Batya had long figured out that letters like hers, sent all over Eastern Europe and accompanied by gifts of money, ensured that word of the girls’ good fortune would spread. The pimps, who called their organization Zwi Migdal, often traveled back to their home countries to offer poor Jewish women great jobs as shopgirls, governesses for children, or companions for aging Jewish matrons—or better yet, to “marry” them. Batya suspected that her mother’s envious tales of Pesha’s daughter, who had lived in Germany in luxury and bathed in hot springs, had made her mother more inclined to accept Moskowitz’s offer. May a fish bone get stuck in his throat. No wonder Pesha’s daughter sent money to her mother but never brought her out of Russia to live with her.

Batya reread her father’s latest letter, mourning his wife. What is a wife for if not to keep a man in his place? he wrote, and Batya thought with fondness about her parents’ constant bickering. With all their differences—and her mother’s complaints about their financial woes—they had been suited for each other. Now Batya also understood the connection the two had shared in the dark. In the long, cold Russian winter nights of her childhood, while the family slept together on the wide loft built above the stone stove, she had heard their muffled moaning and believed it was the aches in their joints from the hard labor they endured all day. Come summertime, there had been evenings when her parents insisted on relieving their daughters from milking duties and took their time returning from the cowshed. How else had her mother been able to conceive time and again?

Batya tied the letters with the ribbon and put them back. “God of great mercy, please protect my naïve father.” She wished she knew more prayers. Without a script, she was merely speaking to God instead of reciting the words He had prescribed for His followers. If she heard the prayers recited aloud at any of the synagogues in town, the forgotten sentences might jolt her memory. Maybe the women’s section had that tkhines book she so wanted.

The moon moved to the other side of the house, and Batya turned away from the window. She sank back on the blanket on the floor. Moskowitz wouldn’t permit her to attend a service at the synagogue. Maybe Freda, who respected the shiva, would have, except that for all her religious adherence, the matron never attended a service herself. Better not ask. If her jailers withheld their permission, Batya would have to defy them. She’d do better to figure out a way to just go.

Chapter Twenty-Three