Usually writing Rashi's Daughters is an escape from real life for me. I may be writing about Hanukah during the summer or about a medieval wedding after attending a brit milah (I've actually attended 4 this year). But today is my mother's sixth yartzeit and I'm writing the chapter where Rivka dies, where I have to delve into her three daughters' conflicted feelings of grief and relief. So my life and my characters' lives are colliding and reinforcing each other. In some ways it makes it easier to write, but in other ways it's more difficult. It certainly makes me remember my mother, Anne S. Einstein, to whom Book I was dedicated.
If you believe in miracles, I may have participated in one this week. On my way to speak at Yussel's, a Jewish bookstore in Long Island, I got to the train station early enough to take a different train. Thus I arrived in Merrick, my destination, with almost an hour to spare. The weather was nice, so I decided to walk. As I wandered through a residential neighborhood admiring the fall
foliage, I noticed a pile of boxes and other stuff for the garbage to collect the next morning.
I was curious, so when I got closer I looked in one of the boxes and saw that it was full of old Hebrew books. Astonished, I checked the other boxes and they had even more, some dating to the 19th century. They were mostly different kinds of books, not a load of prayerbooks or something like that, and I couldn't believe that somebody was throwing them away. Surely some of these were valuable, and at least they should be buried in a Jewish cemetery, not in the dump.
So I called Michael, Yussel's owner, who drove over in his van to get me. He spent only a few moments checking the boxes before deciding to take the entire lot back to the store. Within the hour, rabbis from the community (whom he called) were pouring over the collection and leaving with armfulls of books. Michael took the ones he thought he could sell, and I took some old Passover haggadot that the original owner had collected (they were small and light).
By the end of the evening I learned who'd origianlly owned the books. Of course it was a rabbi, in this case elderly and living in a nursing home, and clearly whoever had cleaned out his things had no interest in what happened to them. So if I hadn't been early, if I hadn't accidently turned onto this street with its pretty trees, all these books would be in a landfill by now.
A miracle? coincidence? bashert? an accident? You decide.