At a Place Where He Was Supposed to Be Safe, He Was Molested
In his memoir, “Chosen,” Stephen Mills recalls summers at a Connecticut camp led by a director who abused him while befriending his family.
Chosen: A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood, by Stephen Mills
Four centuries after arriving in America, Jews still worry about their place in this country; they pore over demographic surveys like Talmudic texts, looking for clues on how to forestall intermarriage and apathy. But in recent years, they’ve settled on an unlikely savior: Jewish summer camps. A 2011 study found that attendance at Jewish camps was one of the best predictors of increased engagement and religiosity.
This year that consensus faces serious threat. One volley came this winter when the governing body of Reform Judaism, the URJ, released a report identifying 72 incidents of sexual misconduct at URJ summer camps going back five decades, including 33 involving minors.
Another arrives this spring with the release of a searing, haunting, urgent cri de coeur from Stephen Mills called “Chosen: A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood.” Mills, the co-author with Roger Fouts of “Next of Kin,” describes in astute, stomach-turning prose how — beginning just weeks after his bar mitzvah in 1968 — he was sexually abused for two years by the director of Camp Ella Fohs, located outside New Milford, Conn. Mills then recounts his decades-long trail of misdemeanors, trauma and wrecked relationships, followed by a dramatic attempt to bring his abuser to justice.
“Chosen” opens with Mills, an only child, sitting on the lap of his father, a World War II veteran and aspiring writer who uses a wheelchair because he has multiple sclerosis. A lonely boy, Mills becomes even lonelier at age 5 when his father dies. Mills’s mother, the dispassionate daughter of a Talmudic scholar, quickly remarries and insists that her son call his stepfather “Dad.” Mills responds in part by sneaking down to the basement, where he turns the dials of his father’s shortwave radio, trying to find his voice.
By junior high school, a girl-besotted Mills is sent to a coed summer camp funded by the UJA-Federation, a Jewish philanthropic organization. The director, Dan Farinella, with his “big shoulders, powerful arms and broad chest,” “a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his left shirtsleeve,” likes to horse around with male campers.
One night, after a sex-ed film, Farinella summons Mills, saying, “Don’t worry, you didn’t do anything. I just like to get to know my campers.” He then proceeds to test and groom Mills, taking him for long walks, quizzing him about masturbation, preying on his isolation. Mills is flattered, as are his parents when Farinella shows up in the off-season, bringing a box of cannoli when he whisks Mills away for a weekend of “projects” at camp.
Once on their beds in the infirmary, Mills says, Farinella tosses him a pornographic magazine, pushes him down on a mattress and fellates him. “I closed my eyes and prayed,” Mills writes. “I’m not here. I’m not here.” When he opens his eyes, “I was floating, looking down at my body, as if it belonged to someone else.”
Anyone who’s listened to accounts of abuse survivors will recognize certain characteristics — the disassociation, the shame, the self-flagellation. But Mills has his father’s instincts as a writer. He fills his story with indelible details — the Brylcreem in his predator’s hair, the cloying compliment Farinella pays Mills’s stepfather when he arrives to invite Mills to the Bahamas for Christmas. And Mills does a nuanced job of capturing his own emotions, how he blames himself for getting aroused, how he delights when Farinella gives him a Led Zeppelin album, how he imagines the glowing letter of recommendation his abuser will write to colleges.
That commitment to honesty continues in the book’s second section, “Flight,” as Mills opens up about his descent into “drugs, petty crimes and paranoia.” He sabotages promising relationships with women, joins a yeshiva in Jerusalem, drops out of grad school, then volunteers at a refugee camp in Thailand, where he becomes ill. When a doctor tells him he’s suffering from post-traumatic stress, Mills returns to New York to seek help.
The book’s final section, “Reckoning,” is in many ways the most riveting — and the most disheartening. Once Mills connects his behavior to his abuse, he craves justice. He painstakingly identifies dozens of other victims of the same man. The F.B.I. of the 1980s, though, refuses to prosecute, and when authorities tip off Farinella’s new employer, the Jewish Community Center in Pittsburgh, those employers “hustle Farinella out the door in the dead of night” while apparently doing nothing to stop future predation. The task falls to Mills to make a confrontation. As he puts it, “Who was left to speak for the children?”
“Chosen” is a timely and important book. It can be difficult to read; I had to finish it during the day to avoid nightmares. But looking away is even worse. The book is a stark reminder that the widespread sexual abuse scandals that began with the Catholic Church are still spreading to other institutions.
Four centuries after Jews arrived in America, they still long for a place where they can feel safe. As Mills’s brave account makes clear, none of us can allow our longing for acceptance to permit us to stifle the cries of those we’re most called on to protect.
