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 stor, y 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 Two Living in the low rent district of radicalized lower Manhattan where Naphtali obsesses over the mystical text of the Zohar is forced to look for employment and stability amid the constantly changing rhythm of America's most rejected, where light refracts from the broken glass shards of shattered souls scattered along the sidewalks, littered with irredeemable lives of the rejected and the unwanted. Within the darkness of exile, Naphtali's Jewish light begins to shine. The lives of Yaakov, a mystical holocaust survivor, and Willow, the young woman who comes to his rescue, are explored and elucidated.