The Rabbi’s Daughter   

Chapter 1

From a young age, I learned that Abba didn’t just belong to us, but to everyone in the neighborhood who needed a rav. Sometimes it felt like the whole neighborhood had Abba’s number. Rarely did we make it more than a few seconds after Havdalah without his phone beeping with another sh’eilah, another situation, another emergency. When we’d sit with him — to do homework, to learn together, for guidance — he’d flip his phone over and ignore the messages, but I could hear the buzz, the little vibration against the table that signified another question for him.

Today, his phone is clipped to his belt as we crawl through the attic. It’s a low-ceilinged room, tall only at the center where the roof arcs upward, and there are so many boxes stacked throughout that it’s a bit of an obstacle course. I’d offered to sort out the attic myself, but Abba refused. He takes a savage kind of pleasure in throwing out old things, buried in the attic because one of us (Ima, always Ima) couldn’t bear to throw out a useless, forgotten memento.

Now, though, the attic must be emptied. My parents are moving to Eretz Yisrael. I push aside a box of clothing that’s marked “Boys two to three years” — my parents haven’t had a three-year-old boy in three decades — and squint at the next box. It isn’t labeled, and I have to open it to see what’s inside. Manila folders, carefully organized and stacked in the precise way I know must mean they’re Abba’s. “Hey, check this out.”

Abba scoots a little closer. I glimpse his phone for an instant before he tucks it away. Should be fine. Just rinse before adding to the soup, says the last message he types, and I breathe a sigh of relief on behalf of whichever hapless cook just made a kashrus mistake. “Look at this. Are these old lawyer files?”