Cover

Dedication

To the millions of girls and women ensnared

into sexual slavery—then and now—

let this story be your cry for help.

To my daughters—Tomm Yariv Miller, Eden Yariv

Goldberg, Melissa Carner Simon, and Cheryl

Hoffman Carner—may you use your ample talents

to make this world a better place for women.

Epigraph

I am a procurer. I provide the public with merchandise, merchandise that everyone knows but no one speaks of. My business, if you want to know, is everywhere, in the entire world: Paris, London, Budapest, Boston. My main office, though, is in Buenos Aires. . . . I have an eye for the goods. One glance and I can tell you how much it’s worth and how far it should move. In my business, though, a sharp eye alone is not enough. One also needs a keen nose, a sniff that will tell you from a mile away what kind of a dog is buried there. . . . What do I deal in? Ha, ha! Not in Hanukkah candles, my friend, not in Hanukkah candles!

—Sholem Aleichem, “The Man from Buenos Aires,” 1909

Prologue

Russia, 1889

Blood pounded in Batya’s temples with the effort of pushing the cart. On the rutted road, the mud-crusted wooden wheels clanked with each turn, and the axles screeched in protest of the heavy load. The late autumn world was silent, indifferent, the fields drained of color. Batya breathed in rhythm with the axles: Turn, clank, screech—gasp in. Turn, clank, screech—sigh out.

At her side, her mother struggled to push, and her groans reverberated in Batya’s fourteen-year-old heart. Up front, her father labored to pull the cart, and although the heap of their salvaged belongings blocked Batya’s view of him, she could hear him pant. She was worried that her parents’ exhaustion might doom them to the fate that the bloody pogrom had left unfinished.

At least the barking of the dogs that accompanied their exile from Komarinoe had faded. Batya dared not glance back to see the flames of their burning hut rising like a cry to heaven. She dared not turn her head, as if from this distance she could glimpse her friend Miriam lying in a red pool, defiled.

Yesterday’s rain had turned the ground soft, and a wheel sank in the mud. Batya’s father pulled harder, grunting with the effort. If only they had their horse. As old and emaciated as Isadore was, he had served Batya’s father, Koppel, on his daily rounds, delivering cheese and butter to his customers. But the horse had been commandeered—led away from their yard by the constable—while their Russian neighbors, friends Batya had known all her life, looted their home. They didn’t wait until her family had departed, nor did they offer money to buy the stove, cot, and chicken the family couldn’t take along. They had just carried them out.