He’d said the same thing when she decided to get a Masters in philosophy. They were in the kitchen. Her mother was ironing, her father looked out the window at the boys running after each other in the park. “Why philosophy?” he asked. Her mother listened.

“I could teach,” Rachel said.

“Do you want to?” her father asked.

“No.”

“Then why?” he asked. Then said again, “Do me the kindness to explain.”

This time she could tell him why, and she told them about one night . . . one night only . . . that decided her. She was studying Hegel’s lectures on history, all alone in her room before exams. Everyone slept, except her, and she read the words over and over and thought they could have been broadcast from another planet for all the sense they made to her. Yet she kept trying. Defying the language that wouldn’t be understood, defying her adviser who said Hegel was very difficult for women, defying Hegel himself, who’d probably hated women and Jews, and she was both. Good. She’d beat him; she’d make sense out of the stilted German-­into-­English if she sat there until she was an old woman. She read commentaries and explanations. She read the notes she’d taken at Adam Levy’s lectures. His lectures were wonderful and if Levy were there, talking only to her, he’d make her understand. Then she was glad he wasn’t; she wanted to do it on her own. She went back to the words themselves. She paced the apartment and had a shot of her father’s brandy. Then she went back to her desk and started again. The text, the commentaries, the notes, and suddenly, as if he were in the same room with her, she heard Adam Levy’s soft voice with its faint accent.

“Hegel is about relationships,” he was saying. “He tells us how things relate not only to the elements that give them character, like the sugar in a sugar bowl; but also to all the things they are not. A sugar bowl relates to a cream pitcher by not being a cream pitcher. Thus in some sense it incorporates the idea of a cream pitcher. He goes further. . . .” She remembered how Adam’s eyes shone as he explained to them. “He says that the seed of the tree contains all its processes, germination, growth, maturity, death, decay; but he says even more.” He looked right at Rachel then. “That same seed also contains all the things it will never be. That seed, by being the seed of a tree and not of a flower, encompasses the idea of flower. . . . In other words . . .”

In other words . . .