The Cookbook Collector (5 page)

4

T
he Bialystok rabbi of Berkeley, known affectionately as the Berkinstoker, had come west from Brooklyn fifteen years before with his wife and baby. The family had grown, as had Rabbi Helfgott. He’d gained a few pounds with each of his wife’s pregnancies, and after the birth of their tenth child, he was a substantial man indeed. He wore the traditional garb of the Bialystoker sect: black frock coat and black gabardine trousers, a white dress shirt, and, when he went out, a broad-brimmed black hat. Burly, bearded, and gregarious, he was a familiar sight near campus, and Jess remembered him well from Sproul Plaza where she leafleted for Save the Trees. She had often seen the rabbi marching through the crowds with leaflets of his own for anyone who looked Jewish. He’d even approached Jess once and suggested, “Why don’t we trade? I’ll take yours, and you take mine.” She had offered him a leaflet titled “Arcata Arboricide” and he’d handed her a glossy brochure titled “Do a Mitzvah Today.” Then the rabbi had gestured broadly toward the bare white London plane trees lining the plaza. “You light Shabbes candles, and I will save a tree….” Jess remembered all this as she walked with Mrs. Gibbs to Dana Street, and she wondered if the rabbi would remember too.

The morning was sunny but cool. Mrs. Gibbs wore a white cardigan over her white clothes. Jess pulled up her jacket hood and gazed at a message chalked on the pavement in front of I. B.’s Hoagies & Cheesesteaks:

HASTE MAKES WASTE
IT IS ILLEGAL
TO LOITER, REST, OR BE
POOR AND HOMELESS
IN BERKELEY
THANK YOU CITY COUNCIL

Jess wondered about the author of this message, with its internal rhyme and sorrowful enjambment. She imagined a poet of the streets, chalking up his anger and despair with untaught eloquence, tracing lines of exclusion, sorrowing at telephone poles with a thousand silver staples where police had ripped off and discarded notices and poetry under the rubric “Post no bills.” Why not post? Jess thought indignantly. Why was freedom of speech limited to sanctioned bulletin boards? She imagined chalk covering the pavement from Durant to Telegraph.
It is illegal to loiter, rest, or be poor
….

Mrs. Gibbs stopped at the door of a brown Victorian garlanded with rambling roses, ramshackle porches, and metal fire escapes. As soon as Mrs. Gibbs rang the bell, Jess felt a prickle of unease.

The door opened wide, revealing Rabbi Nachum Helfgott. He didn’t just smile. He beamed. His eyes crinkled up so that they looked like the tiny black seeds of his round bearded face. “I remember you!” he exclaimed in exactly the tone of a Jehovah’s Witness who’d spotted Jess years before in San Francisco Airport and cried out to her,
There you are!

“I remember you too,” Jess replied.

“Really?” Rabbi Helfgott looked genuinely surprised and modest, as though there were many rotund rabbis in black suits and hats walking through Berkeley. “Did you by any chance light candles?”

Jess shook her head. “Did you save a tree?”

“I planted one! My wife and I planted one. Do you see this tree here?” He pointed to a bushy silver-barked tree near the corner of the house. “This is an apricot tree! This is what they tell us.”

“Oh, now I feel bad about the candles!” Jess exclaimed.

“It’s okay. It’s all right. Every Shabbes is a new opportunity. Every week the world begins again. Come in, come in.” Rabbi Helfgott seemed to enjoy doubling phrases. He was such an expansive man he spoke in twins. “Tell me your name once again.”

“Rabbi, this is Jessamine Bach,” said Mrs. Gibbs.

“Ah, Bach like the musician,” said the rabbi. “Very nice. Where are you from?”

“I grew up in Newton,” said Jess, “but now my father lives in Canaan, Mass.”

“Canaan! My brother-in-law lives there! My wife’s sister and her family. Who is your father?”

Jess pictured a Bialystoker rabbi in full regalia descending on her father and his Korean wife. “He’s not Jewish,” she answered instead of answering.

The front and back parlors of the house had been converted into a synagogue with
EXIT
signs over the doors to satisfy the fire code. A warren of hallways and little rooms and creaky carpeted stairs surrounded these parlors. Through one door, Jess saw a restaurant-style kitchen with banks of cabinets, freezers, and refrigerators. “The house was once an ashram before we came here,” Rabbi Helfgott explained when he saw Jess staring.
“Baruch
Hashem, we were already equipped to feed a hundred.”

The rabbi ushered Jess into an office piled high with papers and computer equipment. Jess looked back, expecting Mrs. Gibbs to join them, but her neighbor had taken the little book she always carried in her purse and stood by the window praying silently.

“My mother was the Jewish one,” Jess volunteered.

The rabbi nodded. He was a true evangelist, although he only sought out Jewish souls. His goal was to return Jews to themselves. “Where is she from?”

“She’s dead,” said Jess.

The rabbi bowed his head, and recast the question gently. “Where was she from?”

“London,” Jess said.

“Really! My wife is from London! What was her name?”

“Gillian Bach,” said Jess.

“Sit, sit,” the rabbi said, even as he mused. “Gillian Bach. I don’t know the family.”

Jess sat on an old swivel chair, and the rabbi heaved himself into a larger version behind his desk. There were at least two other swivel chairs of different sizes in the office, and Jess wondered for a moment whether the rabbi kept outgrowing them.

“Mrs. Gibbs tells us you’re a student. What do you study?”

“Philosophy,” said Jess.

“Philosophy! Very interesting. I myself have a personal interest in philosophy, particularly Jewish philosophy. You have perhaps heard of our
Tashma?”

She shook her head.

“This is a very great work, covering everything.”

“Everything!”

“God. Evil, but especially Humanity, the Soul. The Messiah. In other words, the big philosophical questions, the biggest questions, including the biggest one of all.”

“And what’s that?” Jess asked.

The Messianic rabbi didn’t hesitate. “Ah, the biggest question in Jewish philosophy is very simple:
When?
”

Jess couldn’t help smiling at this summation, and seizing the opportunity, the rabbi swiveled in his chair and reached behind him for a thick black book with page edges marbled in striking pink and purple. “This
Tashma
is translated into English with a commentary. Would you like to borrow it for a while?”

“Sure,” said Jess, but that felt disingenuous, so she added, “I might not get to it right away. I’m kind of swamped reading for class.”

“And what reading is that?”

“Hume,” said Jess. “David Hume.”

“David Hume. This is the kind of name that in my own field I wonder whether such a David was possibly Jewish.”

“Scottish,” said Jess.

The rabbi lifted a finger. “The Jewish community in Scotland is very nice.”

Jess hesitated. Then she said, “I don’t think he believed in God.”

“There’s the proof!” exclaimed Rabbi Helfgott. “It is a very interesting fact that many of the most famous goys, particularly philosophers, when you scratch the surface turn out to be Jews. Hume in the past could be Hamish. Hyman. Even Halberstam. There are many possibilities. Names are very important, very mystical in their significance. Your name, Jessamine, is very unique, very interesting. Do you have a Hebrew name?”

Jess shook her head.

“Many, many people who come to see us enjoy a Hebrew name, which we can find for them. It’s a simple matter that for many people is profound.”

On the wall behind the rabbi, a bulletin board displayed snapshots of babies, boys and girls, children of all ages. Above the bulletin board hung a large portrait of a white-bearded man.

“The Bialystoker Rebbe,” said Rabbi Helfgott. “You know what a
tsadek
is? A
tsadek
is a saint. However, the Rebbe is not only a saint. He is also a genius. He has spirituality and intellect in equal measures. How many of us can say that? When he saw this thing, the Internet, did he say, ‘I am now eighty-six years old; I have no interest in computers’? No. He said, ‘With technology the whole wide world is now interconnected.
Baruch
Hashem, this is a miracle. A network of computers makes it possible for souls to transmit Torah everywhere.’ He also said: ‘There are no coincidences.’ It is not by chance that you and I live in such a time as this. People ask every day, ‘Why was I put on earth?’ As if there is perhaps one reason. The truth is there are too many reasons to count, and each reason and each soul connects to every other. I see in my own life that this is true. Is it an accident that Mrs. Gibbs came here to us, even though she was not a Jew? Is it by chance that she lives in the same building as you? And that you yourself are involved in the Internet?”

“I’m not involved at all,” Jess corrected him. “My sister is the one who—”

Rabbi Helfgott was unconcerned. “Everybody is a link. Do you understand?”

Jess nodded, suppressing laughter. There were many evangelicals in Berkeley. Moonies and druggies, hairless Hare Krishnas chanting in their flowing robes. Men in suits distributing little green Gospels. Prophets in sandwich boards preaching the end of days. Jess had seen all these, but she had never spoken at length to a religious guru, and despite Theresa’s warnings, she enjoyed it.

“Let me explain,” said Rabbi Helfgott. “After Torah, computers are my first love. Even in yeshiva as a boy, I wanted only to learn about these machines. Why? Because I loved the thought of them. Because of their power to change the world. Because of their memory. They take drudgery and make mincemeat of the most tiresome tasks. Some young boys in Brooklyn love baseball and some love candy. I personally loved to learn computer manuals and programming languages. Naturally this was only my hobby. When I grew older, I created the first Bialystok Web page, and I have continued as the webmaster ever since. When it was time for me to become an emissary, I asked the Rebbe, ‘Please, send me to San Jose to be the
shaliach
there. This is the center for computers. This is where the lights of truth and learning will transmit instantly to all the nations.’

“The Rebbe said, ‘Nachum, I am not sending you to San Jose. I am sending Mindel there instead.’”

Mindel? I thought. He knows nothing about computers. He does not care at all about technology. But I did not argue with my Rebbe. He knew more than I did.

“‘For you,’ said the Rebbe, ‘I am sending you to Berkeley.’ The Rebbe knew me better than I knew myself. When Mrs. Gibbs came to tell me about you and your investment, I understood.” Rabbi Helfgott opened his desk drawer and took out a long checkbook.

Was this a mistake? Jess thought. Probably. The office door was open. She could walk away, but she did not.

“Eighteen hundred dollars,” said Rabbi Helfgott, writing carefully. “This is a very special number. Each Hebrew letter corresponds to a number. Ten is
yud
, eight is
chet
. Together those letters make the word
chai:
life. Eighteen hundred is one hundred times
chai
. A very nice number which is also a round number.”

Jess watched, fascinated, as Helfgott ripped the check out of his checkbook.

“I follow the market each day,” the rabbi said. “I myself even trade a little in shares. I have some Apple. I have some Cisco. I bought Crossroads Systems at nineteen. I know from technology stocks. Veritech is the one that everybody wants.”

Jess started back, surprised. “You want me to give you some of my shares?”

“No, no, no.” The Rabbi raised his hands. “The loan is free. Just return the eighteen hundred after the IPO. If you want to give me anything more, then you decide however to repay me. Give to
tzedakah
—a gift to charity. Give to the Bialystok Center. Or give nothing. This is an investment. You are investing in Veritech. And I am investing in you.”

5

E
veryone expected Emily to take care and take charge. It had always been this way. When her mother was sick, she’d filled out her own permission slips for school. When Jess signed up to bring home the kindergarten rabbit for the weekend, Emily took care of it.
Look at Emily taking care of her sister
, her New Jersey aunts said to one another after the memorial service. There were no relatives from England. Her English grandparents had died before Emily was born, but the New Jersey aunts were full of admiration.
What an angel. Look how good she is
, her father’s sisters said. Emily knew she was not an angel, but the more she doubted, the better she behaved.

At work she was the peacemaker. She wasn’t just the chief executive officer of the company; she was the adult when her partners behaved like children. Admittedly her colleagues were young. Alex Zaslovsky, Veritech’s chief technology officer, was just twenty-two. He had come to America at fifteen, and still spoke with a slight Russian accent. He’d been a math prodigy and skipped several years of school. He’d also been late to grow, so that even now he had a slight frame. He had black eyes, long lashes, a thatch of thick brown hair. He’d heard a secretary whispering about him at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “How old is that one? Twelve?” He turned on her and gave her the finger right before his presentation to the board.

“Alex!” Emily whispered, and Milton Leong, the company’s twenty-five-year-old CFO, turned red with suppressed laughter. She appreciated Alex’s mind, and Milton’s sense of humor—his jovial personality set the tone for a company profiled in the
San Jose Mercury News
as “the most happy start-up.” But there were times when the two of them tried her patience. In a young industry, Alex and Milton acted their age.

This was the story they told about Veritech’s beginnings: Once upon a time, back in ’96 when Alex and Milton were grad students, they stayed up late finishing a paper, and they decided to order takeout. They started shuffling menus, and just as they settled on Thai food and began debating between Shrimp Delight and Shrimp in Love, a new paradigm for large-scale data storage and retrieval came to them. Each cache of data should have a take-out menu.

“Very funny,” Milton said, but Alex wasn’t joking. They met Emily, who saw the potential of a new data-storage paradigm, which was ingenious and elegant, and she drafted a business plan. Within months, Alex developed V.0, Milton found the first clients, and Emily organized the company.

The true story of Veritech’s beginnings was complex and technical, and had more to do with the paper Alex and Milton had been writing than the collection of take-out menus. They had not debated which sort of shrimp to order, because Alex was allergic to shellfish. Nor had they simply met up with Emily. She had come to them looking for an infrastructure project. But it was the business with the take-out menus that reporters fixed on. A take-out menu with numbered specials was something every interviewer could visualize, an endearing symbol for a couple of brilliant students brainstorming late at night. Veritech’s goal was to become the biggest Web-based data-storage company in the world, but its origin myth was all fun and games, as if once upon a time some guys got together and said, “We’ve got enough talent here. Let’s put on a show!”

There had been freedom in the early days, a sense of unlimited possibility, but with each new round of funding, Alex and Milton and Emily felt more constrained. They had to answer to VCs on their board, particularly to the forty-one-year-old Bruno, with his fair hair and sunburned brow. Bruno was Swiss, and he had worked at Xerox and at Apple before moving to Sirius Venture Partners. He cycled competitively, stayed late, and woke early to shoot out e-mails to everyone, “trying,” as Milton put it, “to give us marching orders for the day.” As they filed for their blockbuster IPO, Bruno’s pronouncements and e-mail warnings intensified. “Sensitive time! Remember, we are making an important transition which requires the utmost care. There will be many visitors in the building. Please be discreet in elevators and public spaces.”

Of course everyone down to the secretaries knew that this was a sensitive time. Emily had braced herself for arrogance and gloating, a sense of entitlement at the company, but in fact, the ethos was the opposite—one of indebtedness to investors, to underwriters, to the world. With floodgates of cash about to open, everyone felt enormous pressure to produce the next new thing. Veritech stored data for more than one hundred corporate clients, ranging from monumental Microsoft to newcomers like Bluefly, but on the eve of the IPO, Emily began to understand what no one wanted to admit: at the moment, Veritech’s real customers were their underwriters, their true audience the analysts poised to examine the company from head to toe, and ultimately Veritech’s true product had nothing to do with data storage. What Veritech offered the public was its stupendous expectations.

“We need a new idea every week,” Alex complained.

And Emily said, “Well, yes.” And then, more thoughtfully, “A new idea is practically built into our share price.”

Alex did not enjoy this comment, but he was willing to hear it from Emily. He respected her more than anyone. He was also in love with her. He stammered when he spoke to her. At times he couldn’t even look at her. This was awkward, given the amount of time they spent working together, and the tension they both felt. The public offering weighed heavily on Alex, even as he conceived one new idea after another—his latest, the prototype for an electronic-surveillance service.

He presented the concept at an early breakfast in Veritech’s rooftop lunchroom, a place with a stainless steel outdoor kitchen and round tables shaded by market umbrellas. Charlie, the tall blond company chef from L.A., was whipping up omelets for Emily, Alex, Milton, and Bruno when Alex announced, “I have a plan for something called electronic fingerprinting. This will track every time someone touches data and record who touches it, as well as when and where. The records will be kept in a log for every data-store….”

“Cool,” said Milton.

“Cool?”

“What did you want me to say?”

“Something better,” Alex said.

Picky, picky, thought Charlie behind the stove as he flipped Alex’s omelet—plain with no cheese, no sautéed mushrooms, no roasted peppers.

“Okay, how would this be different from tools we already have?” asked Milton. “We can do all that when we collaborate on projects.”

“This tool is not for collaborators,” Alex said.

“Who is it for then?” asked Emily.

“People who want to check security. For example, managers who want to check on their employees.”

“So managers could use fingerprinting without employees’ knowledge?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do you see a problem with this?” Bruno asked.

“No.”

“When it comes to privacy and human rights?” Bruno prompted.

“No.”

“Born in the USSR,” Milton teased.

“Meaning?” Alex demanded.

“This is like a Soviet-style app you’re coming up with here.”

Alex took his finished omelet to the table.

“Seriously,” Milton said, following him, “this kind of surveillance idea sounds kind of Cold War, don’t you think?”

The four settled at a round table shaded by a green umbrella, and Charlie cleaned his griddle and thought about his future restaurant.

“A surveillance idea is therefore … out of date?” Alex challenged Milton.

“Well, yeah,” Milton said, “since the Cold War ended, like, ten years ago.”

“And what makes you think it ended?”

“You guys,” Bruno said. “We are in storage, not security. Are you suggesting that we expand into an entirely new area?”

“Let me show you what electronic fingerprinting can do,” Alex said.

“I’m not interested in what it does in general. I’m interested in what it can do for us.”

This was the kind of thinking that enraged Alex. “He doesn’t get it,” Alex fumed to Emily, right in front of Bruno. “He doesn’t have the capability to understand.”

“My capabilities are fine,” snapped Bruno. “But let’s pretend that I’m the rest of the world and I have no use for what you’re selling me.”

“I’m not selling anything. I’m inventing. You don’t know the difference.” Alex spoke louder than he had intended, and Miguel, the cleanup engineer, as he was called, looked up, even as he kept wiping tables.

“Alex,” said Emily.

He glared at her, as if to say, Don’t you Alex me. “I’m going to work.” He marched down the stairs.

“No, wait.” Emily hurried after him into the top-floor lounge they called the Playroom, a space furnished with sagging couches, Foosball, pool, and Ping-Pong tables. “Don’t go.”

“What do you mean, ‘Don’t go’? Am I a child for you to order me around?” Alex demanded.

“Oh, stop and listen to me,” said Emily. “You have got to get hold of yourself. Don’t let other people get under your skin like that. You’re so smart. Be smart about people too. Be generous when you come to the table with something new.”

“I’m not interested in speaking to Bruno about this,” said Alex.

“But you’ve got to. You’ve got to speak to all three of us. That’s how it works,” said Emily. “Go back up there and start over.”

“No. He should apologize to me.”

“Look, there’s only one way to get things done, which is to stop taking offense and explain yourself.” She was determined to get through to him, her difficult, prodigious CTO. “I won’t let them interrupt.”

“No one can stop Bruno and his twenty-million-dollar financing from interrupting me.”

“I can,” Emily promised.

“I told you, I’m not interested.”

“Just tell me. Come on.” She knew he wanted to explain his idea. She sensed his excitement, along with his pride. In fact, her voice charmed him, as much as her earnest advice.

He picked up a paddle and began bouncing a Ping-Pong ball up and down on its flat surface. Tap-tapping over and over, he explained a plan for data monitoring so audacious and innovative that Emily knew if Veritech did not pursue it, others would.

“There are still ethical questions,” she pointed out. “And strategic questions. Bruno’s right to ask if we want to go into the security business right now.”

Alex kept his eye on the ball. “Storage and security go hand in hand.”

“This would be a different kind of security,” Emily mused. “Almost forensic.”

“Exactly.”

“Almost like spying,” she said. “We’d have to think hard about that.”

“We can think while we build,” said Alex.

“No. Think first and then build,” Emily countered. “Is the prototype working yet?”

Ah, the fundamental question. “We broke it this morning,” Alex admitted. “But the idea is there.”

She nodded, half entranced with his scheme. Bold, broad-ranging, category-busting. “The idea is fantastic.”

Alex bounced the Ping-Pong ball too hard, and it popped off the edge of his paddle, but he was quick and made the save. “Work with me, then.”

She wanted to. She wanted to give him free rein, but prudence prevented her. Her instinct was to distrust his instincts.

“You need to present this idea formally to the Board.”

“We’ll see,” said Alex.

“Say you will, or I’ll do it for you.”

He bristled. “You aren’t presenting anything for me.”

She turned away, then, so he couldn’t see her smile. He was arrogant, but she’d manage him. His idea had so much potential!

As she took the stairs down to the third floor, her imagination leaped ahead. If Alex let go of his surveillance model, his techniques could be employed in new, more sensitive search engines. His idea of fingerprinting could have applications for passwords. What if Veritech went into password verification? Yes! She would name Alex’s new password authentication system Verify. Emily stopped on the stairs and almost laughed. Deliberate in everything she said and did in public, she had a passion for new schemes.

She hoped she could talk seriously to Alex that weekend. The day before the IPO, she was hosting Sunday brunch, an event that impressed Jess as very formal and old-school.

“You have such a sense of propriety!” said Jess, who’d come early to help shop and set up.

“It’s not propriety,” Emily replied, as they browsed the melons at the Farmers’ Market in Stanford Shopping Center. “It’s just …”

“What?”

“Doing the right thing at the right time.”

“There you go,” said Jess. “That’s what propriety is. You don’t even realize you’re doing it. You’re a throwback.”

“To what?”

Jess considered this. Hi-tech at work, Emily was paradoxically old-fashioned in her life. She didn’t even own a television. “The nineteenth century,” Jess concluded. “No. Eighteenth. You can be eighteenth. I’ll be nineteenth.”

“I never pictured you as a Victorian.”

“No,
early
nineteenth century,” said Jess, who had always been a stickler when it came to imaginary games and books. The Blue Fairy, not Tinker Bell. Lucy, not Susan. Jo, not Amy. Austen, not the Brontës.

“Focus.” Emily considered the bins of cantaloupes and casabas.

“Let’s buy one of everything,” said Jess.

“That’s too much.”

“You can afford it! You’re going to be a millionaire tomorrow.”

“Shh. No, I’m not.” Still, Emily’s heart fluttered. Even with the six-month lockup, even with the volatile market, she had three million shares of Veritech.

Jess gazed at the apples arranged in all their colors: russet, blushing pink, freckled gold. She cast her eyes over heaps of pumpkins, bins of tomatoes cut from the vine, pale gooseberries with crumpled leaves. “You could buy a farm.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To be healthy,” said Jess.

Emily shook her head. “I don’t think I’d be a very good farmer.”

“You could have other people farm your farm for you,” said Jess. “And you could just eat all the good things.”

Emily laughed. “That’s what we’re doing here at the Farmers’ Market. We’re paying farmers to farm for us. You’ve just invented agriculture.”

“Yes, but you could have your own farm and go out there and breathe the fresh air and touch the fresh earth.”