The stuck wheel wouldn’t budge. Batya and her mother tucked the hems of their long dresses away from the mud and, leaning forward, pushed with all their might. Twelve-year-old Surale dropped the rope with which she led Aggie the cow to lend the little strength in her thin arms.

The cart wouldn’t budge.

“Remove the heaviest things,” Batya’s mother told her. “The table.” She pointed, and Batya’s heart skipped a beat. No! This was their sturdiest piece of furniture, her mother’s dowry—inherited from her own grandmother—and her source of pride.

Couldn’t they just lower the table until the cart dislodged, then put it back on top? Before asking the question, Batya understood that her mother wished to ease the effort of pushing the cart. The loss pulsating in her heart, Batya climbed up and pushed the table off. It tumbled down and crashed, two of its legs flying into a ditch. Batya’s mother bent to stroke the tabletop, now splintered, a top she had wiped and waxed thousands of times until it shone with her love.

Batya readjusted the large tin pot her mother used to churn butter, tied together with the tools for cheese making. These were her family’s livelihood. She resecured them over the bedding, but tossed down the bench, now useless without the table.

“That will do,” her father called out to her. He crouched to slide the broken bench seat under the wheel to create a ramp. With the next push, the cart lurched forward, freed.

As they continued on the road, pulling and pushing the cart, Batya’s head became light from the exertion. Perspiration cooled her face, but left it itchy, attracting flies. Her knitted socks chafed. Blisters burned. Hours from now, when she would finally take off her wooden clogs, she would find gaping holes in the bottom of the socks.

At last, they stopped to rest at the side of the road. The chill of the day confirmed the approaching winter. How long could her family continue like this, Batya wondered, and where were they to go if the entire region was being cleared of its Jews? If only her two older sisters hadn’t dispersed to their lives—each joining a man with whom she had fallen in love, flouting their father’s traditional role in finding them a match. They had broken his heart, and now, with Surale still so young, Batya was left to worry about their parents alone.

Her father turned his head upward to God. “When a man becomes his own horse, does a horse turn into his own master?”

“Where are we going?” Surale asked the question Batya dared not bring up.

“To America, of course,” he responded with exuberance in his voice.