I translate the Hebrew out loud: “The daughter of a voice? That doesn’t make any sense.” “Sometimes the voice of God is referred to as a bat kol,” he says. When I walk with Tati, I feel like I’m supposed to think about important things, like prayer and faith. I come here to get away from the noises of the town and the chatter of the townsfolk. But I don’t hear God in the silence-I hear myself. “In silence you can hear God,” Tati says to me as we walk. They give me time to talk to Tati, but also time to think. 2 LayaĪs I follow the large steps my father’s boots make in the snow, I revel in the solitude. The death of those young lovers has been a pall hanging over Dubossary since its inception. I think it means something else-that our town was founded in tragedy. Mami always said that this town was founded in love and that’s why my parents chose to live here. That grave is the reason we know that there were Jews in Dubossary as far back as 1666. I like to put a stone on their grave when I go there, to make sure their souls stay down where they belong, and when I do, I say a prayer that I too will someday find a love like that. We don’t know anything else about them, but we know that they were buried, arms embracing, in one grave. It is said in our shtetl that it marks the final resting place of a bride and a groom who died together on their wedding day. The names on the stone have long since been eroded by time. The oldest gravestone in our cemetery dates back to 1666. I like to go there with him every morning. Instead of praying in the synagogue like all the other men of our town, my father goes to the cemetery to pray. If you want to know the history of a town, read the gravestones in its cemetery.

Perfect for fans of The Night Circus, The Bear and the Nightingale and Uprooted. A magical debut with a fairy tale feel that will break your heart.

Sisters of the winter wood