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Overview
Five hundred years later, Alma Ben-Ami journeys to Madrid to fulfill her ancestor's dying wish. She has recruited an unlikely research partner: Manuel Aguilar, a young Catholic Spaniard whose beloved priest always warned him about getting too friendly with Jews. As their quest takes them from Greenwich Village to the windswept mountain fortresses of southern Spain, their friendship deepens and threatens to cross boundaries sacred to them both; and what they finally discover in the Spanish archives will force them to confront the truth about who they are and what their faiths mean to them.
At times humorous, at times deeply moving, this beautifully written and meticulously researched book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of Inquisition-era Spain, Sephardic Jews, or falling in love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780991058471 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Kasva Press |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2017 |
| Pages: | 370 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Born in New York, Daniella immigrated to Israel with her family as a child. She currently lives in Tekoa, Israel, with her husband and their three sons. She wrote her first book at age ten and completed her first full-length novel at fourteen. Her Talmud studies notes from high school consisted of a series of silly dramatizations of Jewish sages yelling at each other. She’s pretty sure her teacher would have been horrified.
She blogs at LetterstoJosep.com about Judaism and life in Israel, and at The Rejection Survival Guide about resilience in the face of rejection and criticism. Connect with her online at Daniella-Levy.com.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
One Last Story
"There's something I never told you."
Mazal started and lifted her head from the book of Psalms. She had been praying at her grandmother's side all night, by the light of the Sabbath lamps her mother had lit before sundown. For the past day or so, her grandmother Míriam had been lying motionless, only her chest moving up and down with each shallow breath. But now her eyes were wide open, gazing at her young granddaughter from beneath the scarf that was wrapped around her hair.
"About what?" Mazal closed the book and set it down by the clay lamps. She took her grandmother's hand.
"The ring," her grandmother rasped. "You have to try to return the ring."
Mazal's eyes scanned the room. One of the lamps was empty, its wick dark, but the other still burned low, casting flickering shadows on the mud walls and the curtain that separated them from the mats on which the rest of the family slept. A hint of light crept in from the window above their heads, already bringing with it the suffocating desert heat. She could barely make out the sparse contents of the room, but she already knew there was no jewelry to speak of, except the few silver bands that were always on her mother's wrists.
A muezzin sounded in the distance, calling the Muslims to prayer.
"What ring?" Mazal whispered.
Míriam took a shuddering breath, closing her eyes again, and then slowly reached for her collar. She drew a leather cord from beneath her robe. Dangling from it was a wide golden ring. Mazal's eyes widened. She had never seen anything of such value in her grandmother's possession.
"Where did you get that?" she breathed.
"There is something I never told you," Míriam repeated, "about our escape from Spain. Something I have never told anyone. Not even your grandfather." Her breath caught in her chest and she coughed weakly.
Mazal's heart began to pound. "Should I get Mama?" she whispered, shifting her weight as if to stand up.
"No." Míriam grasped her hand tightly. "This is only for you." She beckoned Mazal closer.
"Before I tell you," she whispered, her voice barely audible, "You must promise that you won't tell anyone else."
Mazal swallowed. "I promise."
"And that you will do everything in your power to accomplish what I failed to do in my lifetime ... and return this ring to its owner. Or his heir."
Mazal stared at the ring in her grandmother's hand, glinting in the flickering lamplight.
"I ... I will try ..."
"And if you are not successful ... you will pass it to your daughter ... or your granddaughter, inshallah. And my ketuba, and your mother's. And you'll tell her the story. Maybe one day ..." Míriam's voice trailed off, and she closed her eyes again, her grip on Mazal's hand going slack.
"Abuela?" Mazal whispered urgently.
Míriam opened her eyes again.
"Tell me the story." Mazal raised her grandmother's hand to her lips and kissed it. "I promise to do everything I can."
Míriam looked deep into her granddaughter's eyes, her own welling with tears. Then she took another rattling breath, and began to speak.
CHAPTER 2
Alma
"Oh hell no. There is no way I'm going in there."
Mimi was staring into the storage room of our late grandfather's Judaica store, her lips curled in a look of disgust. I had just flipped on the light, a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, and it revealed two cramped aisles of shelves buried in cardboard boxes, packing paper, and bubble wrap. And the dust — it was everywhere. Clinging to the walls, the boxes, the peeling laminated wood flooring; floating through the air, filtering the already-faint light from the bulb and making it look even yellower.
I tried to say something snarky, but all that came out was a coughing fit.
"I can't afford to get that gunk on my clothes," she went on, smoothing out the skirt of her business suit. She cast a wistful glance at the narrow staircase behind us that led down to the back of the store. "I'm supposed to be heading straight for the job interview of my dreams after this."
"Well that's fine," I wheezed, slipping my inhaler out of my pocket and taking two hearty puffs. "I'll just sit here and suffocate in the dark."
Mimi turned to me with an arched perfectly-plucked eyebrow. "Alma, you forfeited the right to use asthma as an excuse for anything the minute you decided to move to Manhattan."
"I didn't decide to move to Manhattan," I protested, covering my mouth with my sleeve and taking a step into the room. A cloud of dust rose under my shoe in response. "I decided to transfer to NYU. It's not my fault it happens to be in Manhattan."
"I came here to help you move in to Grandma's apartment. Taking a dust bath in my interview suit was definitely not part of the plan."
"Oh, stop being such a JAP."
The acronym for Jewish American Princess earned me a playful smack on the back of the head, knocking my glasses askew. But it also hit its mark: she took a tentative step in behind me, teetering on her high heels.
"She really needs to hire someone to organize this," she said.
"Shhh. Don't give her ideas, she'll get me to do it."
"Gotta earn your keep somehow, li'l sis." Mimi started scanning the shelves in the aisle on the right, and I stepped into the one on the left. "I can't believe the supplier didn't have a website," she went on. "How does anyone keep track of information when the only record of it is on a piece of paper?"
"You expect Grandma to be entering this stuff into a computer?" I snorted. "See anything that looks like it might have the record books in it?"
"If I were willing to touch anything, I might be able to move some boxes around and look."
I rolled my eyes.
I paid for my moment of passive-aggressive scorn: my foot caught on the corner of one of the boxes on the floor, and it knocked me off balance. I grabbed at one of the shelves to my left to steady myself. That turned out to be a bad idea. The shelf rested precariously on a pair of metal supports, and it gave when I grabbed it. Not only did I fall on my face, I ended up with a big box landing squarely on my back. It knocked the wind out of me and I couldn't even yelp in pain. The box then tilted over and spilled its contents — heavy books, from the sound of it — onto the floor.
"Whoa, Alma, are you okay?" came Mimi's voice, muffled by layers of cardboard.
I extricated myself from the mess, straightening my glasses and cursing under my breath. Mimi was standing behind me, but she seemed to be focused on something other than my plight.
"Hey, Alma, look." She pointed at the wall where the shelf had been. Disgruntled at her lack of sympathy, I followed her gesture. I promptly forgot my irritation; the box had been concealing a small metal door built into the wall. It looked like the door to a safe.
"Huh," I said. I inspected the round knob in the center of the door. There was a little keyhole underneath it.
My heart started pounding.
The one advantage of digging through the storage room was that sometimes real treasures turned up — tarnished silver menorahs, crystal candlesticks studded with rhinestones, or rare, out-of-print editions of Jewish scholarly volumes. And if those things were lying around in boxes ...
"What would they have hidden in a safe?" Mimi voiced the rest of my thought.
I groped in the pocket of my denim skirt for the keys to the store, and then started going through them one by one, searching for a key that looked like it might match. After a few tries, I found one that slid neatly into the hole, and with a little jiggling, I managed to turn it in the lock and swing the safe door open.
Inside was a plain, rather flat wooden box. I scrunched my mouth to one side in disappointment. "Well, that's anticlimactic," I said.
"Nu?" Mimi urged. "Take it out and see what's inside."
I slid the box out of the safe and pulled off the lid.
The inside was lined with maroon velvet, and resting in it was a pile of what looked like old parchments. I squinted at the one on top through my glasses, and Mimi leaned over my shoulder to peer at it. It was a formal Jewish document of some kind, inscribed in beautiful Hebrew calligraphy. Mustering all my twelve years of Hebrew school, I scanned it, trying to figure out what it was. It didn't take me long to spot my grandfather's name: "Hachatan hana'im ... Gershon ben Moshe l'mishpachat Dahan, amar la laKalah, Alma bat David ..."
"Grandma's ketuba," Mimi said. "This is weird. Why would she be storing it here?"
I peeked underneath it and saw a very similar document. Underneath it was another. They all looked like ketubot, Jewish marriage contracts; and when I examined the dates on top, they seemed to be going back a generation each time. My eyes widened as I noticed that the pile was pretty thick. "How far back do these go?" I wondered aloud. I carefully lifted the pile from the box and let the parchment on the bottom fall gently onto the velvet. I squinted at it in the dim light.
On the third of the seventh month, five thousand, two hundred, fifty and two years to the creation of the world ...
5252. What Jewish year was that? Math was not my forte, but I did know that we were somewhere in the 5770's.
I took a sharp breath.
"Mimi," I rasped, "This ketuba is five hundred years old."
*
"Grandma!" I called as we burst into my grandmother's Lower East Side apartment with the wooden box tucked carefully under my arm. No response. "Grandma?" A heavy, sweet aroma I couldn't quite place wafted from the kitchen.
I led Mimi across the small living room, past the old leather couches tucked around the walls, and walked through the open doorway that led to the kitchen. When I saw my grandmother, I stopped short and Mimi almost crashed into me. Grandma was sitting on one of the wicker chairs by the tiny breakfast table, her head rolled to one side, her headscarf askew and her wispy white hairs peeking out underneath. Her walker was parked by the wall next to the doorway. She was snoring loudly.
Mimi put her finger to her lips, her eyes wide beneath voluminous eyelashes. Her makeup was immaculate for her interview today, and her black hair was ironed perfectly straight. Between that and the suit showing off her figure and long legs, she looked particularly stunning. She had always been the pretty one.
Well ... and the smart one.
Well ... she and Shoshana were both pretty and both smart.
Is there a third category in this sister-classification system?
Mimi made a "hands off" gesture, and I nodded in agreement. If you valued your life, you never, ever woke Grandma.
Mimi looked at her watch. "I need to go," she whispered. "You interrogate her for me as soon as she wakes up, and report back."
"I will." I gently rested the box on the table next to Grandma. "Hey, Mimi," I said, turning to her. "Thanks for bringing me and my stuff down here."
She grinned. "You're welcome." She leaned in and kissed my cheek.
"Good luck with the interview."
"Good luck with Grandma. And school. And ... everything."
She pulled back and took my hands, studying me for a moment.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" she asked.
I groaned in frustration. "Why do you all keep asking me that?"
"You would have made a great nurse."
"No, I wouldn't have. Because I never would have passed the boards. I barely scraped by in most of those courses."
"You'd have pushed through. I just ..."
"You think this degree is pointless. I know. I've heard it all before. Abba and Ima have lectured my ears off about it. Stop trying. It's done already. I'm here. Deal with it."
She crossed her arms, still giving me a piercing look. "This better not be all about David."
"Even David isn't all about David," I countered. "The whole thing just ... reminded me how important this is."
She did not look convinced. But she sighed in defeat and turned toward the door.
"I'll see you back in Albany for Rosh Hashana, yeah?" she tossed over her shoulder.
"Unfortunately," I answered.
There was a pause.
"Ima will have a fit if you're not there," came her stern voice.
"I'll be there, I'll be there."
I heard the front door shut behind her.
I glanced back at Grandma, who hadn't moved at all. Then I turned my attention to the pot on the stove. There was some diced fruit, maybe apples or pears, boiling gently. The liquid was a kind of deep orange and seemed pretty thoroughly boiled-down. I looked at my grandmother and then back at the pot. With my free hand, I slid open the silverware drawer next to the stove, took out a fork and was about to poke one of the chunks of fruit.
"NO NO!"
I jumped, almost dropping the fork, and whirled to see my grandmother, perfectly alert, shaking her finger at me with one hand and fixing her headscarf with the other.
"Top silverware drawer is for meat! That pot is dairy! Don't you go treifing my kitchen!"
My shoulders slumped sheepishly. "Sorry, I didn't notice the blue tape."
Her weathered, olive-skinned face relaxed and she let out a laugh, swinging her upper body forward to heave out of the chair. "How are those quinces doing? Mmmm, they smell good."
She stirred the pot, and then suddenly froze and looked at me.
"Where is Mimi?"
"She left just a minute ago." But her question reminded me of the box on the table.
"Oh, Grandma!" I exclaimed, crossing the kitchen toward it. "Care to explain this?" I picked it up and turned to face her.
Grandma glanced at it and then did a double take. She reached out and took the box from me, her pale green eyes widening.
"This ..." she breathed.
"Look familiar?"
She put the box on the breakfast table and pulled off the lid. She gasped. "The ketubot!"
"Are they what I think they are?"
I watched her gently finger the edges of the parchments, counting under her breath in Spanish. "Veinticuatro," she said finally.
"Whose are they?" I insisted.
She looked up at me with wild eyes. "Get me my reading glasses."
I launched off in the general direction of the kitchen counter, and floundered around for a few moments before realizing I hadn't the faintest idea where her glasses were. "Um ... where are they?"
My grandmother gave me a withering look. "I forgot that I own a priceless historical treasure, and you expect me to remember where my glasses are?"
"So they are what I think they are?"
"If you think they're the original marriage contracts of our maternal ancestors, going back twenty-four generations, then yes."
"Really?" I squealed.
"I'm pretty sure. My grandmother gave them to me before she died — except for the last one, which is my own." Her voice was soft and strained with emotion.
I looked back down at the box, and noticed her reading glasses folded neatly right next to it.
"Um, Grandma." I pointed.
Grandma followed my gesture, spotted the glasses, and sighed deeply, putting them on. "There was something else, though. It wasn't just the ketubot. There was an object ... something very valuable." She pulled the papers back out, her eyes scanning the bottom of the box. I leaned closer, squinting at the maroon velvet, and noticed something glinting gold wedged into padding at one of the corners. I reached for it, pulled it out, and held it up in my palm for both of us to examine. It was a ring, wide and heavy, with a flat bezel featuring an engraving of some sort of bird.
"This feels like solid gold," I murmured.
Grandma took the ring from me, turning it over in her hand. Her brow was wrinkled deeply.
"There's a story with this. Something my grandmother told me. I just know it. And I remember that it was very important." She gave a frustrated sigh. "But I just don't remember what it was."
"I can't believe you forgot that you had these!" I sank into a chair. "I asked you about seventeen times in the past three months if you had any documentation, and you said you didn't think so!"
"Well, then our timing is rather fortunate, wouldn't you say?" She slipped the ring into her pocket and stacked the ketubot back into the box. "When are you starting that genealogy program?"
"I'm not sure. The semester in Madrid is supposed to start in the spring."
"Good! So you'll have these to jump-start your research." She closed the box and hobbled over to the stove.
"But you never even mentioned them to me!" I pressed. "My whole life! Mimi said she'd never heard of them either! Even back before you started having issues with your memory ..."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "By Light of Hidden Candles"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Daniella Levy.
Excerpted by permission of Kasva Press LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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