Thank you for your gift of money, that first letter read. We were able to buy a new stove, thank Hashem, and a traveling rabbi has blessed it, so it should serve us faithfully until the age of one hundred and twenty. I mean, your mother’s and my one twenty, of course, not the stove’s.

There’s another matter I consulted the Good Lord whether to tell you, and He advised me to do so. You see, your intended, the revered Reb Moskowitz, has fallen victim to a crook, and I ask that you warn him: When I finally found a money changer willing to break down the one-hundred ruble bill that Reb Moskowitz had forced upon me and your good mother, the money changer laughed us out of his store. The bill was fake. Please warn your groom that when it comes to his business associates, he should remember to employ the “honor him, yet suspect him” rule, as the Good Book teaches us.

An old lump swelled up in Batya’s throat. Her hatred toward Moskowitz had long grown as big as if it were another organ in her body. A curse she had heard her mother direct at the czar surfaced: May he hang himself with a sugar rope and have a sweet death. The man had no soul. If she could yank out his heart and throw it to the dogs, it would have still failed to satisfy her desire for retribution.

For her second letter home, months later, Batya had sat with the Professor and told him to write that she was in good health and eating well. Batya regretted that when Fishke had run off with Keyla too soon, it had left her able to read but not yet ready to write full sentences. Indeed, when the Professor read Batya’s letter back to her, his lyrical descriptions of her well-being and rich food were written in a flowery language she would never have been able to emulate. In subsequent letters, the Professor reported about her marriage—earlier than initially planned, at fifteen. The Professor built fantastic tales of her successful union with the devoted groom who covered her in silk gowns and jewels, of her pantries filled with provisions she shared generously with the poor, and of the Garden of Eden–like beauty of Buenos Aires.

Batya had been grateful for the fables, even if she could never be forgiven for the lies. Telling her parents the truth would have killed them. There was nothing her simple dairyman father could have done to help her from across mountains and oceans.