Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman Read Free Book Online

because the Rav is solearned. He is steeped in ancient language, and seems far removed from the world. He seems completely disengaged. And, of course, he is insistent, he absolutely insists, not only for himself, but for Isaiah, his successor, for everyone who follows him, on a religion of strict observance. Slowly and firmly with the passing years, the Rav has guided his community into a life of increasing restrictions. He has moved in his exegesis of Jewish law toward an interpretation ever more bounded and punctilious. What he truly values, it seems to Jeremy, is not deep thought about the sacred, but obedience. Gradually, irrevocably, the Rav is drawing his people after him, in study, in word and deed, into a realm of obscurantism, a life encumbered and weighed down by tradition and endless layers of legalism and strict observance. So it is strange to feel at times the secret disdain that the Rav carries within him, even for his own followers, even for Isaiah, his own son, the good son, after all. To hear him say in that dismissive voice, he is not an artful person, he is not a subtle person. The Rav can show that to Jeremy because he thinks Jeremy is full of scorn already. Cynical and detached enough to enjoy his father’s sense of irony. He has flattered Jeremy and rebuked him at the same time.
    “What will you do?” Jeremy asks his father.
    The Rav does not answer. His silence excuses Jeremy from the room.
    Closing the door behind him, Jeremy sees Isaiah in the dining room helping Nachum through the day’s Talmud passage. The two of them sit together in their white shirtsleeves bent over the open volume on the table, the folio pages with their ganglia of texts. In the kitchen Rachel is already preparing dinner. Methodically she is putting up a large brisket for the evening. There will be lunch and afternoon prayers; there will be dinner. There will be evening prayers. There will be blessings for washing hands, blessings for breaking bread, blessings after all the meals. There will be prayers before bed. The house is filled with blessings. All time and all activities are regulated by them. It was different when Jeremy’s mother was alive. The blessings, the prayers, were hardly noticeable then. They were like the ticking of clocks. Inaudible, except in the dead of night.
    Jeremy doesn’t like to come to Kaaterskill in part because he feels his mother’s absence there. When his mother was alive she ran thehouse. She insisted on having things done properly. The windows washed, the baseboards dusted. She kept his father’s work at bay, never allowing books in the dining or living rooms. Now the Rav’s reading, his notes, dictionaries, and volumes of Talmud, seem to creep through the house like tendrils of ivy. Jeremy’s mother, Sarah, was a pious and imperious woman, his father’s match in the standards she set, although, of course, her interests were different from his, focused on the kitchen and the table, the lighting of candles and polishing of candlesticks, flower arranging, needlework, knitting, painting—she painted well and knitted exquisitely. She was meticulous about her home. She set a gorgeous table on the holidays with crystal and silver, and she had a set of Limoges china, used only two nights a year for Pesach. When she baked, she baked with passionate intensity, destroying any batch that fell below her expectations. When she entertained she exhausted herself. She made herself ill. When she shopped for clothes or furniture, she looked in the stores uptown and then bought on the Lower East Side. She bought there and yet she never bought cheap things. Everything had to be solid. The furniture was solid wood, the silver sterling. The candlesticks she bought at the time of Isaiah’s engagement were not hollow like the pretty ones she saw in Tiffany, but solid silver down to the base.
    But her real passion was for Jeremy and for his education. Isaiah was never interested in literature or in art, but