num_pages: 272
description: Isaac, 43, a haberdasher, has led a life of “almosts” – almost getting married, almost becoming a rabbi, almost starting a school of his own. After his mother dies, he leaves the Lower East Side and moves to Jerusalem, where he ends up as an assistant to an elderly kabbalist and his wife who daily minister to the seekers who gravitate to their courtyard.One day on an errand, Isaac happens upon Mustafa, an Arab janitor who works on the Temple Mount, holy to both Jews and Muslims. Mustafa suffers from an extreme case of torticollis – his head is turned painfully and permanently to one side. He has been cast out of his own village – a mutant – unloved even by his own mother.Somehow, the luckless haberdasher from the Lower East Side has finally managed to heal someone’s wounded spirit, in this case, Mustafa, and the two men enter into an intense and fraught friendship.Though rejected by his family, Mustafa longs to return and be respected by his village. Isaac yearns to find his place, in the courtyard (where he is forever the assistant), and in the romantic realm (he goes out on innumerable blind dates to seek a wife), and is thwarted on both counts by his own anxieties and memories of past betrayals. When a beautiful young woman in the courtyard, Tamar, becomes electrified with feeling for Isaac, he is too frightened and prudish to respond.Mustafa, wishing to return Isaac’s kindness, finds an ancient shard on the Temple Mount whose value may exceed anyone’s imagination, and brings it to Isaac in gratitude. That gesture sets in a motion a series of unexpected events that land Isaac in the company of Israel’s worst criminal riff raff, put Mustafa in mortal danger, even as Tamar struggles to save them both.
language: English
title: In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist
publisher: NYRB LIT