“Isn’t it too far to walk from Russia?” Batya asked. In her mind’s eye she tried to visualize the world map Fishke had shown her before he ran off with her sister Keyla. Fishke, a wandering scholar her father had picked up on his travels to tutor his daughters, had planned to start the revolution but ended up in a Siberian gulag as a guest of the czar. Keyla had written that she hired herself as a farm laborer near her husband’s prison, hoping to visit him once a month. “America is even farther away than Siberia,” Batya added.

“Just a locomotive ride to Odessa, then a ship across God’s vast ocean,” her father replied.

A locomotive! Batya had heard of this steam-spouting dragon that roared over metal tracks. Railroads dug through mountains and soared high on bridges, never to be swallowed whole in the belly of the rock nor to fall into the abyss of deep valleys. She rose on her toes and looked over the field into a distant, blurred line of a white birch forest, searching for tracks. Once they happened on them, would she just wave to the locomotive the way one would to a passing wagon? Would the iron beast stop in its rush and let them all climb in?

The idea of being carried away from here lifted Batya’s spirits, but her mother grumbled to her husband her usual practical considerations.

“You tell me who has the money for that locomotive, let alone for a ship’s passage?” she asked. “A passport alone costs fifteen rubles for each person. When was the last time you saw sixty rubles in one pile?”

“The Master of the Universe—not you—decides who gets to go to America.”

“So the Master of the Universe buys you tickets with no rubles?”

Batya looked around her at the wilderness, at the cart heaped with whatever had been left of their lives. She wanted so much to believe in her father’s dream, or she’d fall into despair.

Part I

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”

“I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing. . . .

I am unwelcome, and my body is burning with the shame of not belonging.”

—Warsan Shire

Chapter One

Batya’s family had been on the road for two days when a kind innkeeper who had been Koppel’s customer allowed them to settle on the hay in his barn. He brought over a pot of steaming soup rich with vegetables and three-day-old bread.

Hunger and fatigue had knitted into Batya’s body. Her feet throbbed from the days-long flight. Her blisters oozed, and she couldn’t wait to release her feet from the clogs. Her stomach rumbled.