In her room, finally alone, she read the letter. Her father’s familiar handwriting spoke to her through his grief. Clutching the single page, Batya fell on the bed. Her tears soaked her pillow until she thought she had none left.

Five months earlier. All this time she’d had no premonition. No tingling down her neck had signaled that her mother was watching her from above.

She needed to pray, to plead with God for her mother’s departed soul. Girls didn’t say kaddish, the prayer for the dead, but there had been another women’s prayer her mother had recited for her own deceased mother from her collection of Yiddish women’s prayers, tkhines. Yet the words were elusive. For four years Batya had been trying to remember some of her mother’s utterings. She had been too young or too busy—or, Batya now admitted, too uninterested—to have memorized them. She had failed to anticipate how short her time with her mother would be. Now she regretted her ignorance.

She walked to her dresser and withdrew a small packet of letters tied in a red ribbon. Had she not kept the letters in her dresser, a snooping sister might suspect another hiding place. Six letters in all had come through these past four years, and probably as many others had been lost. She braced herself as she took out the one letter she had read only once, for she couldn’t bear the pain of it. Her refusal to bring Surale to Buenos Aires had left her father baffled, but her mother didn’t save her tongue when she asked her husband to admonish the daughter who had dashed their hopes, all the while bragging about her good fortune.

Your mother asks how you can deny your sister the chance to find happiness and riches with a good husband like yours. I know that you are not selfish, but your mother can see no other reason for your denying your flesh and blood. You know Surale’s good heart, as pure as the fresh snow and as generous as late summer dandelions. As the Good Book says, she would have turned mountains on their heads to help you.

Batya had cried then, and cried again now. “Forgive me, Mama. Now that you are in heaven, you see for yourself. You know the truth of the fate I wanted to spare my little sister. I risked your wrath out of my love for her. Please forgive me and love me again, wherever you are now.”

When Rochel knocked on the door, Batya let her in and fell into her arms. “I need to pray for my mother’s soul but don’t know how.”

“But I do. We’ll have our own minyan.”