A Day of Small Beginnings
A Novel
Chapter One
WHEN I WENT TO MY REST IN 1905 I WAS EIGHTY-THREE AND childless,
aggravated that life was done with me and that I was done with life. I turned
my face from the Angel of Death and recited the Psalm of David: What do You
gain by my blood if I go down to the Pit? Can the dust praise You? If God's
answer was punishment for my sins or praise for my good deeds, I cannot say.
Understand, I did not call Itzik Leiber to my grave that spring night
when my return to the living began. The boy had already jumped the wall
of our cemetery, our House of the Living, as we call it. He was down on all
fours, like an animal, looking for a place to hide. What's this? I thought.
Sleep, Freidl, sleep, I told myself. An old woman like you is entitled.
What did I need with trouble? I was a year in the grave. My stone was
newly laid, still unsettled in the earth. I had no visitors. In death, as in
life, people kept their distance. In our town, a childless woman's place was on
the outside.
And yet, from the hundreds of gravestones that could have h ... read full excerpt from A Day of Small Beginnings ebook
