The crowd began to mingle and disperse, the adults gravitating toward husbands and wives and the children drawing back from the water’s edge, to be scooped up by parents who carried them away. Wilhelm’s father and Uncle Hayyim came over to where Wilhelm and Aunt Sarah and his mother and grandmother were standing, but Wilhelm continued staring at the floating bread. Above Wilhelm’s head, the grown-ups in the family were talking—at least, all of the grown-ups except for Wilhelm’s father, who remained silent. But as Wilhelm traced the paths of the bread in the water with his eyes, his ears, tracing the sounds of the voices above his head, registered his father’s name. “Unfortunately, not everything can be cast into the water, Nadav,” Aunt Sarah suddenly said.

Wilhelm snapped his eyes up from the river, twisting his head around until he had a full view of Aunt Sarah’s nostrils, which were blazing open, her lips protruding from her face. “Some things never go away, Nadav. Even the New Year doesn’t atone for sins between one man and another.”

“Stop it, Sarah,” Wilhelm’s grandmother said, her voice quavering but getting louder, her chin, miles high from Wilhelm’s perspective, jutting out like a finger pointing at Aunt Sarah’s nose. “He didn’t do anything, and you know it. Just because you want someone to blame—God, it’s been fifteen years, Sarah. Stop it already!”

“That’s easy for you to say, with a living son!” Sarah shrieked.

“Sarah, please stop,” Hayyim said, grabbing her arm. “Of all times of year—”

“I’ll even say it in German—the boy should know it too!” she shouted, pointing at Wilhelm’s father and forcing the funny words and vowels out of her voice until she was screaming in stilted German: “He killed my baby! I don’t care what they tell me—I know he did! He killed my baby!”

Then Sarah lunged at Wilhelm’s father, and her fingernails might have dug right into his father’s eyes if Wilhelm’s grandmother hadn’t grabbed her son from behind and Uncle Hayyim hadn’t restrained his raving wife.