-Caveat Lector-
Poet's Cry Sears As Bereft Mom Keeps Up Hunt For Lost Intern
By SEAMUS McGRAW
FORWARD CORRESPONDENT
Susan Levy keeps a volume of poetry in her Modesto, Calif. home. It's an
old, tattered book filled with melancholy odes crafted nearly a century
ago in Russia by her great-great-uncle, the legendary Hebrew poet Chaim
Nachman Bialik, and handed down in her family through the generations.
"Revenge! Revenge!" the poet once wrote. "Cursed be he who cries
revenge. Fit vengeance for the death of a child, the devil has not yet
conceived."
Mrs. Levy takes little solace from the words of her kinsman. Not now,
anyway. Not when the fate of her 23-year-old daughter, Chandra Ann Levy,
a bright and driven young Washington intern who vanished late this past
month after leaving a downtown health club there, remains a mystery.
"My happiest gift would be that she comes home safe," Mrs. Levy said.
So far, D.C. Metro Police admit they have few clues to the young woman's
disappearance, which has gripped the media with a swirl of allegations
about her friendship with a congressman.
Officially, she's still considered a missing person, said Sgt. Joseph
Gentile, a police spokesman. "There's no concrete evidence that there's
been any kind of foul play," he said. Still, police, who are pursuing
the case with the FBI and investigators for the Stanislaus County
Sheriff's Department in California, have combed her apartment looking
for clues and scoured the banks of the nearby Potomac River with
body-sniffing dogs.
That has done little to ease her mother's anxiety. "This isn't the kind
of thing she would do," Mrs. Levy said Tuesday in a telephone interview
from her home.
Nor has the lack of solid evidence that a crime has been committed done
anything to quell the media furor over the case, much of which has
focused on allegations of a link between Ms. Levy and Rep. Gary Condit.
Mr. Condit, a married, Harley-Davidson riding California Democrat who
has described the young woman as a friend, has put up a $10,000 reward
for information leading to her safe return. An additional $10,000 has
been put up by California's two senators, Barbara Boxer and Diane
Feinstein. Another $15,000 has been offered by Ms. Levy's frantic
parents.
So far, neither the reward nor Mrs. Levy's pleas for her daughter's safe
return on nationally broadcast television programs, including "Larry
King Live" and NBC's "Dateline," have turned up any solid leads.
According to police reports, Ms. Levy, a University of Southern
California graduate student who had spent last semester working as a
paid intern fielding media calls at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, was
last seen April 30 leaving the health club where she is a member.
The young woman, who had at various times entertained thoughts of
becoming a sports writer, an FBI agent, "or maybe joining the CIA,"
according to her mother, was scheduled to return to California within a
few days to attend her graduation ceremony.
"We spoke on the phone on April 27," Mrs. Levy said, adding that her
daughter =97 though uncertain about her future, and unsure whether she
would return to Washington or seek work back home in California =97
seemed to be in generally good spirits.
At 10:45 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on May 1, Mrs. Levy received an
e-mail from her daughter. It referred to flight schedules to California,
and in it, Ms. Levy mused that she might consider taking a train
cross-country instead, Mrs. Levy said.
That was the last time she heard from her daughter.
On May 5, Mrs. Levy and her husband, Dr. Robert Levy, contacted
Washington police, who searched their daughter's DuPont Circle
apartment, about a mile from the White House. Police found the young
woman's bags packed.
There was no sign of a struggle, authorities said. She had just
vanished.
But that, said Mrs. Levy, is unthinkable. Growing up, Ms. Levy was
anything but the kind of flighty kid who would just disappear. As a
teenager, she was smitten with the idea of entering law enforcement, and
had served as a Police Explorer.
Among her tasks as a 16-year-old was to knock on neighbors' doors to
advise them to get their dogs licensed, Mrs. Levy said. "She knocked on
a lot of our Jewish friends' doors," she added.
A stellar and "focused" student, the 5-foot-3-inch Ms. Levy received her
undergraduate degree in journalism in just three years =97 a nod, her
mother said, to the literary bloodline that goes back to
Great-Great-Uncle Chaim. For a time, Ms. Levy worked two jobs, one with
the Modesto Police, the other with the Modesto Bee, her local newspaper.
Her only concession to adolescent rebellion, Mrs. Levy recalled, came
when, as senior in high school, the raven-haired teenager went out and
got a single rose tattooed behind her right ankle. "You can imagine how
I felt about that," Mrs. Levy said.
A short time after graduating from San Francisco State University, Ms.
Levy enrolled in a master's program in political science at the
University of Southern California and served a series of internships,
first in Los Angeles city government, then in the office of California
Gov. Gray Davis, and finally, this past semester, with the Federal
Bureau of Prisons.
She was drawn to the idea of public service, her mother said. "It's
really a Jewish thing, tikkun olam," she said.
In April, not long before she vanished, her internship ended. Ms. Levy
was left to mull over her options, her mother said. She considered going
to law school, or seeking out work with the FBI or other federal law
enforcement agencies.
She had a world full of options, her mother said. There is simply no
reason for her to vanish on her own accord.
But the very fact that there would be so little reason for her to
disappear voluntarily has spawned a virtual cottage industry of
rumormongering.
Last week, Ms. Levy's former newspaper, the Modesto Bee, published a
series of e-mails that Ms. Levy had sent to a friend. The e-mails seem
to hint at a mysterious man with whom the young woman may be
romantically involved.
"Everything else here in D.C. is going good, my man will be coming back
here when Congress starts up again; I'm looking forward to seeing him,''
Ms. Levy wrote late this past year in one of the published e-mails.
In another e-mail, Ms. Levy said her boyfriend had paid for her travel
between Washington and California. "I was sick when I was in Sacramento
and I only got to go home for one night before I flew back to D.C. The
nice thing is that the man I'm seeing took care of my plane ticket!''
Those missives have sparked a torrent of speculation on the television
tabloids and in newspapers across the nation about the identity of the
mystery man. And that angers Mrs. Levy.
"I'm not going to talk about those rumors," she said. "That's not going
to do anything to get my daughter back."
Instead, Mr. and Mrs. Levy have spent their time trying to keep the
media focused on the search for their daughter. They wait, they hope and
they pray, most of all that they never have to feel the full fury of the
old verse in Bialik's book of poems:
"Fit vengeance for the death of a child, the
devil has not yet conceived".
Saba Note: If there is someone out there who knows where this little
girl is, they would do well to meditate on the above "old verse" written
by Bialik..........and if I would be the "boyfriend" of whom Ms. Levy
wrote, I would seek refuge with the FBI, for the devil by now has no
doubt thought of something very special in the way of vengeance.
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