WHAT LISA KNEW
The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case
Joyce Johnson
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1990
304 pp., $19.95
Joyce Johnson has taken a long, unflinching look at human evil, and this book is her report from the heart of darkness.
The Steinberg case achieved immediate notoriety and a permanent place in the mythology of these ignoble times. A first grader, Lisa Steinberg, died because of abuse by her parents, who were not married and had adopted her illegally. The "father" was Joel Steinberg, a white, middle-class New York lawyer; the "mother" was Hedda Nussbaum, once a writer of children's books and a children's editor at Random House. He was someone you might have gone to law school with, and, if your children read the Charlie Brown books, she had a hand in their education.
The case was electrifying because the villains were us.
Lisa Steinberg did not die at once but lay between life and death for twelve hours while her parents did nothing to save her. When they finally called 911, all the official personnel involved noticed the lack of what has to be the most universal of emotions, a parent's anguish for a child in danger. Hedda and Joel were no longer human. A hundred philosophical questions about our nature are raised at once.
These Times
One of the most frightening things about Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum is that they not only were of our world but were taking the highroad:
Spontaneous, natural, free, these benign but essentially amoral words, so much the credo of the 1970s, had different meanings for different people. You owed it to yourself to be yourself, but many were quite uninterested in what obligations they had beyond that. Hedd Nussbaum was thrilled when Joel talked of freeing her because she had always imagined she was a superior being. Only now was her true self being discovered. Finally, she had met a man who instinctively seemed to recognize that the earnest school-teacherish young woman who had sought the approval of so many people was really only a cowardly fake.
So their love began as a liberation, as all loves do, and ended in murder. How do you get from the one to the other?
The times were critical, for people like Joel and Hedda do not have the strength to do any more than go with the current. Like nearly everyone else, they had no real desire for self-knowledge, but unlike nearly everyone else they were also unwilling to take even minimum responsibility. The essential amorality of the credo - to enjoy without guilt -was ideal for people like Joel and Hedda, who were so wrapped up in themselves they could never hear their children crying.
The seventies may well be one of those decades that are quickly lost in history, like those of the nineteenth century that are no longer of note. Or, who knows,
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