Abraham Hochman, or “Professor Hochman,” as he styled himself, was a clairvoyant on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century. His specialty was locating truant husbands, and he used a proprietary divination method involving counting out handfuls of peas or nuts, asking questions about one's life, and consulting gems, planets, and heroes of the Tanach for the answers. We will learn more about this unusual oracle and use his supremely nutty method of soothsaying, as outlined in the 1909 volume "Der shlisl tsu der nevue" (The Key to Prophecy), to answer questions about our own mysterious destinies.

Open to all with an open mind.

Mikhl Yashinsky is a writer, singer-actor, Yiddish lecturer and translator. Born in Detroit, educated at Harvard, currently living in New York City. His original Yiddish play, “The Gospel According to Chaim,” was recognized as the first new full-length Yiddish-language drama produced professionally in the United States for many decades and “jolted the repertoire with a work that is both traditional and delightfully subversive” (Forward). Performed with National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in the Yiddish-language “Fiddler on the Roof” directed by Joel Grey, “Amid Falling Walls,” and “The Sorceress,” a New York Times "Critic's Pick," in which Mikhl brought a “keen, if malevolent, psychology” to the title role (NYT). Research for that role, the witch Bobe Yakhne, led Yashinsky to begin examining and teaching Ashkenazic occult practices, both those practiced in the shtetlekh of Eastern Europe as well as on the Lower East Side — and will be presenting a historical divination method gleaned from this research at this lecture-demonstration.