Chris Moriarty - The Inquisitor's Apprentice

“Isn’t that right, Rabbi?” Mo asked Sacha’s grandfather. But Grandpa Kessler was snoring happily in the big feather bed that filled up the rest of the Kesslers’ kitchen. So Mo turned to Sacha’s father instead. “Isn’t that right, Danny?”

“Sure,” Mr. Kessler agreed without looking up from his copy of Andrew Carbuncle’s best-selling memoir, Wealth Without Magic . “Only in America.”

“You got that right,” Sacha’s Uncle Mordechai mocked from behind the ink-splotched pages of the Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker . “Only in America can Jewish boys grow up to become cogs in the anti-Wiccan machine just like gentiles!”

Uncle Mordechai had been kicked out of Russia for being a Blavatskyan Occulto-Syndicalist — which he considered to be piling insult on top of injury, since he was actually a Trotskyite Anarcho-Wiccanist. Still, the change of continent hadn’t altered Mordechai’s politics. He devoted his days in New York to writing for a series of bankrupt revolutionary newspapers, acting in the Yiddish People’s Theater, and planning the revolution over endless tiny glasses of Russian tea at the Café Metropole.

Mordechai looked like a revolutionary hero too — or at least like the kind of actor who would play one in a Sunday matinee. He was what Sacha’s mother called “dashingly handsome.” He had long legs and an aristocratic profile and glossy black curls that flopped into his eyes all the time just like Sacha’s did. But while Mordechai’s curls looked debonair and sophisticated, Sacha’s curls just looked messy. Sacha had tried to figure out what the difference was. He’d even secretly borrowed a little of the Thousand Tigers Pungent Hair Potion that Mordechai got from his favorite Chinatown wizard. But it hadn’t helped. Whatever Uncle Mordechai had, you couldn’t buy it in a spell bottle.

“At least being an Inquisitor is a job,” Sacha’s father pointed out, still without looking up from Wealth Without Magic . “That’s more than some people in this family have. and stop tipping your chair back, Mordechai. We only own three chairs, and you’ve already broken two of them.”

Uncle Mordechai tipped his chair back even farther and crossed his pointy-toed shoes on the kitchen table in a flamboyant manner calculated to convey his unconcern with such mundane matters as chairs. “I have two careers,” he proclaimed, tottering on the brink of disaster. “The pen and the stage. And if neither of them is financially remunerative at the moment, I regard this as the fault of an insufficiently artistic world!”

“Never mind that, Mordechai.” Sacha’s mother leaned over to stir the fragrant pot of matzo ball soup simmering on the stove top and to adjust Grandpa Kessler’s cane, which was holding the oven door closed while her bread baked. “The point is, our Sacha’s going to be an Inquisitor.”

Mrs. Kessler’s opinion of Inquisitors had changed completely in the last month. When the Inquisitors had simply been the division of the New York Police Department responsible for solving magical crimes, she’d thought they were drunken Irish hooligans just like the regular cops. But now that her son was going to be an Inquisitor, she wouldn’t hear a bad word about them.

“I still don’t get it, though,” Bekah said skeptically. “Who ever heard of a Jew being an Inquisitor? And why Sacha?”

“Because he’s special! T hey said so with their fancy test.”

Bekah rolled her eyes. Bekah was sixteen and rolled her eyes often. At the moment she was wedged between Sacha and their grandfather on the feather bed, trying to do her night school homework. As far as Sacha could see, she wasn’t making much progress. She’d written out America is founded upon the principle of the right of the common man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without interference by magical powers three times — only to rip it up and start over when their grandfather jostled her elbow and ruined her careful penmanship.

“I’ll say he’s special!” Grandpa Kessler snorted. the sound of arguing voices had woken him up, and he wasn’t about to miss out on an argument, even if it was one the family had already had many times in the last few weeks. “He’s the grandson and great-grandson of famous Kabbalists, and what do his magical talents amount to? Bubkes! ”

“Unless being able to memorize the batting averages of the entire Yankees starting lineup counts as a magical talent,” Bekah quipped.

Sacha sighed. He would have liked to argue with Bekah, but she was completely right. If only he could have remembered his Torah lines as easily as he remembered baseball statistics, his bar Mitzvah wouldn’t have been a public humiliation.

“Never mind that.” Mrs. Kessler checked the bread and loaded a little more coal into the stove. As she bent over the stove, her little silver locket swung toward the fire, and she absentmindedly tucked it back into the collar of her worn-out dress. “The main point is that this apprenticeship is a great opportunity for Sacha. Isn’t it, Sacha?”

“Uh … yeah … sure,” Sacha mumbled.

But actually he wasn’t sure at all. On the one hand, there was the money. It was exciting to imagine himself all grown up and making enough money to move his family out of the tenements and into the wide-open green spaces of Brooklyn. It was nice to picture his mother and sister quitting their jobs at the Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory. Or his father studying all day like the learned man he was instead of wrecking his back hauling slimy barrels of fish at the East River Docks. But on the other hand … well … did Sacha really want to spend his life writing out Illegal Use of Magic citations and dragging people like Mrs. Lassky off to jail?

He still felt awful about Mrs. Lassky. He’d had no idea she’d get into so much trouble. After all, lots of people used magic — at least when the cops weren’t looking. New spells traveled up and down Hester Street as fast as gossip. There were spells to make bread rise and spells to make matzo not rise. Spells to catch husbands and spells to get rid of them. Spells to make your kids listen to your good advice and stay home and study instead of loitering on street corners like gangsters. Even Sacha’s mother used magic whenever she was sure her father-in-law wasn’t looking. So what had Mrs. Lassky done that was so terrible?

“Sacha?” his father asked. “Are you all right?”

He realized everyone was staring at him. “I… I feel kind of bad about Mrs. Lassky.”

“Don’t worry,” his mother said airily. “She just paid a fine.”

“And she should have paid a bigger one!” Grandpa Kessler said. “This back-alley witchery is a public disgrace — a shande far di goyim ! And it’s against religion too. As the learned Rabbi Ovadia of Bertinoro said, ‘God weeps when women work magic.’”

“Well, maybe God wouldn’t have to weep if the men would let women into shul to study real Kabbalah,” Bekah said tartly.

“Don’t talk back to your grandfather, young lady!” Mrs. Kessler snapped.

“What? I’m only saying what you’ve said a hundred times before—”

“And don’t talk back to me either!”

Bekah waited until their mother had turned back to her soup and then looked at Sacha and rolled her eyes again.

“I see you rolling your eyes,” their mother told Bekah without even bothering to turn around. “I guess that means you don’t want any blintzes this Sunday morning?”

“No! no!” Bekah cried. “I take it back! I unroll my eyes!”