CHAPTER FOUR

I AWOKE WITH A FEELING OF mind-numbing exhaustion—the way you feel when you’ve come down with a nasty flu. All of me ached: my muscles, joints, throat, eyes, and most of all my head. With great effort, I heaved open my eyelids, which were crusted together and felt unbelievably heavy.

I saw the shadowy form of a person moving slowly, too fuzzy to make out who it was. A sound, like a rustling of clothing amplified a thousand times, crashed against my ears, painful in its intensity. And great, clanging thuds, the footsteps of the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk, rattled the windows. I tried to lift my head; a searing pain shot down my neck then on through my spine. For a moment, I felt coolness, wetness, on my forehead. And then, a warm, soft brushing against my cheek. A familiar, pungent scent burned my nostrils and rose into my skull. So familiar, it tugged at my heart and made me want to weep. Grandma! I tried to open my mouth but my jaw was clamped shut. Grandma! The word ricocheted like a hammer banging on the inside of my skull.

I blinked once, twice. Felt myself sinking, as if into warm water, a new heat washing over me as the awful clanging vanished, sinking into silence and calm. The pain in my head evaporated. I drew in a deep breath; all of me expanded with lightness and relief. I blinked again several times, and after a few moments, my eyes were able to focus.

I was in a bed, my face turned toward a wooden wall. The air was heavy with smoke and crackled with the sound of burning logs.

“Finally!” I heard a cheerful young voice say.

I sat up. The voice belonged to a girl who was sitting across the room, poking with an iron at a small fire that was flaring to life in the grate of a broad red-brick fireplace. Hanging above the sputtering flames was a large iron pot, like the cauldrons in storybooks my parents had read me when I was little.

“I’ve been trying to wake you up for the longest time! Come on, we’ve got so much to do!”

What an interesting language! I found myself thinking. Guttural ch’s and rounded, elongated vowels, ouhs and aaihs. It sounded like the German I’d heard on the trip I’d once taken with my father to Heidelberg. I understood perfectly well what the girl was saying, and knew from my recent experiences that, when I opened my mouth to speak, I would find that I, too, would be able to speak the language like a native.

I smiled at the thought of how easy it was, on this journey, to learn languages. If only back home in Brooklyn I could just open my mouth and find myself in full command of an utterly new tongue!

“Go ahead, smile if you want. But I don’t see how me doing what’s left of the work for Erev Rosh Hashanah is exactly funny! You promised to help me. Sarah, you said. I’ll do the lion’s share. That’s why you came, isn’t it?”

She didn’t sound the least bit angry: only amused.

And I was grateful that she mentioned her name, and so quickly: no need to guess.

“Yes, of course,” I said, pulling aside the scratchy blanket and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “It’s cold. You’d think the fire would take the edge off.”

“Well, get dressed, you silly chicken,” Sarah said, laying down the crooked fire iron and picking up a long wooden spoon. She stood to stir the pot and I saw that, though she was petite, she had a strong build; she looked as if she’d have no trouble wrestling me to the ground, if it ever came to that. Her light brown hair was pulled tightly into two braids that fell down her back to her waist. She stirred vigorously with the spoon and the starchy smell of some kind of porridge wafted across the room to where I was sitting. My stomach responded with a loud gurgle.

“The others won’t be back for hours,” Sarah said. “Between morning and afternoon prayers at the shul, they’re having lunch at the Lubovskys. Let’s eat breakfast. Yossele can eat when he’s finished his game.” She looked out into the yard; only now did I register the sounds of children playing.

“Yossele can’t get enough of that game! He and Moishe from next door are at it every morning before cheder. Papa says it helps get the wiggles out so that he has sitzfleisch for Talmud.”

I marveled at my instant understanding of all her Yiddish expressions: cheder—the school for Jewish children, where they taught the Old Testament—Tanakh—and the commentaries of the sages—Talmud. And sitzfleisch: the ability to sit still for long periods of time.

Sarah smiled. “And if you ever decide to get out of bed, you can start the samovar!”

She jerked her head in the direction of a wooden cabinet on which stood the beautiful, shiny brass samovar. Grandma’s samovar! The one that sits in the display area of her wall unit, built especially to showcase it. How peculiar, that Grandma showed me how to use it just before—well, just before I began falling through time. The samovar that her own mother—Sarah!—managed to bring with her from Lithuania when she fled the pogroms and sailed to South Africa.

Sarah. Grandma’s mother. It was startling, looking at this warm, lively girl, to think there was any way she would ever turn into the hard, unyielding woman I’d just left behind in South Africa.

A gray hessian dress was draped across the end of the bed; I pulled it on over the heavy cotton underclothes I was wearing that appeared to double as pajamas.

So, I had gone back yet another generation and now I was here, with Sarah in a small shtetl somewhere in the heartlands of Lithuania, at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the floor, beside the bed, was a pair of coarse leather shoes that looked roughly my size. I glanced over to see that Sarah was wearing similar shoes. I picked them up, noticing the neat little stitches joining the uppers to the soles. The leather laces had the same handmade look. I raised one shoe to my nose to smell the natural leather.

Sarah was serving porridge into two bowls; she looked over to see me sniffing the shoe and gave me an odd look.

“You’ve been wearing shoes made by my father your whole life,” she said.

“I know.” I felt the heat rise to my face. “I just like the smell, that’s all.”

“You are a funny creature, aren’t you,” Sarah said.

I marveled again at how this pretty, good-natured girl could have become the dour woman that had filled Darlene—and me—with fear. What lay ahead for her that might bring about such a dramatic transformation? I knew so little about her; Grandma had never talked of her, except in referring to the treasures she’d passed down—the samovar and the cuckoo clock, and the orange-and-black wedding china. I scanned the room, wondering if I might lay eyes on the cuckoo clock that I’d come to love; my heart leapt a little at the thought that I might hear again its familiar sound. But then I remembered it had been a wedding gift—and Sarah’s marriage still lay some years ahead, in a future that was to me the distant past. The distant past … What an impossible thought that this room, so vivid, in all its antique detail, as real as anything I’d ever experienced, in fact existed almost a century before I was born!

On my way over to the samovar, I paused to look out the window; the uneven glass, set within a lattice of crudely shaped lead, had a greenish hue, with little bubbles trapped here and there within. Beyond the window stretched a dirt yard, dominated by an ancient water pump and a long wooden trough. Beyond the yard stood other simple wooden houses much like this one, each with its own large patch of packed dirt, separated from each other by enormous gnarled trees. The early-morning light was diffuse, almost gray; I was reminded of sepia-toned photographs I’d seen lying in disorderly piles at the antique stores on Atlantic Avenue, back home in Brooklyn.

In the yard, two boys, seven or eight years old and dressed alike in simple brown trousers and rough-hewn shirts, both wearing peaked caps, were engrossed in a game involving short, pointed sticks. They took turns crouching on the ground and flipping one pointed stick over with a second, to see how far it could be flipped. As they ran to check the precise location of each flipped stick, they held on to their caps. I had a vague memory of some old photographs my mother had once shown me of her mother’s family from Lithuania. A sepia image floated up from somewhere deep in my own hidden memory: serious faces, hair styles and clothing from another time, a grouping of people looking out from the past, wary, perhaps unnerved by the glassy eye of the camera.

“Always the daydreamer.” Sarah’s voice snapped me from my reverie.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was watching the boys.”

“You’d never think, looking at him, that Yossele is the star scholar at cheder. He’s such a mischievous pup.”

My heart clutched at the thought of my own brother, Billy, whose sixth birthday was coming up. Oh no! I thought with dismay. I’m going to miss his birthday! Another jolt overcame me at this thought; here I was, still thinking in normal terms about the passage of time—as if it made any sense to think that in a few weeks it would be Billy’s birthday! I was a hundred years away from that date—and from Billy! What could it possibly mean to be one hundred years away from my brother? My head wavered, my knees felt weak, as if I was going to faint; it was all too confusing. Lost in time and space, away from everything—everyone—I loved.

“Anyone would think you want to go out and join the boys with their silly sticks!” Sarah’s voice brought me back to the moment.

“No, I’m too old for that,” I said, aware of how sad my voice sounded.

“You make growing up sound about as glorious as a funeral!” Sarah’s voice rippled into laughter.

The surprise of it—Sarah! With humor bubbling out of her!—snapped me back into the moment of here, now, though I could feel myself fighting it, as if I wanted to stay sad, wanted to keep the thought of my little brother, Billy, close before me. I shook my head, allowed the feel of it all—of the real me, the lost me—to subside. But even as I allowed it to ebb, a tiny, fierce refusal did not allow it to disappear entirely; deep within, I could still feel the dull, aching throb of what I knew was my real life.

One last glance revealed Yossele and his friend, shouting with fun and rolling on the ground in a tussle.

I turned to the samovar. How lucky that Grandma had shown me how to use it—but also, how odd! Now, her words came back to me. After our failed experiment, which left us with the unpleasant taste of rust in our mouths, Grandma had said: If ever anyone asks you to make tea in a samovar, you’ll know how! How prescient her remark was! Could she have in some uncanny way known that I would find myself in that exact situation—where someone, her own mother, in fact, would issue that very request?

I knelt to examine the dried pine cones in a wooden crate by the fireplace. I chose the smallest, driest ones and a few tiny, dry twigs for tinder, lighting one in the fireplace to get the fire burning. I spotted the little teapot on the shelf above the fireplace; beside this was an old, battered tin containing large, brittle tea leaves, very black and curled. I placed these in the teapot. When the water in the samovar was hot, I filled the teapot and set it to rest on top. I waited a good fifteen minutes to let it steep, and then prepared a cup of tea for each of us, using the concentrate from the teapot and topping it up with fresh hot water from the samovar, the way Grandma had shown me.

Sarah fetched two thick cubes of brown sugar, handing me one and placing the other between her teeth. I did the same and raised the cup to my lips, sipping through the cube of sugar. I braced myself for a bad-tasting mouthful but instead found the tea was fragrant and very strong—with no hint of rust!

After breakfast, we took our dishes outside and washed them in a wooden tub that we filled from the water pump.

“Oy Gevalt!” Sarah groaned as Yossele came bounding toward us; his face was flushed, his hair slicked to his forehead. He yanked off his cap and tossed it to Sarah, who caught it expertly.

“I’m late! But I was winning at catchkus—and I never win against Moishe! I didn’t realize the time!” he said, cranking the pump and vigorously washing his face and hands. “Brrr! Could Hashem make it any colder?”

“And that was a clean shirt,” Sarah said with a mournful sigh. “The other one’s on your cot. Go on in and change it.”

“You’ll wash this one for me, darling Sister?” Yossele turned gleaming eyes to Sarah, his face lit with warmth.

“You’re impossible,” Sarah said with a smile. “I’ll be in to serve you some porridge.”

“No time! I have to get to Shacharis!” Yossele said as he ran toward the door. Before entering, he stopped short, fumbled in his pocket, then turned and ran back to Sarah. “Here, Sis. Take these.” And he shoved something into Sarah’s hand. “I’ve never seen such smooth, round ones. Tonight will be a triumph!”

Sarah slipped whatever Yossele gave her into the pocket of her apron as she watched her brother swivel around and disappear into the house.

“What did he mean—he’d never seen such smooth, round ones?”

Sarah laughed. “Oh, his little treasures,” she said, reaching into her apron pocket and withdrawing two large walnuts. They were indeed unusually smooth and round. “He must have spent an hour going through the nuts,” Sarah said. “It’s for palantes; you remember how much fun it was to play that on yontif when we were little? I have a mind to borrow one of these and play myself! Yossele devoted all of last evening to sanding down the plank. These nuts are going to roll down so fast they’ll leave all the others in the dust. Look—” Sarah stretched out her hand so I could better see them. “He’s marked them, so he’ll know they’re his.” Branded into the indent where the nut’s stem had once been was a dark burn mark.

“Come on,” Sarah said, pocketing Yossele’s walnuts. “I want to make sure he eats something before he leaves.”

In the short time we’d been outside, the filmy gray veil had lifted from the sky to reveal a cold, deep blue.

Inside, I heard the sound of whistling coming from behind the door to Sarah’s parents’ room, where I assumed Yossele had gone to change. At the happy sound, I was overcome once more with the sadness that had overcome me earlier, as I stood by the window watching Yossele and their neighbor at play. Before I could hide what I was feeling, I realized that Sarah was eyeing me intently.

“Hadassah,” she said, her voice gentle. “What’s wrong?”

Finally, I thought, my name—the name I was to carry here. I knew instantly that the name meant myrtle and tried to recall how a myrtle tree looked.

“It’s just that—well, Yossele reminds me of someone.” The words slipped out before I had time to think about what I was saying.

“Oh? Who?”

I was about to hedge, but the truth popped out against my will. “My own brother. Billy.”

“Bee-lee?” Sarah repeated—the shape of the syllables awkward through her heavy Yiddish accent. And then, there it was: the furrowed brow, the gauzy look of confusion, the same kind of expression I’d seen first on Talia’s face, and then on Darlene’s.

“He’s full of joy. For the longest time, we thought he had thin lips, because he’s always smiling!” I tried to clamp down on the flood of words, but they rushed along heedlessly, as if I no longer had control of my tongue. “He’s the sweetest boy in the world. And clever as can be! We’re very close—like you and Yossele.” My eyes welled with tears. There was nothing I could do to stop them; they spilled out in a rush. “Mama calls him joyous boyous.”

Now, the whole picture burst forth in my mind—all of us, the family, my family. Gathered around the breakfast table on a Saturday morning, Mama’s face filled with expectation as we tucked into whatever breakfast she’d made—pancakes or French toast, or scrambled eggs.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like I can see my brother in your brother. Something about the eyes—”

Sarah’s face relaxed into a tentative smile—gone that troubled, mysterious questioning. “That’s my Yossele. Little rascal, I’m going to have to wash his shirt and pants—and they were clean this morning!”

Yossele emerged from the bedroom, tugging on his jacket, which I could see was shabby around the lapels and cuffs, though scrupulously clean and brushed. Sarah disappeared into the pantry and returned with a piece of black bread slathered in congealed chicken fat.

“Now you be a good young man, Josef Anshel—so that you’ll be worthy when it comes time for you to complete the minyan.”

He took the bread and bit into it hungrily.

“Eat carefully,” Sarah said, eyeing the clean jacket.

Josef Anshel. The name rang ominously in my ears.

Josef Anshel. I knew that name—but from where? Yossele, then, must be his nickname. I rifled through my memory and a sickening nausea crept over me. My head reeled. Josef Anshel. Josef … my great-grandmother’s brother. Which is to say Sarah’s brother, of course. Grandma’s uncle. Her Uncle Josef, whose story had haunted her whole life but whom she’d never met.

The memory snagged me: and there she was, my mother, in my mind’s eye, her face unspeakably grave. Her voice rippled back to me; I clung to the sound—clung to the faint and yet steely connection with her.

“My grandmother was the only one who left,” she said. “If they hadn’t gone to South Africa … ” Her voice trailed off.

“And Josef? Your grandmother’s younger brother? You told me they were very close—like me and Billy.”

“Yes,” Mama said, looking at me from some other place. “Like you and Billy.”

For a moment, she seemed to forget I was even there; it was if in traveling back with her recollection into the past, I had ceased to exist.

“Mama,” I said. “You were telling me about Josef.”

“The Nazis dragged them into the street. The whole family. Josef, his wife, his three children.” Her eyes were inward; I don’t know who Mama was talking to, but it didn’t seem like she was talking to me.

“They herded the whole village into the woods and made them dig an enormous pit. Then they shot them, one by one, right at the edge of the pit … so efficient …”

“How old were the children?” I asked.

“Seven, five, three,” Mama recited, staring into unfathomable blackness.

Josef—Yossele. This sparkling, bright, mischievous boy who was the star of the cheder. That is what the future holds for him, I thought. And now I remembered something else: the letter Darlene—Grandma—pulled from beneath her mattress, written to her mother. Hadn’t that been signed Your brother Josef? The family for whom Darlene had prayed, night after night, for who knows how many years. Maybe Grandma is praying for them still, for their souls—for the soul of this boy before me who could not have been more vivid and alive.

In my agitation, I found myself scratching hard through the coarse fabric of the gray dress.

“Hadassah, what’s wrong?” Sarah said. “Is there something wrong with your arms?”

I felt Sarah at my side; her hands were on mine, holding them still.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was just—something I could see.”

I knew the instant the words were out that they sounded strange—that I sounded strange. A wild gulp rose in my throat. Mama! I wanted to cry. I want my mama! And Papa! And Billy!

“Sssshh.” Sarah didn’t query my odd words, just held my hands with hers.

I opened my mouth, the words on my tongue—I want to go home! But I choked them to silence. I had no home to go to—not here, not now.

Yossele was standing still as a statue, looking at me with intensity—as if he were trying to uncover my thoughts, as if he could sense my dreadful knowledge about him in the horrified depths of my eyes. Frantically, I tried to break up the images in my mind’s eye so I might hide them from him—as if I were cracking them into shards with an icepick.

Sarah noticed Yossele’s strange look, and with a last, concerned glance at me, turned back to her brother.

“Remember, there’s no other if you dirty this one,” Sarah said, tugging Yossele’s starched white collar into place. “Go on, you can finish eating that on your way.”

“Gut yontif,” Yossele said, averting his eyes, suddenly shy.

“Gut yontif,” I replied. He glanced back up, and for the briefest moment, again held my gaze. This time, there was puzzlement in his face—and perhaps, I thought, just a shade of fear.

“Run along, for heaven’s sake!” Sarah said, and Yossele spun around on his heels and was gone.

“We still have so much work to do,” Sarah said. “We need to stay busy.”

Sarah’s words echoed hollowly in my mind. We need to stay busy. Another thought glistened its way through my agitated mind. Mama—always busy. Always doing something, in motion—Grandma, too. Everyone in a frenzy of action, never stopping, never stopping to—

“Come along,” Sarah said. “We need to bring everything up from the cellar.”

Sarah lit a candle that was in the kind of old-fashioned holder I’d seen in movies. I followed her through a small door and down steps made of hard-packed mud. The damp smell of the earth felt reassuring. The candle flame shot up thin and tall—no breeze, here, to make it shorten and flicker. It cast long shadows, making everything look mysterious. Deep shelves were dug into the mud walls and large sacks and wooden tubs lay neatly arranged on the floor. She pointed to a hessian sack.

“You grab that one,” she said, all business, now.

The bag was too heavy to lift, so I dragged it across to the bottom of the stairs, then pushed and pulled it all the way up.

We made several trips down and back. Sarah was right—it was good to be busy. My melancholy thoughts receded; I found myself pleasantly absorbed in the physical labor.

I don’t know how long we hauled things—I lost all track of time. Dragging a huge wooden tub of root vegetables across the kitchen floor, I paused, aware of the fatigue in my arms. I looked about at everything we’d brought up: carrots, turnips, onions, a dark leafy green that looked like kale, only more delicate. There was also a large earthenware dish filled with congealed chicken fat, the surface studded with little skin rinds.

“Don’t forget to pick out the bits of skin for gribenes,” Sarah said. The word was familiar; Grandma had made it for me on several occasions—a delicious, salty mixture of crispy fat rinds, onions, and carrot ends.

On our next run down to the cellar, I brought up a freshly slaughtered chicken; Sarah carried a thin, wide slab of beef. Back down, this time for a half-dozen scrawny dried fish that gave off a sharp odor, their eyes shriveled like raisins that nonetheless seemed to track my face with their dead gaze as I climbed back up the stairs.

We peeled and chopped and carted heavy pans back and forth to the fireplace cauldron or outside to the oven that was housed in a wooden hut behind the house. We kneaded the sweet challah dough until my hands ached and then set the dough under a cloth to rise in a little alcove in the wall beside the fireplace. Later, we would braid the dough and shape these lengths into two large rounds. I remembered this characteristic Rosh Hashanah shape from the bakery in Williamsburg that my mother took me to once around this time of year; she’d explained that the round challahs symbolize the wish for a year in which life and blessings continue without end.

I sat for a moment to rest. Over by the fireplace, Sarah wiped away a sweaty strand of hair, then dipped a wooden spoon into the chicken soup pot and brought the steaming liquid to her lips.

“Perfect,” she said, a satisfied smile spreading across her face. She glanced at me then, the smile fading from her lips.

“Are you thinking about it all, too?” she asked.

I didn’t know what she was talking about, although Sarah clearly assumed that I did.

I nodded.

“Are your parents also talking about leaving?” She set down the wooden spoon, her face alert with concern.

“Yes,” I said, feeling what was becoming a familiar wave of sad confusion. Who were my parents here, in Lithuania, in the early part of the twentieth century? Where were they? And why was I here with Sarah—and at such an important time for this community, the Jewish New Year—rather than with them? I knew from the experience I’d already accrued on this strange journey that there was no point wondering such things. The stark truth bit into me: I was an orphan traveler, lost in time.

“Nothing’s been the same, since the death of Yitzhak Baron,” Sarah said, crossing to the table and sitting down beside me. “I was eight years old when he was murdered; I remember it all so clearly, though, like it was yesterday. He used to come with the other yeshivah students to take his Shabbos meals with us—the only time all week they ate anything besides potatoes and gruel.”

Sarah’s eyes shone with sadness. “I think about him all the time. He was a hero: the way he barricaded himself with the others in that house and threw stones at the czar’s men.”

Her expression darkened. “My father didn’t want to crawl down into the cellar that night to hide. Lots of people did; they were the smart ones. But we ran. Ran and ran, through the streets. I’ll never forget it—the Cossacks on their horses, holding flaming torches.”

“How absolutely terrible,” I said.

Sarah sniffed, then brushed her hand across her nose.

“You’re right, of course you’re right. It was terrible—the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It was also horribly confusing. We were in a panic. I’d never seen Mother like that, Father, too. They’ve always been—I don’t know, calm, strong. Taking care of everything in our lives.”

Sarah leaned toward me. “Did you know Father was once an important scholar? I used to watch him pack his cobbling tools away at the end of the day—just to see the happy look in his face, knowing he had all evening to devote to his books. Mother would serve us dinner, and then Father would go behind the curtain.”

Sarah gestured to the thick cloth on the far side of the cabin. I imagined that perhaps there was a little alcove there, set aside for private study.

“His candle would burn for hours. Sometimes, I lay awake and watched the flickering shadows.”

Now, finally, Sarah smiled. “I used to pretend that the shadows were the secrets of the Talmud, coming to life.”

She looked a little embarrassed. “I sound like a fool!” she said, her eyes shining, but no longer with joy. “When Father gave it all away, it was a terrible thing—for all of us. For me! After that, I stopped running to his workshop at the end of the work day. I couldn’t bear it!”

“What couldn’t you bear?”

“The deadness in his face. As if the light of his soul had gone out.”

“And that happened after the death of—Yitzhak Baron?”

“I never told you this …” Her voice trailed off, but then Sarah continued with resolve. “I saw Yitzhak’s body. In the street. They’d done terrible things to him—too terrible even to say. He wasn’t recognizable. I only knew it was him because my father told me so. Everything around us was burning. Burning. The butcher’s shop, the cheder, our synagogue. It was summer—the vegetation was so dry. Do you remember that enormous yew tree outside the schoolhouse? It was on fire—like something from the Torah. Holding the flames in its branches, waving its arms around, making a horrible crackling noise, like it was a burning person.”

Sarah jerkily shook her head, as if trying to dislodge the image of the burning tree from her mind.

“Even that didn’t prepare me for the sight of the burning books. They dragged them from everywhere and stacked them up outside the schoolhouse. But you know all of that. Everybody does.”

I nodded, trying to fix my features into a believable expression of horrified recall.

“Who could have known what books look like when they burn? Father said something to me then. Right as we were passing the huge bonfire of books.”

“What was that?”

“He was quoting from some famous German poet. I don’t know, maybe from a hundred years ago—.”

She frowned, trying to retrieve the name. “Heine, I think.” She fell silent.

“What was it?” I asked carefully. “What did the poet say?”

The words seemed stuck in Sarah’s throat; finally, she gave them voice.

“Where they burn books, they will also burn people.”

A shudder ran through me as I recalled the terrible images I first saw when I was eleven years old: skeletal corpses, Jewish people murdered by the Nazis, being bulldozed toward the crematorium, hundreds, thousands, in order to be burned.

“And then, we were running again. Stumbling, tripping. It was so hot, all around us. Ash was flying through the air. I could taste it in my nose and in my mouth. Father must have snatched his tallises before leaving the house; he had two, they were his prize possessions. One was precious to him—passed down in his family for, I don’t know, maybe a hundred and fifty years and given to him on his Bar Mitzvah. It had embroidery made out of real gold. The other one he was given on his wedding day by his wife’s parents—that’s the one he gave me to hold in front of my face, so I wouldn’t breathe in the ash.”

“Behind the tanner’s, the stench got worse—maybe the cow skins were scorched. It was so bad—I felt like I had to vomit. That’s where we found him. In the gutter.”

Horror was etched into Sarah’s features; she cast her eyes downward, as if she could no longer bear to meet my gaze.

“You have no idea …” she said, but then caught herself. “His own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. What they did …” Her throat caught. “Father recognized his yarmulke. Imagine. His yarmulke. Father took his own precious tallis, the one he’d treasured his whole life, and laid it over Yitzhak’s body. He kneeled down, and I kneeled down next to him, and he recited the prayer for the dead. Right there, in the middle of that nightmare. The smoke, the fires we’d left behind us, sucked up all the air. The awful smell was overwhelming. I felt like everything stopped—that there was only us and our words. I’ll never forget the way the old cotton of Father’s tallis slowly turned dark red, until there was no more yellow or gold at all.”

There, in that rough, simple cabin was a stillness that felt as old as time. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, but then, still visibly distressed, Sarah rose and moved aimlessly from here to there, as if trying to remember what task we’d left unfinished.

“I must have been mad,” she said.

“Mad? Why?”

“The trouble died down. That’s what the grown-ups call it. The trouble. I thought it was over, forever. That it was all just bad memories. But now …”

“Yes?”

“Well, you know as well as I do!” It was the first sign I’d seen, on this strange journey, of impatience about my odd situation, about me. As if it was suddenly irritating to Sarah that I didn’t know what I was supposed to know.

“It’s all started up again! How are we supposed to make sense of that? How are we supposed—?” Sarah let her unfinished sentence dangle in the air for a moment. “Just the same as before! Burning Jewish stores and synagogues all around Ezerenai. It’s only a matter of time before the looting and fires reach Dusiat. We’ll never be safe, not ever!”

“The violence is still very far away,” I found myself saying. “Besides, things have changed. I can’t imagine the authorities will let it get so out of hand again.”

I had no idea what I was talking about! Perhaps I was not too far off the mark, though, or perhaps Sarah was just desperate to put the matter from mind. Whatever the reason, after wiping away a tear, she nodded.

“Nothing’s going to happen tonight,” I said. “Tomorrow is another day. Let’s bring in the new year with a spirit of happiness and peace.”

Grandma had told me a little about her mother’s life, how she had fled a terrible pogrom with her family, ending up in South Africa. I knew that Sarah was right—that her family was not safe in Dusiat. I also knew that they would escape, but that many of her family would not. I wanted to reassure her, but it was all so complicated. And in that moment, everything I thought I knew about Sarah from the little snippets I had heard from Mama and Grandma felt papery, like a story I’d once read long ago, not pertaining in any real way to the flesh-and-blood girl before me. What I knew was just a story, a fairy tale or myth. And yet I also knew that the plot of the story, which had been passed along to me by my own mother and grandmother, was, in a sense, true; those events had happened, they were what the future held for my new friend, Sarah, sitting with me here, now, her eyes fiery and afraid.

What if—what if I could say something now that would change that plot, that would make the future unfold differently? In some way that was better for Sarah and her family? The thought pressed on me with the weight of a millstone, leaving me feeling helpless.

Part of me felt there was nothing I could do, that history was unchangeable, that everything, in fact, had already happened the way it was going to happen.

Sarah, however, seemed to have been cheered by my words.

“You’re absolutely right,” she said, her mood brightening. “Come on, let’s get back to work. Why don’t you do the tsimmes? I want to get to the taigelach. It always takes longer than I expect—they’re so fiddly.”

Sarah got busy at the large wooden table with the taigelach dough, forming little balls and dropping them into a clay dish filled with honey.

I trusted I would know what to do, given the way I had so far been mysteriously endowed with whatever language or skill was necessary. I chopped carrots and turnips and threw them into a medium-sized pot, adding a generous cup of sugar. Then I added several handfuls of plums and raisins from one of the wooden barrels we’d brought up from the cellar. I placed the pot on a hook hanging down from a wooden beam over the flames in the fireplace.

Sarah drained the last of her taigelach from the pot of hot oil and plopped down on a wooden chair, giving a satisfied sigh.

“It’s so much easier having you here to help! We might even have a chance for a real rest before the sun goes down. Mother made the holupshas and gefilte fish yesterday, so that leaves only the kugel and the compote. If we’re lucky, Uncle will bring some of that dark chocolate from Vilnius that we had last year. He promised, and you know he’s a man of his word.”

We finished up our preparations in a flurry of contented activity. My stomach let me know with a round of crazed rumblings that we’d not eaten since breakfast. Once again, Sarah read my mind.

“No point stopping to eat now,” she said. “Better to store up our appetites for the huge feast. Otherwise we’ll never get through the meal.”

Against the protests of my gurgling stomach, I nodded. The fabulous smells of all the dishes cooking in the house were a torture—though nothing compared with the excruciating temptation when I brought the steaming challah loaves in from the outdoor oven, my hands protected by thick mittens. It took every ounce of willpower to stop myself from tearing a piece of the glossy caramel-colored loaf and stuffing it into my mouth.

Finally, everything was ready: the table laid with the family’s best linens, crockery, and silverware, the candles secured in silver candlesticks, the challahs on their special plate, covered with the white embroidered challah cloths Sarah’s mother had ironed before sunrise.

Sarah boiled up a huge pot of water and poured it into the metal tub by the back door. A sheet hanging from the rafters gave us privacy; we stripped down and climbed into the steaming water. Sarah handed me a bar of brown soap that felt hard and smooth as a candle. I brought it to my nose; it smelled like honey.

“You’re always sniffing things, aren’t you,” she said, smiling.

“It’s just that it’s all so—” I caught myself. I was going to say—all so new and strange, living in another place and time.

“Everything is so—what?” she asked.

“Fragrant, I suppose,” I said.

Sarah cocked her head, gave me that look—the look they’ve all given me at some moment or other, in each of the worlds I’d visited. I steeled myself. Here it comes, I thought. The question.

“Hadassah, I was just wondering—” she began, faltering a little.

“Yes?”

“Well I know it’s a strange thing to ask, but it’s just, well—who, exactly, are you?” Squinting at me through the steam, Sarah seemed a little taken aback by her own words.

“Why, I’m your friend,” I said.

“I don’t know—I feel as if I’ve known you forever.”

“Well, we’ve grown up together, after all. So, in a way, you have known me forever.”

“We didn’t grow up together,” she said. “You only moved to Dusiat recently. You were born and raised in Vilnius.”

Then, Sarah looked right into me, as if she were trying to dig the truth from me with her eyes.

“I meant that we met at an important time in our lives—when we’ve grown from girls to young women.”

I gave up trying to get any lather out of the hard, slippery bar; I slid it over my skin and then handed the soap to Sarah. She took it and let out a little sigh.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have this funny feeling—” She seemed momentarily embarrassed.

“Go on,” I said. “You can tell me.”

“It’s just a feeling—that you know things: about the future. That you know how it is all going to turn out.”

“What do you mean—turn out?”

“The trouble.”

Of course, Sarah was right. I did know how it was going to turn out. I knew that what would happen to Sarah, to her family, to the people she knew, and later, to the Jews throughout Europe, was far, far worse than she could imagine.

“I get that feeling sometimes myself,” I said, “that it’s all preordained. That everything that is going to happen has already happened.”

I recalled my father once explaining—in that excited way he had when talking about interesting ideas—Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return of the same: that everything in human existence and experience cycled around so that nothing, in the end, was ever really new.

Sarah smiled. “Yes, that’s it, I suppose,” she said. “It’s a bit like that feeling I sometimes get where a memory feels like a premonition. I’ll be thinking about something, remembering something that happened when I was a little girl, and then I get confused and think—no, that never happened, but I know that one day it will.”

I nodded.

“Then—you’ve had that feeling, too?” Sarah asked, incredulous.

“Maybe not exactly the same, but I feel like I know what you mean.”

Sarah leaned over the edge of the tub to place the soap in the metal dish on the floor, then jabbed her palm against the water, splashing it up into my face.

“Then I suppose you’re not the only odd one after all,” she said. “I guess we’re just two of a kind.”

“And we don’t do half badly together in the kitchen,” I said, splashing her back.

Looking across at this playful, generous, hard-working girl, flushed with the heat of the bath, my heart squeezed at the thought of what life held for her: the anguish and fear, the hardships of emigrating to an unforgiving place, decades of hard work and childbearing. The loss of her precious baby Rose. The piling up of disappointments, the hardening of her spirit. I tried to picture Darlene’s mother—the coldness, even cruelty in her eyes, the bitterness that hung about her like an odor—but was unable to. All I could see was my new friend, laughing and splashing, her brown eyes shining and beautiful and full of life.

We dressed quickly into fresh underclothes and two almost identical dresses Sarah retrieved from her parents’ armoire that were made of navy blue wool, with high necks, hems that reached to mid-calf, and sleeves that buttoned tightly at the wrists. Just as we were closing the last buttons, we heard the sound of heavy boots and voices.

“They’re here!” Sarah said, hastening to the door.

A moment later, in they burst, Sarah’s parents and four brothers. Her father was wearing a large black cap without a brim that looked like an oversized yarmulke, and a simple suit I imagined was his holiday finery. He wore a full beard streaked with gray, with short forelocks tucked behind his ears. The other men and boys also had short tufts of hair tucked behind their ears, along with similar kinds of brimless caps. Yossele was among them, his cheeks flushed with excitement. Sarah’s mother wore a headscarf and a simply tailored woolen dress like the ones Sarah and I were now wearing.

“Gut yontif!” everyone called out to each other. Sarah’s father kissed her on the head, then gave me a warm look, and smiled.

A bustle of conversation followed while coats were removed and taken into the parents’ bedroom and the new arrivals warmed their hands by the fireplace. The talk was of the afternoon service at the shul, which Sarah and I had foregone, being busy with the holiday preparations. I understood that we would attend services with the others the next morning and found myself excited at the prospect of experiencing my first ever synagogue service.

I flashed on our visit to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, pictured again the bimah and the heavy candelabra that hung down from the ceiling. I wondered how the synagogue in Dusiat would compare, recalling how Mama had wanted to go to the services before Billy’s illness intervened. I also remembered how I’d found myself back at the synagogue later that night, where I’d been visited by that uncanny, remarkable vision of people dressed in old-fashioned garb, swelling around the synagogue, trudging about under some kind of unbearable weight.

Everything within me clutched, as had happened now so many times on my lonely, tumbling journey through time. Was it really possible? Had I in fact—sitting in the back seat of the taxi outside the synagogue in Rhode Island—had a premonition of here? An image of people just like those now swarming all around me? But wait, not just people, these were members of my own family! My very own relatives from long ago.

Mama, how I longed for her! How I longed to leap into her arms and shout: yes! You can go to the Jewish services—with me! Here, in our very own historical synagogue, who knows, perhaps older than the Touro. The synagogue of your mother and grandmother and great-grandmother, and all these other lively people talking and laughing and preparing for the grand feast. We could go together tomorrow! If only you were here!

My thoughts were interrupted by Sarah.

“Come on, let’s heat the water. The sun is slipping down.”

There was still an hour or so until sundown, when it would be time to light the candles. Sarah and I heated pots of water so that the rest of the family could bathe.

Sarah took the hot water out while I went to the well to fill the second pot which I then set on the fire to boil. I was grateful for the long minutes as the water heated; I was able to rest.

Yossele was the last to wash. “I don’t need a bath,” he said to his sister.

“If you promise to wash very carefully … ” Sarah replied, ruffling his hair.

“Promise!”

I sank onto the bench by the fire and allowed my eyes to close. My mind whirled with all the impressions of the day; images of gribenes and freshly baked challah and dried fish with raisin eyes danced behind my closed eyelids and I found myself sliding into sleep.

I was awoken by Sarah’s mother, a plump woman with a pretty, but oddly vacant face, who was calling out: “They’re here! The rest of the family is here!”

I jumped up to see a group of people cheerfully, noisily entering the house, taking off their coats, walking over to the fire to warm themselves. An uncle and aunt, Sarah later explained, with their three teenage children, as well as Sarah’s two older sisters, one of whom was very pregnant, and their husbands. They made their way to the table, and everyone fell silent. Sarah’s mother lit the candles; along with the other women, Sarah and I partially covered our eyes and recited the prayer. Then, Sarah retrieved a metal container with two handles and we traipsed outside to the pump. One by one, each person filled the container and poured water over their hands, first one and then the other, and back to the first, muttering the hand-washing prayer under their breaths. When everyone had had their turn, we filed back into the house in silence. The thin man at the head of the table—Sarah’s father, whose angular face harbored interesting shadows—placed his hands on the covered challah and recited the prayer for bread. He peeled off the cloth, broke pieces from the challah and dipped them in honey, then passed them around the table.

I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything as delicious as that first bite of bread: so sharp was my hunger, so soft the bread, with its perfect chewy-smooth crust. A plate of apple slices was then passed around, along with the honey. I dipped my slice into the pot; the honey sheen glimmered like sunlight as I raised the apple slice to my lips. Those first divine tastes were the beginning of a magical evening. One course followed the next, served by the women; Sarah and I, who’d prepared and cooked most of the food, were released from serving. The food, from first to last, was exquisite. As each dish was served, the diners heaped compliments upon us, and every now and then, one or another relative would cross to where we were sitting and enthusiastically pinch our cheeks.

I’d always been a bit unadventurous in my diet, preferring to stick to familiar foods. But I surprised myself, tucking in heartily to everything that was offered—spreading salty, congealed chicken fat on my challah, sampling the chopped herring and chicken livers that arrived early in the meal. We all sipped heavy, sweet red wine from metal cups. Between courses, the entire table lifted their voices in song, delivering the ancient Hebrew prayers up to the heavens. The room flickered with a dozen candles placed in alcoves in the wall, making all the faces around the table glow.

Late in the evening, light-headed from wine and heavy-bellied with food, I looked around, suddenly detached from the proceedings. Here I was, celebrating my first ever Rosh Hashanah. I felt a sinking within my chest, as if my heart were being dragged away from its normal place.

The women and girls cleared away the food and resumed their places for the singing of the Birkas Hamazon, the lengthy, sonorous prayer sung after meals. Yossele proudly took the lead, lifting his voice high, closing his eyes, and swaying to the beautiful melody. He was singing from the heart; his youthful warmth, love, and commitment seemed to wash through the room, affecting everyone. As the prayer came to a close, I could hear Yossele’s clear voice, drawing out the melody line so that it wove languidly through the air.

Poteiach et yadecha, umasbia l’chawl chai ratson. Baruch hagever asher yivtach badonai, v’haya Adonai mivtocho.

I felt once more my mother’s presence: it was as if she were coming to me in the sounds of the prayer rising in this simple wooden house. I could almost hear her voice, singing along with the crowd.

I closed my eyes. A faint memory tickled at me—the sound of my mother singing those same Hebrew words as I slipped into sleep. An even fainter recollection—whispered words in my ear: That’s a Hebrew prayer, darling. Doesn’t it sound sweet? How old had I been? Three? Four? My mother singing me to sleep—I always had trouble falling asleep—with songs from old-time musicals: The King and I, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music; perhaps having run out of things to sing she reached back into her own past for another song or two, retrieving the Birkas Hamazon she’d learned at Hebrew school.

I opened my eyes again to see the beatific faces around the table, transported by the ancient prayer to some place I did not know, and yet that did not feel completely unfamiliar. No one seemed to notice I was not singing. I felt a hollow ache in my chest and a tear leaked from my eye; though I often seemed equipped with the knowledge I needed on this remarkable journey, the Birkas Hamazon eluded me. How I wished I knew the words so that I might join in.

Why did my mother never teach them to me? How could I have reached the age of fourteen—a full two years beyond the age when Jewish girls back home in Brooklyn celebrate their Bat Mitzvah—without having celebrated a single Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, or any of the other holidays that were central to my Jewish heritage? This surely came about by way of a well-thought-through and deliberate act—to cut my brother and me off from all of this; such a thing could hardly have been an accidental oversight.

It didn’t add up. Sitting there, aware of the feeling of connection in this simple room—extending beyond the family to an entire people with almost two thousand years of history—I recalled something else. My mother: not as the grown woman I knew as Mama, but as a young girl named Talia, sitting in the little square in Broken Hill, talking sadly, with a kind of brokenness, about how she’d never really felt like an Australian, for the simple reason that she was a Jew.

Sarah’s grown sisters and brothers-in-law took their leave, along with her aunt and uncle and their children, and her four older brothers, who lived in the dormitories at the yeshivah, where they studied. Yossele, happily exhausted, climbed the ladder to the alcove above his parents’ room where I assumed a small bed of some kind awaited him. Sarah and I were left alone with her parents. Her father had shed a little of his sadness with each cupful of wine, and now he smiled as he congratulated us both on our cooking.

“Let’s do the Torah reading together,” he said, rising and taking a somber-looking book from the bookshelf at the far end of the room.

I glanced at Sarah, who leaned across to me and whispered:

“We still do the holiday reading together on holy days. It’s one of my favorite things …” Her voice trailed off; she watched as her father returned to the table, walking slowly, carefully, the large volume open in his hands, head bent in the flickering candlelight to peer closely at the small print on the page. When he finally sat, he removed his eyeglasses and turned his attention to Sarah, fixing hovering eyes on her face.

“I always think of the Rosh Hashanah reading as my Sarah-le’s special passage,” he said.

He turned back to the page—hunched his shoulders a little and began swaying gently back and forth in his chair, slowly, at first, increasing his speed by shades. He sang in a voice that was both joyous and sad: Hebrew or Aramaic, I could not tell, and yet once again I understood every word.

“And God remembered Sarah as He had said, and God did to Sarah as He had spoken. Sarah conceived, and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him.”

Sarah’s father sang these words—straightforward enough in their meaning and sound—as if they contained within them deep wisdom and transporting beauty. He repeated the haunting chant once, twice, and then abruptly broke off and resumed in a spoken voice.

“She named her son Isaac—which means will laugh because, as Sarah declared, God has made laughter for me, so that all that hear will laugh with me.”

How strange, I found myself thinking; the man Sarah would marry, Grandma’s father, was named Isaac.

There was silence in the wooden house, but for the sound of the scholar’s voice. I wondered where Sarah’s mother was; she had disappeared. Absent, I thought. Even when she was in the room, it was as if she wasn’t there.

“And so, Sarah-le, may God bless you, too, with many, many reasons for joining in such laughter—the music of angels, the best music there is.” He reached over and affectionately patted his daughter’s cheek.

Could he have known that one day Sarah would give birth not to one or two children—but ten? One of whom would not survive—whose booties, knitted by Sarah many years forward in the future, Grandma had actually given to me! Sarah’s father turned and fixed his gaze on my face; there was something unsettling about his regard.

“Sons, yes—may you have sons. But also daughters.”

His eyes were boring into me, reaching for something—effortfully reaching for knowledge. Could Sarah’s father have intuited—even if not consciously—that I was the grandchild of Sarah’s future daughter? The daughter conceived to replace her precious, lost baby Rose? My grandmother the daughter she would tragically find herself unable to love?

“Daughters,” he said. “God’s sweet treasures.”

He turned back to the book before him and seemed to slip into a trance; he remained very still, suddenly taller in his seat, as if an invisible cord were pulling him upward. Warmth suffused his features as he focused intently on the book in a way that was both gentle and fierce. I was gazing at an unknown landscape of emotion; he took me with him, and I felt he was taking Sarah, too. Now, he seemed almost to be emanating light. I squinted tightly; an aura of illumination appeared around his body.

My eyes suddenly felt almost unbearably heavy. I allowed them to close and it was as if a door slammed, taking away the cocoon-like world of Sarah’s family home, leaving me stranded in a blank nowhere, curiously silent. And yet, the chanting of Sarah’s father still filtered in, as if the life of that room were both happening and not happening at the same time. I felt sure of only one thing: the breath coming in and out of my lungs, the whooshing feel of it, feathery and light.

A vague and yet powerful memory of elongated shapes and forms came over me, flashes of color, taste, smell, floating in a sea of sound. An image swam into my mind: an enormous candelabra, its shiny gold stems coiled like snakes, the flames pulling up from blackened wicks to rise like hot ghosts to the ceiling. Light fractured into a hundred colors and spread across a vast space.

A single voice: a man’s song loud in my ears. My own eyes blinking sleepily, my hands balled against something soft, oh! So very soft! Plush, a blanket. I un-fist my tight hands, stretch out my fingers—reach for the hot colored light pouring down over me, blue, pink, yellow, purple, broken into shapes by lines and curves of black. My eyes blinking, now open wide to see the stained-glass window above.

I turn my head; how different it all feels! My neck mushy, soft, my limbs circling, everything so different, so different, me and not me: someone else, but only me. I turn my head again and this time, the new sight slams into me, jolts me from this strange underwater domain: my mother, only different, so different, her face—what? Like Talia’s? More like Talia’s in any case—the Talia of so long ago, so recent for me, and still so far ahead in the future, not yet born as I sit here, at Sarah’s table, listening to Sarah’s father chant ancient words.

I am a baby in a baby carriage, the young, Talia-like Mama I glimpse in this strange, early memory is my mama from then, from when I was a baby.

And I place the memory. I had, after all, been in a synagogue, only long, long ago. My mother must have taken me when I was a baby, still in a carriage. The memory of it lost long ago, or never fully formed, and yet something about being here, now, snagged the hidden recollection and made it bloom to life.

My eyes snapped open; Sarah’s father had finished his chant and was staring into the middle distance. Sarah, too, appeared to be in a trance. Finally, her father spoke.

“My dear girls. Now, it is time to sleep.” He bent and planted a gentle kiss on Sarah’s forehead. “May the Lord bless you and keep you.”

Then, he looked at me and for a moment hesitated. I felt as if he wanted to plant a kiss on my forehead, too. It was as if he was wondering if I were indeed family, since then, it would be permitted. Physical contact with a girl outside of the family would be forbidden.

I am family! I wanted to call out. I am your very own great-great-granddaughter, and I have traveled all the way from Brooklyn and back more than a hundred years … impossible, I know, but it is true!

He seemed to be listening to something, as if trying to make out the very words that were echoing in my own mind. Solemnly, he bent again, this time placing a kiss on my own forehead.

“And may the Lord bless you and keep you,” he said, before turning toward his room, his rough workman’s hands hanging heavily by his side.

Sarah watched him disappear behind the door. Silence, and then the authoritative sound of a small bolt being carefully moved into place.

“I’m not the least bit tired,” Sarah said, turning to me. “Are you?” Her eyes shone in the light of the single candle still lit behind her on the alcove in the wall. “Why don’t we go out and take a quick look at the river? Now’s our chance!”

I glanced about to see if I could sight a coat that might belong to me. I found nothing like that. Just as I was thinking how cold it was likely to be outside, Sarah spoke.

“You take the blanket. I’ll take Mama’s heavy shawl.”

I tugged the blanket up from the small bed, folded it into fourths, and draped it around my shoulders. It was incredibly warm. I reached to remove the candle from the alcove.

“We won’t need that,” Sarah said. “The stars are bright tonight—I saw them through the window. Maybe they know it is Rosh Hashanah and there is no moon—and they want to help us bring in the new year with the glory of light!”

We left through the front door, closing it slowly behind us.

The sky was indeed bright with what looked like ten thousand stars. They hung in endless layers, shimmering with unfathomable mystery. I looked up and down the dirt road to see small wooden houses, similar to Sarah’s, modest in the white wash of light.

Sarah turned her head up to the skies.

“Can you believe how bright they are? And just after our holiday reading about Sarah! Do you remember the passage from the story of Abraham, Sarah’s husband? From Genesis … ”

“No,” I said, “I don’t remember.”

“Well you know that Abraham and Sarah wanted children so badly. God takes Abraham outside and says to him, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.’”

My mind flashed back to Billy and how much he loved to count everything. I imagined him craning his neck upward beneath this impossibly bright sky—could almost hear his little voice in my ears. “Sis! How will we ever count all these stars! There must be a zillion, trillion, bajillion!”

We walked toward the glimmering sliver in the distance, beyond the town: the river.

The brisk air chilled my cheeks and nose, though my body, under the thick blanket, remained warm. We rounded the corner onto a broad dirt road and came to a halt before a much larger building than any I had seen so far. It was a simple structure, almost like an oversized cabin, made of roughly hewn wooden planks, several stories high. The roof also seemed to be made of wood, with two odd little red-brick chimneys sitting on top. The imposing polished wooden doors seemed out of place, to belong more to a stately edifice of stone. Mounted above the doors was an oversized Star of David made of the same dark polished wood as the doors.

“Are you sorry you missed services tonight?” Sarah asked.

I was curiously choked up and unable to speak, so I only nodded. Sarah took me by the hand, such a simple, sisterly gesture, it brought tears to my eyes.

“We’ll have our chance in the morning. Let’s get up even earlier than everyone else so we can be the first ones here!”

We stood a moment longer, the light-pricked skies wide above us. The old wooden synagogue seemed weary, as if sagging on its foundations, and I had the odd thought that it was only managing to keep from collapsing through pride.

“Come on,” Sarah said, tugging me away. I turned reluctantly from the synagogue, my anxiety spiking to dread. “Come on!”

We hastened along the road. Sarah seemed to be floating. I held tight to her hand and found myself floating beside her. Something had happened to her mood, I could feel it as if it were a ripple of heat—a delicate sense of freedom. We passed shops, shuttered in the starlight, Yiddish signs painted in bold calligraphy declaring their identities: butcher, grocery, bakery, ironsmith. The squiggly letters had a peculiar effect on me, rolling in my imagination with a physical vitality, as if tumbling against my palms. It all seemed—I don’t know, so solid, as if these simple wooden buildings had been here forever. Countless children through the ages must have moved along this street in the depth of a night like this, generation upon generation of girls just like Sarah and me, sneaking out on a late yontif evening, hungry for adventure.

We walked at a brisk pace; after all that rich food, it felt good to be moving, the blood pumping through my veins. The streets were silent. The houses we passed were shrouded in darkness, the entire village slumbering, the villagers sated from their own Rosh Hashanah feasts, dreaming, perhaps, of the religious services that would take place the next day, beginning at dawn.

The street seemed to go on forever, and then, abruptly, came to an end, and we stepped off the hard dirt road onto a field covered in short brown grass, chewed down, perhaps, by sheep or goats. The land rose and then dipped; we broke into a slow run on the downward incline and I felt a rush of cold air in my hair.

The river was closer than it had seemed from the road; we were now only three or four hundred yards away.

The silence was broken by a strange rumbling that I felt as vibrations in my feet before the sound reached my ears. The sound grew to thundering: hoofs, pounding the ground. It was coming from behind us, beyond the village. I looked back to see a posse of horses being ridden hard by young men riding low, their hair streaming behind them.

“Cossacks,” Sarah whispered. “They’re training for Dusetos.”

“Dusetos?”

“The races. On the shores of Lake Sartai. They couldn’t be more than two weeks away.”

We stood, frozen, watching the riders speeding along in the distance. Sarah glanced at me; her face was filled with fear.

“What is it?” I asked.

Sarah’s lip trembled; she shook her head, looked away. “Come on, let’s go down to the river.”

We ran swiftly toward the riverbank, our cares whisked away by the cold air. My heart pumped wildly, my speeding feet seemed to lift from the ground; I was flying through space and time, released.

And then, there it was: the expanse of gray water, no longer a shiny band of metal, but a surface of choppy little waves, crumpled by the wind. We stood on the bank panting, then plopped down on the ground.

I turned, smiling, to face Sarah. To my surprise, I found that she was not smiling at all; her face was unhappy and pinched.

“I can see why they called the river Sventoji—whoever it was who named it.”

In the starlight I could see a thin, shiny line starting in the corner of Sarah’s eye and moving down her cheek, a tiny river all its own.

“The Holy,” she sighed. “That’s exactly what it is.”

She looked at me full on, her eyes burning. “But then, all rivers are holy, aren’t they?” Her voice was thick and pained. “The source of life.” She paused, lost in thought. “Helpless, too,” she said, as if to herself.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, feeling helpless myself.

“This beautiful river—oh, how I love it! It has been my closest friend the whole of my life—but it’s powerless to stop them from killing us. To stop them from wanting to kill us. How many centuries has it lain here, moving, always moving, toward the sea—toward freedom—while our own countrymen set fire to our homes?”

Sarah reached out and gripped my arm so hard I let out a little cry of pain.

“Those waters are dark! And I feel like I know something—some terrible truth. There is much more killing to come. I feel it here.” And she freed my arm to place her open palm on her chest. “It’s only going to get worse!”

The terror in her eyes spilled out, flooding over to me.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

“My parents have been talking about leaving. That won’t come as news to you; your parents are probably talking about the same thing.”

Did I imagine the shade of a frown in her face as she uttered the words your parents?

“So many people have gone to Southern Africa. It’s almost impossible, now, to get into America. Ever since Kishinev …”

“Kishinev …” I said.

“It made no difference, did it,” Sarah said, “that they found the murderer in the end. The government had already declared that the death of the Christian baby was a ritual murder, plotted by Jews. The peasants formed a mob—how efficient they were, burning, killing. With the full support of the government. As far as everyone was concerned, if they said that Jews did it, then they did it—even after a Christian relative of the baby confessed to the crime.

“I think that’s what scares me most. That there’s no reason to it. It’s just pure hatred that has nothing to do with reality.”

It was colder here, by the river. Despite the blanket, I began to shiver; the shaking seemed to reach all the way to my bones.

“Perhaps we ought to go back,” I said.

Sarah wiped away a tear.

“Yes, I suppose we should,” she said.

“It’s a new year. Maybe everything will settle down. Blow over.” The moment my words were out, I realized how hollow they sounded.

Sarah gave me a probing look. “I’ve always found hope in the bright spots of our history,” she said. “The times our people have flourished.”

Hearing her say that—our history—jarred; the history she was talking about, of the Jewish people, felt like it had nothing really to do with me. Yes, my mother was Jewish, and I had known that all my life, but since I’d not been raised Jewish, it seemed like a fact that did not really impact me.

“Such as …?”

“My favorite period is when the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem, almost fifty years after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple. You know, when King Cyrus of Persia decreed that not only could they return, but he would provide funding to help them rebuild the temple. Did you know that Jews talked Aramaic in those days? Papa has taught me some in our studies together, since some of the Torah is written in Aramaic. I am so lucky, since most girls don’t get to learn like the boys … I’ve always loved that passage about the edict; it comes right at the end of the Tanakh. I memorized it when I was a little girl:

So said Cyrus the king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth has the Lord God of the heavens delivered to me, and He commanded me to build Him a House in Jerusalem, which is in Judea. Whoever among you, of all His people, may the Lord his God be with him, let him ascend!

“Those last words fill me with hope—let him ascend! It means that one day, we will go up to the place we call home, where we belong, where no one will set fire to our houses or murder us just for being who we are.

“That period of the Second Temple lasted for six hundred years. Six hundred years! I know, there were still wars and all kinds of terrible things happening—that seems to be how history works. But it was a period mostly of peace and flourishing for Jews. I long for that—for our people to be left alone.”

I didn’t know what to say. Together, in silence, we turned our backs on the river. The return journey seemed longer; the chill had sharpened, and though I held the blanket tightly around me, the frigid air crept in through the unavoidable crevices. By the time we rounded the corner onto Sarah’s street, I was shivering uncontrollably. A bank of cloud dampened the starlight, sinking the house in shadow.

Inside, the house was dark—the single candle from earlier had sputtered out. I unfolded the blanket I’d been using as a wrap and spread it over the bed; we undressed in the near darkness and climbed in together.

“Shanah tovah,” Sarah said, reaching for my hand. Her voice seemed far away, as if coming to me through the wrong end of a telescope. I returned her grip, aware of a vaguely desperate feeling that I was clutching her hand to keep Sarah from slipping away.

“Shanah tovah.” My accent was as thick and natural as hers, as if I’d been uttering this Hebraic expression, “A Good Year,” the whole of my life.

Within minutes I could hear, from the sound of her breathing, that Sarah was asleep. I felt exhausted, but at the same time alert and wide awake, as if I’d never sleep again. I lay there, listening to Sarah’s deep, even breaths, my mind a whirl of images, impressions, tastes, and sounds from this very long day. I drew in some careful, steady breaths and tried to still the tumbling carnival of images. I found myself fixing on the disturbing conversation I’d had with Sarah in the midst of our marathon cooking session.

What was the name of that yeshivah student she’d mentioned—the one who, along with a group of friends, had fought back against the czar’s men with stones, and was later savagely murdered? I had an urgent feeling—that I must recall his name. How could I let him lie there on the street in my mind’s eye, brutalized, without remembering his name? I desperately wanted to say a prayer for him here, in his hometown, on this Rosh Hashanah evening.

It came to me. Yitzhak Baron. If Sarah was eight at the time, then that particular pogrom took place five or six years ago. And now, according to Sarah, the violence was again in full swing, though it had not yet reached Dusiat.

I pictured Cossacks on horseback holding firebrands, kicking children down in the street, drawing pistols and swords: knifing, shooting, attacking the men and women with whom we’d celebrated this evening. Wasn’t the world meant to become less baffling as one grew older—not more? I longed for the feelings I’d had as a young child, lying in bed as my mother or father read to me, snuggly warm and safe, with thoughts only of Winnie the Pooh and the Magic Faraway Tree, filled with the certainty that aside from the villains in fairy tales, people were kind and good and righteous.

I curled up under the woolen blanket, suddenly woozy and aware of a crushing need for sleep.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting up in bed, coughing wildly. A thickness of black smoke burned my eyes and choked my throat. I shed the heavy blanket and stumbled to my feet.

“Sarah!”

She was lying in the bed, still asleep. I shook her body—she remained unmoving.

“Sarah!” I shouted again, and this time she stirred.

She leapt from the bed and ran coughing to the sideboard where the large jug of water stood. In a moment, she was back; she threw a soaked cloth to me and I caught it, then pressed it to my nose and mouth as I could see, in the wavering orange light, she was doing with a similar piece of rag. Sarah crawled on the floor to her parents’ door and began pounding on it with her fist. A loud thud: Yossele, jumping down from the alcove and landing clumsily on his side. He, too, was coughing. I ran over to help him up. He winced as he righted himself but did not seem seriously hurt. Blinding smoke billowed through the space. The fire roared, attacking everything with burning claws.

The bolt, I thought, recalling how Sarah’s father had bolted his door. At that moment, the door fell forward—whether her parents had axed it open or it had succumbed to the flames, I did not know—and Sarah’s parents stumbled out. Sarah thrust wet rags into their hands and together we crawled along the floor to the back door.

Then, we were outside in the alleyway; the cool air rushed into my lungs with such intense relief, it felt almost like pain. Beside me, Sarah was gulping in air. She leaned close to my ear.

“Mama said it was going to happen,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “She’s been saying it all along.” Her eyes were glassy and oddly calm.

We ran along the street. I looked back, keeping the damp cloth over my mouth and nose as the smoke billowed all around us. Row upon row of simple wooden houses I’d passed by earlier in the night were in flames. Beyond the houses, against the hills’ silhouette, I made out a series of swiftly moving shadows: men on horseback, twenty or more, brandishing fiery torches. The powerful young men we’d glimpsed earlier in the evening, riding low on their horses, their jackets flying behind them. On their faces, I imagined a grim satisfaction as they turned back to look at the burning village, their eyes glinting perversely with pride.

I thought back to last night, when I lay in the wooden bed that by now was surely aflame, picturing a scene that was eerily close to what was happening now.

We ran on, joined by ever more people—men, women, children, pouring from the houses, running together, a burgeoning, frightened herd. I kept closely behind Sarah’s father; I realized he was clutching something; a large piece of fabric was flapping in his hand. I squinted to make out what it was and recognized the crumpled piece of white silk, with its yellow-and-blue embroidery and shaggy white fringe. In all the commotion, surrounded by deadly, thick smoke and greedy flames closing in on their house, Sarah’s father had thought to bring his tallis—the simple prayer shawl given to him on his wedding day by the parents of his wife.

What, I wondered, would I seize in such a situation from my own home—so very far away in time and place?

The street widened, and I felt a flare of intense heat; instinctively, I veered away from it toward the middle of the packed-dirt road. I turned my head to see the old barn-like synagogue furiously burning; only a few hours earlier, it had called to me in a sweet and welcoming way … There was something brighter about this fire. A horrible stench pressed through the rag I held to my nose: fumes, kerosene or some other kind of combustible fluid. The enormous wooden doors were aglow, eerily without flames. The illusion held for but a moment; an angry cracking, like the sound of logs being split, tore the doors apart, huge timbers chewed at by the devouring flames.

A loud creaking split my ears and I turned my face from the vile burst of heat that brutally punched the air. Time compressed, and though I continued to hurl myself down the street, along with the growing crowd, something inside me gripped onto the molten moment: the heat of the dying synagogue was inside me, like the energy in a giant coiled spring. Only a few hours ago I had longed for the morning, when I’d expected to pass through those enormous polished doors and into the sanctuary. Where I would join Sarah’s family—my family—in prayer, the sinuous Hebraic words gliding from my own tongue, their meaning rich and plain as I rehearsed the service that my grandparents and their parents and all my ancestors down through two thousand years of history had uttered before me.

Now, it would never be; it would never come to pass.

Escape? But to where—and by what means?

Something in the heat that pummeled us, that flooded my being from within and tugged at my heart and soul, felt like a taste of what might have been, what would have been, if not for the Cossacks and their firebrands.

And then, it was snatched away—the sight of the burning synagogue, the houses all around. The street ended and we veered off onto open farmland, our collective feet muffled by the brown grass underfoot. We were off across the field, and then rounding a large copse of trees, moving farther and farther away from the village. Everything was suddenly dark, increasingly dense vegetation hiding the sight of the flames. No sounds but the thudding of our feet on the earth and the deep heavy breathing of hundreds of people—much of the population of an entire village, in the thick of the night, moving along carrying nothing, no possessions, only life—fleeing into the darkness with nowhere to go.

I looked up to the skies, which were darkening, swallowing the stars whose generous light had earlier allowed us to pick our way across the nighttime landscape toward the Sventoji River. We were now in dense forest; a small clearing opened up ahead and we all slowed, spreading through the space, quiet voices rising in ghostly chorus. Sarah slipped her hand in mine; we both waited for our breath to steady before speaking. I wondered how far we were from the river—wondered how long it would take us to reach, and whether there would be boats to sail us away from all this.

Sarah was studying my face and once again, for what felt like the hundredth time in the course of this very long twenty-four hours, I had the unsettling feeling that she was reading my mind.

“Father says there are going to be boats,” Sarah said. “We don’t know when they’re coming—but soon. Small boats. They’ll take us to the Baltic Sea.”

“And then where?” I asked, scrambling to remember my geography. The Baltic Sea, how foreign that sounded, conjuring images of people and places I’d never imagined would actually involve me.

“They talked about the big boats, the ships. That sail to Southern Africa. We have people there. Distant relatives, from Dusiat. They saw the writing on the wall, that’s what Papa says.”

Sarah’s eyes were shining strangely, the way eyes look with fever. Her voice, though still a whisper, vibrated with excitement. But my own heart sank; I knew that I wouldn’t be going with them. I was developing an instinct about my journey—and standing there, in the darkness, whispering to Sarah, I knew that I was about to leave her and find myself once again flung into some other reality.

Oh please, let it be home.

The wish was so intense, it felt like a crushing weight on my chest. But even as these words formed in my mind, I had a foreboding that my wanderings were not yet over. I felt an awful plunging within, as if my heart and stomach were sinking within me like giant stones.

“For now, we’re going to hide in the forest,” Sarah said. “Look—” She pointed into the darkness, some distance away, where a group of men were busy with shovels. Some were crouched on the ground, their bodies hunched, intent, busy. “They’re digging pits,” she said, her voice lowering to the faintest whisper, so soft I could only just make out her words.

“Pits?”

She nodded. “You’ll stay with us.” Her voice was tentative, the fevered shine gone from her eyes, which were now hollows of seriousness.

I said nothing. What remained unsaid, hung between us: Where else would I go?

Sarah gestured toward another group of men, huddled together within a dense grouping of trees.

“Yossele is going back with my eldest brother, Chaim. To Kovno. Things are calmer there. Chaim says the government will keep the trouble in check. He can join Chaim at the yeshivah.”

No! I wanted to shriek. Yossele mustn’t go with Chaim! The terrible image of Yossele’s future reared up in my mind, bloody and awful; my hands trembled as I reached for Sarah’s arm.

“Hadassah, what’s wrong?” She searched my face.

My throat seized; I could not utter a single word.

I felt I was choking on time itself; I knew the future, which meant I had the power to change the future, to speak out—no, to shriek—Come with us, Yossele! So you might live in South Africa, not here, not in Kovno, where several decades from now a new band of evildoers will make the Cossacks’ attacks seem pranks by comparison. So that you and your children might be spared the horror of succumbing to the Nazis’ bullets. In South Africa, you will have a different wife, different children—and you will all survive!

But how could I interfere with the past? The past had already happened!

A voice threaded its way into my confusion. Wait, this inner voice said, Yossele has nothing to do with your own past. I struggled to make sense of this thought. Since Yossele was Sarah’s brother, he was not in the direct line of my own family—only now did I make the actual connection that Yossele was in fact my great-great-uncle. His fate, therefore, had no impact on the fact of my own birth. Maybe I could say something now, to Sarah? Maybe I could change history after all—maybe I could save Yossele! That sweet boy, so clever, the intelligence shining brightly in his eyes.

How could I not say anything? I closed my hands into fists—could feel the immense power in my own hands and tried to squelch it. It all felt too much! But—but—how could I turn away from the chance to save Yossele from his fate? Yossele, his wife, his children! I was too panicked to run the logic—and who could believe in any case in logic when it came to this crazy topsy-turvy time and space journey I was on? Logic would say this: that if Yossele went to South Africa with his sister, Sarah, he of course would end up with a different wife, different children. The point was, I’d be saving him. And yes, even saving the children that would not in fact end up being born. My mind was scrambling. The crowd was pressing in, we were being pulled apart by this river of humanity.

“Sarah,” I said, aware that the pressurized-steam panic rising within me was evident in my voice. “Yossele must go with you! You cannot let him stay here!”

She shook her head. “We’ve talked with him,” Sarah said, pressing my hand. “Mama, too, and Papa. It’s agreed. He’ll be safe here.”

“He won’t be safe! I’m telling you—you cannot let him stay!”

Sarah let go of my hand. “Hadassah, what are you talking about? How can you possibly know—?” There, the furrowed brow, her eyes wavering with confusion and fear.

“If you don’t—he’ll be shot!”

Sarah’s eyes went blank. “Hadassah, what’s happening to you?”

She looked at me sideways, this time with a wariness that made me want to weep. It was as if the feeling between us was suddenly sucked away. All the closeness and togetherness of the past day evaporated.

I sank to my knees, limp with helplessness. History itself was bearing down on me, a dark river governed by the moon, thrusting forward, but tugged by a raging sea—the future, Destiny, bearing down on the moment, on me, with brute, unyielding force. I saw myself for the first time as the tiniest thing on earth, powerless as a mote of dust.

“Sarah,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I reached for her hand and she tentatively took it, and then the dark look in her eyes melted away.

And then, he was there beside me, Yossele; I had not heard him approach.

“I want to say goodbye,” he said. Was I imagining it? An unbearably knowing look in his eye? “And wish you safe journey.”

I’d never felt so hopeless. I looked at Yossele, tried to return his farewell but was struck mute, as if by some mighty, external force.

“It’s all right, really,” he said, raising his arm toward mine, as if he were going to take my hand, but then dropping it again.

He turned, then, and walked away. It all seemed so surreal—hundreds of us milling around under cover of the forest, the night heavy around us. Ordinary people, standing about in an ordinary way, and yet everything extraordinary, not normal at all: the world turned on its axis, lives uprooted, ripped from their foundations, everything changed, forever. And yet—after all, just people whispering and talking and planning, under the stars.

How must Sarah’s parents feel—leaving their young son here, perhaps never to see him again? No, not perhaps. I had to remind myself: I knew how this would all turn out. After tonight, Sarah and her parents would, in fact, never see any of these family members again: not Yossele; not the other six older siblings I’d met this evening—which felt like weeks ago, not mere hours; not their cousins and uncles and aunts and everyone else remaining behind.

Something seemed to be happening; a murmur passed through the crowd, and then the strange, silent feel of motion, as if we were all giant particles heating up. Now, we were moving again, more slowly, this time, as if we were governed by a single force—as a herd moves: many creatures, one mind.

But where was Sarah? A moment earlier, we were together.

“Sarah?” I scanned about me. “Sarah!”

A sharp pain erupted in my left temple, as if someone had landed a blow with an iron rod. Then, the same pain in my right temple. Panic engulfed me, the signal, yes, that had preceded each of my tumblings back through time. I’m not ready to leave Sarah! I wailed within. And with no chance of at least some sort of farewell?

But then, a rustle beside me and there she was—her eyes feverish.

“Hadassah! I mustn’t forget to give you these!”

“What?” I said, disturbed by the agitated sound of her voice, by the mysterious, unreadable look on her face.

“These!” And she reached her hand out—we were being parted by the crowd, people swarming, moving more quickly now, coming between us. Her arm stretched and was knocked aside, then reached back out toward me. I stretched my own arm out too, felt the warmth of others brushing up against me, pushing Sarah and me apart. My head was now throbbing with alarming intensity, the pain clouding my vision.

“Yossele—he asked me to give them to you! I don’t know why—but it seemed important to him!”

I couldn’t speak; my throat was dry as sand. I reached for Sarah, but the distance between us was growing.

“And it’s important, also, to me!” Sarah said. “Here!”

Through the crowd, around and between, our fingers touched—our hands slid together in a fervent, quick clasp.

Two hard, round, smooth little balls—the oddly polished walnuts Yossele had chosen with such pleasure, knowing they’d bring him victory at palantes. I curled my fingers around them; they felt solid and reassuring against my palm. For an instant, I was overcome by an unexpected calm, here, in the midst of all this chaos.

And then, Sarah was being pulled away from me by the crowd, a startled look on her face; in my ears, the faint echo of her voice, whispering my name—lyrically, the Yiddish sounds stretching, sounding the way they had looked to me above the shop windows of Dusiat, with their unusual angles and beautiful arcs: “Hadassah—remember me. And I will remember you!”

I opened my mouth to speak—to say But I am here—with you! You don’t need to tell me to remember you! Don’t leave—Stay—

But she wasn’t staying, she was moving away, away, out of sight, joined with the moving crowd, as if she were floating down a swiftly moving river whose tide rumbled suddenly within me, a churning, roiling desperation, threatening to engulf me, overwhelm me, swallow me down, and crush the breath from my lungs—

The pain in my head ballooned, swallowing all thoughts, and then, the tumble into pelting rain and dreadful hurling through tempestuous darkness. Gone the bright stars, the danger of fleeing and flames, the thunder of running in a human herd, the feverish look in Sarah’s eyes.

And then, a violent slapping—water so cold it stung. And salt spray, burning my eyes. Everything was in complete darkness; I remembered, suddenly, the story of Odysseus that my father had read to me when I was young. And as I tumbled deeper into the storm, I thought of the squall in that story that lasted nine days and nine nights. Of how Odysseus and his men had tied themselves to the masts to keep from being flung into the raging, wine-dark sea.

I had no twine, no anchoring mast; in the face of the violent seething, I felt helpless and unprotected. My body twisted and ached as the stinging rain lashed me. I closed my eyes against the salt spray and balled up my fists, as if to battle the tempest with my hands. I kicked and thrashed and screamed with all my might, though the sound was swallowed to nothing by the roar in my ears.

I found myself doing something I never did back home, in my real life, in Brooklyn.

Praying.

I prayed I might again squeeze Billy’s hand: look again into those gleaming, impish, smiling eyes.

I prayed that I would see my parents, that we would be a family again. That my mama would recover and go back to being the mama I knew.

I did not see how I could survive. I don’t know how long I struggled. I was clinging to the slimmest thread of hope as time catapulted me farther back.

“Em—i—ly.” It sounded like the voice of a small child, trying to speak through tears. No, not a small child—Billy! I was sure of it! Billy’s voice, coming to me from—where? Desperately, I tried to open my eyes, but they were glued shut.

The touch of a cool hand on my forehead, the sound of a soothing voice.

“My darling … ”

The light intensified; even through my closed eyelids, I cringed with the intensifying pain it brought on. More voices, a man, a woman, the sound of people moving and talking, not close by but farther away, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. A soft clanking, and rustling, the distant sound of mechanical beeps. Now, a quick, sharp pain on the inside of my elbow. And then, the pain crushing my skull and shooting down my neck peeled away, the light disappeared, and the voices and sounds drifted off into the ether.