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congregation, be a real rabbi again. So Momma could be the rabbi’s wife again, like back in the village.”
    Hokhmah unconsciously twisted and retwisted the damp bedsheet. “I did everything Momma said to. I quit college to help Poppa in the store. I helped her in the house. I helped Essie and you. I watched Avraham get sent all the way through college, and him only half so smart as me.”
    â€œHokhmah, you crazy or what?” Yetta chided. “Avraham would need to support a family in time. You know that.”
    â€œAnd when Poppa died I took care of her. Other women my age had children already. That’s how she’d taunt me. Never a word of thanks I stayed with her instead. All those years, singing only to myself in my room but quiet, quiet , so she wouldn’t hear and have her heart wounded by my voice …”
    Yetta sighed and wiped her glasses on her skirt hem. “So? Who knows? You think anybody else gets to do what they want? Life takes and does on you how it likes.”
    But her sister rambled on, caught up in an eerie energy of bitterness. “I saved up my pennies scrimped from household money, and I bought the music and learned them in secret—all the arias I might have sung. All of them still there, fragments of melody inside my head, snatches never coming together whole—”
    â€œAch, you don’t even know what you’re saying anymore, Hokheleh, you’re so tired—”
    â€œNever one full coming-together American meal at home. Always the day-old bread, the cheapest cuts, always either dairy or meat, always the kosher kitchen even after Momma got sick and I had to keep it, her sharp eyes spying out when I tried to sneak and not wash everything separately—dishes, silverware, pots, pans.”
    Yetta stared at her in amazement. “Now there’s something wrong with keeping kosher? God’s own Law isn’t good enough for you? Like Broitbaum wasn’t a good enough name for you? You always gotta be different?”
    Hokhmah shut her eyes. “Oh, you don’t know,” she said listlessly, “you don’t even know what an aria is . What’s the use of trying to make you understand?”
    â€œIt’s him put that into your head,” Yetta grumbled. “Like Momma said, he might as well have come from goyim , your precious David. Not a religious man, not—”
    â€œHe’s not Orthodox. He’s an educated man, Yetta. And he did always fast on Yom Kippur.”
    â€œI should give him a medal?”
    â€œI bet him and Poppa would’ve liked each other, though. Educated men, I mean—”
    â€œPoppa knew the Talmud like a genius. Your fancy David ain’t good enough to clean Poppa’s boots.”
    Hokhmah buried her face in the pillow. Not to have to hear it anymore. Was that one of the reasons she had loved David? Because he taught her that she could eat ham and lobster and laugh about it and not be struck dead by Jehovah? Because he recognized what she was singing when she sang? She heard her sister rise and move about the small room, arguing with herself.
    â€œEmpty he was, your David, behind the eyes. I saw that. I saw it when I went with you to meet him and the other refugees at the dock. Momma knew. ‘We don’t got troubles enough of our own?’ she said to me. ‘Now Hokhmah has to play big-shot Miss Millionaire? She has to volunteer to sponsor some high-class snob who just discovered pogroms exist? Some pretend goy who wouldn’t lower himself to speak to the likes of us in the old days?’ Nu? Momma was wrong? Time proves.” Hokhmah could hear her busily rearranging the few items on the bedtable. “Momma saw the emptiness, when she met him.”
    â€œI saw it, too, Yetta,” came the muffled reply, “but I knew it was there from—from loss. Not from what Momma said—‘a soul full of scorn.’ Momma kept hissing any