Naphtali is twenty years old when forced to leave his home in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn conclave where he grew up practicing the most stringent type of orthodox Jewish life, and is suddenly transported to Greenwich Village in 1970, which was also the year Carbon 14's half-life of 5730 was attained. How these two disparate facts coincide and meld together is the background to this five-volume series of novels ending in the year 2020. Alphabet City is a drug-ridden, poverty-stricken bastion of creative fervor and abstract depravity. For fifty years, Naphtali lives in Alphabet City, marries, has a child, and tries to change the world along with his Russian friend Boris and Iraqi compatriot Walid, who runs the coffee shop. Willow threads her way throughout the story, spanning decades, ending in Heaven. Alphabet City in Lower Manhattan is the purview from where fifty years of world history take on a spiritual perspective.
The Rebbe of Alphabet City-Part One. The two thousand years of Roman rule over the Earth, during which time the Jewish People were commanded by the Creator to bring light into the world, but instead became religious. In 1970, when twenty-year-old Naphtali, while awaiting his arranged marriage, was visited with tragedy, a fissure in creation happened. Naphtali is forced to radically change his life by moving from Brooklyn across the Williamsburg Bridge to the outskirts of Greenwich Village at the zenith of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, inviting his soul to shine forth. He will spend a lifetime in Alphabet City, and this is his story