1984–1985 was my freshman year at Delbarton, a highest-standard Catholic junior high and high school in suburban New Jersey. The school is situated inside a 400-acre Benedictine monastery, home to a couple hundred Fathers and Brothers. For most of the 6 years I spent there, 7th through 12th grades, I was the sole Jewish kid among 500 students.
Every Spring, the school's Freshman English teacher, Father Gerard Lair, a former Headmaster and an animated cold-war spy novel buff, took students on a 12-day Spring Recess trip to the Soviet Union. Our annual mid-March break was 2 weeks long.
Back then, you could go pretty far and back in 2 weeks. Perhaps even further than you can go now. Fewer queues. Way less traffic.
Even the Soviet Union, the Big Daddy “Evil Empire” of the latter half of the 20th Century, was not totally off-limits to travel for commoners, especially a group of Catholic school kids. After all, the tour group’s unintended consequence was to spread gospels, religious and political, among Russian commoners in a non-military way. The Cold War had many fronts. Many were economic. Some were military. A few were cultural. Most were absurd (just ask Joseph Heller).
Fr. Gerard started the yearly Soviet sojourn in the late 70s, and the trip was the stuff of legend among students, if only for the casual way it came up in conversation.
“Spring Break in Russia this year? Zubes and me are going.”
”No, we’re skiing in Killington again.”
“Bummer.”
Towards the end of our 1984 Fall semester, Fr. Gerard announced the March '85 trip, and I signed up with no hesitation to peer behind the "Iron Curtain."
A couple years earlier, I was a proxy at my own Bar Mitzvah for a Soviet Jewish kid named Mischa, who was disallowed to perform his service in Moscow, because Jews. The organization that connected me to Mischa also sent couriers into the USSR. In late 1984, they got wind of my upcoming journey (by that, I mean my mother talked to a friend at our synagogue who talked to a friend at the program who convened a meeting and - you just know how these things go). After what I imagined to be a but of deliberation, they came to think “Jewish kid on a Catholic school trip chaperoned by priests” was a perfect cover, and then enlisted me on a mission to sneak documents and artifacts into the USSR.
I was 14 years old.
My first task, which could have ended the adventure before it started, was to ask Fr Gerard if such a mission was, well, kosher for his trip.
Fr Gerard’s Freshman English syllabus included, among other works, The Falcon & The Snowman, Midnight Express, Catch-22, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Slaughterhouse Five interspersed between Beowulf, The Merchant of Venice, and Walden.
When I laid out to Fr Gerard what the proxy organization charged me with doing, I may as well have walked out of a few of those books into reality. He could have scuttled the whole thing in 2 seconds with a silent shake of his head. In retrospect, however, I realize there was no way he was going to say no.
As the former head of school, Father Gerard had high-level intelligence clearance in the monastery. He could authorize himself to keep secrets. When I approached him to secure permission to say yes, which in effect would endanger everyone on our trip should I get caught, he said only, “I’m in. You tell me what we need to do.”
In a pouch strapped around my body just above my belt, I carried religious papers with names and addresses of Russian Jewish citizens, microfilms with banned political and literary material, a mini Torah scroll, and a piece of the Wailing Wall from Jerusalem.
In a pre-smartphone time of no instantaneous communication or easy extractions, once behind the Russian line, with only “Fr G” aware of and involved with my mission, I was left to my own devices to figure out how to be a teenage cold war secret agent.
I brought my semi-automatic Nikon EM (11th birthday-present) and 3 rolls of film. The photographs I shot were the kind of random, amateur shots a 14-year old kid would shoot upon being instructed to act like a tourist. Fr G used my camera for the photo of me inside The Kremlin at the top of this post.
The clandestine group told me no foreigner had ever been thrown in jail for what I was attempting, because our cause had sympathizers high enough up the Soviet Party chain. Couriers had gone in and out of the Eastern Bloc for decades under the guise of tourism with no repercussion. There’s no way all of us were 100% unnoticed. We were not state-sponsored spies.
All that said, they also told me if I was caught, I risked only a quiet deportation back to the U.S. for me & my classmates, but the people whose information I carried would catch hell. Other people’s lives and covers were at risk with every trip. I understood as best I could at 14, but really, what did I know then, other than an endless hyperlocal sense of myself? To this day, I have no idea why adults put this kind of faith in me, but they did.
The trip took me from New Jersey to Helsinki to Leningrad to Moscow, where my drop was scheduled on day 9, the day before returning home. I got through every checkpoint with flying colors. I memorized every phone number and name and code word required to communicate with my Russian contacts.
Me and Fr G went on a mission.
The fallacy of youth is also its source of power. When you feel invincible, it’s not that you don’t see danger, it’s that you don't see risks - either to yourself or to others.
Danger is an adrenaline rush. Risk, otoh, sucks the fun out of anything.
The downside of maturity, in a way, is an erosion of fearlessness, not innocence. Once you start seeing the ripple effects of your decisions over time, it’s no longer possible to take any risk you want. As you age, how you manage fear is what keeps danger (to yourself and to others) to a minimum.
No matter what age you are, however, you can still be everything you want to be. So long as you’re breathing, you still have potential. I remain in awe of my younger self saying "Sure, why not?" to this adventure without blinking. I’ve gone on to do a lot of cool shit, but this mission will always take the cake. Lol I try not to frame my life as if I peaked at 14, but perhaps that was my fate all along.
I hope my telling this story over the coming months here will make the world a bit smaller, and proves that there is more in common among people than not. Catholics and Jews, Russians and Americans, boys and girls… In the end, messy as this world's always been and will be, there are still more possibilities than impossibilities.
If nothing else, that I was a "Spring Break Spy" proves anything can happen to anyone.
Doesn't mean anything goes as planned, of course.
dw 2024