Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

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.

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.