“It must be a blessing to have a mother to take care of your little brother and sister and the house. Now you won’t have to work so hard,” Raizel Liba added sweetly, while chubby Adina Sara had stood by, nodding in agreement, dispensing a big, warm hug.

But it was not the approval of the B- and C-listers she craved—daughters of pharmacists and shopkeepers—but those of the elite group who had once been her peers, daughters of rabbis and kollel-heads. Freidel’s father was principal of the school, while Gnendel’s headed his own kollel (no doubt the reason she’d found anyone at all to marry her, with her face! And no doubt they’d held the wedding three weeks after the engagement so as not to give the groom an opportunity to change his mind).

When her mother had lived and her father had been a full-time scholar, her place among them had been assured. She’d been a princess, community royalty, her lineage linked from both sides to distinguished rabbis and scholars going back a hundred years.

But her mother’s sudden death had put an end to all that. For not only had the shocking details surrounding it fueled the rumor mill, but it had also triggered the economic necessity for her father to leave the kollel and take up full-time employment—a disgrace in their scholarly community. Perhaps worst of all was her father’s shocking determination to make a redheaded baalas teshuva his wife.

Now, instead of concrete, she stood on beach sand, she thought, her status shifting with every new wave of community gossip. In every word, every glance, every gesture toward her by others, she searched feverishly for sly suggestions of disdain, conjuring insults and slights out of thin air. And even when she failed to find them, it did little to assuage her anxiety or dissipate the clouds of disparagement she imagined hanging over her head. The only thing that had so far kept her from collapsing altogether were her grandparents. Living and dead, they were still all indisputable community luminaries.