Batya had said that she was from Komarinoe, where, she knew, no Jew had been left. No one could verify or dispute her story. Yes, she admitted to her sisters, she was the widow of a rich Argentine Jew, but after her sister-in-law’s betrayal, she had erased that part of her life.

“It would add to your status,” Surale had claimed.

“I didn’t come to the Holy Land to brag about my good fortunes. I’ve learned how fleeting they are. In my heart, I never left Komarinoe—or you.” When Surale persisted, Batya recruited Keyla, now living the dream she and Fishke had never brought to fruition.

“We’re building an equal, just social order,” Keyla explained to Surale. “Here no one is better than anyone else.”

Batya had buried her five and a half years of captivity. If she had been robbed of her youth—of her innocence—she was still only twenty-two years old.

She would never speak Spanish again. Instead, she was learning Hebrew. The children in the family picked it up fast in school, and she tried to decipher words as she listened to them playing. Some of her male neighbors had learned to read it in their yeshivas or synagogues, but they, too, stumbled on the spoken version of the language that had only recently been revived from its biblical roots. It was pronounced differently, in the Sephardi style, that of Ovad’s people. The revived Hebrew coined new words that hadn’t existed in the Bible in order to fit these modern times, words that ranged from “brush” and “cream” to “wheelbarrow.”