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“Please help our son,” the couple said to me. “He's acting more and more strangely.” Fifteen-year-old Jacob's mother focused on me with a frightened look in her eyes. “My husband thinks it's just adolescence,” she said, “but I'm worried that something is seriously wrong with him. He refuses to do anything his teachers tell him to do, and he's insulting and defiant with them. He treats his classmates so badly that no one wants to be his friend any more. He beat up one of his friends for little or no reason, and the school insists we get him evaluated. If it weren't that we're big donors to the school [a Jewish parochial school] and that all four of his grandparents are concentration camp survivors, they would have thrown him out.”
Jacob's parents told me that he was withdrawing more and more from the world and locking himself up alone in his bedroom for hours and hours. He had painted the walls of his bedroom black, except for a strange, jagged white line all around the room, high up, near the ceiling. He had also insisted that heavy black curtains be installed that he could draw over his windows.
When I met with Jacob, I found no sign of serious emotional disturbance. He appeared to be an ordinary teenager, except for an air of bristling anger and defiance and a significantly more-than-average anger toward and suspicion of authority figures. He offered glib explanations for the various forms of behavior that had been troubling his teachers and worrying his mother.
The situation began to clarify itself when his mother brought me a copy of a Holocaust Remembrance pamphlet that she had helped produce for distribution at Jacob's school. Jacob, who possessed a fair degree of artistic talent, had drawn the cover for it. It consisted of