Challah and Pumpkin Juice by Calico
Chapter Notes: "hartse" means darling in Yiddish; I will be using some Yiddish words and phrases throughout the story, but they're meanings are pretty easy to figure out from the context.
Prologue
Vienna, 1932
Eliezer Stein held a wet cloth to his wife’s hot brow, sponging away the sweat as best he could. Beside him crouched their six-year-old daughter; she had fallen asleep on her knees, her head cradled in her arms. Eliezer had been holding back his tears for her sake, but now that he didn’t have to, he was too exhausted to cry.
Gently Eliezer smoothed the hair back from his wife’s sticky face. Avigail couldn’t die, he thought desperately. How could he raise their daughter alone? How could he survive alone? He couldn’t face the prospect.
Slowly Avigail’s eyes blinked open. Eliezer noted that they were yellow with sickness. She couldn’t hold out much longer…
“Eliezer.” Her voice rasped painfully, barely a whisper through her parched lips. It hurt him to hear her that way; she had once had the most beautiful singing voice in the entire district, perhaps in all of Vienna. “Eliezer, don’t wake the child. There is something I must tell you.”
Eliezer squeezed his wife’s hand. “Go on, hartse, I’m here.”
Avigail closed her eyes, as if steeling herself for one last battle against the influenza which was ravaging her body.
“I am not who you think I am. My family…we are different, so different from the congregation. We have…abilities.” Avigail stopped and coughed, her thinned frame wracked with convulsions. Eliezer waited, his face nearly as pale as Avigail’s.
“I am a witch,” Avigail concluded simply. From beneath her pillow she pulled a long stick of cypress wood and pressed it into her husband’s hands. “Keep it for our daughter. She may have magic also. It is too early to tell. But if she does, she will get a letter in her eleventh year, from a school for magic. You must let her go there.”
Eliezer stared at his wife, the woman he had loved for ten long years. A witch! Could it be true?
Did it matter?
“Do you hate me?” Avigail’s eyes were dull with suffering, but they still made Eliezer’s heart leap.
“How could I hate you?” Eliezer kissed his wife’s hand. “It wouldn’t matter to me if you turned out to be a mermaid. I love you, forever.”
Avigail forced a smile. “Forever.” Then something passed across her face, a look of sudden understanding and finality. “It’s time, Eliezer. Send for the Rabbi.”
Eliezer could feel his heart breaking as he sent a servant for Rabbi Herzl and watched his wife slip away from him. Gradually Avigail’s skin grayed and her breaths grew fainter. It cost him all his control to stay by her side and not break down. Their daughter slept on, unaware and nearly forgotten by her pain-stricken mother and grieving father.
The end came just before dawn. As the Rabbi murmured the prayer for the dead, Eliezer closed Avigail’s lids over her sightless gray eyes. Then he looked down at the face of his daughter, peaceful and unknowing in her slumber.
“Oh, Tzipporah, what am I going to do?”