The Source of the Soul

By CeCe Rubin

A mother's comforting words to her son sets off a journey through time and souls. As Hannah listens to Ezra's story, she's unaware that their family's legacy is deeply connected with the divine.

Readers are taken back to the Snyder family's rise from humble beginnings in Poland to a new life in New York. Through generations, the story follows spiritual beings navigating their earthly existence.

Hannah's life, forever connected with her husband Ira's family, reflects the struggle between free will and divine purpose, as they each seek to fulfill their celestial mission.

An exploration of Kabbalistic secrets, mysticism and love, CeCe Rubin's THE SOURCE OF THE SOUL will leave readers contemplating the eternal battle between good and evil, and the promise of a more peaceful era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Jun 5, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1

Buddha

The evening stroll was going well, and my usually rambunctious three-year-old quietly walked by my side, holding my hand. The sun was setting behind the rows of corn on the farm road where we walked every evening after dinner during the Summer so we could watch the lightning bugs illuminating conversation with each other.

My son tightened his grip on my hand looking up at me. I have a question, he said. Go ahead, honey, I answered, fully expecting a request for ice cream before bed.

Ezra’s facial expression turned serious. Is it ok for me to believe in Buddha? Aren't we Jewish? he asked.

Ezra's words startled me. Up to that point, his interests ran the usual gamut of a three-year-old: children's books, Sesame Street, Barney the Purple Dinosaur, and following his step brothers everywhere they went during their visits on alternating weekends. "Why do you think you believe in Buddha? I asked. Ezra stopped walking and let go of my hand. He looked down and kicked at the rocks on the dirt road.

We stood there facing each other as if that moment had been long coming.

I am afraid you will be mad at me, he said, his big brown eyes welling up with tears.

I kneeled down and hugged my worried little boy. He threw his hands around my neck, holding onto me. His little body shuddered as I waited for him to calm down.

What is the matter, Ezra? Did you get scared by something? I thought about all the Asian-themed cartoons and video games his stepbrothers enjoyed watching and playing. Ezra was allowed to watch as long as they were E-rating. That must be it, I thought, relieved to have found a simple explanation for my little boy's strange question.

Ezra took a deep breath, stepping away from me. He spoke tiredly and matter-of-factly. When I was an emperor, I believed in Buddha. I wasn't a good person, Mom. I hurt and killed many people, and one day, my soldiers killed me in an alley. Ok, that caught me by surprise.

Ezra… were you watching a grown-up movie? I asked.

Ezra looked at me. He held my hand and pulled me along to start walking again. No, Momma, I keep remembering my life before I was your son.

What? I asked, stopping to look at Ezra’s serious expression.

Mommie, are you mad? he asked.

No, honey, I am not mad. Did either one of your brothers tell you this? I asked.

I had been aware of my husband's son from his first marriage relentlessly teasing of Ezra whenever I or the nanny wasn’t around. My husband never intervened, even when Ezra was brought to tears by Nathan's latest prank or tease. Ezra would seek refuge with my son from my first marriage, Adam, who would bring a crying Ezra to me. Adam was a typical five-year-old, uninterested in babysitting his little half-brother, but unlike Nathan, Adam was kind and nurturing to Ezra.

On one occasion, Adam ran to my room and pulled me by the arm into the basement where Ezra had followed Nathan, who had lured him by telling him he had a surprise. Nathan had lit a candle telling Ezra to touch the flame. I came in time to stop Nathan, who pulling Ezra's hand towards the flame.

I screamed and Nathan let go of Ezra's hand. He looked at me expressionless and turned to Ezra to say, See, you are a baby. Now you can't watch movies or play with me. Nathan ran upstairs as I held Ezra until he calmed down. Adam stayed and comforted Ezra, telling him that he could watch movies in his room whenever he wanted to, and that was enough to get Ezra to stop crying.

I spoke with my husband that night about the incident in the basement. Ira went into Nathan's room and told him to stay away from fire and matches, that he could have accidentally set the house on fire. Nothing was said about Nathan's disturbing behavior towards Ezra.

In another incident, Nathan pushed the barely ambling Ezra into traffic as we walked home one Summer night after getting ice cream at a local shop. My husband told Nathan to be more careful with his baby brother. After that incident, I insisted on being present at all the outings that my husband would take Nathan and Ezra together. My son Adam stayed away from Ira since the incident that had led to a change in custody. Adam went to live with his father and visited me on alternate weekends.

Ezra and I walked up the long driveway. Antique lamp posts illuminated the way to the estate built by Ezra's grandparents on the highest hill on the Abington property.

Ezra stopped and lifted his arms, asking me to carry him. I picked him up, kissing his chubby cheeks. He put his head on my shoulder and twirled a lock of my hair as we walked home.

I found out I was pregnant with Ezra one week before my husband and I left for a vacation to Egypt and Israel. My husband was appalled by the news. His facial expression hardened his chest, heaving from a sudden coughing fit that turned into an intermittent cough every few seconds, as it always happened when Ira was stressed. Not this again, he said. We were being so careful. He stood up and left for his study, slamming the door behind him.

The news of my pregnancy shattered Ira's plans for his future as the father of one. His statement not this again referred to the surprise pregnancy during our first months of courtship. The pregnancy was terminated after a family meeting where Ira's father demanded the issue be resolved to avoid a scandal and embarrassment in their prominent social circles. Before leaving on our scheduled trip to Egypt and Israel, Ira told me in no uncertain terms that I was to terminate the pregnancy as soon as we returned home.

On that trip, startling events changed the courses of our lives. It was the beginning of the extraordinary and, at times, heartbreaking and horrifying events I memorialized in these pages.

I remember thinking as I walked with Ezra back home that his comments about being a bad person who hurt people had to do with the cellular memory that Ezra had retained from his father's rejection of him and my desperate fight for his survival. Ezra had been very consistent regarding his personal preferences from the time he was an infant. He would nurse while holding a lock of my long hair. After he was done nursing, he would suck his thumb with a piece of my hair wrapped around it, preventing me from leaving without kicking up a major fuss.

Ira called Ezra's bond to me enerving. Ira began to spend time with Ezra by the time he started to walk. Ira was uninterested in Ezra as an infant and was often irritated by his cry.

Ira started to spend time with Ezra when he would sit on the sofa quietly watching his favorite shows on TV. I had to remain seated on the sofa during my husband's parallel interactions with little Ezra, like a perpetual referee between two rivals for my attention. Ezra seemed perfectly content until I attempted to leave the room.

Ezra would run after me. His little face had a panicked look that would disappear as soon as I entered his field of vision.

I made an appointment with Ezra's pediatrician to discuss his clingy behavior; the doctor dismissed my concerns and told me, Ezra is a bright child who prefers your company at this time in his development. I wanted to tell the doctor how Ira and Ezra's interactions were awkward and appeared steeped in mutual mistrust. However, I knew the pediatrician wouldn't have an answer and would probably think I was overprotective of my youngest son.

Ira had arranged our lives to be organized and predictable, dictated by his needs and interests.

Ira was approaching 40 when I fell pregnant with Ezra. Ira was enraged. He wanted his freedom. Having a child meant disruption, noise, and neediness of my time, which meant less attention to Ira's needs.

My role in our marriage was to keep myself as thin as possible to fit the standards of beauty of his ultra-rich and influential social circle and to quench the fat phobia he had inherited from his father. I was also in charge of the social calendar, where I had to keep detailed planning for the weekends when we would go on double dates with couples from his social circle, as well as attend the many social and business functions we were invited to throughout the year.

Ira was as strict with his weight as he was with mine. He ate a diet of meat and fish boiled or grilled without a vestige of fat or condiments, boiled vegetables, and salad with dressing on the side.

Another one of my responsibilities was to ensure that Ira was served the right foods only at all functions we attended and at home. I would start the day sitting with Ira at the breakfast table where I would read the proposed menu for the day as well as my plans for the day as Ira insisted that every second be accounted for with activities he felt were worthwhile.

Ira worked out daily three times a week. He had a very muscular personal trainer come to our home. I was expected to participate in the training sessions and later join Ira for a massage and sauna, followed by a shower and brisk lovemaking.

Ira would leave for his office around 11:00 AM and would return home in the evening. Adam, my five-year-old son from my first marriage, and Nathan, Ira's four-year-old son from his first marriage, would join us at the dinner table during their alternating weekend visits to our home.

Ira was happy with this arrangement and would exchange a few words with my son at dinner before giving the boys the ok to leave the table, wishing both good night. They would disappear into their separate but interconnected bedrooms, where they had a great variety of books, toys, and train sets, and as they grew, their beloved TV sets and the latest in video game systems.

When they were little, Adam and Nathan would wait for me to tuck them in with story time and cuddles after Ira had gone to his study, where he enjoyed solitude and a cigar. I could hear Adam and Nathan talking to each other through the open door that connected their rooms once they were sure that Ira had fallen asleep and they were free to chat without having Ira charge into their rooms demanding that they stop fooling around and go to sleep.

I was expected to be in bed by Ira's side as soon as he lay down for the night. He made love to me three times a week aside from the massage and sauna occasions. He hurried through the act, looking at the wall or at the ceiling unless he was angry. Anger and my fearful expression were his aphrodisiac. This side of Ira was not known to me while we dated. He was assertive and a bit demanding, which I interpreted as a sign of his interest in me.

I would wait by his side every night until he was fast asleep, and I would then get up quietly and leave the room for my studio at the back of the mansion. I would draw, paint, and dance to classical music or Rock and Roll. The night would pass quickly, and I would return to bed at the first signs of the sun rising, sleeping a few hours before getting up with Ira to eat breakfast together when he would give me the list of tasks he expected me to accomplish and give listen with perpetual disapproval of my plans for the day.

Chapter 2

Me

Iwas born in the lower-middle-class Boston neighborhood of Dorchester and named Hannah after my maternal grandmother.

My father left the family soon after my mother announced they were expecting a child. My mother described him as a tall, muscular delivery man from the Little Italy neighborhood. They had dated for a short time before she became pregnant. I had never met him or seen photographs of him.

I grew up fantasizing about my father and the reasons for his departure from our lives.

Having never seen him, I was free to create an image in my mind. He often would look like a combination of a super-tall Al Pacino and Sylvester Stalone, and at times Ken, Barbie's boyfriend. I told fantastic stories about my father's secret missions as an FBI agent to the kids at my school and in my neighborhood. One day, I came up with a story that I felt was more believable: my father was a great magician who had gotten lost in the universe after his disappearing trick had gone wrong.

My mother's parents had immigrated to America from Europe, landing on Ellis Island and moving to Boston, where they had found work in a factory. My mother's childhood was lonely; she was the only child of overworked parents who tried but never succeeded in speaking English properly. This handicap kept them from gaining traction in attaining better-paying jobs, remaining in the insular immigrant community where they felt comfortable despite their poverty.

My mother had an exotic beauty, accentuated by her love of makeup. She became very popular in school and her neighborhood, where she met my father. My grandparents were against my mother marrying my father, who was a gentile. They didn't have to worry about it as my father disappeared from my mother's life as soon as he learned of my existence. She never knew his address, and he must have changed his delivery route because she never saw him again.

My mother's out-of-wedlock pregnancy was seen as disgraceful, and before she started showing her growing belly, she was sent to live with a distant cousin until I was born.

She grew tired of the cousin and his wife's disapproving looks shot at her growing belly and the awkward silence during dinners. She soon found a job and a tiny government-subsidized apartment where she brought me up with the help of the many neighbors she befriended.

My grandparents passed away within months of each other by the time I was two years old. Their bodies were weary from backbreaking work and poor nutrition, which left them vulnerable to chest infections, ultimately leading to pneumonia and death.

My childhood and adolescence were spent in benevolent neglect as my mother attempted to marry a wealthy man. She worked as a bartender at a popular restaurant, carefully fielding offers from the many single and married men who frequented the bar. Despite my mother's evident ease that allowed her to freely enter into sexual relationships with men, she refused to discuss the topic with me. This left my sexual education to books, my friends, and perverted old men in the building complex who would, at times, expose themselves or show unsuspecting children pornographic pictures from worn magazines they kept rolled up in their back pockets.

Chapter 3

Adam

My mother had multiple lovers who never intended to marry her and adopt me. As the years passed, I could see my mother's beauty waning, which seemed to coincide with the disappearance of her suitors, leaving my mother in a constant state of anger and regret.

At that time, I had graduated high school and received a full scholarship to a prestigious art program at The Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

I shared an apartment with two roommates in town while attending college. We became inseparable, and our friendship remained steadfast throughout the years. Schoolwork was easy for me.

I enjoyed partying and dating the men who came to our parties from other universities around town where the women's pool wasn't as abundant as it was in my school.

I would enter into intense relationships and feel that each of these men was the one. My boyfriends were careful to use condoms most of the time. I assessed each unexpected pregnancy as a heavenly sign of approval of the relationship. It is meant to be, I would tell myself until it wasn't. The rejection and loss left me feeling like damaged goods and worthless.

In reality, as I learned much later at the therapist’s office, I was reenacting the abandonment I witnessed of my mother’s multiple ill-fated relationships and my father's disappearance early on in my childhood. Despite being intelligent and artistic, I was unable to see my worth. I was a mess.

I met Seth in my senior year. He was tall and handsome in a nerdy way. He took me to meet his family on our second date. We traveled to their cottage in one of the small islands around Portland, Maine.

The cottage was a mansion perched on a lot overlooking the ocean. His parents had the measured warmth of the very wealthy. That weekend the cottage was at total capacity, with several family members that had come for the weekend.

The property caretakers would cook all the meals and serve them. They made sure that the bedrooms had fresh linens, that the bathrooms were fully stocked with fluffy towels, and that all the canoes and kayaks were lined up at the beach with more towels and lounge chairs set up facing the ocean and the beach volleyball net. A drink caddy was rolled to the beach with alcoholic beverages, snacks, juices, and spring water.

A 38-foot live-aboard boat was used to cross the short distance to Portland, where the whole family would go out for lobster dinners after shopping at the quaint stores in town.

Seth introduced me to a world of opulence and privilege I had never experienced before. We got engaged three months later and married six months after I became pregnant with Adam.

Seth's family invited us for a weekend at their other mansion in the beautiful town of Cape Elizabeth after learning of my pregnancy and our plans to marry each other. We arrived on a Friday for lunch. Afterward, Seth walked with me to his father's study, where I was introduced to the family's attorney and another attorney hired by the family to represent me in signing a voluminous pre-nuptial agreement.

I was not concerned with the document's content and signed it even as my assigned attorney read through his copy before giving me his opinion. Despite my insecurities, I was in awe of finding someone who wouldn't get away. I was in love with Seth. I adored his quirky character and his even-keeled disposition of someone who has never known any real danger to his emotional or physical well-being.

His needs and wants would materialize in his life in equal measure, a fact that should have been a warning that his needs and desires would require a constant stream of women to indulge his appetite for novelty and sex.

Adam was two years old when I found myself looking for the phone number of the same attorney representing me on the signing of the pre-nuptial agreement. I had grown tired of Seth's escapades with other women that would sometimes last for an entire weekend.

He would play with Adam for a short time, quickly losing interest in our son's attempts at conversation about his favorite topic, Thomas the Tank Engine. We would eat dinner together, and Seth would excuse himself from the table to go out with his fraternity brothers for their weekly game of poker, or he would inform me of needing to attend an urgent meeting.

I confronted Seth one early morning as he returned from his late-night meeting. Seth was very matter-of-fact regarding his infidelity, telling me that all men in my family do it. He suggested I get a hobby or even open a business of my own. He smiled and petted me on the head before falling asleep by my side.

I met with the attorney who had looked again into the pre-nuptial agreement I had signed. He agreed to represent me in a divorce action, and he informed me that due to the short length of my marriage and several clauses contained in the iron-clad prenup, I will exit the marriage the same way I had entered it, with nothing other than child support for Adam.

We divorced nine months later. I found a job in sales at a trendy gallery on Newbury Street. Adam attended a great nursery near my work. Life went on, and I struggled with paying bills in Boston, New England's most expensive town, while reeling over history repeating itself as my little boy experienced his father's disappearing act.

Adam's paternal grandparents adored him, and he spent many weekends in their family home, occasionally seeing his father for a few minutes before he left again. Adam would stay at his paternal grandparents’ home whenever Ira whisked me away on another impromptu business trip or vacation. Ira's son Nathan from his first marriage and Adam were not expected to attend these trips.

Chapter 4

The Family Fortune

CJ Senior, Ira's grandfather, started the journey into his privileged life in a modest home in Vilnius, Poland, in a world no longer in existence where faith and persecution went hand in hand.

CJ Senior's father, Pinek Snyder, was born and raised in Vilnius. Pinek worked with his father in their busy tailor shop, where he met Bessie Weiss, who was hired to assist at his parents’ shop. Bessie's father and grandfather had been renowned Jewish scholars, serving as religious leaders at the Vilnius Shar Hatzedek synagogue and teachers at the religious school. Bessie started working as an apprentice dressmaker at the Snyder's shop to supplement her family's income which had dwindled as the acts of anti-Semitism grew, shifting the Jewish population from one town to another as they searched for safety and peace.

Pinek would watch Bessie from behind the row of suits lined up in their wood hangers. Bessie would walk around the shop, swaying her hips while pretending not to notice Pinek's gaze. She would stand on her toes to reach for the hat boxes on the top shelf, causing her dress to hike up a little, showing her toned calves and eliciting loud sighs from behind the suits where Pinek hid. His father would smack him playfully, telling him to pay attention to his work.

Four months after Bessie started to work at his parents’ shop, a meeting was arranged by Pinek's father at Bessie's parents’ home to discuss the matter of betrothal and marriage. Their besotted children could no longer hide their love for each other, causing considerable disruption at the shop.

Pinek and Bessie Snyder started their married life in the upstairs apartment near the Snyder tailor shop. They made love with great abandon, enjoying each other physically and intellectually.

Bessie was a natural storyteller and would entertain Pinek with stories she heard while hiding under the stairs at the religious school where her grandfather was a teacher. They discussed philosophy and the commentaries from distinguished scholars in the study of the Bible.

Their happiness vanished as the death sounds could be heard outside their window. The Vilnius pogrom lasted three days. The looting and murder of families and friends were carried out by hordes of Polish army soldiers in a vicious attack on the unarmed, religious population. During the ethnic riots in Poland and Ukraine during