The Beautiful Possible Read Online Free Page B

mother pretend that her own marriage was fixed by tradition? It was anything but. She opens her father’s prayer book and riffles through the pages. The Ashrei prayer he taught her to recite in a singsong melody. The Shema he taught her to recite slowly, because, he said, you want each syllable to feel sad when it departs from your lips . She was five when he taught her those prayers; it could have been yesterday.
    Ida stands next to Rosalie and pulls a thin volume off the shelf, tucks it under her arm.
    “Something I shouldn’t see, Ma?”
    “Every marriage has its secrets.”
    Rosalie knows the contents of her father’s library by heart but she can’t figure out which book her mother is hiding from her.
    “The Spinoza, Ma?”
    “Guess again.”
    “The Mei HaShiloach ?”
    “Of course not. I already put that one in the shaimos pile.” Ida smiles. “Tateh’s students won’t understand the Ishbitzer’s teachings, and it’s not a suitable book for a young rabbi and his beautiful bride.”
    Rosalie remembers her father sharing his interpretation of the Ishbitzer Rebbe’s work. God is in all things, even in your doubts and desires. So let your heart be your master; let your life become a sacred story. He insisted she tell no one that he was teaching her a nineteenth-century Hasidic book considered so heretical that Polish Jews would keep it hidden in an outhouse. I can’t teach this to my students. They will learn the language of transgression before they understand their own boundaries.
    Ida carries the book into the kitchen.
    “You hid the Spinoza with the blue cover,” shouts Rosalie. “Right?”
    “Oh, that Spinoza. His writings nearly destroyed our marriage. These books aren’t so innocent. None of them. I carried faith in my bones, from Lublin to Brooklyn, I never wavered. But he—”
    “Tateh was a Hasid, Ma. His doubts only brought him closer to God.”
    “Whatever he was he was. We survived each other and it worked out.”
    Rosalie doesn’t know whether to cry or laugh. She spent her childhood watching her parents’ separate orbits grow distant and then even more remote until something realigned and they began to revolve around each other like the earth circles the sun. Rabbi Shmuel and Ida Wachs, spinning celestial objects. Rosalie would lie in bed at night and listen to her father talk to his students in the living room while her mother hummed in a singsong voice in the bedroom. It wasn’t until after her father died that she found a tin filled with notes he wrote to her mother.
    My head is in the books but every word reminds me of our kisses.
    Buy a chicken and remember to ask the man for some livers on the side. And then pick out a pastry for us. One bite for you, one bite for me, my sweet butterfly.
    While her mother seemed to uphold the wheel of tradition, blessing every morsel of food before she took a bite, Shmuel played with the edges of his beliefs, testing the parameters of his faith. When Rosalie was small, he experimented with keeping Shabbat on a Tuesday, just to see how it would feel. He wore his silk-lined coat, blessed wine and challah, sang zemirot, napped, and meditated. When the sun set he told Rosalie it was a failed experiment. Tuesday cannot be Shabbat. Next time I’ll try Wednesday.
    After her father read a book review that quoted Saint Augustine, he borrowed The Confessions from the Brooklyn Public Library. Then he perused the shelves. Pascal. Rousseau. He peered at the Koran, dabbled in Sufism, considered Buddhism and Zen, but always returned to his beloved Hasidic masters. He told Rosalie that these rabbis gathered sparks from all of human experience,packaged them up for their students so they could taste the essence of the entire world without needing to leave home.
    A year before he died, Shmuel shocked his students by espousing the works of Spinoza alongside his Hasidic texts. He shaved his beard and tucked his tzitzit inside his pants pockets, keeping the