The baby on Surale’s side reached his arms to Batya. She took him, hugging him to her chest while feeling Vida’s arms wrap around her thighs.

“Ima, Mommy,” the little girl said. The new name—her new identity, Vida’s mother—never failed to warm Batya’s heart.

Surale spread a blanket on the ground, and Batya sat down, pressing Vida to her and kissing the girl’s fair-haired head, like her own. The baby was pawing at her chest, and Batya lifted her shirt to let him suckle.

Her pregnancy had been the greatest surprise after the monthlong voyage from Uruguay. One more miracle to add to the list of improbable events that had happened at the time of her escape. God had blessed her with her own son, who wouldn’t be scraped out of her womb by the brothel’s doctor. The sense of wonder hadn’t lost its newness in the eleven months since his birth. It didn’t matter who his father was—though she hoped that he inherited Ulmann’s sensitivity. Her baby was all hers to love.

She had sold her jewelry, and the Jewish Colonization Association office in Jaffa had cashed her savings booklet. Combined with a subsidy from the Baron de Hirsch’s coffers—he now worked with another Jewish baron, the French Edmond Rothschild, for the latter’s colonization program in the Holy Land—she was able to acquire her own lot, hire masons, and build a small stone home for herself and her sisters’ families. Surale’s husband, Duvid, fashioned the furniture, and had since been earning money in the neighboring villages doing carpentry work. A new, proud Jew in the Holy Land, Duvid rode on the back of his mare, a gun strapped on his right side, his tool belt on his left, and his saw mounted behind him. He was a fine young man, and every time Batya witnessed the tenderness with which he treated his wife, she thanked the strength she had mustered to stave off her parents’ pleas to bring Surale to Argentina. Her mother in heaven must have since forgiven her.

Batya switched the baby to her other breast, and he sucked hungrily as if he hadn’t just emptied its twin. Her finger stroked the soft spot on his skull that reminded her of his vulnerability. Her baby. Yaakov, her father’s real name, not its diminutive Koppel, because here her son would grow up to stand tall and proud, like his namesake ancestor, Jacob, who walked this land, promised to his grandfather Abraham.