by Dara Horn
At school she has to write a report about a philosopher. On her mother’s suggestion, she chooses Rambam, and attempts to read parts of Guide for the Perplexed. It turns out to be much more difficult than she expects—the sort of thing her demanding and brilliant parents find simple, logical, even obvious, but when Tali actually tries to read the book in weird medieval Hebrew (which her mother claims is “perfectly clear”), or even in a heavily edited and modernized translation, it makes almost no sense. Skipping to the end, she comes across one of the only lucid passages in the entire book: a parable of a king in his palace, whose subjects stand with varying closeness to the palace’s inner chambers. Those who are within the city, but who have turned their backs to the palace, Rambam wrote, are people who are smart enough to think for themselves, but who have adopted false ideas about the king. Those who seek to enter the palace, but never manage to see it, are people who believe in the law but lack the capacity to appreciate its source. Those who come up to the palace walls and walk around it are scholars of the law who do not question the fundamentals of their own beliefs. Those who enter the palace antechambers are people who have plunged into speculation about their beliefs, even if they have not yet answered their own questions. Only those who have mastered all there is to know of both the physical and the metaphysical world, to the extent possible for human beings, are able to enter into the innermost chamber of the king. But for most people, Tali understands, the gates of perception are locked against them. She counts herself as one who remains outside the palace walls.
For her school report, Tali has to include biographical facts. In Rambam’s case, Tali discovers, the facts are largely drawn from the Cairo Genizah, the darkened synagogue storage room that a Jewish university professor from England discovered over a century ago—the room for which her mother once named the software program that made their family rich. From scraps of parchment in the genizah, Tali learns, it is known that Rambam was born in Córdoba, was trained as a physician in Fez, briefly lived in Crusader-occupied Israel, and then settled in Cairo. In Cairo he served as a personal doctor to royalty, first to a government administrator and later to the sultan Saladin. About his private life little is known, Tali discovers, beyond the fact that he had a merchant brother who drowned in the Indian Ocean along with much of Rambam’s own money, that he married late and apparently had only one son, that he was overtaxed by his work, his community obligations, and his own genius, and of course that he published voluminous works on Jewish law, philosophy, and medicine—including, Tali notes with interest, a treatise on asthma written for an unidentified royal patient. The man was absurd in his brilliance, a gift to mankind. He reminds Tali, uncomfortably, of her mother.
Tali’s mother now marvels over this original genizah professionally. After selling her company in the United States, she accepted a prestigious position as chief computer scientist for an Israeli institute that scans, uploads, transcribes, catalogues, and collates all of the quarter-million scraps of paper from that airless room in Cairo now kept in libraries around the world. It is a ridiculous job, Tali thinks privately, the height of irrelevance—the very opposite of what her mother once used her brains to do. But her mother is entranced by it, has been entranced since they moved. “Imagine, metuka, if someone tore up your school notebook and threw the pieces across the ocean,” her mother says, explaining how the software she was creating could match handwriting and other characteristics, piecing together ancient manuscripts when one page was in Cambridge and another in New York and another in Kiev. The word metuka catches Tali’s attention. Tali still recalls a time when only her father would address her with Hebrew endearments, when to her mother she was “baby” or “sweetie” or other English words. But that time seems submerged beneath the earth, buried in an underground room.
“It’s almost impossible to reconstruct, but only almost,” her mother continues. “Everything on every piece of paper in that room was perfectly preserved, just as it was when it happened. When scholars read through those papers, they can rebuild an entire city in their minds, exactly as it once was, with hundreds of thousands of details—everything from the stories of individual lives to the colors of the stripes on people’s coats. It’s like viewing the world through the memory of God.”
The image haunts Tali, following her through the software her mother once invented as she explores the virtual rooms marked with a dungeon door. Because of the carefully preserved evidence, or at least the evidence that her mother’s carefully encrypted passwords will allow her to see, Tali knows the truth of that time, can wander through it, relive it. What she doesn’t know is what might have happened—what lies behind all the doors that weren’t opened, how much of what happened was determined by people’s choices and how much by some force of destiny beyond human perception. Often she imagines crawling through a small door high in an ancient wall, and entering the palace.
IT IS NOT A memory palace, like the ones her mother once created, though Tali often mistakes it for one. Memory palaces enshrine the past. But Tali’s private mental palace contains only what has been excluded from both past and future: an imaginary past of what might have been.
She enters it first through the grand door of her mother’s childhood, neglecting for now the twin portal beside it of her father’s youth. Her father’s is a crumbling Moorish arch containing a half-rotted wooden door, like the doors in her grandfather’s old photos of his childhood in Marrakesh, while her mother’s is a doubled screen door (the screen door preceding a wooden one), the sort that once felt unremarkable to her but which she now thinks of as loudly American. Behind this door is a long hallway, with rows and rows of interior doors.
Tali is practiced now at opening these doors. She chooses one painted pink, its smooth wooden surface soiled with half-scraped-off stickers. Behind it Tali finds a girls’ bedroom, with two pink beds and a thick white carpet. Inside the room, two girls about Tali’s age are seated on the floor, their expressions heavy with concentration and purpose. Tali recognizes them from the photographs that her mother has scanned into various computers and displayed around the house: they are her mother and her aunt. Theirs is an intense, deep, soul-embracing friendship, one that Tali cannot help but envy. Tali steps into their American bedroom, her feet sinking into a carpet as thick and indulgent as landscaped grass, and sees that they are playing chess. It has been a long game, judging by the intricate configuration of the pieces on the board and the collections of pieces lying uselessly in the carpet. As Tali watches, her aunt Judith picks up a bishop and deftly captures her mother’s king.
“Checkmate,” Judith announces. The smile on her face is kind, loving—the smile of someone who sees winning as a last resort, a smile of total trust.
“I was wondering why you were giving up your queen,” Tali’s mother says. Her voice is laced with laughter and admiration. The two sisters are laughing together now, the way Tali always envisions them. “Why do you always win, Judith?”
Tali is reluctant to close the door.
Up a flight of stairs, in a home office littered with electronic screens, Tali finds her mother as she looks now, engulfed in code. Tali enters the room cautiously, afraid to disturb her, because she knows how cold her mother can be to people who interrupt her work. But to her surprise her mother whirls around in her swivel chair, then jumps out of it to embrace her.
“Tali!” her mother calls—or at least this mother calls, for Tali has never heard her mother call her name with such enthusiasm, not even the first time they saw each other in Egypt. Then her mother was in a hospital bed, her smiles and laughter weakened. But this mother calls out “Tali!” and springs from her seat, grabs Tali’s hands and dances with her, unable to confine her love to a mere embrace. What shocks Tali even more than this is seeing her mother do something she has almost never seen her do: her mother removes her phone from her pocket and drops it, unconsulted, on the desk.
“Let’s go out and see the daffodils together,” her mother sugg
ests. “They’ll only be in bloom for one more week. I don’t want you to miss it.” Her mother stretches out a hand to her, beckoning her to come along. But something in her mother’s face seems forced, false. Tali drops her mother’s hand, preferring, somehow, the version of her mother that sits facing a screen, unable to look up. Quietly, she leaves the room. As she closes the door, she notices that her mother seems relieved.
Back down in the main hallway, behind a heavy door decorated with frescoed paintings of ancient butlers and bakers carrying wine and bread to a long-dead king, a dark flight of stone stairs leads downward. Tali has often tried to avoid this staircase, but she finds that she cannot help herself. She follows it, for what seems like years, down into the depths of the earth. Deep in the basement of the palace, beyond the back of the furnace room, there is a tiny iron door that leads to the cell in which her mother was once held in Egypt. Tali arrives at the door’s threshold, and stops. Behind this door, Tali knows, is her mother’s dead body—a possibility that once, when Tali was six years old, was nothing other than real.
Tali knows this tiny door, knows what lies behind it. But she refuses to enter it, refuses even to imagine it. Instead she returns upstairs by a different staircase, a spiral staircase hidden behind a curtain alongside the entrance to the dungeon—a black velvet curtain that Tali would never have noticed if she hadn’t approached the threshold of the tiny iron door. At the top of the spiral staircase she enters another door, this one a child’s height and painted a thick red, like a door from a children’s book.
Behind this door she finds her old kitchen in Massachusetts, alive with all the details that now feel as distant to her as Marrakesh must feel to her grandfather, down to the now unfamiliar brands of cookies in the pantry and the odd lack of a drain in the weirdly wooden floor (was the floor really made of wood?). Outside the kitchen window she can see the branches of deciduous trees, their leaves aflame in astounding colors she hasn’t seen in seven years; she has been back to the United States five times since the move, but never in the fall. But strangest of all are the people seated at the kitchen table: not her mother, whose body she knows is in the dungeon below, but her father and her aunt Judith. It is a scene she remembers from when she was six years old, a memory as vague as if it had been a dream. What she doesn’t recall from her dreams, though, is what she sees now: her father’s smile, and her father holding Judith’s hand.
“Come, Tali,” her aunt calls to her, waving her free hand to beckon Tali to the table. A meal that Judith has made awaits her, composed of foods Tali has not eaten in years—pot roast, sweet potatoes, a salad made of enormous dark lettuce leaves. As Tali sits down in a strange wooden chair, Judith asks her about a test she has apparently taken in school about something called the Civil War, then tells her to hurry up and finish her dinner so she won’t be late for field hockey—a sport Tali has heard of, but cannot actually describe. Her father smiles at her as she finishes her dinner, a strange smile she has never seen before. Tali finishes the meal, the flavors more than familiar on her tongue. She rises from the table, hesitant. Judith stands and embraces her. “I love you, Tali,” her aunt whispers in her ear. As the door closes behind Tali, she catches a glimpse of her aunt kissing her father on the lips. It is here in this impossible room, for reasons that she will never understand, that Tali feels the most at home.
Tali spends lifetimes in this palace. As she masters the flow of its corridors, staircases, doors, and rooms, she begins to understand all that could have happened, all that might have happened, all that in fact did happen in a world beyond her own. Within the walls of this palace, she can see everything with perfect clarity: what was just, what was unjust, what could and should have been, when choices were possible, when choices were nearly—but only nearly—impossible, when a person could have squeezed through a half-opened door into a different life. She understands, as years pass within the palace walls, why her mother wanted to save every moment of everything that happened, why her parents have carved out their own palaces. Looking back at the past, no matter how false that past might be, allows a person to become like God.
The only person Tali cannot find anywhere in this palace—the one person who is excluded from it entirely, left outside the palace walls—is her sister Yael.
IT OCCURS TO TALI, often, that Yael is her aunt Judith’s fault. If Judith hadn’t gone to Egypt to save Tali’s mother, her mother would have died—or as Tali thought of it, her mother would have remained dead—and Tali and her father would have continued living on their own. Or with Judith. Or perhaps there would have been another little sister, if Judith had stayed, a sister-cousin. But even if that were so, she wouldn’t have been the sister Tali now had. She might have been someone Tali liked. Then Tali might have become what her aunt Judith once was: a champion among sisters, devoted to the very end. Or perhaps, if Judith had lived, Tali would have witnessed the love between Judith and her mother, would have known what it meant for sisters to live without envy. But that could never be true for Tali and Yael.
Tali is bright, or at least bright enough. Her aunt Judith taught her that, once. But Yael, whom Judith never met—beautiful, radiant Yael, six years old now and reading and writing fluently in Hebrew and English, already winning science competitions for children twice her age, already learning the fundamentals of code—Yael is not merely bright, but luminous. Tali’s parents, especially her mother, love Yael embarrassingly, extravagantly. For while Tali is merely a survivor, a remnant of a forgotten life in an old country, a scrap of their former selves packed along with them to their new home, Yael is the true child of their hopes, the child who almost never was: the miracle child, the life that was saved by Judith’s sacrifice, the gift of a benevolent God. Tali hates her sister with a passion that frightens her, and cannot speak to her in peace.
This is the beginning, as Tali sees it, and nothing else matters. All of the worlds before it might as well never have existed.
Author’s Note: The Opposite of an Archive
UPON EMBARKING ON sorting the many thousands of documents discovered in the Cairo Genizah, the great twentieth-century historian S. D. Goitein declared the Genizah to be “the opposite of an archive.” It’s a label that some novels, including this one, might bear with pride. But readers who prefer their evidence more neatly organized can find many historical works addressing the ideas that appear in this book.
The story told in this novel of Solomon Schechter’s discovery of the Cairo Genizah follows the outline of the tale as Schechter himself recounted it in a set of essays called “A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts.” The lives of the twin “lady adventurers” Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis, discoverers of the Syriac Gospel of Mark, are beautifully recounted in Janet Soskice’s The Sisters of Sinai. (I am grateful to Martien Halvorson-Taylor for pointing me toward Soskice’s work.) Schechter’s astonishing discovery earned him a fair amount of fame, but his frustration with Cambridge and his innate sense that the Jewish community’s future lay elsewhere led him to accept the position of president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City in 1902. A critical biography of Solomon Schechter has yet to be written. For details of his personal life, including information about his parents, his health, and his twin brother, I drew from Norman Bentwich’s Solomon Schechter, a hagiographic work published in 1938.
The story of the Cairo Genizah, its previous explorers, and the importance of the texts found within it is recounted thoroughly in A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo, written by Stefan C. Reif, the now retired director of the Genizah Research Unit and head of the Oriental Division of the Cambridge University Library. When I had already completed my research for this aspect of the book, two wonderfully accessible works on the Cairo Genizah’s discovery and significance simultaneously appeared, and I was able to benefit from these as well. Amusingly, one is called Sacred Treasure while the other is called Sacred Trash. (The author of the former is Rabbi Mark Glickman; the latter was co-written by Adina Hoffman and Pete
r Cole.) Both, from slightly different angles, are marvelous entry points for any reader intrigued by the Cairo Genizah’s history. They take the Genizah’s story well beyond Schechter’s discovery and right up to the Friedberg Genizah Project—an Israel-based digital enterprise to scan and catalogue every Cairo Genizah document in the world.
Guide for the Perplexed, written in Fustat (now part of Cairo) by Moses Maimonides (also known by his Hebrew acronym Rambam; d. 1204) as a series of letters to his student Joseph ben Judah in Aleppo, is a rich, dense, and complex philosophic work whose attempt to reconcile faith and reason inspired everyone from rabbinic leaders to Muslim philosophers to Christian theologians like Aquinas. The most accurate English translation available is that of Shlomo Pines, and Pines’s edition is the indisputable entry point for English-language readers embarking on a philosophical study of this work. Quotations from the Guide that appear in this novel are drawn from an older translation by M. Friedlander due to that translation’s greater accessibility, though I sometimes adapted the language or condensed the work’s arguments for clarity. Maimonides’ discussion of astrology in his letter to rabbis in Montpelier in France is adapted from a translation in Isadore Twersky’s A Maimonides Reader. Another primary source for the ideas in this novel, though I did not quote it directly, was Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance. Readers interested in Maimonides will find a lifetime’s worth of secondary literature on every aspect of his work. I am not a philosopher or a Maimonides scholar, and I can only aspire to be one of those who glimpse the palace from its outside walls. For this reason I am all the more grateful to the many scholars who have provided pathways into his writings.