Her heart skipped a beat, and she curled into herself. Was another pogrom following them? In the first pogrom Batya had survived, the constable had shown up in the middle of Shabbat dinner—not to drink with her father, as had been his habit, but to inform him of the order from above. He then stood watching as the town’s thugs dragged Koppel by his beard, beating and kicking. Batya and Miriam ran with their mothers and sisters to the woods, where they all huddled, listening to the attack on the village’s Jews, praying for Batya’s father’s life. When they returned the next day, they found him injured but alive. All they could do was bandage his rib cage and place warm compresses on his open wounds before turning to the mitzvah of preparing the dead for burial. Short-handed in performing the sacred act of purification of the deceased, Batya’s and Miriam’s mothers hadn’t been able to prevent the girls from seeing the pregnant woman whose belly had been slashed, nor the little boy whose head had been smashed against a wall.

After that, theirs were the only two Jewish families remaining in the village. Now, none.

In this latest pogrom, the constable’s warning had helped Batya escape with Surale by climbing the oak tree from which their rope swing hung. They had shivered there together throughout the long night, while Miriam was defiled and murdered.

“What’s going on?” Batya now whispered to her mother, who was stroking Surale’s hair.

“Shhhhhhh.”

Batya tiptoed to the door and put her ear to it.

“What would you want with her? She’s not ready to reproduce,” she heard her father say.

The other man replied, “She’s quiet and obedient.”

Batya crept back to the beddings. “Is Papa selling Aggie?”

“Shhhhhhh,” her mother repeated, and Batya returned to her spot at the door.

“As the Haggadah says,” her father quoted, “‘She comes naked’: that means with nothing.”

“What would I want with your money?” the man replied, and the hair on Batya’s arm stood as she recognized Reb Moskowitz’s voice. “I’ve just given the treasurer a thousand rubles to build a grand new synagogue—with a tin roof, mind you—and to hire a rabbi.”

“Come back here,” her mother whispered, and when Batya crawled onto the bedding, her mother pulled her head toward her shoulder. “Let me tell you a story that was told to my father by the great Rabbi Nachman: A group of sages wanted to dig deep into the kabbalah to find the Truth. The one Truth above all others. They retreated to the desert to contemplate the puzzle. After months of ponderous discussions, they discovered that each animal—a bird, a reptile, or a mammal—had its own shadow. Uniquely its own. But you know what else they found?”

“What?”