FOR THE REST of the voyage she regretted it, and she cried enough tears to fill the vast ocean with bitterness. But when she finally reached her old town, it turned out that there would have been no one to repair them anyhow. As it happened, a few days before Leah left New York, her grandmother’s house had burned to the ground. Raphael the scribe, her neighbor, had died trying to put out the fire. Her grandmother had not been hurt, but she had died shortly thereafter, the neighbors said, of guilt and despair. When Leah arrived at the place where the house had been, the earth was still scorched so badly that even the mud that covered the rest of the town wouldn’t stick to it.

Leah avoided lying, at least technically. After an appropriate interval, she sent her parents a letter saying she had met someone and had gotten married—which was true, though it had happened before she left. She told the people in the town that her husband had died in America, which was also true. In the letter, and when she told the people in the town, she even gave herself and her imaginary husband a new family name: Landsman (or, as the government registers would later spell it, Landsmann), a name common enough that no one would question it, but also a word that had meant so much to her family in America and now meant nothing to her—literally, a word for a person who came from the same place as you, from the same hometown. It meant more than that, though, to Leah’s family. Meeting a landsman was a kind of relief; you had the deep comfort of knowing that you weren’t alone in a city full of strangers. There wouldn’t be any more landsmen in her life, Leah realized as she mailed the letter. Even the people in her old hometown, her real landsmen, now seemed like strangers to her.