When he was young the forests around Krakow were full of deer. Cabalists were everywhere then, and prophets cried through the village streets, like men with pushcarts, that the Messiah was on his way—the prophets were thin and ragged, as if no one would believe a prosperous man. But the Cabalists wore fur and shiny coats to their ankles. Some of them were fakes who said they could tell the future, cast spells, heal the sick, but some, like Aaron Levy, his father, were mystics who studied, meditated, and said that God emanated and that they could receive the emanations, be bathed in them, feel ecstasy from them. Aaron Levy would kneel for hours alone in the dark or with one candle in the room—meditating down the tree, he explained, from Kether to Malkuth. But his son Jacob liked people and by the time he was seven he had memorized the six hundred thirteen laws in the Torah and by the time he was twenty he knew the Talmud and its commentaries well enough to be consulted as a judge by the people of the village. Jacob didn’t care about the world and about people, not about Zohar, Gematria, the Sefirot, or whether God in his infinite nothingness had gotten out of the way to make space for the universe. “You’re not a mystic,” his father told him sadly. Levy agreed. But when the Germans declared war on Poland and crossed the border, Aaron Levy took his son to a shtetl near Sosnowiec to see the most famous cabalist in Poland. “In the world,” his father told him. The old man lived four miles out of town on a lonely road that was just wide enough for the cart they borrowed. One room of the little house had only three walls; the fourth was open to the forest and the old man was in that room with the April wind blowing his caftan and beard. He sat on the packed dirt floor, in front of an unlit fireplace, and for the first few minutes they were there, he stared at the cold hearth without greeting them. Levy took a step, but his father restrained him. “He knows we’re here,” Aaron told his son, and Levy and his father waited while the wind blew everything around. There was a thin book on the floor next to the old man; the wind blew it open and ruffled the pages, and, as if that were a signal, the old man turned and looked at them.