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Willow Locke, a teenage immigrant living in turn-of-the century Manhattan, must find the strength within her to protect her family from an insidious corporate plot to destroy the un...
Talia asked her mother as she drifted towards the door carrying their little enamel pot. Rachel turned to regard her daughter with weary eyes.
"Yes I think there is rye today–I'm going to get our portion before it is gone," she answered, disappearing into the hallway.
Talia's younger brother, Eitan, slept on a thin pallette in the corner of the open room. She studied him as he slept. His placid expression was so different than his waking mischievousness. She could picture Eitan's face contorted in wild laughter, or bruised from a fist fight, or blotched with ink and dust, but to see him sleeping—his face relaxed and scrubbed raw by Rachel—was like looking at another person. This was the only time Talia could see an eleven-year-old boy when she looked at him.
She envied the amnesia of childhood. She thought Eitan would one day become fully American, while the rest of the family would remain trapped in Prague forever. He had only been 6 on the night of the pogrom. Talia wondered about the structure of his memories. What was that night for him? Just meaningless sound and image? If only she could erase her own memory. But the memory had a way of reinforcing itself. There was no catharsis, the event only re-engraved itself deeper on her memory. The trauma never faded, instead it intensified. She carried it with her like a precious family heirloom and recreated it every time she thought of it. It was a chasm of horror and despair in her spirit. She could never climb out of it.
The Lostch family had lost everything in the rampage. Reuven's shop and the small apartment upstairs had been incinerated. The intricate brass automata he'd made and sold—his life's work—had all been slagged. In inevitable reiteration, she could feel the images pressing against her vision, forcing the flickering kinetograph of her memory into motion yet again. Pictures burning ever deeper into her mind.
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Talia looked back through the overlapping scrims of broken glass and flame to see the face of Reuven's piano player writhing in the heat and beginning to flow off the armature, even as the heat tensed the mainspring and the brass child began its arpeggio.
Nothing could be carried from the burning shop. Eitan had lost one of his shoes and Ayala swept him up in her arms. The drunken mob that chased them across the Charles bridge had seemed strangely elated, their arms around each other, drinking and singing, almost like carolers at Christmas. Most were staggering along the cobbles singing some old folk song but a few of the younger men hunted the streets and alleys, scenting out their Jewish prey. She saw a young man sprinting after them, some kind of club swinging in his hand. Fast-moving silhouette blacking out the pillar of fire that had been their home.
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