“Listen, Leah,” her father said, “just forget about this, all right? Forget this boy. Let’s just dance a little, eat a little, let everybody enjoy themselves today, but you’re coming home with us tonight, understand?”

“And then I’m going to start saving money to buy a ticket back home,” Leah announced when her mother released her hand, her voice shaking as she tried to keep it firm. “I won’t stay here! You can’t keep me here!”

Leah’s parents knew it was the wrong time to protest. They pulled Leah back out into the crowd, where the women danced around the bride in circles for hours and hours without noticing the redness in her eyes.

When the case finally came before the rabbinic court—after three months of Leah’s father hounding David to give her a divorce, and three months of David refusing—Leah heard what the witnesses her father had tracked down reported, and she nearly threw up on the spot. If David was such a brilliant and successful scholar, Leah’s father demanded, why had he left Europe at all? According to three different witnesses from David’s hometown and the town where he had studied, David’s scholarship was the real thing. Everyone had known him as the town prodigy. Once he had left home, he had become the genius of the rabbinic academy. The only problem was that, in one of the houses where he ate his meals in the town where the academy was, he had beaten the host family’s youngest daughter so severely that the girl could no longer walk or move her arms. It was little more than a miracle that she hadn’t died. After the incident, he was expelled from the academy and returned to his hometown, where his relatives shipped him off to America as soon as possible. By the force of the court and under threat of excommunication, David granted his wife Leah a divorce.

On her wedding night, Leah lay in her iron cot with Freydl again, crying until daybreak as Freydl, in her violent sleep, thumped her head against the wall.

The day after her wedding, Leah went back to the factory as usual.

ALL DAY Leah sat at her sewing machine, hemming skirt after skirt after skirt, glancing now and then at the clock ticking on the factory wall. Sometimes it seemed to her that the hands of the clock were moving backward—she could have sworn that the clock had read ten o’clock at her last glance, but when she looked up later, it was only half past nine. As the minutes ticked by, minute by minute, she began to feel as if she were not sewing the skirts, but rather that they were sewing her. It was as if the sewing machine needle were moving back and forth along her arms, stitching them together and then encasing her whole body in seams until she was ready to be folded up and shipped and bought and worn by some other woman who, in some distant time, would profit from life more than she had. By the time the sky outside the factory’s few windows had dimmed to a deep blue, she felt like she was dead.