The Cookbook Collector

worked in Berkeley for seventeen years. Magisterially, he raised both hands. “Let me put this on the table. Mahatma Gandhi or Malcolm X? These are very interesting people, but when it comes to more or less Jewish—the answer is simple. Neither was a Jew! However, let’s look in depth at our first point: Tefillah. Prayer.”

“Wait,” Jess interrupted once again. “I want to understand whether social action can be a kind of prayer.”

Rabbi Helfgott smiled. “No.”

“No!” She could not conceal her surprise.

“Social action is original,” said Rabbi Helfgott. “But praying is prescribed. In social action we improvise, depending on the situation. However, in the Jewish tradition when we pray, we read words already set down for us. Social action is ad hoc. Prayer is total catastrophic insurance, covering every possibility.”

“So you’re saying it’s better to be spiritually derivative than creative?” Jess asked.

“Absolutely!”

The room was silent. Ha! Helfgott thought. Who was radical now? The Tree Savers? Or their bearded guest speaker in his frock coat? Who was pious now? Students feeling their way on a unique spiritual journey? Or their rabbi who dared suggest that the soul’s journey was not unique at all, but scripted?

“This is the gift of our tradition,” the rabbi said. “You wish for Oneness—you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The wheel is already there for you. Spinning! You wish to speak to God? You know what to say for every occasion.” He lifted up a blue prayer book and watched the Tree Savers’ faces: some skeptical, some puzzled. All surprised.

“Therefore social action is not prayer. However, when it comes to charity, this is another story. And the word tzedakah, ‘charity,’ has another meaning. ‘Justice’!”

Rabbi Helfgott took a sip from his water bottle, for he did not drink or eat anything in nonkosher houses, not even Tree Houses.

“We look at the problems of the world. The poor, the homeless, the oppressed. We look at the endangered species of the world. We say, ‘What can I give? What can I do for those who have so little? For those who are silent?’ Prayer is one method. Giving of time and money is another. Are prayer and social action the same? No. Are they connected? Absolutely. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. Look to the sea. Look to the Earth. Look to the trees. If they aren’t God’s messengers, they are definitely His witnesses. Look to the world and unite with what is natural around us. I myself have discovered in California more evidence of the Shechinah, the Holy Presence, than I ever saw in my childhood. I myself grew up in an urban environment! One scraggly plant, one asphalt playground. What did I know from the natural world? Until I, who lived in Crown Heights, began driving my van through the golden hills along 280—what did I know? Until I, who grew up in books, took my family to Point Reyes National Seashore, to see the wildflowers blooming and the waves crash over the rocks—what did I understand? My wife and I saw the immensity of the ocean! Our children saw Tomales Bay. Then I, who never noticed the landscape, came to repent my ignorance. Then I dedicated my heart to the cliffs, the wind, the trees. To the refreshment of our planet speedily in our day.”

Silence.

Nervously, Jess scanned the faces around her. Some looked at Helfgott with respect. Others with curiosity. No one spoke. Then suddenly, Arminda said, “Yeah!”

Leon applauded, and the others joined in.

“He was great,” Leon told Jess that night as they cleaned the kitchen.

Jess twirled her mop happily. “I knew he would be!”

“Clergy are always great. We should have him write an op-ed for us. Something about Wood Rose Glen.”

“I don’t think he knows anything about Wood Rose Glen,” Jess said.

Leon stopped scrubbing the stove. “We could explain what Pacific Lumber is doing and why we need to stop them—and he could put it in his own words.”

“Wouldn’t that be like using him?” Jess asked.

“Only in the best possible way.”

Jess thought about this. “Even if it’s for the best, I wouldn’t want to. I mean, I couldn’t use a rabbi for publicity.”

“No, of course not. No more than he wants to use you, taking your invitation to preach.”

“Couldn’t you imagine a free exchange of ideas?”

“Everyone’s got an agenda,” Leon said wearily. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“If you want him to write an op-ed, then you ask him,” Jess said.

“I’ll be up north.”

“Don’t go,” Jess murmured as she mopped, moistening the tiles at his feet.

“Come with me,” Leon said.

“I can’t. I have to work. I promised George.”

“And what did you promise him, exactly?”

“It’s just such a great opportunity.”

Leon turned his back on her and finished scrubbing the commercial stove with steel wool. “You keep saying that.”

“It’s true.”

Jess was cataloging the McClintock cookbook collection. Arriving at noon and leaving in the late afternoon, she spent at least five hours every weekday with the books. George was never home in the afternoons. He had given Jess a code of her own for the security system: 1759, the year the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were published, and she came and went as she pleased. Apart from Concepcion, who cleaned three times a week, Jess worked alone.

At first she had felt overwhelmed by the house, its airy symmetry, its silence. Now she was accustomed to the place, but she caught herself wondering, Is this still Berkeley? George’s neighborhood felt as far from Telegraph as the hanging gardens of Babylon. You could get a good kebab in Jess’s neighborhood, and a Cal T-shirt, and a reproduction NO HIPPIES ALLOWED sign. Where George lived, you could not get anything unless you drove down from the hills. Then you could buy art glass, and temple bells, and burled-wood jewelry boxes, and dresses of hand-painted silk, and you could eat at Chez Panisse, or sip coffee at the authentically grubby French Hotel where your barista took a bent paper clip and drew cats or four-leaf clovers or nudes in your espresso foam. You returned home with organic, free-range groceries, and bouquets of ivory roses and pale green hydrangeas, and you held dinner parties where some guests got lost and arrived late, and others gave up searching for you in the fog. That was George’s Berkeley, and even in these environs, his home stood apart, hidden, grand, and rambling; windows set like jewels in their carved frames, gables twined with wisteria of periwinkle and ghostly white.

Jess had the use of one of George’s old cars, a Honda Accord, that she drove from the flats to his enchanted hills. Like a pilgrim, she climbed the outdoor staircase, opened the door, and slipped off her shoes. She skated in socks over silken floors to the oak table in the dining room, where George had left her a laptop and a reading light, book cradles, magnifying glass, note cards, sharpened pencils, archival file boxes, Mylar sleeves, references and bibliographies—Bitting, Vicaire, Lowenstein, Maclean, Driver. George had them all. With these tools, she set to work, one book at a time—typing title and publication details into her database, adding descriptive notes: two cookbooks bound as one, wormholes in section vi.

Jess had always been the less responsible sister, the whimsical daughter, the girl with the flyaway hair. Openhearted, she had always trusted others, but no one had returned the favor so generously. She was aware, always, of George’s faith, his conviction that, working independently, she would not mar these precious volumes, or pocket a small cookbook for herself, or dog-ear pages, or cut out an engraving, as some thieves did, even in great libraries, with staff and guards.

She had never spent time in such beautiful rooms. Lofty ceilings and massive beams, windows glowing with sun and cloud and distant ocean. She had never worked with such material.

She studied each cookbook minutely, turning pages one by one, extracting the collector’s drawings, pulling off his paper clips. Removing these artifacts to file, she noted exactly where they occurred, between recipes for pottage, or instructions for preparing trout or carp or pike. She cross-referenced each, as an archaeologist might