The Cookbook Collector

by Allegra Goodman

  “Good to meet you. I’m Jess.”

  “And these are your children?”

  “My sisters,” said Jess. “I’m just visiting.”

  “Very nice. Where are you from?”

  “Berkeley.”

  “I have family in Berkeley!”

  Oh, this was too strange. Jess remembered Rabbi Helfgott. My brother-in-law lives in Canaan! My wife’s sister’s husband.

  “Do you know Rabbi Helfgott? My brother-in-law,” said Rabbi Zylberfenig with some pride. “A very famous rabbi on the West Coast. You have perhaps heard of him?”

  “I met him recently,” said Jess.

  Rabbi Zylberfenig beamed at her.

  “It’s a funny coincidence,” said Jess.

  “There are no coincidences,” said Rabbi Zylberfenig quite seriously. “I hope you’ll come by us for Shabbes at our center here in Canaan. We are not yet so big and well established, but we are a very warm community, very welcoming. You’ll come for dinner?”

  Rhythmically, Jess pushed her sisters on the squeaking swings. “I think I’ll probably need to stay here.”

  “Bring the family,” Zylberfenig urged her. “We always have room for more. In fact, we are always interested in making room.”

  “Is that why you’re looking at the property there?” Jess asked.

  “Only browsing,” Zylberfenig said, as though he were standing at a magazine stand and not a boxwood hedge.

  The girls were fussing. “Up!” Maya cried, by which she meant “down.”

  “There are many possibilities,” the rabbi said.

  Rabbi Zylberfenig’s wife was waiting on the other side of the old Weldon place. The rabbi had parked on Pleasant Street, and Chaya was sitting in their van.

  “Two acres at least. Beautiful,” Shimon said as soon as he returned to Chaya. They sat together and looked out at the white house with its peeling paint. Their little ones slept in car seats in the back. The other four were home.

  “I met a very interesting woman from Berkeley,” Shimon continued. “She knows Nachum.”

  “Really?” Chaya was slender, bright-eyed, English. “Is she staying? Did you invite her for Shabbes?”

  “Of course.”

  “She’s coming?”

  Shimon smiled. “Who knows? I hope. She’s visiting her family.”

  “Invite them too.”

  “I did. I told her please bring the family.” Shimon’s eyes were still fixed on the two acres. A pair of giant oaks stood in the front yard. “Just four hundred thousand,” he said.

  Chaya tsked under her breath. She wondered if the place was overpriced, and if they’d get a variance, and if these neighbors would object to a Bialystok Center. Some did and some did not, and you could never predict. But the big question was, Where would they find the money?

  “We would have room for expansion.” Shimon started the van and released the emergency brake.

  “Renovating that house …,” Chaya began.

  “We won’t renovate. Im yirtzeh Hashem, we’ll crush it down.” As Shimon eased down the hill, a loose apple rolled along the floor of the van.

  “This is a small community,” Chaya said.

  “Even a small community can do great mitzvahs. It is very interesting what a small community may do.” He spoke softly, so as not to wake the children. “You’ll see.”

  The Rebbe had sent the Zylberfenigs from Brooklyn as newlyweds to bring Yiddishkeit to Canaan, returning lapsed Jews to their own religion. Now, eleven years and six children later (although they did not count children, because it was bad luck), they had not succeeded as well as their peers in other towns. Chaya’s own sister in Berkeley, for example, presided over a large establishment with her husband. This was partly because Berkeley was a city, while Canaan was a town of fewer than twenty thousand inhabitants (although it was better not to count populations either). Berkeley was more affluent than Canaan and overflowing with young college students, many of them Jews, ready and waiting, ripe on the vine. Canaan’s Jews were older and well settled and often mistrustful of their own religion.

  It was also true that Bialystok emissaries had to fend for themselves. Parents might support shleichim, but not Headquarters. Each Bialystok Center had to raise its own money. In his wisdom, the Rebbe adhered to the famous dictum “Every tub on its own bottom.” Chaya had married with a little dowry, but that money was gone. He was not a saver, Shimon. He was a spender, and a buyer, and always, every day, expected miracles. “We have students,” Shimon reminded her. “We have supporters. We may even someday have angels.” He was a pious man, but when he said “angels” he meant in the financial sense. Angels who would buy property for them someday. Shimon was always hopeful, always learning, always thinking, and Chaya respected this, but she found her husband aggravating as well, probably because she was a woman, and had to concern herself with laundry, groceries, and cooking. She was constantly sorting out her children’s shoes, performing the countless details of mother and rebbetzin, even though the Messiah was due at any moment.

  9

  On Thanksgiving Day, with the markets closed, the whole world seemed to sigh with satisfaction. Emily was worth half a billion dollars. Jess was a happy thousandaire. They drove to Providence with Richard, Heidi, and the girls to eat dinner at a new restaurant called Sonoma Grille.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little weird to fly back east to eat faux Californian cuisine?” Jess whispered to Emily when they arrived.

  “Shh!” Emily glanced toward her father as they sat down at the table. They were six without Jonathan, who had to cancel at the last minute.

  “Servers went down this morning,” Emily explained, and she tried to sound serene, and she tried to feel patient, but she was neither. All she wanted was to take her father’s car and drive to Cambridge. “He has to be there.”

  “An ISIS crisis.” Jess poked Maya with a breadstick.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Emily said. “It’s just a little …”

  She trailed off, sensing Jess watching, waiting for her to admit how she really felt.

  “We’ll have Thanksgiving tomorrow,” Jonathan had promised Emily on the phone.

  “I’m sorry about the crash,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter.” His voice was light. He was in great spirits, thrilled that Emily had come, and certain that, within weeks, he would be as rich as she.

  Everybody knew prosperity would come, that wealth was imminent. Profits followed prospects. Cash kept rolling in. Chaya accused Shimon on Thanksgiving of thinking money grew on trees, and he told her, “But it does!” Chaya was fretting about children’s winter coats, but her husband had a deeper understanding of the age. His own student Barbara, a regular at all his classes, was married to Mel Millstein, the director of Human Resources at ISIS. His own Barbara, who came to services each week, had expressed her wish to share whatever wealth the Internet would bring.

  Even now, Barbara was serving Thanksgiving dinner in her little house on Fuller Circle. The tablecloth was harvest gold. The salt and pepper shakers, Pilgrims. Barbara served turkey, sage and onion stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and corn bread to her grown children, Sam and Annie, and her husband, Mel, the angel who didn’t know it. Poor Mel, stubborn Mel, who didn’t like to listen to Barbara’s stories of the Bialystoker rebbes.

  “The third Bialystoker Rebbe is known as the Dreamer,” Barbara explained to her family. “When he was a young student, his learning was so brilliant that he levitated above the ground As his knowledge grew, he began floating higher, so that, in time, whenever he opened his mouth, he began to fly upward, lighter than air. His teachers had to keep the windows shut. They were afraid the young man would fly away….”

  “Your mother is taking a class in Jewish mysticism,” said Mel.

  “Cool,” Sam said politely.

  “What happened to going back to school?” asked Annie.

  “Oh, I don’t think I have time,” Barbara murmured.
>
  “Why not?” Annie had always been ambitious on her mother’s behalf.

  “Well, there’s the house. There’s the garden,” Barbara said vaguely.

  “Mom, it’s November,” Annie said. “How are you gardening in the winter? And what do you need to do in the house?”

  “Quite a lot!” Barbara retorted, thinking of the wet basement.

  “You need to get a life.” Annie meant this lovingly. She was just thinking aloud.

  Barbara plunged the serving spoon deep into the cranberry sauce. “I have a life.”

  Barbara seemed at times like a woman having an affair. Mel knew, of course, that she was not sneaking off to sleep with God, or any of his messengers, but sometimes it felt that way. She hummed. She was always humming without noticing, and she had never been a hummer. She glowed when she talked about services or classes at the Bialystok Center. A sudden youthfulness suffused her skin. Maybe it was love after all, but if so, Barbara was in love with the whole Zylberfenig family—the rabbi, his wife, and all their children, down to the baby. Especially the baby. She was irrational about these people. They held her in their thrall.

  Mel was Jewish, named for his grandfather Mendel. With his dark eyes, strong nose, and melancholy little mouth shaded by a moustache, he looked as Jewish as they come. But he was from the nonbelieving branch of the religion. Superstition scared him. In fact, superstition made him superstitious. These were strange times. The world seemed on the cusp of some revelation—or some disaster. The Y2K bug lurked inside the world’s computers like a worm eating the world tree. According to the CIA, terrorists were out to get everyone on New Year’s Eve. Even as Barbara began praying and nailing mezuzahs to door frames throughout the house, Mel felt that something terrible might befall him. Each mezuzah case was no larger than Mel’s index finger and concealed a scroll inside, so that no scripture was visible, except for one Hebrew letter, the shape of a three-tined fork. They were small, these mezuzahs, but they were everywhere, each like a chrysalis, a tiny portent. Lately he lived in dread. What would become of him? What new belief would open up its wings and flutter through the house today? Barbara had begun praying morning, noon, and night. Turning toward the east, she clutched her prayer book and mumbled words in Hebrew. And she wrote checks. Little checks. Nothing too crazy, but donations all the same, to the Zylberfenigs, those mystic Bialystokers of hers.

  As he cleared and Barbara washed the Thanksgiving dishes, she said, “I’m sorry I snapped at Annie. I’m happy.”

  “I know.” His voice was bleak.

  “I’m thankful, actually, because we’re all together.”

  He nodded, although he and Barbara were alone in the house. The kids had driven off to see their friends.

  “We’re blessed,” said Barbara. She turned off the water in the sink and turned to face him. She was glowing again. Her cheeks were rosy, her eyes bright with the sky. She looked as though she’d just come in from walking on a perfect fall day. “Just think what we can do when we sell our stock.”

  “Our stock? Who’s selling stock?”

  “We could give,” said Barbara.

  Suddenly, Mel knew the desire in Barbara’s infatuated heart. He took a full step back in shock. Donate stock! Mel had assumed that after twenty-eight years of marriage he and his wife had discovered every little quirk and source of irritation—but now this! An entirely new category, like a previously uncharted island or a new species in the rain forest. That was how her suggestion revealed itself to him, a new mammal, a giant three-toed rat, just when naturalists thought they’d seen it all.

  “Oh, no. No. That’s not going to happen. If and when ISIS goes public—if and when I’m clear to sell my shares—there’s no way in hell I’m giving them to those Hasidic lunatics of yours.”

  “Mel,” said Barbara, hurt by his language.

  Anger swelled within him. “I am not giving a penny of my money to those holy rollers and their evangelical, superstitious, brainwashing cult. Over my dead body.”

  “I never said anything!” Barbara protested.

  “You don’t have to. I know. Don’t you think I know what they want out of you? And what you want to do?” And he did know, because after all, he had been married to Barbara half his life. He had met her at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where he had worked in payroll and she was just a sweet young nurse. He knew exactly how his wife looked when she hoped for something, or when she wanted something, or when she dreamed. He knew her yearning liquid eyes, her tender mouth. He could read her face, even as she became a stranger to him.

  10

  By Friday morning, Jess was so homesick for California that she begged Emily, “When Jonathan comes to pick you up, could you take me too?”

  Emily looked guilty.

  “I’m just kidding!” Jess assured her.

  Waiting must have been torture, but Emily hardly let it show. She kept busy, playing Candy Land with the girls, and then helping Heidi sort through boxes in the guest room. Jess avoided these activities. Through the kitchen window, as she washed an apple, Jess saw someone in the garden next door. The rabbi again, in his black coat and hat.

  “Dad,” she called her father.

  “Hold on.” His voice was muffled through the door of his home office off the living room.

  “He’s back.” Jess stood outside the door.

  “Who?”

  “The rabbi looking at the Weldon place.”

  Now the door opened. “Where?”

  They hurried to the window.

  There he was. They could see the top half of Rabbi Zylberfenig over the hedge. He was gazing contemplatively at the winter ruins of an overgrown rhododendron, surely thinking something mystical about the dormancy and rebirth of plants.

  Richard’s eyes narrowed. “He must be the nonprofit with the day-care scheme.”

  “He didn’t seem like a psychopath or anything,” Jess ventured.

  “Except that he’d like to convert every Jew in sight to flat earth ancestor worship,” Richard countered.

  Jess couldn’t help giggling at that last.

  “You think it’s funny,” Richard said.

  “No,” she protested.

  “These people are opportunists,” her father declared. “I know what they did in Sharon, and in Bethel. They infiltrate wherever they can, because you know what they want?”

  “The Messiah?”

  “Money.”

  Oh, if Richard had known what Jess had done—borrowing from one of them. Fortunately, her father could not read her mind. “The sole purpose of these centers is to raise money to open more centers,” he explained. “These things are viral, as is the religion, which is a cult based on their rabbi, whom they worship.”

  “Oh, come on, Dad, how do you know what they believe?” asked Jess.

  “I know more than you think,” her father said.

  “Let’s say they do worship their rabbi. Aren’t they allowed freedom of religion? Or are you like those people theoretically supporting battered-women’s shelters—everywhere but your backyard?”

  “Don’t lecture me about freedom, young lady,” said Richard. “These people intend to come in, bringing traffic to a residential neighborhood. They are planning a religious school and propaganda center next to my home. Don’t tell me their beliefs are sacrosanct when their practices threaten to impact me and my family.”

  Who was this irate man standing in the kitchen? Who was his family? Not Jess and Emily. He spoke of his new wife and kids, of course. They were young and sweet, but Richard had aged, and his doubts had hardened, along with his beliefs. Jess had asked him once, when she was about ten, whether he’d stopped believing in God when Gillian died.

  “No, sweetie,” he’d replied. “I wouldn’t give up believing because of some event that happened to me. Terrible things happen every day. It would be illogical to give up hope in God because of one death in our family. No. I never believed in the first place. Not before, not after.”

  At
the time, Jess had found his answer comforting. Richard’s rationality had always reassured her. If she woke in the night, afraid of thunderstorms, he would sit on the edge of her bed and talk to her about probability and statistics, explaining the low odds that she’d get hit by lightning. She didn’t worry about crossing the street, did she? Well, she was far more likely to die that way. He’d also explained that the chances of dying in a plane crash were infinitesimally small, and that Newton enjoyed the lowest crime rate in Massachusetts. Highly unlikely, then, for armed robbers to break into their home at night. Now, however, Jess looked at her father and wondered where his anger came from, and why he sounded so obsessed with people he dismissed, and so threatened by a religion he denied. She herself vacillated when it came to belief. She did not particularly believe in God. Or, rather, she didn’t believe in a particular God. Nevertheless, she kept an open mind. She was not a melancholy agnostic, but the optimistic kind. She liked to give God the benefit of the doubt.

  “Why don’t you go out and talk to him?” Jess asked her father.

  “I have nothing to say to that man,” Richard replied.

  “That’s not true,” said Jess.

  Her father returned to his study.

  “I think you have a lot to say,” she called after him.

  Upstairs, Emily sat on the floor with Heidi, contemplating the open box before her.

  “What about your father’s National Geographics?” Heidi asked. “If we could move those boxes out …”

  “I love those.” Jess stood in the doorway with her mouth full of apple. As soon as Heidi lifted them from the box, Jess recognized the cheerful yellow magazines—a complete set from 1915 to 1970. She’d pored over the maps and photographs, the little Afghan children in native dress, the photos of dunes and deserts, the sweep of sand in black and gray and white.

  “If you want them, we can ship them all to you,” Heidi said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Jess,” said Emily. “Pretty soon you’ll see them all online.” She looked at Heidi. “Give them to the library,” she advised. “Jess doesn’t have room.”