The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1) by Joan Cochran (popular books of all time .txt) 📗

at the black metal tables and chairs on the plaza. Most are middle-aged or younger and show signs of sleeping rough. When a gray-bearded man approaches me for a handout, I give him a five. Living outdoors has to be tough on older people and I briefly catch his gaze before he mumbles his thanks.

It’s late August and the air’s sticky with humidity, but at nine in the morning the sun is too low on the horizon to cast its heat on the open plaza. It’ll be unbearable in a few hours when Miami’s furnace sun scorches its red and yellow tiles. I assume most of the people in the plaza will escape the heat under highway overpasses, where I’ve seen cardboard shelters.

The hushed sanctuary of the air conditioned library is a welcome relief from the humidity and I take my time mounting the gracefully-banistered wood and metal stairs to the second floor. Upstairs, the room that houses the Florida collection is cool and faintly lit by overhead chandeliers. I pass five long tables on which small lamps throw soft yellow light, and wonder if the men sitting there, some reading and some snoozing, come to this room to escape the heat. Rows of metal shelving stocked with books extend almost fifty feet from the wooden tables to the room’s windows.

I haven’t been here in years so I start by approaching the librarians at the wood-paneled enclosure in the middle of the room. A tall man in khakis and a dress shirt looks up as I draw near. He’s almost completely gray and has a full, neatly-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and moustache. Thick glasses distort his eyes into large orbs. I assume he’s a retiree, a senior citizen who volunteers at the library. But the sound of his “can I help you” stops me. He speaks with the deep timbre of a much younger man and I stare at him a second, experiencing an odd sensation. It’s as though a masked man has removed his disguise—his beard and thick glasses—to reveal the same face, but much younger.

It doesn’t take him long to catch on to what I need. He pulls a set of keys from the drawer and leads me to an enclosed room where the library keeps its rare book collection. I’ve always wanted to enter the library’s Fort Knox, to see books that are so valuable, so precious, they’re worth locking away. When the door to the small room clicks behind us, the bearded librarian pulls out three scrapbooks and a leather-bound tome. He lays them on an antique wooden table and announces he’ll check back in half an hour. Then he pulls the door shut.

Although the books that fill the walls are sequestered behind glass, the room emits a musty scent and I imagine each of the well-worn volumes releasing an aroma as distinct as that of an aged wine in a well-stocked cellar. I feel remarkably at peace in this inner sanctum with its carved wooden table and shelves of rare books and wander for a few minutes, glancing into the cases. None of the titles are familiar but there’s a sense of sacredness to the room. Perhaps it’s because these books are a testimony to the past, to the permanence of the written word and the value humans place on the preservation of knowledge. I settle into a chair, don a pair of white cheesecloth gloves from the box on the table, and begin my search.

This time I’m lucky. The recipes I find for baked, boiled, and stewed fish are unlike anything I’ve seen before. The most appealing come from a small brown scrapbook with recipes written in a delicate, spidery penmanship. I squint to read the small, faded words. I’ll need to do a bit more research to identify some of the ingredients, but it’ll be worth the effort for something so rare. I’m surprised by the number of recipes that involve fish, then recall that’s what was available in South Florida in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the region was being settled.

I’ve just finished jotting down the third recipe, this one for a kosher fish stew, when the librarian returns. I can tell from his placid smile that he knows I’ve found what I’m seeking. I gather up my notes and precede him out the door.

I’m about to ask the librarian if he has any books or ideas about researching criminal activities in Miami during the 1940s when I notice a stack of small boxes on a shelving cart outside the librarian’s station. They’re containers of microfilm. I haven’t seen those since I began searching the internet years ago. The uppermost box is labeled Miami News, 1950.

I turn to the librarian. “You can read the paper that far back?”

He reassures me I can. “But there’s no good way to search it,” he adds, “so you need some idea about when the story you want appeared.”

I think back to the conversation I had with my father about Fat Louie and to the Kefauver articles I found in the museum. I know it’s a long shot and that it’ll mean hunching over the microfilm machine for hours, but curiosity gets the better of me. I ask for the Miami News from 1948 to 1949. If my uncle testified at the hearings in 1951 and World War II ended in 1945, those would be likely years to find articles on him and, maybe, my dad. I make a trip to the ladies room, then settle in front of a microfilm machine with ten boxes of film.

My stomach is grumbling and my eyes ache but, two hours in, I’m no better off than when I started. It’s taking longer than it should to scroll through the blurred images of articles published more than a half century earlier; I can’t resist reading the occasional story. Nineteen forty-eight, it seems, was particularly eventful. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated and Israel declared its independence from Great Britain.

I move on, finding