The Cookbook Collector

the time to leave, to think about the future, and spend time with my family….

No excuses, and no confessions either. Emily’s sense of responsibility was strong, but her need for privacy was stronger. She sent the message from her laptop, and then proceeded to the next order of business—helping Heidi prepare breakfast for the children. The nanny arrived. Heidi took the train to Providence to teach, and Emily took a walk with Jess and Richard.

It seemed to Emily that the leaves had changed overnight. Suddenly, trees of ordinary green were scarlet, gold, spectacular. When she’d arrived in Canaan, she must have been too distraught to notice.

“I heard everything you said,” she told Richard, as they walked down Pleasant Street.

Jess took her hand.

“Now I want to know the whole story,” Emily told her father.

Richard didn’t answer.

“You have to tell us, Dad,” said Jess.

Richard kept moving, eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead. “Well, what do you want to know?”

“I want you to start at the beginning,” said Emily.

“Your mother and I met at Cambridge,” Richard said. “I was on a Fulbright, and she was a choral scholar.”

“We knew that before,” said Emily. “I want you to begin at the beginning, with her mother and her father.”

But Gillian’s parents were not the beginning for Richard. Those dark-costumed people were not the story of his wife. Gillian began with him at Cambridge, where he bicycled with her through golden autumn fields and listened to her sing in the Girton College Chapel Choir. She had applied to college without her parents’ knowledge, and when she got her choral scholarship she broke from childhood, choosing music as her religion.

Emily and Jess pressed him, but they didn’t understand. Their mother’s life began when she came up to Cambridge on her own. “It’s like a fairyland here,” she used to say, when they walked through the ancient cloisters. She was a quiet rebel, buying a Liberty-dress pattern and sewing her own gown for the Emmanuel College ball, dancing until dawn, and then slipping barefoot onto the velvet lawns reserved for Fellows. As a soprano she sang for services and feasts. As an adventurer, she tried champagne for the first time and pork loin and frog’s legs. In summers she and Richard punted on the river Cam. On vacations she stayed in his apartment, and when he got the job at MIT, she married him. Her Hasidic family had nothing to do with it. They would not even meet Richard, much less look at their runaway daughter. She came to America, and took Richard’s family for her own.

Emily shook her head. “But don’t you see, Dad? That’s not good enough. Those are our relatives too. You can’t pretend they don’t exist.”

“How productive is this line of inquiry right now?” Richard asked her. “How will these questions help with what you’re going through?”

“Come with us to the Zylberfenigs’ house,” said Emily.

Richard’s jaw tightened. “Absolutely not.”

Undeterred, Emily took Jess that very afternoon to Alcott Street. Laptop in hand, she rang the bell. Then she knocked on the door. Seconds later, Chaya Zylberfenig welcomed the sisters with open arms.

“I knew I was right!” Chaya cried. “Come in, come in! The doorbell’s broken. Come sit!” She ushered Emily and Jess into her living room filled with bookcases of tall Hebrew books. She seated the young women on her slip- covered couch, under her picture of the Rebbe. Brushing tears from her eyes, Chaya said, “Welcome, nieces.”

“Is it really possible you’re our aunt?” Jess asked. “It’s so strange.”

“Ah.” Chaya smiled. “My husband always quotes the Rebbe. There are no coincidences.”

“You’re so young,” Emily said shyly.

Once again Chaya explained. “There were nine of us. Your mother, Gittel, oleha shalom, was the oldest. I was the ninth, and so I was much younger. She left home when Freyda and I were babies.”

Emily could not hide her disappointment. “So you didn’t know her.”

Chaya shook her head, “We were told unfortunately that she had died—even before her real death.”

“Don’t you think that was wrong?” Jess couldn’t help interjecting.

Emily touched her arm in warning.

“It was many years ago,” Chaya said diplomatically. “What she did and what our parents did is all said and done. But I can tell you all about the family. Your grandfather Leib, zichron l’bracha, was a jeweler.”

“A jeweler!”

Jess watched, amazed, as Emily whipped out her laptop and began typing. “How do you spell ‘Leib’?”

Two hours later, Emily was still bent over her keyboard, typing. She’d stopped only to plug her power cord into the wall behind the couch as she continued to pepper Chaya with questions. “How did he die?” And, “Where are those children now?” With a kind of manic energy, she added to her family record, while Chaya talked and Jess sat back and watched, overwhelmed by this sudden cousinage in London. Jess knew that there were stages of grief. Was this one of them? The genealogical stage? The note-taking, fact-finding, photo-album stage?

“This is the house where we grew up.” Chaya opened her crimson, leather-bound album to a picture of a tall brick town house. “This is my older sister Beyla, who raised us and who lives there now. She knew your mother well. These are my middle brothers, Menachem and Reuven … or maybe not.” She squinted at the picture. “Maybe that’s not Reuven. That could be Cousin Mendy.”

Emily studied the pictures. “We need to scan these in. If we digitize everything, then we can share the files.” Turning to Jess, she asked, “Did you see the picture of the house?”

“Uh-huh,” Jess said weakly from the corner of the couch.

“You’ll stay for lunch?” Chaya asked them. They adjourned to the kitchen, and the children gathered, blowing through in a little storm of elbows, arms, and knees. Chaya served cold cuts, which Jess didn’t eat. The boys tried to touch their noses with their tongues. These are my cousins, Jess thought. These are Rabbi Helfgott’s nephews, and his nieces, just like me. Emily kept typing, her face aglow.

“You in particular look like a Gould,” Chaya told Emily. “You have the Gould eyes.”

“Hazel?” Emily asked.

“Determined,” said Chaya. “This is very much a Gould trait.”

“Very much so!” Shimon agreed as he came in from the garage.

“Shimon, meet our nieces, Emily and Jessamine,” Chaya said.

“Baruch Hashem. Here you are!” said Shimon and he did not look in the least surprised.

“Clear your places!” Chaya called after her boys as they ran off. They doubled back again and threw their paper plates into the trash.

“Life is strange,” Jess murmured, looking at her uncle in his black frock coat.

“Life is very, very beautiful.” Shimon washed his hands and said a blessing, after which he sat down and fixed himself a sandwich. His blue eyes sparkled as if with news he couldn’t tell. Two new nieces, two beautiful souls in his own kitchen in Canaan, and one of them—He didn’t think of Emily as rich. He never used that word, even to himself, but she had means. She had capacity to illuminate everything around her. Like Barbara, Emily had much to give.

“Will you join me for my class?” he asked Jess and Emily. “My brother-in-law Rabbi Helfgott tells me that you, Jessamine, are one of his best students. Very philosophical.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Jess demurred. She didn’t feel philosophical at all.

All day and night, Emily continued in her hectic phase. Thoughts of her mother’s true identity had unleashed in her a million schemes and plans. She was sending e-mails to Aunt Freyda in Berkeley and Aunt Beyla in London. She was already telling Jess that evening that they should fly to London. The sisters sat on their twin beds in the guest room and Emily said, “We’ll go to Golders Green and see the house. We’ll see the house where she grew up and meet the family.”

“We could,” Jess said.

“There might be some of Gittel’s papers there, or school reports. Or maybe we can find a diary.”

Gently, Jess suggested, “From what Dad and Chaya say, I’m not sure you’re going to find any diaries or mementos.”