He paused, his hand upon a book that was considerably older and more worn than its neighbors. Only shreds of leather were left clinging to the boards; the spine, too, had flaked away, revealing narrow bundles of pages bound with fraying catgut. Carefully Altschul opened it—and his frown deepened as he turned the pages, skimming formulae, diagrams, pages of close-written Hebrew. He could barely read most of it, but the fragments he understood told of theories and experiments and the sorts of abilities that, should the tales be believed, were forbidden to all but the holiest sages. What, in the name of God, had Meyer been doing with a book like this?
He closed the cover, his hands trembling with unease—and now he saw that the next book in the stack was just as worn and ancient-seeming as the first. And so was the next book, and the next. Five in all he found, five books of secret knowledge that most scholars thought had vanished into legend. These were sacred objects. He should’ve prayed and fasted before even touching them. And now here they were, in America—in a Reform charity office, of all places!
Heart pounding, he carefully moved the books to one side, away from their neighbors. Then, as though nothing had happened, he went on to the next, blessedly ordinary volume. He imagined he could feel his hands tingling, as though the forbidden writings had leached through the tattered covers and into his skin.
It had grown dark by the time all the books were sorted. At last Altschul summoned the boy and then traveled down the table, the boy translating his instructions while Fleischman grimly wrote them down. These books—Altschul outlined with his hands one large group of stacks—were to be given to Rabbi Teitelbaum at Congregation Kol Yisroel, at Hester Street. These books—another swath of small towers—must go to Mariampol Synagogue, on East Broadway.
“And these,” the boy said as Altschul gestured to the final, solitary stack of decrepit-looking volumes, “must be sent to Rabbi Chaim Grodzinski, the Rav of Vilna.”
Fleischman’s pen hovered above the paper. “I’m sorry, who?”
“Rabbi Chaim Grodz—”
“Yes, yes, but Vilna? In Lithuania?”
Man and boy explained to Fleischman that the Rav was the chief rabbi of Vilna, and a holy and important personage. In return, Fleischman informed them that the man could be Elijah the Tishbite for all he cared—Lithuania, for heaven’s sake! Did they think he had a pet Rothschild to pay for the shipping? No, the books would have to join their brethren in one of the other stacks, or else Altschul must deal with them himself.
The rabbi stared at him in silent anger, and then back at the tattered relics. Without another word he snatched up the books and stalked out the door and down to the street, the boy following behind.
That night, when the boy’s mother asked her son what had sent their rabbi uptown, he described for her the charity office, and the countless books, and the man who’d turned his newspaper pages with a rattle and a snap. But he made no mention of the books that Rabbi Altschul had carried home on the Elevated. He didn’t want to remember how the rabbi’s eyes had gleamed with a terrible fascination as he’d gazed at them, how he’d neglected to stand for their stop until the boy tapped him on the shoulder. The boy had never liked Rabbi Altschul, not quite—but until that day, he’d never been afraid of him.
Rabbi Altschul did not send the books to the Vilna Rav.
Instead, he wrapped them in a prayer-shawl, placed the bundle inside an old wooden suitcase, and pushed the suitcase beneath his bed, far out of reach. Then he resumed the usual course of his life: synagogue, prayer, and study. Months passed, and not once did Rabbi Altschul touch the books, even though they tempted him greatly. Neither did he make inquiries into the circumstances of Rabbi Meyer’s death—although he couldn’t help wondering if the books had played some role in it. He imagined how it might’ve happened: the excited discovery, the heedless blundering through their pages, an attempt at some spell thoroughly beyond Meyer’s abilities—and then, the inevitable consequence.
His intuition was correct, to a point. The books had indeed hastened Rabbi Meyer’s death, slowly draining his strength as he studied them—not out of a naive, hubristic desire for their knowledge, but in an attempt to control a dangerous creature, one that Rabbi Meyer had discovered and sheltered and grown to care for. The creature was a golem, a living being sculpted from clay and animated by holy magic. This particular golem had been made in the form of a human woman—one who was somewhat tall and awkward, but otherwise entirely ordinary to all appearances. The golem’s name was Chava Levy. She worked at Radzin’s Bakery at the corner of Allen and Delancey, not seven blocks from Altschul’s own synagogue. To her colleagues, she was indefatigable Chava, who could braid an entire tray of challahs in under two minutes, and who sometimes seemed to reach for whatever a customer wanted before they’d even asked. To her landlady at her Eldridge Street boardinghouse, she was a quiet, steady tenant, and an expert seamstress who spent her nights performing repairs and alterations for pennies apiece. She was so quick with these tasks that her admiring clients sometimes asked, Chava, when do you find time to sleep? The truth, of course, was that she never needed to.
SYRIAN DESERT, SEPTEMBER 1900
In the desert east of the human city of ash-Sham—also called Damascus—a pair of jinn chased each other across the landscape.
They were young for their kind, mere dozens of years old. For millennia, their clan had dwelt in the shelter of a nearby valley, far from the human empires that grew and shrank and conquered one another in turn. As they flew—each of them attempting to steal the wind that the other
