, she’s another Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston quality of a singer.” Soon they got married and he moved into her small apartment in South L.A., where they paid some six hundred dollars a month. They had two sons, and eventually, afraid that their children would become involved in the local gangs, they moved with Evans’s mother-in-law and brother-in-law to Moreno Valley, a suburb with a fast-growing Black population. They had another son, and, over the years, they rented homes that ranged from two thousand to four thousand dollars a month.

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As the world eased out of the Great Recession, in 2010, his wife told him that their differences had grown too great. Although she had a talent for singing, she’d earned her nursing degree, but he was still holding on to the hope of becoming a famous poet. “You can’t just get stagnated and stuck on a dream that has not materialized,” she told me. After their divorce was finalized, he put his belongings in a trash bag and walked out, beginning a life of homelessness. He got two weeks’ worth of motel vouchers from General Relief, and when those ran out he headed toward Union Station, where he hoped to sleep on a bench. He was crossing Normandie and Vernon when a couple he knew from the Black-consciousness community spotted him. They took him into their store, a Caribbean gift shop called Bles-sed Love, and told him that he could sleep there in exchange for some help at the counter. There was a windowless black-lit room in the back, with murals of Egyptian iconography on the walls and the solar system painted on the ceiling. He slept there for nearly two years, waking at dawn for morning prayers and opening the store two hours later.

One morning, a customer told Evans that he supplemented his Social Security income by house-sitting for Weekend Warriors. There were two types of gigs, he explained: 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., which paid five hundred dollars a month, and 24/7, which paid eight hundred dollars. All you needed was an I.D. Evans called Diane Montano at around 10 a.m., and at 2 p.m. a van picked him up and took him to a house in Riverside.

The rules were simple: don’t leave, don’t host guests, and don’t talk to anyone—not contractors, property managers, real-estate agents, or prospective buyers. If you were working a 24/7, only short trips to the market or the laundromat were allowed. The premises had to be kept clean at all times, or pay would be docked. The driver supplied Evans with a mini-fridge, a small microwave, an inflatable mattress, and plastic floor coverings to protect the carpet.

The driver came by to check on Evans occasionally, always unannounced, photographing each room and sending the pictures to Montano, so that she could monitor Evans’s cleanliness and track the progress of the renovations. By the time Evans was living at No. 265, he had learned the rhythms of the gig. He knew that the driver wouldn’t come by at night or on Sundays. When he could, he’d steal out to Moreno Valley, an hour and twenty minutes away, to visit his sons. He kept loose change in a coffee cup in his car, and he’d give his youngest son all the coins he’d collected since his last visit. “They know Daddy has to work away from the house,” he told me. “They’re big boys now.”

“You may be king of the jungle, Tim, but don’t forget—here you’re just another actuary.”

Around the end of the month, the driver would deliver a check. In seven years of working for Montano, Evans has never met her. (Montano declined to comment for this article.)

At No. 265, two construction workers junked the decades-old kitchen appliances and Formica counters, tore up the carpeting, and laid down ash-wood laminate floors. By the end of June, the exterior was painted gray with slate-gray trim, the interiors a bright white. Shaker-style cabinets and granite countertops were installed in the kitchens. Edison bulbs hung from the ceiling in black metal light fixtures. Evans’s beat-up white microwave and mini-fridge looked incongruous. By October, the property was staged for showing, with wishbone chairs, reclaimed-wood tables, and woven wall hangings. In 2005, it had sold for four hundred and twenty thousand dollars; now it was listed for nine hundred and thirty thousand. A few weeks later, a termite tent went up to address bugs found during a home inspection, the final step in many L.A. real-estate transactions.

Montano told Evans to leave for a couple of days, to escape the fumes. Usually, he slept in his car (as does about a third of Los Angeles’s homeless population), but a strong El Niño had brought heavy rain to California. He accepted Montano’s offer to “bunk up” with another house sitter, in Compton, in South L.A., where the city’s rents are rising the fastest and where Black residents are most likely to be homeless. It’s also where many of the house sitters are assigned work.

Mansa Moosa-El opened the door and was surprised to find that his bunkie was Augustus Evans. “He has tremendous respect on the street,” Moosa, who was born Adrian Rhone, told me. He knew that Evans had walked with Louis Farrakhan in the early eighties, and he had seen him at community events. “I’m the fantastic immortal classic,” Moosa, who is forty-nine and was born in Compton, told me. “He’s the one and only golden oldie.” Whereas Evans dressed in trousers, blazers, and loafers, Moosa, a Black Panther, preferred a louder look: he wore a leather jacket, rose-tinted sunglasses, and African beads, and carried a staff with a black plastic snake coiled around it. Learning that Evans was house-sitting made him feel less miserable about his own situation. Moosa walked Evans through the small three-bedroom house, pointing out the lack of sinks, cabinets, hot water, and heat. The only thing that functioned was the toilet.

Moosa’s life has been shaped by L.A.’s demographic trends. As recent books like “The Color of Law,” by Richard Rothstein, and “Race for Profit,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, explain, a number of inner-city ghettos, like Compton, were formed by government policy. During the Great Depression, the government tried to enlarge the middle class by encouraging homeownership through the creation of the thirty-year mortgage. But restrictive covenants prohibited Black people from buying houses in certain neighborhoods, and further limitations were imposed by redlining, which barred prospective buyers in areas with large numbers of people of color from receiving federally insured loans.

During the Second World War, L.A.’s Black population almost doubled, as newcomers were drawn by factory jobs. Residents of Compton, which was then nearly all white, protested new housing for the workers. A large public-housing complex that had been planned for the neighborhood was moved to Watts, a racially mixed neighborhood nearby. “By 1958, it was 95% black,” Rothstein wrote in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. “Public housing policy was largely responsible for this segregation.” It wasn’t long before white people fled Compton, where Moosa’s parents bought a house in the early seventies. By then, L.A. had the fastest-growing Black population outside the Southeast, three-quarters of it concentrated in South L.A. Moosa’s father worked for the city, in the records library, and as much as a fifth of the Black population had solid manufacturing jobs. But, by the eighties, those jobs had disappeared or gone overseas. Moosa, like many Black Gen X-ers, fared worse than his parents.

The foreclosure crisis was ruinous to L.A.’s Black communities, in part because residents, after decades of being denied mortgages, had been disproportionately targeted for predatory loans and reverse mortgages. When the bubble burst, Black people were seventy-one per cent more likely than white people to lose their homes. Last year, Black homeownership reached its lowest rate since 1968, when housing discrimination was outlawed by the passage of the Fair Housing Act.

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Even as renters, Black people are in a uniquely precarious situation. Jacqueline Waggoner, a president of Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable-housing nonprofit, and the chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness, told me, “When people are severely rent burdened, they don’t really have anyone to call. Their siblings or family members—many of them are one paycheck away from being homeless themselves.” A 2016 report found that white households in L.A. have a median net worth of three hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars; the figure for Black households is four thousand dollars.

The pandemic is making a terrible housing crisis even worse. For the first time in more than a decade, rents have stopped rising, but income has fallen precipitously. It is estimated that, among renters in L.A. County—a group that is disproportionately Black and Latino—at least three hundred and sixty-five thousand households currently don’t have an adult with enough income to pay the rent.

Although only eight per cent of Los Angeles residents are Black, Black people make up forty-two per cent of the homeless population. “I come from a pretty good family,” Moosa told me. “I grew up with a two-parent household, and I still couldn’t make it work.”

Like Evans, Moosa found himself homeless after his marriage fell apart, in 2017. In 2018, half of all unhoused people in L.A. County were homeless for the first time in their lives. A compounding factor for both Evans and Moosa was a criminal record, which made it harder to get a job and to pass credit and background checks. As a radical young activist, Moosa had served time for commercial burglary, possession of an explosive device, and assault and battery. His driver’s license had also been suspended. “Can’t be no Black Panther and follow all the rules,” he joked.

For a year, Moosa slept wherever he could: on couches, on someone’s laundry-room floor, and in cars and mobile homes that friends were trying to sell. He stayed until he wore out his welcome. “You can tell you have to walk,” he said. “Rather than make it all melodramatic, you better do that.” On April 1, 2017, he had a heart attack; a year and a half later, he had a stroke. (The average life expectancy of homeless people is estimated to be almost thirty years shorter than that of the general population.) When a doctor learned that he didn’t have a home, he was referred to a shelter.

Many of the people checking into the shelter were unbathed or mentally ill; the shelter felt like “county jail on the streets,” Moosa said. His younger brother, who had been house-sitting for a couple of years, shared Montano’s number. Moosa took a selfie and texted it to her along with a picture of his state I.D. Soon afterward, a driver picked up Moosa and took him to an apartment complex in Buena Park, an affluent area in Orange County. “I was, like, Yeah, all right, this is it!” he said. But as an outsider in white suburbia, without a car or money, he went hungry. After several days, he texted his brother, who drove him to a Wendy’s. Moosa took a sip of cold soda and his system was so shocked that his entire body began to shake.

“It’d be a lot of unpredictability and instability to it,” Moosa said of house-sitting. “There’s been times I feel like a turkey on Thanksgiving Eve.” If a property was listed for sale, he might find out at six in the morning, when a real-estate agent, wanting to beat traffic, arrived without warning. “I’ll be pumping a log, and they’ll come in before it hits the water,” Moosa said. “I’ll exit the bathroom and the Realtor is standing there, three feet away. ‘Oh, um, can we look in here?’ ”

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The house sitters aren’t told who owns the homes they’re protecting, but it’s apparent when the “For Sale” signs go up: Wedgewood and its subsidiary, Maxim Properties, which are based in Redondo Beach. In recent filings, the company has reported buying and selling several thousand homes in L.A. County each year, and many more up and down the West Coast and in Florida. The company uses more than a dozen different L.L.C. names, many of which sound like ski resorts, such as Catamount Properties and Breckenridge. A significant number of its Los Angeles properties—and seemingly all of those assigned a house sitter—are in communities of color.

“Many of the neighborhoods that were redlined are seeing investment pour back in for the first time since they were redlined in the nineteen-thirties,” Braden Crooks, a co-founder of Designing the We, a design and social-impact studio that has staged exhibits on redlining throughout the country, told me. “But, because of this historic wealth destruction, because people lost ownership and are mostly renters . . . you don’t see the speculative investment that’s pouring back into urban and redlined neighborhoods lifting everyone’s boats. You see it washing them away.”

Wedgewood’s role in the housing crisis hasn’t gone unnoticed. The week before Thanksgiving, 2019, a group of Black mothers calling themselves Moms 4 Housing occupied a Wedgewood property in West Oakland that they said had been vacant for years. They washed the walls, installed a water heater, and set up their children’s bunk beds. Then they began paying the water and electric bills. Two months later, Alameda County sheriff’s deputies arrived in riot gear and removed them.

Shelter-in-place orders to minimize the spread of covid-19 have brought new attention to vacant houses owned by investors. The Alliance for Californians for Community Empowerment, which supported Moms 4 Housing, staged an occupation of vacant homes owned by Caltrans in L.A., and throughout the summer the group organized rent strikes and protests against eviction.

Mychael Lindsey, another house sitter, didn’t like how Wedgewood acquired properties from people who had lost them in distress, but he told me that he’d made his peace with it, and at least he loved how Wedgewood renovated them. “All of our signature houses have the pretty cream carpet, the gray wood floors that are really nice, that mix with the gray granite tops,” he said.

There was one house-sitting assignment that rested uneasily in Lindsey’s mind. A house in Compton that had been lived in by the same family for three generations was foreclosed on after the mother died. When Lindsey showed up, the family was still there. Rather than informing Weekend Warriors and calling the sheriff for a lockout, he decided to give them another week. He told his boss that the property was secure and that he could clear out the furniture himself. The family cried in relief when he told them. But, after the week was over, the construction workers arrived, and they had to leave.

I asked Moosa, as he stood smoking in the back yard, if it felt weird to work for a company that’s implicated in the gentrification of his neighborhood. “Hold on,” he said. “Man, wow. Does that shit feel weird?” He looked up at the sky, considering, and then snapped his head down. “No!” he yelled. “It feel like racist white folks still controlling my existence all the time, which is still the same reason why I don’t even vote!”

But Evans saw house-sitting as a blessing. “Unfortunately, I am one of those who need shelter of any kind, and I’ve got shelter with pay through the cold, raining months, thanks to Diane,” he said. The checks were often late, but they always came eventually, and he could concentrate on his reading and writing. “I get twenty-four-hour peace,” he said. His years in prison had accustomed him to solitude—he could sit there for ten, twelve hours a day. He tried to stay out of people’s way.

In November, 265 Robinson Road went into contract, and on a rainy Thursday in early December the new owner, a Black man in his forties, knocked on the door. He toured the house and told Evans that he would be moving in the next day. “All of this?” Evans said, pointing to his colorful African sheets and inflatable mattress. “It won’t be here tomorrow! It’ll be like I was never here.”

Montano had a new assignment for Evans: replacing a house sitter whom she didn’t trust at a condo that was under contract for three hundred and thirty thousand dollars in Panorama City, a predominantly Latino suburb. Intruders had left a large black stain on the carpet in the master bedroom. Montano told Evans to protect the property while the carpet was replaced. When he arrived at the beige stucco complex, a young man and woman were rolling a blunt on the front steps. Evans toured the premises: a living room with a fireplace, a dining area with a low-hanging light fixture. Upstairs were two bedrooms, with cream-colored carpet throughout. Evans put protective plastic on the floor of the smaller room, which had a view in two directions, and inflated his mattress.

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At one-thirty in the morning, Evans heard the front door opening. He rose and walked to the top of the stairs and saw a man and a woman in their thirties. “Are you squatting in here?” the man asked, agitated. “I’m security,” Evans told them.

“Well, can a woman use the bathroom?” the man asked. “No, come on, let’s go,” the woman said.

“ ‘A’ is for ‘anxiety,’ ‘B’ is for ‘boredom,’ ‘C’ is for ‘coping mechanisms’ . . .”

The next morning, workers came to replace the bedroom carpet, and Montano texted Evans to tell him that he needed to be out by 11 a.m. He could bunk back in Compton.

For the first time in what seemed like years, it was Friday and Evans was off the clock. That night, he decided to go to one of the clubs he used to visit in his youth, order a Shirley Temple, and see some live music. But, before he could choose which club to go to, he got a text from Montano: the sale of the condo had fallen through—the roof was leaking and water was streaming into one of the bathrooms—and she needed him back there immediately. He got into his car and hoped it would make it back to Panorama City.

A couple of weeks later, at 9 a.m., Evans heard the front door open. A woman in her forties entered, with a bag full of recycling. She knew the smart-lock code and assumed that Evans was the boyfriend of the woman who’d given it to her. She’d come to take a shower. “A lot of times, when Diane hires someone, they’re pretty much homeless anyway, so they identify with the homeless and as a result they sympathize and break the rules,” Evans told me. “I can identify with the homeless myself.” Nevertheless, he told the woman that she had to leave. She walked to the complex’s trash area and began digging.

Moosa was fired from house-sitting in January, after a neighbor accused him of making racist comments. He told me that he had merely introduced himself to the neighbors, as instructed by Weekend Warriors. As the coronavirus began to ravage communities of color, his ex-wife agreed to let him move in temporarily with her and their children.

An early fatality was Evans’s ex-wife’s brother, whom Evans had lived with in Moreno Valley. He caught the coronavirus in a convalescent home, where he was recovering from a toe amputation necessitated by his diabetes. Evans called Montano and requested his house-sitting check so that he could contribute to the costs of the funeral—which the family still hasn’t been able to have. But the virus brought a measure of stability to Evans’s life. He’s been in the same home since January, when he was assigned to a duplex in Santa Ana. Construction stopped in March, after a truck deposited new appliances, which sat in their boxes unopened all summer. Evans didn’t mind the lockdown. “I’ve been quarantining for seven years!” he said. He began writing a new essay about the sort of relationship he sought, the type of woman he’d want to be cooped up with during a pandemic. It was inspired by a radio story on the recent rise in domestic violence.

Yet sometimes restlessness struck him. He bought two maps, one of the U.S. and one of the world, and taped them on the wall opposite his bed. He thought about getting a passport—“I always thought it was thousands of dollars, but it’s only a hundred,” he said—and looked up prices for flights to Egypt and Jamaica.

His memoir project had stalled around Christmas. He’d been trying to dictate the book into Otter, a voice-transcription app, but hadn’t had the heart to keep talking alone. I suggested that he invite his sons over to listen, but he shook his head. “So much of my history and my life I conceal, because I don’t need to have my children dreaming nightmares over their father’s story,” he told me. “My life, you know, is not an attractive life. There’s no glory in it. I’ve never been in the military. I’ve never been out of the country. The only thing that’s impressive is that in a few days—shoot, next week—I’ll be sixty-eight years old.”

He longed for a home of his own, where he could watch movies with his sons and be surrounded by the possessions that he was currently paying eighty dollars a month to keep in storage. His Social Security check was eight hundred and thirty-eight dollars a month; he couldn’t afford much. But, as a senior citizen, he thought he might qualify for affordable housing. He called three nonprofits specializing in housing for the elderly. All of them said that they had a waiting list of between five and ten years. The news gave him insomnia. In the middle of the night, he wrote:

Millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires,
You will not be moving from this earth to any other planet.
You will not be importing water to start civilization on the moon.
My name is Augustus and I am here to announce your doom.
I want you to look me in my eye and read my lips
before you trip trying to run from the angry populations and board space ships.

One night, he asked me how to use Craigslist. We pulled it up on his phone. “What’s your dream neighborhood?” I asked.

“Oh, wow,” he said, marvelling at the idea of choosing where he wanted to live. “Culver City. Wait, no. Carson? Carson got too much pollution there. Long Beach.” There was a pause. “Damn. What neighborhood would I want to move into?

“Well, you know, I’ll just type this in, just to see,” he finally said. “C-O-M-P-T-O-N.”

He scrolled through bland bungalows on run-down blocks. “You know, they used to call that Chocolate City,” he said wistfully.

“You can’t even get a single for sixteen hundred dollars,” he said, trying to navigate the pictures. “I got to go sell me some books.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 7, 2020, issue, with the headline “A Lonely Occupation.”

Francesca Mari has written for the Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic, among other publications.

A Reporter at Large:When One Parent Leaves a Hasidic Community, What Happens to the Kids?

The irreconcilable differences between Orthodoxy and secularism increasingly end up in court.

By Larissa MacFarquhar, THE NEW YORKER, December 7, 2020 Issue

November 30, 2020

Where Chavie Weisberger grew up, the secular world was thought to be sinful—but she was curious about it. The possibility of leaving her community was so extreme that it took years to form in her mind.Photograph by Dawit N.M. for The New Yorker.

Not many people leave ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Most who do try to keep it secret, because, if everyone knew, the marriage prospects of their siblings could be irreparably damaged. The shame of leaving is very great. It is said that anyone who leaves must be a ruined person—penniless, homeless, probably on drugs, maybe a prostitute, living like an animal, for carnal appetites alone, like the goyim, or else mentally ill.

It’s true that leaving is traumatic. Many people do fall apart at first. There are suicides, and near-suicides. Some who lose their faith would give anything to have it back. Others who think about leaving can’t bring themselves to do it. Leaving means giving up everything you know, and a close, enveloping community where you are never alone, with little sense of what could replace it. Your spouse might divorce you, your parents reject you. You have to be desperate.

Twenty years ago, those who left could feel that they were stepping into a void. They might know no one else who had done what they were doing. There was a network of blogs written by people who no longer believed but continued to go through the motions; some called themselves Reverse Marranos, for the Jews in medieval Spain who faked renouncing their religion in order to survive. But many Haredi communities—their preferred term for ultra-Orthodox, which means “those who tremble before God”—restricted access to the Internet.

Then, in 2003, Malkie Schwartz, who had left the Lubavitch group in Crown Heights, founded Footsteps, an organization for people who had left Haredi communities. She started it as a support group, but she found that people who had left were usually in need of help with practical things as well: improving their English, since Yiddish was often their first language; figuring out how to go back to school or find work with few secular qualifications; finding somewhere to live. Over the years, Footsteps expanded into a fully fledged nonprofit. In 2010, Schwartz was succeeded by Lani Santo, who had a master’s degree in nonprofit management from N.Y.U. At that point, around five hundred people had gone to Footsteps for help; by 2020, around eighteen hundred had, and still more had contacted other groups that had sprung up. By then, Footsteps had become notorious among Haredim, suspected of preying on vulnerable people who were struggling in their faith. Some who sought its help first heard of it when they were accused of being members.

One of the most painful difficulties that leavers faced was the risk of losing their children. In the early days, the few who left had not attracted a lot of attention, and some got custody of their kids without much of a fight. But, as more people defected, communities alarmed by the prospect of so many children lost to Haredism mobilized to keep them. Secular courts were called upon to determine the best interests of children who were being torn between two irreconcilable ways of life: what to one parent was a basic human freedom might be, to the other, a violation of the laws of God. To many Haredim, the loss of a child to secular life was unbearable, because it meant that the child’s future, and that of all his descendants, would be ruined, not only in this world but also in the next.

Chavie Weisberger grew up in Monsey, a hamlet in Rockland County, just north of New York City, with a large Hasidic population. Her grandfather Rabbi Moshe Wolfson was the venerated founder of the Emunas Yisroel Hasidic group to which she belonged. Emunas Yisroel, like all Hasidic groups, traced its lineage to an eighteenth-century charismatic movement in Eastern Europe. Hasidism valued joy and emotional connection with the divine as much as Torah study. It also concentrated power in its rebbes, who acted as intermediaries between believers and God.

Chavie was the fifth of ten children. She saw herself as a good girl, a rule-follower, but she never really believed that the rules were important. When nobody was looking, she would put on the lights on Shabbos, or turn on the air-conditioning. She never really prayed; she just mumbled the words. She knew that she ought to be ashamed of this, and she was, but she wasn’t afraid of God; she was afraid of getting caught.

Her community believed the secular world was sinful, but she was curious about it. She sneaked glances at the TV in the doctor’s waiting room; she stared at people in the mall. In high school, she discovered that she was attracted to girls, and she slept with a few of them, especially at summer camp. She knew that what she was doing was wrong, because it was immodest to show your body to another person, but she didn’t think of it as gay sex—she didn’t know that it was sex at all. She certainly never connected the experience with the fact that in a few years she would be married to a boy.

A matchmaker paired her with Naftali Weisberger, a boy from her neighborhood, and they married in 2002, when she was nineteen. The wedding night was horrific. It felt to Chavie as though they were violating each other. It wasn’t that he was rough—he was meek and shy. But they had been told that they had to consummate the marriage that night, and if they were having trouble they should call the rabbi, so they did. For her, there was no way to come back from that night. She couldn’t imagine loving the person who had put her through it. And although she had not previously connected her relationships with girls with marriage to a boy, now she thought, This isn’t love. I know what love is, because I have felt it.

Cartoon by Edward Koren

After a year, Chavie told her parents that she was unhappy in the marriage, and they sent her to a Hasidic therapist. The therapist told her that people became gay because they were abused in their childhood. When she told him that she hadn’t been abused, he hypnotized her to try to get her to remember, and taught her to self-hypnotize when she was having sex with her husband. Six years into the marriage, Chavie and Naftali had three children, the youngest a few months old. That summer, Chavie, Naftali, and the kids went away to a camp in the Catskills. Being back in that place, Chavie remembered vividly what it had been like to be there as a girl—how fun and innocent summer camp had been—and she felt more than ever that her husband was dragging her down.

A few months later, early one morning, Naftali was changing the baby’s diaper when she fell off the bed and broke her leg. Chavie bolted upright in bed when the baby screamed and said they had to take her to the hospital right away, but it was Saturday—Shabbos—and they were staying with her husband’s family for the weekend. Her father-in-law asked a neighbor, who was an emergency medical technician in the religious ambulance corps, to examine the baby, and the technician concluded that the baby’s injuries were not serious enough to warrant driving on Shabbos. (A lawyer for Naftali Weisberger declined an interview requested on his behalf.) All through the day, as Chavie held the screaming baby, she grew angrier and angrier. As soon as Shabbos was over, the family went to the hospital, but the doctor was so disturbed by the broken femur, and by the fact that they had waited nearly ten hours to bring the baby in, that the hospital called child-protective services. That night, while Chavie slept in the hospital with the baby, she was watched by a child-protection worker, for fear of abuse.

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Not long after, Chavie decided she was done. She knew that husbands were often reluctant to give their wives a get—a religious divorce—so when Naftali agreed to give her one and they went to the beis din, the rabbinical court, she readily signed whatever papers she was given. She didn’t pay much attention to a clause requiring her to raise the children Hasidic. In March, 2009, they were officially divorced. Later that month, Naftali married again. After he remarried, he told Chavie that he needed to focus on his new wife, and he stopped seeing their children regularly. Sometimes he took them out for pizza, but he didn’t have them over to his new house. He didn’t pay child support. Soon he and his wife began having babies of their own.

It was at this point that Chavie allowed herself to think, If I am raising these children alone, how do I want to do it? And what do I actually want in my life? She consulted a Modern Orthodox rabbi, hoping he would tell her that she could be both gay and religious, but he said that if she was really a lesbian she had to be celibate. And so her choice slowly became clear to her: she could be celibate; she could live a secret life and lie to everyone; or she could leave the community. This last possibility was so extreme that it took several years to form in her mind.

Outwardly, she was still a good girl. She worked at a community magazine, she was involved with the PTA. But she must have had some kind of air about her, because people started confiding their own weird stuff. This one wished she could wear shorter skirts; that one wanted to go to the movies. Some women were meeting strangers they had found on Craigslist. One day, she heard her co-workers gossiping about a woman named Chani Getter. Chani was a little older, but Chavie knew who she was—she had grown up on the next block. Someone said, Did you hear? Chani is a lesbian now, and she’s running crazy wild retreats for lesbians, and she takes her kids there. The co-workers were horrified, but Chavie went home, Googled Chani Getter, and called her.

Marie was an Army brat—she grew up half in Germany, half in the U.S. (“Marie” is a pseudonym.) Her father was a Christian, an American soldier; her mother came from a Haredi German family. Neither was religious, and they celebrated holidays in an irregular fashion—a bit of Hanukkah, a bit of Christmas. When Marie was a child, her mother told her stories about growing up Haredi, and the one that stuck in her head was about how if she used the wrong fork and made it un-kosher she had to go outside and thrust it into the ground, and sometimes it was so cold and the ground so hard that it was difficult. At the time, Marie thought this sounded crazy—something that only bizarre, mean parents would force their children to do—and certainly her mother was very bitter about her religious upbringing. But, as Marie grew older, her mother’s stories piqued her interest. She was looking for a way of life that was more spiritual and structured than the way she’d grown up, and, after moving every three years from place to place and country to country, she wanted a community to belong to. By the time her parents settled in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood, when she was in high school, she had found herself wanting to become Orthodox.

She couldn’t force her family to keep kosher, so she ate vegetarian. She babysat and mowed lawns in order to earn money to buy an extra set of dishes, so they wouldn’t be tainted by her family’s non-kosher food. She stopped wearing pants. Her mother was appalled; she said that Marie was spitting on her family’s way of life. Eventually, this caused so much strain that Marie went to live with a religious friend she knew from her synagogue. After graduating from high school, she went to Baylor to study premed.

While she was in college, Marie met a rabbi from Monsey. He told her that in Monsey there were men who were a little older than she but still unmarried because for some reason they weren’t considered a catch. If she wanted to marry a Haredi man, he said, she should look for a man like that, because with her dubious religious background she wasn’t a catch, either. It took her a while to get used to the idea of marrying a man she didn’t know, but she believed that she should trust God without questioning, so she did. She met a twenty-seven-year-old man in a religious chat room, and left college to marry him in the fall of 2001.

When Marie first arrived in Monsey, it felt wonderful to her to be in a place where nobody thought she was strange for being religious. There were kosher stores everywhere, lots of people were modestly dressed. People in the community spoke Yiddish, but Marie understood them because she spoke German. Early on, a woman walking near her on the street grabbed her shirt and yanked her over to let a man pass by, so that he wouldn’t have to walk behind or between them, and that startled her, but she told herself that she was new to this, and there were bound to be customs she didn’t know about.

The marriage, though, was difficult from the start. She wanted to go back to college—she still hoped to become a doctor—but she was scolded for trying to overthrow her husband. (Marie’s husband, too, declined to be interviewed.) She saw that as a bride she had not received the same kinds of gifts as other daughters-in-law; her husband told her that she should be grateful that his family took her in after the way she had been raised, like an animal in a zoo.

When she and her husband had their first child, a daughter, she became absorbed in being a mother and felt happier. A couple of years later, they had a son. But the marriage grew worse. Her husband controlled the household money, and told her that in order for him to give her some, even to buy basic items such as sanitary napkins, she had to deserve it. He called her names, and when their daughter was around six or seven he started calling her names, too—ugly, fat, stupid. Finally, in 2012, they went to the beis din to get a divorce. She got custody of the children; he was to see them for dinner a couple of times a week and every other Shabbos.

After her husband moved out, Marie began seeking out family and old friends. Before she had kids, she had been estranged from her parents, but now they travelled from Texas to visit her. Her family knew that she hadn’t had a minute to herself during the more than ten years that she was married, so they gathered together some money and told her to take a vacation. One of the friends Marie reconnected with was an Indian-Jewish woman whom she’d met in college and who had moved back home afterward, and this friend invited her to visit. Marie arranged for the kids to stay with a family in Monsey for two weeks and bought a ticket to India.

Issac was born in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the ninth of ten children, in what would become the Bobov-45 group. (Issac is not the name he usually goes by.) His father was exceptionally devout and rigid about rule-keeping, but Issac was always getting into trouble. When a teacher hit him, he called the Fire Department. When one of the school principals made him angry, he squirted ketchup and mustard all over all the principals’ lunches. He was bullied by the other kids. When he prayed, he tried to feel a connection to God, but it never worked. Mostly, praying meant nothing to him. His father was always telling him stories about people burning in Hell, and those would frighten him for a while, but then it wore off. He didn’t doubt the existence of God, exactly; he didn’t have a strong belief one way or the other.

He was sent to sleepaway camp for the first time when he was nine or ten. On visiting day his father came to see him, and while the other parents played games, or took their kids out boating, Issac’s father took him into the empty shul and said, Let’s review what you have studied these past two weeks. The summer that Issac was fifteen, he had a rough week at camp and decided to kill himself. Luckily, he didn’t know how to do it—he took forty Benadryl pills and went to bed. The camp nurse gave him water the next day to flush his system, but apart from that no one did much; mental illness tended to be hushed up, because it could affect the marriage prospects of everyone in the family. Issac didn’t see a therapist until about six months later, and that was to deal with attention deficit disorder. He was advised to tell nobody about the therapy, not even his brothers and sisters.

When Issac turned eighteen, in 2006, it came time for him to marry, and matchmakers started getting in touch. Normally, a person had only one shidduch—one match. Eight of Issac’s nine siblings married the first person they met, but Issac met five girls, and five times he was rejected. Part of the problem might have been that he wasn’t a yeshiva boy anymore—he worked in an office-supply store—and having a job was less prestigious. One matchmaker told him that she’d fibbed on his behalf, saying that he learned with a study partner every night, but it made no difference. He was told that one girl rejected him because he talked too much. By the time a matchmaker suggested a sixth girl, he no longer gave a shit. He agreed to go through with the meeting only to pacify his father. The matchmaker didn’t know him or the girl personally—presumably, she had picked a girl for her failings, to go with his.

His father mentioned the girl one day when he got home from work, and Issac drove up to Monsey to meet her. He was done trying to make himself look good—he thought, Let’s just get through this and go home. But he liked her. She was devout, but not stiff or judgmental. She was very attractive. She had had a difficult childhood and wasn’t living with her family. They talked for about an hour, and, fifteen minutes after Issac left, the matchmaker called both of them and told each that the other wanted to meet again, although in fact neither had said anything about it. They met the following afternoon, and then a third time. At this point, Issac had begun to think that something might actually come of it, so they talked seriously for four or five hours. He asked the girl, Faigy (a pseudonym), if she had any questions for him, and she fetched a list she’d drawn up. Faigy told him about her childhood, and he asked her if she was in therapy. She admitted that she was. Issac told her, “If you weren’t, there is no way I would consider this.” She said, “I want to marry you.”

After her divorce, Marie felt hemmed in by scrutiny and gossip. She believed that her ex-husband was trying to find dirt on her, in order to get the kids back. He told people in the community that she didn’t keep kosher, that she didn’t keep Shabbos. People rammed their shopping carts into hers at Rockland Kosher. Her employers, who had heard that she was no longer Jewish, fired her.

The first year of their marriage was easy. His wife was the opposite of his parents, he thought—she never told him what to do. He felt that life with his parents had been a constant struggle, and now the struggle was over. Nine and a half months after their wedding, he and Faigy had a daughter. But being happily married to a religious woman didn’t change Issac’s feelings about religion, and, left to his own devices, his observance started to slip. He still did the basics, showing his face in shul when he had to, but he wasn’t praying every day.

Everything changed when his daughter, the summer before preschool, was rejected by the Bobov yeshiva because, he and Faigy were told, Faigy, who had been brought up in a community with slightly different rules, drove a car. He and Faigy had been pleading with the school for months, and finally they asked for a meeting with the grand rabbi in Borough Park. The rabbi didn’t understand why Faigy insisted on driving. Couldn’t she give it up for the sake of her children? Issac said that maybe the Bobov school was the best school, maybe it wasn’t, but he wasn’t willing to chain up his wife to find out. Afterward, as he and Faigy walked away, down Fiftieth Street, he didn’t feel angry; he felt peaceful. He said to Faigy, “It’s over—the book is closed on Bobov.”

The next day, he realized that he was done with more than the school. He said to Faigy, “If I don’t have to follow the rules for the yeshiva, then why do I need to follow them at all?” He told her, “I think I can keep Shabbos, I think I can keep kosher, but beyond that I’m not sure.” This was intensely painful for Faigy, who was deeply pious. Issac had been untethered from religion inside his head for a long time, but to her it felt as though everything she knew about her family had suddenly exploded into pieces.

Up to this point, whatever Issac had done or not done at home was between him and Faigy. Outside the house, he still looked and behaved more or less like a religious man. But now he felt an urge to go to the barber and have his beard shaved and his payos—sidelocks—cut off. At that point, his apostasy would become irretrievably public. He wanted to do it right away, but he decided to think about it, to make sure that he would have no regrets. So he set a calendar reminder in his phone for four weeks from that day, to give himself a chance to change his mind.

Chavie had been afraid to talk to such a wild-sounding person as Chani Getter, but on the phone Chani was very friendly. She invited Chavie to attend a retreat for L.G.B.T.Q. Orthodox Jews. At the retreat, Chavie was asked to speak about herself, and she saw that people were moved by what she said, and she thought, This is real, this is actually who I am. At the retreat, she met many queer parents who were there openly with their children, not hiding or lying to them. She thought about how she had been behaving with her own children, putting them to bed and then locking herself in her bedroom and watching a movie. Her children were four, six, and eight, so it wasn’t too hard to keep them in the dark, but she thought that as they grew older it would be impossible to keep lying and be a good parent. At another retreat, one of her new friends said to her, “I dare you to take your wig off.” Chavie was shocked—this felt even more exposing than being naked, especially since, unbeknownst to anyone, she had let her hair grow out into a Mohawk and dyed it in rainbow stripes—but she did it. After that, things started moving very fast. A month later, she went to the friend’s house for the weekend and rode in a car on Shabbos and ate bacon, and it didn’t feel frightening or sacrilegious—it felt normal and right. And she realized, I guess I never believed in any of this.

She began introducing her children to her new friends—a lesbian couple, a trans woman. She felt that she and her kids were pushing open the door of their ghetto together, and it was both scary and thrilling. She thought that, since she was abandoning the values of the community, she should come up with alternatives, so she started a “values wall” in her house, and when she read a book with the kids they would extract a value from it and paste it up: kindness, inclusivity, social justice. She believed that a family should have rituals, so for every ritual she abandoned she invented a new one to take its place. She was worried that when the community saw what she was up to it would try to turn her children against her—she had seen that happen. But the key was she had time. Outwardly, they were still a good Hasidic family, so no one was paying attention.

For three years after the divorce, Chavie didn’t tell her children that she was queer. But then, in 2012, she thought that her older daughter suspected it, and Chavie told her that she was. That fall, a transgender friend of hers had a fire in their apartment, and she invited them to stay with her, at her home in Borough Park. They brought their cats; pets were not exactly prohibited in the community, but they were a tell. Chavie grew bolder. She allowed the kids to eat non-kosher food a few times. She let the girls wear pants inside the house. She let the kids watch a movie called “How the Toys Saved Christmas.” She told them that certain Hasidic beliefs were sexist and homophobic, and that she was an atheist. Finally, she thought, I am done trying to please people. One day, she impulsively went outside in her neighborhood wearing secular clothes, with her hair—now short and blond—uncovered for everyone to see. She walked past a group of mothers waiting at a bus stop. At first, they didn’t recognize her, and then they did, and grew very quiet, but she kept walking.

She decided to come out publicly as a lesbian, and was promptly fired from her job at the magazine. The community was horrified that Rabbi Wolfson’s granddaughter had turned out to be such a shocking person. People wrote her letters telling her that she was disturbing the soul of her father, who had recently died. But she never imagined that she would run into custody problems. Her ex was busy with his new children. She figured that, even if he did take her to a secular family court, the judge would side with her, because she was progressive and wanted her kids to get a good education.

It turned out that she was wrong about this. In November, 2012, she received an emergency order to show up in Kings County Supreme Court. The judge told her that she was confusing and harming her children by making such drastic changes in their upbringing, and ordered them removed from her and sent to stay with their father that very day.

Afew days later, the judge issued a temporary order decreeing that Chavie’s children could live with her for three nights a week, on the condition that while they were with her, and whenever she was in Borough Park, she dressed and acted like a proper Hasidic woman. In a subsequent hearing, Naftali told the judge he had assumed that Chavie would have relationships with women after the divorce, but he had expected her to keep them secret from the children. Chavie said that a parent who hid her authentic self from her kids, and raised them according to values that she didn’t believe in, was not a parent but a nanny, and to deprive children of a parent was a terrible thing.

The judge summoned several experts to give testimony on the family. A therapist testified that, ever since Chavie had begun openly flouting Hasidic rules, her older daughter said that she could not have normal friendships with her classmates in school, and that she and her siblings were afraid of being seen in the streets with their mother wearing secular clothing. A psychologist testified that her son’s behavior in yeshiva had grown disruptive and defiant. Both said that Chavie’s criticisms of Hasidism had left the children deeply confused. A forensic psychologist testified that although Chavie was a loving mother who had a strong bond with her children, by disparaging the Hasidic way of life in front of them she had put her own needs ahead of theirs; she should have shielded them from anything that could turn them against their father and his community. The judge, appalled by what he felt was Chavie’s “remorseless” violation of her agreement to raise the kids religious, made his temporary ruling permanent.

Chavie appealed, and, two years later, the ruling was overturned, on the ground that a religious-upbringing agreement could be enforced only so long as it was in the best interests of the children. The appeals court was more impressed by Chavie’s care of the kids, and by Naftali’s spotty visitation and child-support record, than by Chavie’s rogue behavior. The appeals judges accepted Chavie’s argument that it was not in the children’s interests for her to conceal her beliefs from them. They pointed out that the plain language of the agreement required a Hasidic upbringing for the children, but did not specify any requirements as to the behavior of the parents; nor was it acceptable for a court to compel an adult to practice a religion. The solution was to split the difference: Chavie was to make sure that the children dressed and acted like Hasidic kids when visiting their father or attending school, but she could dress or act as she liked.

Chavie had been lucky, but she had also had help. Around the time of her appeal, in 2017, Footsteps hired Julie F. Kay, a human-rights lawyer, who began recruiting attorneys from top Manhattan firms to represent Footsteps members in custody cases pro bono. For a long time, Footsteps members had been at a disadvantage in court because they couldn’t afford to pay lawyers. Many Hasidic parents were also poor, but they could turn to the community for help, raising money in crowdfunding campaigns:

To all Jews and Community Leaders:

Since my friend, a father of 7 children is unfortunately fell into a bitter situation after his wife was unfortunately caught in the bitter net of FS (Footsteps) . . . . I don’t understand how can it be that there is a group that cuts from us pieces and pay monies and more monies to catch souls from the Jewish people and how can it be that the world isn’t shaking from all of this? . . .

I think to myself what kind of face will the Jewish nation have if right by the breakthrough in this case they will God Forbi[d] they will take over the kids with two hands—This can never be allowed to happen—How shameful will that be?

Chavie’s case had established that courts could not compel a parent to follow religious strictures; Kay hoped next to convince the courts that compelling a parent to monitor her children’s observance was not significantly different from compelling her to be observant herself. There was, of course, a long history of decisions in religious custody cases. For instance, a judge on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had written, in 1990, in Zummo v. Zummo: “The government is inherently and constitutionally incompetent to determine whether stability or instability in religious beliefs would be in the best interests of a child.” But state courts were under no obligation to defer to precedents set by other jurisdictions, so each principle that Kay hoped to establish had to be litigated in New York. One of the problems with Rockland County courts handling custody cases, Kay believed, was that their judges were elected, and no group in Rockland County voted with such discipline and unanimity as the Haredim.

In the years after Chavie’s appeal, and with the assistance of the pro-bono lawyers, Footsteps members became more assertive: they regularly claimed that it was unconstitutional to force them to adhere to religious practices they didn’t believe in. These tactics could backfire, however; judges in custody cases were apt to become irritated by lofty arguments about parents’ rights, and didn’t like to get involved in disputes about religion. For this reason, lawyers for the religious parents tended to frame their arguments as commonsense pleas for stability. Courts placed enormous value on stability—as much value, sometimes, as on the preservation of a relationship with both parents. Going back and forth between households with irreconcilable customs and beliefs caused the children to feel bewildered and lost, the lawyer for the religious parent would say. The secular parent had become so caught up in the journey of her evolving desires that she jeopardized her children’s mental health. The Footsteps lawyer might argue that children were resilient, that they could cope with change. But the lawyer for the religious parent would point out that, if the children lived in a household that did not conform to the norms of their group, they might be shunned at school by their classmates, and possibly expelled, which would remove one of the few constants from their already rocky lives. And this was true.

“By the time we find a spot, there’ll be nothing left to pillage.”

Another factor was the feelings of the children themselves. Once children were old enough to express their views, judges were inclined to listen to them. Chavie’s case was unusual: because her ex-husband had been preoccupied with his second family during the years she was moving away from religion, she had had time to bring her children with her. Others were not so lucky.

While Marie was in India, she spent time with a cousin of her friend’s, who had a Jewish mother but a Muslim father. She had met this cousin before, when he visited her college, in Texas, but he was several years younger than her and she hadn’t taken much notice of him. Now they bonded over family troubles, and over the difficulty of being Jewish while having a non-Jewish father. After she returned home, they stayed in touch. Back in Monsey, Marie felt hemmed in by scrutiny and gossip. She believed that her ex-husband was trying to find dirt on her, in order to get the kids back, and that people were watching her on his behalf, looking to see if she had stopped being observant, or if she was entertaining men in her house, getting drunk, shooting up drugs. He told people in the community that she didn’t keep kosher, that she didn’t keep Shabbos. People rammed their shopping carts into hers at Rockland Kosher.

She found work as a home health aide for elderly people, and tried to focus on being a mother. She had custody of the kids, but the one important thing that she had no control over was their education, and what she saw in the yeshivas alarmed her. In the long school day, little time was devoted to secular subjects such as English and math. Many Hasidic children spoke Yiddish at home, and might leave school without being fluent in English. Marie wanted her kids to be able to go to college, so she hired Elana Sigall, an educational consultant. Sigall had found that most judges had almost no understanding of what went on in a yeshiva. They seemed to have a vague sense that Jews valued education and therefore Jewish schools must be rigorous; but several yeshivas had told Sigall that by the conclusion of their education their boys were typically reading English at a third- or fourth-grade level. This was not regarded as a failure by the yeshivas: from their point of view, no more was necessary to live a pious life.

In Haredi divorce cases, judges almost always ordered that the children should stay in the same school, partly to insure that one feature of the child’s life remained stable, but also because it was extremely difficult for children to be part of a Haredi community if they went to a public school, or even the yeshiva of another group. Yeshivas required adherence to a code of conduct that dictated nearly every aspect of not only the children’s lives but those of the parents as well. Children attended yeshiva six days a week; older teen-age boys might be at their yeshiva from eight in the morning until eight at night, eating all three meals there, going home only to sleep. In many ways, the yeshiva was a child’s third parent, with more authority than the other two.

Meanwhile, as Marie’s educational petitions were pending in the court, a year after her first trip she went to India again. She spent more time with the cousin, and they became engaged, and, a year later, they married, although, for visa reasons, her husband did not move to America for many months. Her children were upset that she had married a man they had never met, and Marie’s ex-husband began telling people that Marie had married a Muslim and was no longer Jewish.

Once this got around, the elderly people whom Marie had been taking care of didn’t want her in their homes any longer, and she lost her income. At the same time, in the late spring of 2016 her landlord gave her thirty days’ notice to move out of her apartment. Her government housing subsidy allowed her thirty days to find a three-bedroom apartment in Monsey for fifteen hundred dollars including utilities, which was nearly impossible. She called friends of her ex-husband’s and begged them to help her find somewhere to stay, but nobody did.

This was, as she thought of it, her in-case-of-danger-break-the-glass moment. She had nowhere to live and no money to pay for it; the only place she had friends or family was Texas. She had full custody of her daughter, but she was not allowed to take her son out of the state for more than a brief trip. She considered going to a shelter, but she figured that a court would hold that against her, too—it was lose either way. So she called her parents. Her plan, she told the kids’ yeshivas, was to make some money in Texas over the summer, then come back in time for the next school year.

She had to be out of her apartment by Sunday. On Friday afternoon, there was a knock on the door, and she was served with a restraining order forbidding her to take her children out of New York. Her parents were already on the road, driving from Texas in a U-Haul; she had intended for them all to leave Monsey the following evening, right after Shabbos. In a panic, she called her lawyer, who told her that there was no room in the shelter, but that she should on no account leave the state with her kids. But she thought, Where else can I go? The next night, she piled the kids into the truck with her parents and left.

The day after they got to Texas, the police arrived early in the morning. Marie’s ex-husband was with them. The police got the children out of bed and took them away. Marie went to stay with her brother, in Pennsylvania, and commuted to court dates in New York. The judge was outraged that Marie had ignored the order not to leave the state, and agreed with her ex-husband that the sudden eviction had been traumatic for the kids. The court awarded her ex-husband temporary sole custody of both children.

In court, Marie was pressed to prove that she hadn’t married a Muslim. Her ex-husband’s lawyer displayed photographs of her at her wedding wearing traditional Indian clothes, with wedding henna on her skin. The judge, saying that she needed to assess Marie’s credibility, told her that she should produce a valid ketubah to prove that her wedding was Orthodox. Although the judge had ordered both parents not to disparage each other in public, an associate of her ex-husband’s posted a video online, soliciting money to pay legal fees. “He woke up and found himself alone,” a male voice narrated, in English, over dramatic music. “No wife; no kids. Thousands of miles away, his wife converted to Islam and married a Muslim man. He almost lost his children forever. After a lengthy battle in the courts, he now has his kids back. But that may change soon if he doesn’t come up with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for his lawyers.” Then Marie’s ex-husband appeared and pleaded, in Yiddish, “Dear brothers, it is not easy to turn to you, but what doesn’t a father do for his children. I’m begging you, help me.”

All the time she wasn’t seeing her kids, Marie kept texting her daughter, asking her what was going on, and her daughter told her that her father’s family was asking, Why is your mother texting so often, is she stalking you, is she crazy? Soon the daughter began echoing the same words: Are you stalking me? Let me breathe, leave me alone. Marie found out in court that her ex-husband’s mother had told her daughter that if she talked to Marie she would be stabbing her father’s family in the back. The last time Marie talked to her daughter on the phone, her daughter said that she was a bitch who had married a goy.

For a while, Marie’s son tried to please both of his parents. He told Marie, I say whatever I have to say to Tati to make him happy. But then a rabbi at her son’s yeshiva told the boy’s therapist that if he continued to visit his mother he could be expelled from school. The therapist told Marie that her son didn’t want to come for visitations anymore. Marie told the therapist this wasn’t true, that her son had told her how much he liked coming to see her. The therapist said, “Talk to him, he’ll tell you.” Then Marie did something that, she realized later, destroyed the fragile balance her son had tried to maintain: she confronted him. As her son sat sadly, not looking at her, she let her grief get the better of her and said to him, “What would I be without my children? A mother, her days, her nights, her life—everything is her children. How can I live without you?” Later, her son’s therapist testified that, because the boy loved his life in the community, awarding custody to his mother would be, for him, “a death sentence.”

After both of her children stopped seeing her, Marie lost any lingering attachment to Hasidism. She stopped observing holidays except when her husband wanted to—he was more observant than she was now—although they always made an effort to have a nice Shabbos dinner. But she kept a kosher home, to make sure that, if her children ever came to visit her, she would be able to feed them. After a while, she realized that she no longer believed in God.

By the fall of 2020, she hadn’t seen either of her children in more than two years. In theory, she still had the right to visitations, but the judge had decided not to force the children to see her if they didn’t want to. Marie realized that her children had been put in the position of choosing between her and everybody else—their father, their grandparents, their cousins, rabbis at the temple, neighbors, friends, teachers at school, even God. She was their mother, but she was just one person. It was either her or their whole world.

Issac’s crisis came to a head in the late summer of 2014. He and Faigy had met with the grand rabbi in May; he had cut off his payos about six weeks later. Then, one weekend in August, he and Faigy were in Brooklyn to spend Shabbos with his family. They walked to a friend’s house to celebrate the birth of his baby, and afterward they walked the mile or so back to Issac’s parents’ house to join them for lunch. It was a sweltering day, and by the time Issac got there he was so hot that he took off his fur hat and coat. His father, calling him by a childhood nickname that he had always hated, said, “In my house, you wear that for the meal.” His father said it quietly, but for some reason this command was the one that broke him. He thought, My father liked me when I was a child; he doesn’t care for me as I am.

He ran upstairs to his childhood bedroom and broke down sobbing. Faigy ran up after him, and although it was Shabbos, right in front of her he went to the air-conditioner and turned it on. Then he took out his phone and texted a private Facebook group he was part of. Faigy was shocked by these violations of Shabbos, but she didn’t say anything. She had never seen him cry like that. He stayed in his room for the rest of the day, and when Shabbos was over they left the house.

Cartoon by Liana Finck

During the next couple of weeks, they talked about his not wanting to keep Shabbos anymore, and Faigy grew increasingly distraught. Her therapist asked Issac to come to an emergency session and told him, “You know what, do it for your wife. You can manage twenty-four hours without a phone.” Issac thought, She’s right, and he didn’t want to break up his marriage, so the next Shabbos he put his phone away. The following day, Faigy said, “Never keep Shabbos for me.” She had seen how miserable he was—not at being away from his phone but from the feeling that he had been free and was now caged again.

Issac had friends who violated Shabbos all the time, watching sports, and just lied to their families about it. But he didn’t want to lie. The key, he realized, was his not having given a shit when he and Faigy first met. Because he had shown her who he really was, right from the beginning, he wasn’t afraid to tell her what he was thinking, even when he knew that it might upset her. As a result, they talked about his wanting to break the rules before he did. Years later, Issac would get phone calls from other men who’d been pulling away from observance but had never talked about it with their wives, and by the time they called him there was such a vast gulf between the person their wives thought they were and the person they’d become that Issac thought there was no chance of the marriages surviving, because they were built on lies.

For years, Issac and Faigy talked about Issac’s problems with religion. They had many painful conversations, and they avoided other conversations because of how painful they would be. When Issac stopped observing, it had felt, to Faigy, like the end of the world. She had been raised to fear a vengeful God, and to see her husband breaking God’s laws was to her incomprehensible and terrifying. But then she went to a rabbi for advice, and the rabbi told her that she was wrong to think of God that way—that God was a loving God. The rabbi asked her, “What is there in you that you cannot accept your husband?” Gradually, she came to believe that the rabbi was right, that God was indeed a loving God, and that her terror was just another demon from her past. She came to believe that God had given her Issac for a husband to make her understand what faith was really about.

The rabbi advised her to compromise for the sake of her marriage, and, over time, she let some things go. She stopped worrying if a little of her natural hair was visible under her wig. She bought food with a more lenient kosher certification. But she didn’t feel, as Issac did, that Haredi rules constricted her freedom—she felt that God’s commandments were given in love, as guideposts, to form a structure for her life. To her, it was a joyful thing to be part of a community and a religion that were larger than she was, that had been around for thousands of years.

Faigy never told Issac not to do something, but she asked him not to do it in front of her. Once he started going to Footsteps meetings, he made secular friends, and she feared that they would pull him away from her. It was especially frightening that he had female friends; in her world, there was no such thing as a grown man being friends with a woman. But, after a while, she said it was O.K. with her if he brought these secular friends to their house. To her, their lives seemed very hard, and she felt grateful that she had God to support her.

As time went on, Issac became more and more awed by her. He saw that she loved and accepted him even though many religious women would have thrown him out of the house and barred him from seeing his kids. He knew from talking to other people that his situation was vanishingly rare. He saw that, because of her miserable childhood, Faigy appreciated his being a loving husband and father, despite his apostasy and whatever other failings he had. She remembered how, at the beginning of their marriage, when she was having nightmares about her past, even though he hardly knew her then, he supported her and loved her and encouraged her to go back into therapy.

Faigy believed it was worse for the children to think that their father was evil than for them to doubt that a person who broke the rules would go to Hell. She and Issac explained to the kids that there were rules they had to follow, but that when they were grownups they would be able to make their own choices. She bought the children journals and told them that if anything bothered them they should write about it before they went to sleep, and every night she read the journals and wrote back.

Issac tried not to do anything that would desecrate Shabbos for the rest of the family. He would have preferred to have the kids go to public school, but he didn’t push it—he knew how important it was to Faigy that they be brought up to love their religion. But sometimes he would poke at it, just a little. If the kids were praying and addressing God as He, he would say, “How do you know God’s not a She?” But in the end he didn’t mind too much if his kids were religious. Even though the blessing sung after a meal had always annoyed him—he thought it was too long—he loved to hear his children sing it. The bottom line was that he felt he had no right to force anything on his kids, any more than he had a right to force anything on Faigy, or she on him. A few people had told him that he should write a book, and though he doubted that he would, he had a title: “You Don’t Fucking Own Nobody, Nobody Fucking Owns You.”

At some point, they decided to buy a house, and, because Issac was sick of parking his car fifteen minutes away so that if he wanted to drive on Shabbos he didn’t rile up the entire neighborhood, they ended up buying a house in a part of Rockland County where there were very few Jewish families. There was one observant family nearby whose children were similar to theirs in age, and they had had a meal with them once, but then the father saw Issac driving on Shabbos and that was the end of that. They didn’t have a synagogue community, because Issac didn’t pray anymore, and women in their neighborhood didn’t go to synagogue except on special occasions. They still had a few friends from Borough Park, and Issac had some secular friends from Footsteps, but they didn’t know any couples like themselves.

They wanted to find a place where there were like-minded people living nearby—people they could say hi to on the street, families whom they could have meals with sometimes, who had kids that their kids could play with, and whom they didn’t have to put up a façade with. To Issac, it felt like a lot to ask. They looked at Teaneck, New Jersey, which felt right from a religious point of view—the families there were mostly Modern Orthodox—but the Teaneck Jews all appeared to be upper-middle-class. It seemed that everyone had gone to college, many were doctors or lawyers. Issac had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education and worked in a supermarket; he felt that he and Faigy wouldn’t fit in with people like that.

After Issac stopped being religious, he decided that he didn’t want to have another baby. It was hard enough to work out the religious conflicts with the two girls they had. And what if a third child was a boy? He knew that Faigy would insist on circumcising him, and he couldn’t tolerate the idea of a synagogue full of people celebrating the cutting of his son’s penis. Then, when the boy was older, people would expect Issac to take him to synagogue on Saturdays, and he wasn’t going to do it, and that would be another source of misery for Faigy, every single week. But he told Faigy that if she wanted to talk about it they should talk about it, and, every now and again, they did. He saw how much she wanted another baby, and sometimes he would say to himself, or to his therapist, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I told her we should have one?” But then he thought, I don’t want another baby, and it’s not right to have an unwanted baby—pleasing Faigy is not a good enough reason. For a year, he thought about it and thought about it, working through his own objections. He thought that if they had a boy they could circumcise him in a doctor’s office, with no people. Finally, he realized that he was ready, and he told Faigy. The baby came, and it was a girl.

The experience of having the baby astonished him. It was different from anything he had experienced before. “It’s amazing,” he kept saying, as he looked at the baby’s face. “It’s amazing.” He thought, I guess this is how it is meant to be—making a baby with love. He and Faigy had loved each other before, but having the first two babies hadn’t been a decision—they did what they were supposed to do and the babies came. This time, it was conscious. Issac remembered that his father had told him before his wedding that during sex you should think of holy things, so that your child would be holy, and he thought, This baby is the culmination of our five-year struggle. Every day I see her and I think, She is our love. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 7, 2020, issue, with the headline “Solomon’s Dilemma.”

Larissa MacFarquhar, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of “Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help.”