She found the bus stop for Mahane Yehuda, the open-air market on Jaffa Road. She asked the driver to indicate to her where she should get off. The other passengers overheard. At her stop, Jewish grandmothers were gesturing to her in Hebrew, Russian, French, Spanish, and English that it was time for her to descend. She followed the others off the bus and watched as they fanned out through both the narrow covered stalls entirely full of shoppers and the wider outdoor area separating the two sections. She smelled fresh bread and saw a young Arab boy carrying stacks of pita on a wooden tray on his head, selling them ten in a plastic bag, which had condensation on it from the warmth of their freshness. She saw a booth that sold only spices, all with gorgeous colors: the deep rust of paprika, the bright yellow of turmeric, the fragrant green of basil and oregano, arrayed in large conical piles which the merchant scooped and weighed. There was one kiosk with just halvah, a sesame seed candy that came in a dazzling assortment of flavors: espresso, peanut butter, pistachio, and chocolate. She saw every kind of kosher fish available in Israel, arranged carefully on ice to keep it fresh. Other stalls had dried rice and beans, or all kinds of teas, salads, and meats.
Everywhere she could hear vendors hawking their wares, screaming loudly, “Avatiach, hamesh shekel! Avatiach le’kvod shabbat.” She paused to look around, and one of the merchants beckoned to her and offered a taste of watermelon, avatiach. She bought half a melon to satisfy him, placed it in her backpack, and immediately regretted having bought the heaviest item first. She passed a store with delicious-looking salads of all kinds in a freestanding refrigerated display case and ordered a number of them. When she finished ordering, she handed over her money, holding up fingers for the number of bills the vendor requested. Walking away, she did the monetary conversion and realized she had spent almost forty bucks, a large sum for her student budget. She turned to the right to one of the many alleyways inside the shuk and found a group of stores all selling housewares. She purchased a spaghetti pot, a soup pot, a frying pan, and two plates, two cups, and silverware for less money than she paid for the salads.
She went back outside, somehow finding the way through the winding alleys of the narrow shuk, all leading to the wide area between the two sides of the market, and looked for a bakery to get something to bring to dinner tonight with the cousin of her friend Leora from Princeton. She spotted the bakery with the longest line and figured it must be the best. She was usually impatient waiting in line, but somehow the smells emanating from inside the store, and the anticipation she felt seeing customers exit with looks of pronounced satisfaction on their faces, relaxed her. Her usual frustration with waiting in line was her feeling that she was doing nothing; now she was listening to the Hebrew around her, absorbing the atmosphere. On her turn to order, she chose entirely by visual cues, pointing at the items she wanted and holding up her fingers to indicate the amount.
Walking back to the bus stop on Rehov Yaffo, Wendy reflected on how much more satisfying this experience was than a trip to an ordinary American grocery store. At the shuk, all the food is on display; there is no layer of artificiality, plastic wrap or anything else, between seller and consumer. She remembered her grandmother Essie saying that when the A and P supermarket first opened, she was positive it would be a huge financial flop because no one would be willing to pay more for lettuce with plastic on it. Maybe that was the difference between America and Israel—people were willing to pay for barriers between themselves and their food, to obstruct their encounter with sources of nourishment.
At Mahane Yehuda, the smells of the fresh pita and spices and the alluring look of all the fresh foods enticed Wendy to spend much more than she had planned. Would this too be a metaphor for the rest of her year, becoming sucked in to something she hadn’t known about, released from her usual level of detachment from ordinary things of life like food? Would she be pulled in unexpected ways to things she hadn’t anticipated?
She liked the lack of pretense in the market, the obviousness of vendors yelling for customers, the pushing and shoving of the crowds of Friday morning shoppers trying to get the best bargains. Even if she didn’t celebrate Sabbath, it was her Jewish culture, not Sunday, emphasized as a day of rest here. She’d never thought about being excluded by Sunday, but now that she was here, she liked this activity filled, errand-doing Friday. Wendy found her bus stop and successfully navigated her bags and bundles aboard the bus for the return trip, excited that she was able to recognize the corner stop of Rahel Emeinu and Emek Refaim.
Wendy now had a bit of time before she and her landlady, Amalia Hausman, would share a cab to Amalia’s granddaughter’s new apartment for a Shabbat evening meal. Wendy had heard about this apartment because Amalia was the great-aunt of her Princeton friend Leora, who facilitated the arrangement when Wendy wasn’t sure how to find a place to live. Amalia was in her seventies and had lived in Israel most of her life; she was fortunate in her birth to a German Jewish family astute enough to leave their fatherland for Israel in the early 1930s. Leora’s grandfather, Amalia’s brother, had lit out for the States as a young man, met an American woman, and raised his family there. Leora had told Wendy the story about her great-grandfather, Amalia’s father, who owned a silver factory. One day, he was asked to put a Nazi flag up over his property. He told his wife the time had come to leave, and they did, in 1933. Neither Amalia’s father nor her mother had other close relatives who survived. Wendy and Leora were both fascinated with alternate possibilities and spent hours discussing what if: Would either of them have known when to leave? What if Leora’s grandfather had remained in Israel? What if Wendy’s great-grandparents had stayed in Poland, not come to America? The speculation made Wendy realize that there are so many plausible ways in which anyone’s life could be completely different, something that she wanted to get her subjects to admit, but that many, with their belief that God was guiding them constantly, refused to.
After putting her groceries in the fridge and her pots on the shelves, Wendy had two hours before dinner at Shani’s. She decided to try to do some reading. She gazed at her bookshelf. Textual Soulmates: Professors on the Texts They Love, was an anthology purchased out of voyeurism and curiosity, to see whether there was still ardor and enthusiasm in the ranks of the tenured. That was something that worried her—would she retain her zest for a subject, any subject, over time, or would what started as passionate interest devolve into the chore of necessary deadlines and obligations, devoid of joy or thrill? Wendy had read a few of the essays by professors she knew and knew of, but, still, it was nice to be reminded that many professors do their work out of interest and love. Holding the volume, knowing it existed and was full of excitement for its topic, reassured her somehow. She wanted to love her work and to interest others in it, get them to love it as well.
She pulled her main dissertation advisor Cliff Conrad’s first book off the shelf. She had read it for a senior seminar at Columbia, and it inspired her to go to Princeton as his grad student. Legible Promises: American Transformations in Puritan Diaries and Sermons, 1636–1740 had won numerous awards and established Conrad’s career. Its title was a quote from Cotton Mather: “America is legible in [God’s] promises.” New England preachers saw America as a place to re-create the narrative of an errand into the wilderness of Israel by a chosen people. Her research, in the actual country of Israel, was studying members of the original elect people, also going voluntarily on their own mission of return. She felt both anxiety and excitement to know that Conrad was interested in her work for its extension of the lineage of his own, and hoped she was up to the responsibility of upholding his high standards of scholarship and writing.
Conrad’s serious work on American religion at the beginning of his career had marked him as a maverick. His advisors had encouraged him, but they didn’t share his interest in American religion as a subject worth a major study, particularly for a dissertation and first book. It was thought at Yale’s religion department in the sixties, the time he was working on his dissertation, that to develop a body of work of any stature one must work with some kind of philosophical phenomenon, preferably something involving lots of German, which would lend an imprimatur of heft and gravity to even the most trivial of subjects. There was still the attitude that American religious thinkers were