by Rena Rossner
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Rena Rossner
Author photograph by Tomer Rottenberg
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover art by Rebecca Yanovskaya
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Redhook Books/Orbit
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10104
hachettebookgroup.com
Simultaneously published in Great Britain and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2018
First Edition: September 2018
Redhook is an imprint of Orbit, a division of Hachette Book Group.
The Redhook name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947892
ISBNs: 978-0-316-48325-4 (hardcover), 978-0-316-48329-2 (ebook)
E3-20180822-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1: Liba
2: Laya
3: Liba
4: Laya
5: Liba
6: Laya
7: Liba
8: Laya
9: Liba
10: Laya
11: Liba
12: Laya
13: Liba
14: Laya
15: Liba
16: Laya
17: Liba
18: Laya
19: Liba
20: Laya
21: Liba
22: Laya
23: Liba
24: Laya
25: Liba
26: Laya
27: Liba
28: Laya
29: Liba
30: Laya
31: Liba
32: Laya
33: Liba
34: Laya
35: Liba
36: Laya
37: Liba
38: Laya
39: Liba
40: Laya
41: Liba
42: Laya
43: Liba
44: Laya
45: Liba
46: Laya
47: Liba
48: Laya
49: Liba
50: Laya
51: Liba
52: Laya
53: Liba
54: Laya
55: Liba
56: Laya
57: Liba
58: Laya
59: Liba
60: Laya
61: Liba
62: Laya
63: Liba
64: Laya
65: Liba
66: Laya
67: Liba
68: Laya
69: Liba
70: Laya
71: Liba
72: Laya
73: Liba
74: Laya
75: Liba
76: Laya
77: Liba
78: Laya
79: Liba
80: Laya
81: Liba
82: Laya
83: Liba
84: Laya
85: Liba
86: Laya
87: Liba
88: Laya
89: Liba
90: Laya
91: Liba
Author’s Note
Glossary
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletters
In memory of Nettie Bunder z”l
(1921–2017)
who taught me all the Yiddish I know
Oif a meisseh fregt men kain kasheh nit.
(Don’t ask questions about fairy tales.)
—Yiddish saying
For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.
—Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market
1
Liba
If you want to know the history of a town, read the gravestones in its cemetery. That’s what my Tati always says. Instead of praying in the synagogue like all the other men of our town, my father goes to the cemetery to pray. I like to go there with him every morning.
The oldest gravestone in our cemetery dates back to 1666. It’s the grave I like to visit most. The names on the stone have long since been eroded by time. It is said in our shtetl that it marks the final resting place of a bride and a groom who died together on their wedding day. We don’t know anything else about them, but we know that they were buried, arms embracing, in one grave. I like to put a stone on their grave when I go there, to make sure their souls stay down where they belong, and when I do, I say a prayer that I too will someday find a love like that.
That grave is the reason we know that there were Jews in Dubossary as far back as 1666. Mami always said that this town was founded in love and that’s why my parents chose to live here. I think it means something else—that our town was founded in tragedy. The death of those young lovers has been a pall hanging over Dubossary since its inception. Death lives here. Death will always live here.
2
Laya
I see Liba going
to the cemetery with Tati.
I don’t know
what she sees
in all those cold stones.
But I watch,
and wonder,
why he never takes me.
When we were little,
Liba and I went to
the Talmud Torah.
For Liba, the black letters
were like something
only she could decipher.
I never understood
what she searched for,
in those black
scratches of ink.
I would watch
the window,
study the forest
and the sky.
When we walked home,
Liba would watch the boys
come out of the cheder
down the road.
I know that when she looked
at Dovid, Lazer and Nachman,
she wondered
what was taught
behind the walls
the girls were not
allowed to enter.
After her Bat Mitzvah,
Tati taught her Torah.
He tried to teach me too,
when my turn came,
but all I felt was
distraction,
disinterest.
Chanoch l’naar al pi darko,
Tati would say,
>
teach every child
in his own way,
and sigh,
and get up
and open the door.
Gey, gezinte heit—
I accept that you’re different, go.
And while I was grateful,
I always wondered
why he gave up
without a fight.
3
Liba
As I follow the large steps my father’s boots make in the snow, I revel in the solitude. This is why I cherish our morning walks. They give me time to talk to Tati, but also time to think. “In silence you can hear God,” Tati says to me as we walk. But I don’t hear God in the silence—I hear myself. I come here to get away from the noises of the town and the chatter of the townsfolk. It’s where I can be fully me.
“What does God sound like?” I ask him. When I walk with Tati, I feel like I’m supposed to think about important things, like prayer and faith.
“Sometimes the voice of God is referred to as a bat kol,” he says.
I translate the Hebrew out loud: “The daughter of a voice? That doesn’t make any sense.”
He chuckles. “Some say that bat kol means an echo, but others say it means a hum or a reverberation, something you sense in the air that’s caused by the motion of the universe—part of the human voice, but also part of every other sound in the world, even the sounds that our ears can’t hear. It means that sometimes even the smallest voice can have a big opinion.” He grins, and I know that he means me, his daughter; that my opinion matters. I wish it were true. Not everybody in our town sees things the way my father does. Most women and girls do not study Torah; they don’t learn or ask questions like I do. For the most part, our voices don’t matter. I know I’m lucky that Tati is my father.
Although I love Tati’s stories and his answers, I wonder why a small voice is a daughter’s voice. Sometimes I wish my voice could be loud—like a roar. But that is not a modest way to think. The older I get, the more immodest my thoughts become.
I feel my cheeks flush as my mind wanders to all the things I shouldn’t be thinking about—what it would feel like to hold the hand of a man, what it might feel like to kiss someone, what it’s like when you finally find the man you’re meant to marry and you get to be alone together, in bed … I swallow and shake my head to clear my thoughts.
If I shared the fact that this is all I think about lately, Mami and Tati would say it means it’s time for me to get married. But I’m not sure I want to get married yet. I want to marry for love, not convenience. These thoughts feel like sacrilege. I know that I will marry a man my father chooses. That’s the way it’s done in our town and among Tati’s people. Mami and Tati married for love, and it has not been an easy path for them.
I take a deep breath and shake my head from all my thoughts. This morning, everything looks clean from the snow that fell last night and I imagine the icy frost coating the insides of my lungs and mind, making my thoughts white and pure. I love being outside in our forest more than anything at times like these, because the white feels like it hides all our flaws.
Perhaps that’s why I often see Tati in the dark forest that surrounds our home praying to God or—as he would say—the Ribbono Shel Oylam, the Master of the Universe, by himself, eyes shut, arms outstretched to the sky. Maybe he comes out here to feel new again too.
Tati comes from the town of Kupel, a few days’ walk from here. He came here and joined a small group of Chassidim in the town—the followers of the late Reb Mendele, who was a disciple of the great and holy Ba’al Shem Tov. There is a small shtiebl where the men pray, in what used to be the home of Urka the Coachman. It is said that the Ba’al Shem Tov himself used to sit under the tree in Urka’s courtyard. The Chassidim here accepted my father with open arms, but nobody accepted my mother.
Sometimes I wonder if Reb Mendele and the Ba’al Shem Tov (zichrono livracha) were still with us, would the community treat Mami differently? Would they see how hard she tries to be a good Jew, and how wrong the other Jews in town are for not treating her with love and respect. It makes me angry how quickly rumors spread, that Mami’s kitchen isn’t kosher (it is!) just because she doesn’t cover her hair like the other married Jewish women in our town.
That’s why Tati built our home, sturdy and warm like he is, outside our town in the forest. It’s what Mami wanted: not to be under constant scrutiny, and to have plenty of room to plant fruit trees and make honey and keep chickens and goats. We have a small barn with a cow and a goat, and a bee glade out back and an orchard that leads all the way down to the river. Tati works in town as a builder and a laborer in the fields. But he is also a scholar, worthy of the title Rebbe, though none of the men in town call him that.
Sometimes I think my father knows more than the other Chassidim in our town, even more than Rabbi Borowitz who leads our tiny kehilla, and the bare bones prayer minyan of ten men that Tati sometimes helps complete. There are many things my father likes to keep secret, like his morning dips in the Dniester River that I never see, but know about, his prayer at the graveside of Reb Mendele, and our library. Our walls are covered in holy books—his sforim, and I often fall asleep to the sound of him reading from the Talmud, the Midrash, and the many mystical books of the Chassidim. The stories he reads sound like fairy tales to me, about magical places like Babel and Jerusalem.
In these places, there are scholarly men. Father would be respected there, a king among men. And there are learned boys of marriageable age—the kind of boys Tati would like me to marry someday. In my daydreams, they line up at the door, waiting to get a glimpse of me—the learned, pious daughter of the Rebbe. And my Tati would only pick the wisest and kindest for me.
I shake my head. In my heart of hearts, that’s not really what I want. When Laya and I sleep in our loft, I look out the skylight above our heads and pretend that someone will someday find his way to our cabin, climb up onto the roof, and look in from above. He will see me and fall instantly in love.
Because lately I feel like time is running out. The older I get, the harder it will be to find someone. And when I think about that, I wonder why Tati insists that Laya and I wait until we are at least eighteen.
I would ask Mami, but she isn’t a scholar like Tati, and she doesn’t like to talk about these things. She worries about what people say and how they see us. It makes her angry, but she wrings dough instead of her hands. Tati says her hands are baker’s hands, that she makes magic with dough. Mami can make something out of nothing. She makes cheese and gathers honey; she mixes bits of bark and roots and leaves for tea. She bakes the tastiest challahs and cakes, rugelach and mandelbrot, but it’s her babka she’s famous for. She sells her baked goods in town.
When she’s not in the kitchen, Mami likes to go out through the skylight above our bed and onto the little deck on our roof to soak up the sun. Laya likes to sit up there with her. From the roof, you can see down to the village and the forest all around. I wonder if it’s not just the sun that Mami seeks up there. While Tati’s head is always in a book, Mami’s eyes are always looking at the sky. Laya says she dreams of somewhere other than here. Somewhere far away, like America.
4
Laya
I always thought
that if I worshipped God,
dressed modestly,
and walked in His path,
that nothing bad
would happen
to my family.
We would find
our path to Zion,
our own piece of heaven
on the banks
of the Dniester River.
But now that I’m fifteen
I see what a life
of pious devotion
has brought Mami,
who converted
to our faith—
disapproval.
The life we lead
out here is a life apart.
I wish I could go to Onyshkivtsi.
Mami
always tells me stories
about her town
and Saint Anna of the Swans
who lived there.
Saint Anna
didn’t walk with God—
she knew she wasn’t made
for perfection;
she never tried
to fit a pattern
that didn’t fit her.
She didn’t waste her time
trying to smooth herself
into something
she wasn’t.
She was powerful
because she forged
her own path.
The Christians
in Onyshkivtsi
built a shrine
to honor her.
The shrine marks a spring
whose temperature
is forty-three degrees
all year,
rain or shine.
Even in the snow.
It is said
that it was once home
to hundreds of swans.
Righteous Anna used to
feed and care for them.
But Mami says the swans
don’t go there anymore.
There is rot
in the old growth—
the Kodari forest
senses these things.
I sense things too.
The rot in our community.
Sometimes it’s not enough
to be good,
if you treat others
with disdain.
Sometimes there’s nothing
you can do
but fly away,
like Anna did.
5
Liba
When we get back from our morning walk, Mami is in the kitchen making breakfast and starting the doughs for the day. Tati shakes the snow off his boots as he walks in. “Gut morgen,” he says gruffly as he pecks a kiss on Mami’s cheek. She pins her white-gold hair up and says, “Dubroho ranku. Liba, close the door quickly—you’re letting all the cold in.”
I let the hood of my coat drop down. “Where’s Laya?”
“Getting some eggs from the coop,” Mami sings. She and Laya love mornings, not like me, but I’d wake up early every morning if it meant I got time alone with Tati.
I shrug my coat off and hang it on a hook by the door as Mami pours tea at the table. “Nu? Come in, warm up,” she says to me.
I shake the chill off and start braiding my hair, which is the color of river rocks. Long and thick. I can’t pin it up at all. “Your hair is beautiful like moonstone, dochka,” Mami says. “Leave it down.”