Editor's Letter

Svengali Nihilism

America was transfixed last year by the story of Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum, not only because of the tragic death of a child, but also because the case revealed how a woman of education and independence might be transformed into a moral vacuum. A battered wife is shocking enough, but here we had a systematic erosion of identity by a man obsessed with dominance and control. It seemed, at the time, an exceptionally weird slice of social pathology, but a year later it was surpassed in its degradation by the details of the case in the Bronx against Herman McMillan, who is accused of isolating his wife and nine children in primitive darkness for three years, subjecting them to torture and sexual abuse. Now Vanity Fair brings to light another story of Svengali nihilism (page 210), only this time it is one that is still being played out behind closed doors.

Many articles have been written about the remarkable Jeff Sarwer, now aged eleven, and his sister Julia, thirteen, who gained celebrity on the international chess circuit. John Colapinto won a National Magazine Award in Canada for just such a story in Saturday Night magazine in Toronto. But while he was reporting their triumphs his curiosity was aroused by the unconventional methods of their father, Mike Sarwer, who had taken them out of school so that they could imbibe his doctrine of "spiritual superiority." This April his curiosity was pricked all over again when he learned that Sarwer was taking his second common-law wife to court to obtain access rights to their infant daughter. Colapinto thought this might be an opportunity to look into the shadows behind the bright children. We sent him to the courthouse in Belleville, Ontario. No trial took place, and the harrowing events in the Sarwer household would not have come to light now if Colapinto had not doggedly sought interviews with the mother of Sarwer's infant daughter, with the mother of the chess children, and with Sarwer himself.

"I was aware of Sarwer's need for control two years ago," Colapinto says. "Before my first story went to press I was hounded with phone calls from him at all hours demanding to know how I was representing him. But I had yet to learn that his demands on his women and children extended to forcing them to reveal their every thought and to conform totally to his rigid anti-societal pattern of behavior—the complete erasure of their own personalities until they were reduced to what Sarwer calls point zero."

Is the pursuit of Point Zero in three recent instances a coincidence of media attention, or the mark of some sinister sickness of our times?

Editor in chief