Jerusalem Maiden by Talia Carner

to help her married older sisters with their broods of infants.
    As Ruthi waved good-bye, someone asked Ima, “Did Esther get her cycle yet?”
    No! Esther wanted to scream, but Ima replied only with an ambiguous head gesture. “Her mitzvah age marks her puberty.”
    â€œHow come Reb Shlomo has neglected the mitzvah of seeing his daughter betrothed?” asked a girl who held a baby to her breast under a shawl.
    â€œNo dowry left after he paid that spice merchant,” replied another.
    â€œA good shiddach is in Hashem’s hands.” Ima’s hands rolled a dough pin so fast they blurred.
    â€œThere’s always a shiddach even for a contaminated daughter,” Aunt Tova retorted. “Building a home in the Holy Land is rebuilding the ruins of Jerusalem,” she said to Esther, as if she knew Esther was sabotaging her calling by eating her weeds. Tova was kneading her own brand of bread rolls, the ingredients of which she would share with no one. “It’s your religious duty to contribute to the public good.”
    Thankfully, Esther’s weeds were working; Hanna was getting breasts, while Esther wasn’t. “Is there anything else to talk about but my shiddach ?” Esther took a herring and chopped its head with a cleaver. Whack. She picked up another herring. Whack. Whack.
    â€œThe fish is already dead,” Ima muttered.
    Esther caught herself. She sucked on a piece of herring, and her mind drifted away, up above the courtyard, where the biting remarks and chatter didn’t reach her. She imagined she could look down at the communal space and the dozens of tiny kitchen yards flanking it, all crowded with pails, oilcan stoves, broken furniture, boxes and laundry lines. Her fingers ached to draw it all—the nakedness of the roach-infested squalor and the dust- and grease-covered floor stones below. In the Arab villages there were trees; even the Jewish Sepharadi neighborhoods had blooming kitchen gardens. But where, in the Haredi community, was the sacredness in the stench-filled air that invaded every crack? It occurred to Esther that perhaps, at the time of her birth, God had mistakenly planted her here instead of in Paris—
    Tova changed to her favorite topic. “My Asher,” she said, her face lighting up, “is a Talmudic eeluy . Ask the rabbi. My Asher, he says, is intended for great deeds.”
    Esther smiled. If only Tova knew the truth. Unlike Ima, who had been blessed with five sons, three still living, Tova’s one son was squeezed in the midst of nine disappointments. The five girls who had survived infancy never learned to read, and Tova had married them off at twelve. With neither dowry nor room and board at Tova’s one-room basement home, the marriages were arranged with poor, lame, old or feebleminded suitors.
    â€œTova, your bragging will bring bad luck upon all of us,” a woman told her. “ Tfoo, tfoo, tfoo. ” The women spat behind themselves three times to banish any evil spirit that might be eavesdropping on their conversation. Ima broke into a series of sighs. “I lost three babies. This year I buried my precious Gershon. And I have one son—he should live long—who’s a dwarf.” The other women joined her in a litany of complaints to ensure that the evil eye wouldn’t land in their homes instead.
    Esther’s knife marked long, straight lines in a sheet of dough to cut kreplachs while she listened to the women spouting grievances—food shortages, sick children, troublemaking neighbors, austerity, and the fear of zealous Arabs, Turkish soldiers, Christian missionaries and the Ottoman governor. “He should have a speck of chaff in his eye and a splinter in his ear so that he wouldn’t know which to remove first,” Ima murmured.
    â€œSince we’re the chosen among Hashem’s Chosen, wouldn’t He want us to live in comfort and good health?” Esther