for a Shabbat evening meal. Wendy had heard about this apartment because Amalia was the great-aunt of her Princeton friend Leora, who facilitated the arrangement when Wendy wasn’t sure how to find a place to live. Amalia was in her seventies and had lived in Israel most of her life; she was fortunate in her birth to a German Jewish family astute enough to leave their fatherland for Israel in the early 1930s. Leora’s grandfather, Amalia’s brother, had lit out for the States as a young man, met an American woman, and raised his family there. Leora had told Wendy the story about her great-grandfather, Amalia’s father, who owned a silver factory. One day, he was asked to put a Nazi flag up over his property. He told his wife the time had come to leave, and they did, in 1933. Neither Amalia’s father nor her mother had other close relatives who survived. Wendy and Leora were both fascinated with alternate possibilities and spent hours discussing what if: Would either of them have known when to leave? What if Leora’s grandfather had remained in Israel? What if Wendy’s great-grandparents had stayed in Poland, not come to America? The speculation made Wendy realize that there are so many plausible ways in which anyone’s life could be completely different, something that she wanted to get her subjects to admit, but that many, with their belief that God was guiding them constantly, refused to.
After putting her groceries in the fridge and her pots on the shelves, Wendy had two hours before dinner at Shani’s. She decided to try to do some reading. She gazed at her bookshelf. Textual Soulmates: Professors on the Texts They Love, was an anthology purchased out of voyeurism and curiosity, to see whether there was still ardor and enthusiasm in the ranks of the tenured. That was something that worried her—would she retain her zest for a subject, any subject, over time, or would what started as passionate interest devolve into the chore of necessary deadlines and obligations, devoid of joy or thrill? Wendy had read a few of the essays by professors she knew and knew of, but, still, it was nice to be reminded that many professors do their work out of interest and love. Holding the volume, knowing it existed and was full of excitement for its topic, reassured her somehow. She wanted to love her work and to interest others in it, get them to love it as well.
She pulled her main dissertation advisor Cliff Conrad’s first book off the shelf. She had read it for a senior seminar at Columbia, and it inspired her to go to Princeton as his grad student. Legible Promises: American Transformations in Puritan Diaries and Sermons, 1636–1740 had won numerous awards and established Conrad’s career. Its title was a quote from Cotton Mather: “America is legible in [God’s] promises.” New England preachers saw America as a place to re-create the narrative of an errand into the wilderness of Israel by a chosen people. Her research, in the actual country of Israel, was studying members of the original elect people, also going voluntarily on their own mission of return. She felt both anxiety and excitement to know that Conrad was interested in her work for its extension of the lineage of his own, and hoped she was up to the responsibility of upholding his high standards of scholarship and writing.
Conrad’s serious work on American religion at the beginning of his career had marked him as a maverick. His advisors had encouraged him, but they didn’t share his interest in American religion as a subject worth a major study, particularly for a dissertation and first book. It was thought at Yale’s religion department in the sixties, the time he was working on his dissertation, that to develop a body of work of any stature one must work with some kind of philosophical phenomenon, preferably something involving lots of German, which would lend an imprimatur of heft and gravity to even the most trivial of subjects. There was still the attitude that American religious thinkers were less important subjects for study than their European counterparts. Conrad had persisted, his career ascending with that of his advisor, Sydney Ahlstrom, one of the first to examine a trajectory of American religion as a central part of American culture. In the course of his career, Conrad had worked with documents ranging from Puritan diaries in his own dissertation, to New Age religious narratives in which people experience some kind of sudden revelation that enables them to change their lives and, in the process, earn gobs of money with a bestseller about the experience. Conrad’s interest in these New Age narratives stemmed from his sense of them as part of the continuity of American religious expression and ideology of selfhood that has made America unique. Conrad had never looked at any non-Christian narratives; he was excited about Wendy’s project because it built on his own work and extended its reach by venturing forth to unknown Jewish territory. It didn’t hurt Wendy’s chances for future academic success that Conrad was known across the country. Her primary advisor had even reached the pinnacle of success for a public intellectual—he had been a guest on daytime television talk shows that he and his peers in the academy are aware of but never admit to watching.
Wendy lifted a third book from her shelf. Entitled, primly, Meaning in the Field, she had been told it was required reading by her anthropologist adviser, Violet Dohrmann. It was about the trickiness of the researcher adjusting her or his relations with subjects to a comfortable and appropriate level. One wants to be absorbed with a culture, but not to the dreaded extent of going native. Dohrmann had told her, “Immerse yourself in your host culture; you will be changed by it too, if you do your fieldwork properly. Yet, your hosts, particularly the community of Israeli returnees, may not always recognize your outsider status. They are always on the lookout for another recruit.” Then Dohrmann had told Wendy about her niece Ellen, raised in a good secular Jewish household and educated at Smith like Violet and her sister. Her niece went around the world on a spiritual sojourn in the early seventies, arrived in Israel, and became a religious Jew. It was the first personal information Dohrmann had ever volunteered to Wendy. That was the funny thing about this line of research, Wendy mused: it always seemed to elicit much more personal reactions, from questioner and respondent, than the average discussion of academic research.
Wendy started reading, figuring it would be good preparation for her first Sabbath, learning to immerse herself in the lives of religious people, at least for one Friday night dinner.
As much as the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.
—AHAD HA-AM
An hour before the Sabbath, Wendy and her elderly landlady, Amalia Hausman, hailed a cab at the nearest bus stop and headed to the apartment of Amalia’s granddaughter and her new husband. After they climbed the three flights slowly, at the apartment’s door Shani, the granddaughter, and her new husband, Asher, greeted them. Asher took Amalia’s bag to the spare bedroom, and Wendy handed Shani the bakery packages of assorted cookies and the elaborate cake with ornate sugared confections on top, tiers of cake and parve cream within, that she had procured from the winding alleys of Mahane Yehuda.
“You asked me to bring whatever makes Shabbos for me, so I have desserts here,” Wendy uttered cheerfully. Nothing had ever “made Shabbos” for Wendy, but she figured that any dinner could be worth sitting through if there were good pastry at its conclusion.
Shani squealed, “Oh, Wendy, Marzipan Bakery,” reading the name on the boxes. “Did my cousin Leora tell you it’s my favorite?”
“I spotted the bakery with the longest line, and figured,” she shrugged her shoulders, “it must be the best.”
Shani carefully positioned the boxes, along with the homemade gefilte fish Amalia brought, on the counter of her tiny kitchen. Asher excused himself to take a shower, while Shani scuttled around the apartment, turning on and off lights, asking her grandmother what else she should remember, plugging timers and appliances in, pulling electric cords out.
Wendy and Amalia were put to work setting the table. Wendy stretched out the white cloth while Amalia tugged the other
