The Inquisitor's Apprentice by Chris Moriarty

Author:Chris Moriarty [Moriarty, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A Shande far di Goyim

THAT SATURDAY MORNING Sacha slipped into the Hester Street synagogue late and settled into the last row. You could never hear anything back here, because the old men in the congregation were always wandering in and out and gossiping to each other. But this morning it was the gossiping old men he wanted to see—and most especially his grandfather.

He waited patiently until prayers were finally over and the only people still hanging around were Rabbi Kessler's little gaggle of would-be Kabbalists. Then he tagged along while they meandered over to the storefront shul on Canal Street and settled in to do the three things Kabbalists did best—or at least the only three things Sacha had ever seen any Hester Street Kabbalist do. One: shaking their heads over the latest bad news from Russia. Two: complaining about how all the young people were too busy chasing girls and baseballs to remember their religion. And three: discussing the possibility on a purely theoretical level of maybe perhaps coming up with a tentative plan for coaxing an obviously reluctant Messiah into coming back sometime in the next few millennia to do something about the sorry state of the world.

Finally Sacha managed to get his grandfather alone for a minute and ask him about Edison's dybbuk. After a lot of thought, he'd decided to tell a mostly true version of the story, but without mentioning his mother's locket or the alarming fact that the dybbuk had followed him home the other night.

"Isn't that just like the goyim?" Grandpa Kessler asked when Sacha finished his story. "Here's Thomas Edison, rich as the czar, with everything a man could want in life, but he runs into a two-week stretch of bad luck and suddenly he's looking around for a Jew to blame. Us Jews, our luck goes down the crapper for two thousand years and we call it being the Chosen People."

"Yeah, well, that's New York for you," Mo Lehrer said, ambling over to join the conversation. "The whole city's coming apart at the seams, and the Inquisitors are running around investigating how some rich goy got Yiddish luck."

Sacha laughed at the joke and caught himself thinking he'd like to share it with Lily. But of course he could never do that. He was quite sure that no one in Lily Astral's family ever complained about having Yiddish luck.

"But ... well ... do you think a rabbi could have summoned the dybbuk?" he asked tentatively.

"Of course a rabbi could have," Grandpa Kessler snapped. "Any rabbi worth his salt can summon a dybbuk—well, except those hoity-toity uptown rabbis who don't study Kabbalah anymore and spend all their time pretending to be Episcopalians. But the point is, no rabbi would have."

"Why? Because dybbuks are evil?"

"No, dummkopf! Because they're magic!" Rabbi Kessler yanked at his beard in frustration. "Do you have anything between your ears but baseball scores? Don't you remember anything you learned for your bar mitzvah? The last thing any real Kabbalist would ever do is work magic.

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