This plot continues up to our present day, in Israel and America, where some of post-war Europe's Jewish remnants are also remaking their lives through the international diamond trade, and not always righteously. These sections depict a plethora of the criminal and grisly but to truly understand these historical narratives, the reader must understand the title, Zaddik, a Hebrew term referring to a righteous community leader who dispenses justice to his people. But the Hebrew term has always implied a group of Hebrew words that describe the unrighteous and unjust in a community, and only when these meanings are understood, does Rosenbaum's unique murder mystery reveal its depth and impact.
The novel opens with a graphic description of a psychopath called 'the Cutter' committing a grisly murder in New York City's diamond district to obtain the fabled gem. The murder victims are a diamond dealer and his secretary who belong to a Brooklyn Lubavitcher Hassidic congregation whose Zaddik teaches a class in Judaism open to all comers. One of these students is Dov Taylor, a former NYPD detective retired for enigmatic personal reasons, who is a recovering alcoholic staying sober only by faithful attendance at AA meetings. He works a security guard job and has only limited and superficial contact with his former NYPD colleagues. Divorced, he carries on superficial serial relationships with increasingly younger women whom he tries to treat pleasantly and with consideration at their eventual breakups.
As Dov scans a local paper before his Judaism class he sees an article about the recently murdered Diamond District pair. His first thought is relief that he is no longer a Detective working such horrible cases. But when another member of the class asks Dov to use his police contacts to assist the victims' Zaddik in the murder investigation, Dov reluctantly agrees. Through this connection, he forms a friendship with the Hassidic Zaddik's lovely daughter, a more worldly and independent young woman than her peers. But in learning that her father has arranged a marriage for her with the son of another Hassidic rabbi, Dov pulls back on their relationship, putting righteousness into practice in a small way. He also continues to pursue justice and even widens his investigation into the murder.
Then suddenly, in a one hundred page digression back in the middle of the book, we meet a second Zaddik, an l8th century community leader called 'the Seer' who is trapped with his bewildered, helpless congregants in the middle of a horrific Polish pogrom on a Jewish high holy day. The wisdom he dispenses is ambiguous and mysterious, though it seems to hark forward to the contemporary Diamond District murders that Dov is investigating. By the novel's end, Dov has done all he can, though it turns out there will be no solution to the actual crime, only an incomplete resolution. At the novel's end, however, improbably but fittingly, we discover through allusions to the Polish 'Seer' that Dov Taylor is himself, literally, if only genealogically the book's third Zaddik.
More Articles
- To Become a Citizen After Birth, You Must: Apply For “derived” or “acquired” Citizenship Through Parents; Apply for Naturalization
- Remarks by President Obama on Research for Potential Ebola Vaccine, December 02, 2014
- And Now For Something Completely Different: Daddy Long-Legs — A Weird and Wonderful Railway
- Weekly Legislative Update: Hearings Tuesday for Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and Improving Benefits for Underserved Veterans
- How Educated Are We? About 13.1 Percent Have a Master’s, Professional Degree or Doctorate; Number Doubles Since 2000
- Elevating the Conversation: How a New Message Helped Win the Fight for Same-sex Marriage
- The Whoppers of 2017: President Trump Monopolizes Fact-Check.org's List of the Year’s Worst Falsehoods and Bogus Claims.
- A Better Way Forward on Title IX Enforcement? Remarks by Education Secy Betsy DeVos at George Mason University
- EPA Chief Planning To Scrap an Obama-era Rule to Curb Discharges of Lead, Arsenic and Mercury from Power Plants Into Sources of Drinking Water
- Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll – August 2017: The Politics of ACA Repeal and Replace Efforts