Tzipporah fully intended to tell Millie and Clarice that she was Jewish at the feast, but promptly forgot her resolution when food appeared magically on the platters before her. Carefully avoiding a plate heaped with pork and a bowl of seafood paella, Tzipporah made to reach for a slice of roast beef when she realized, suddenly, that she had no idea if it was kosher. She had always avoided pig and shellfish, as Jewish law demanded, but she had never thought that coming to Hogwarts would mean giving up meat altogether.
Well, if I must, I must. Tzipporah set her jaw resolutely and helped herself to salad, fried rice, and several bread rolls with butter, muttering the blessings under her breath.
“Mmm, try the steak, Zippie!” Millie spewed, her mouth full of red meat. She passed the platter to Tzipporah, who put a piece on her plate and began to cut it up. When Millie wasn’t looking she hid the pieces in her napkin.
The plates soon cleared to be replaced with an array of luscious desserts. Tzipporah sampled several ice creams and an excellent treacle tart, but discovered nothing to rival Maria’s apfelstrudel. It’s just as well, Tzipporah thought, pushing away her half-finished tart. It will make Maria’s cooking taste all the better when I go home.
Sleepily, the first years followed a prefect girl up what seemed to be hundreds of staircases and corridors until at last they reached the portrait of a fat lady. Upon a word from the prefect, the portrait swung to let them all clamber through a hidden hole into a warm, fire-lit common room. The prefect led them up a staircase to a large room with eight beds and left them to get settled. Tzipporah had just enough energy left to pull on her nightgown and crawl beneath the deep scarlet blankets before she succumbed to her dreams.
Tzipporah dreamt of Vienna “ its cobblestoned streets and loud marketplace, its parks and gardens, its sparkling green canal. She awoke once, in the dead of night, to find that she had been crying in her sleep, but could not remember why.
The next morning dawned steely grey. By the light from the window Tzipporah checked to see that her roommates were all still asleep before murmuring the Yotzer Hame’orot, the morning blessing, facing, as best she could tell, to the southeast where Jerusalem lay. Then she pulled her new robes from her trunk, donned them, and tied her hair into a knot at the top of her head, from which curls obstinately escaped.
“M-morning, Zippie,” Millie yawned as she caught sight of Tzipporah, fully dressed and reading her Defense Against the Dark Arts book in bed. “Give me a moment, and then we can go down to breakfast. Have you seen me trunk?”
“I saw you push it under your bed last night,” said Clarice, who had clearly been woken up by the voices around her.
The two girls got dressed in silence until Millie stubbed her toe and let out a stream of Gaelic curses, which awoke the rest of the sleepers.
“Sorry, Rosa, Annika,” Millie said as her two fellow Gryffindors rubbed their eyes groggily. The other three girls sharing the room exchanged glances and flopped back onto their pillows.
“Those are the Johnson cousins,” Millie whispered to Tzipporah, pointing at the three occupied beds. “We tried to talk to them last night at the feast, before you got sorted, but they keep to themselves.”
When Clarice, Rosa, and Annika were ready the five girls went down the common room, wondering aloud how they would ever find their way to the great hall. Luckily, a second year named Minerva McGonagall, who wore a tartan bow in her hair, was kind enough to show them the way. But upon reaching the entrance hall they were stopped by a mass of students, all of whom seemed to be crowding forward to see something in the middle of the floor.
“Clarice, go see what it is,” Millie prompted the smallest girl. Clarice nodded and darted through a knot of Ravenclaw fifth-years before they even saw her, weaving nimbly towards the source of the commotion. Within minutes she was back with her friends, her expression one of incomprehension.
“There’s some kind of symbol painted on the floor,” she reported. “I don’t know what it means. No one seems to, except a few of the muggle-born foreigners. They keep going up to touch it, and talking to each other in a different language.”
“What language?” Tzipporah asked.
“I dunno.”
“Can you draw the symbol?”
Rosa handed Clarice a scrap of parchment and a quill, and Clarice sketched a small replica of the symbol. Tzipporah saw it and felt the blood drain from her face.
It was a swastika.
A swastika? A muggle symbol, at Hogwarts? What can it mean?
“Zippie, are you okay?” Millie asked, catching sight of Tzipporah’s face. “You look about ready to faint.”
“Do you know what that symbol means?” Clarice asked eagerly.
Tzipporah remembered what her father had said to her over a year ago, when Tzipporah had brought home a German newspaper she had found in the street. He had told her that the day the swastika came to Vienna would be the day they left.
Tzipporah knew exactly what the swastika meant: death for the Jews, for herself.
And now the swastika was at Hogwarts. How is it possible?
“Zippie?”
Tzipporah emerged from her memories to find the four other girls staring at her in concern.
“No,” she lied. “I don’t know what it means.”
At that moment one of the professors pushed his way to the center of the hall, Ogg lurching along behind him with a bottle labeled Magical Mess Remover. Other professors began shooing the gawking students into the great hall. By the time Tzipporah and her friends reached the place where the swastika had been, the floor was polished clean again. Tzipporah walked across the spot with a sinking heart.
I can’t tell my friends that I am a Jew, she thought sadly. If there is this kind of hate at Hogwarts, it wouldn’t be safe. How do I know they would still want to be around me if they knew the truth? It will have to be a secret.
While her friends were distracted with filling their plates, Tzipporah quickly removed her Star of David necklace and dropped it into her pocket.
“Hurry up, Zippie!” shouted Millie from the entrance of one of the greenhouses, the pink gigglebloom behind her ear clashing horribly with her hair. Beside her, Clarice stood immersed in her Herbology book, unaware that a long black vine was slowly entwining itself around her ankle.
Tzipporah pulled her wand from her bag, hastily running through the short list of spells she had learned in the last three weeks. Then she squinted in concentration and aimed at the vine.
“Cenderio!”
Red sparks burst from the end of Tzipporah’s wand, shooting directly at the ebony plant. She grinned proudly as the vine retreated into the moist gloom of the greenhouse. Blessed are you, Adonai, for the magic you have given me. I don’t know how I ever lived without it!
Millie was laughing at the dumbfounded expression on Clarice’s face, drawing stares from the first year Ravenclaws who were waiting with the Gryffindors for the start of the lesson.
“Are you all right?” Tzipporah asked as she put her wand away.
“Y-yes,” Clarice stammered. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice….and that was German Blackroot, one of the most dangerous vines in Europe! If you hadn’t spotted it, Zippie “”
““ you’d be plantfood,” finished Millie. “Good thing Zip pays attention, unlike some people who spend all their time reading.” Clarice blushed and jammed her book back into her bag. “Aw, I’m just codding. But seriously, Clarice, you ought to spend more time having fun. And you too, Zippie. You’re both always studying in the evening. Why don’t we have ourselves a girl’s night this Friday? We can paint our nails “ a third year taught me the spell to do it by magic “ and share secrets, and all the rest. I bet Annika and Rosa would come too…”
Annika and Rosa, although they still often ate and studied with Tzipporah, Millie, and Clarice, had quickly become best friends. They communicated in a complicated language, midway between Russian and Polish, which baffled the rest of the first-years, including Tzipporah. At that moment they were in fact jabbering near the greenhouse door, oblivious to Clarice’s near catastrophe.
“I suppose we could have a girl’s night,” agreed Clarice. “We’ll just do our homework on Saturday. What do you say, Zip?”
Tzipporah was trying to hide her panic. That Friday was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. She had planned to sneak down to the lake after dinner to hold her own solitary service. I can’t have a ‘girl’s night’ on Rosh Hashanah! It would be sacrilege beyond anything I’ve done yet. How can I get out of it?
Why don’t you just tell them the truth? suggested a small voice at the back of Tzipporah’s mind. You don’t know that it will change anything.
No. It isn’t safe.
Tzipporah thought fleetingly of the Star of David pendant lying hidden in her trunk, along with the small tin candlesticks and prayer book her father had given her to use at school. Each Shabbat since she had arrived she had had to wait until her fellow Gryffindors were asleep before creeping out of bed to light the candles and sing the blessing in the only private place she could find “ the girl’s toilet.
As for daily prayers, Tzipporah woke up early to mutter them quietly to herself before her friends awoke. In the evenings she would murmur them in bed before she fell asleep, her words mercifully contained behind the scarlet hangings.
Then there was the problem of her father’s packages. Tzipporah had bought an owl when she and a servant had gone to buy her school equipment in Kishefberg, the only wizarding town in Austria. Now Dr. Stein was using Sove, as he had dubbed the bird, to send Tzipporah weekly loaves of challah and a pair of candles for Shabbat. These deliveries were difficult for Tzipporah to explain to her friends.
“My father is a baker,” she had lied. “He sends challah because it is my favorite. The candles are because he is afraid I will study too much with too little light and ruin my eyes. I told him he was being silly, but he won’t listen.”
“If you say so,” Millie had shrugged. Then she had torn off a large portion of the challah, munched a bit, and washed it down with pumpkin juice. “Laird, but this is good! Clarice, try some with the juice….”
And so each Friday morning the girls devoured the challah and pumpkin juice, never knowing or guessing its significance.
“Zippie? What do you say to Friday night?”
Shaken from her thoughts, Tzipporah tried to form a plausible excuse.
“Sorry, I’ve…promised to help Fonzie Jurgen with his Defense homework. Maybe another time.”
“Fonzie? Hmmm, well, you can’t get out of it without breaking his poor heart, then…I guess we can do it on Saturday.” Millie didn’t seem to mind the change, but she gave Tzipporah an appraising look as they entered the greenhouse.
Tzipporah had trouble concentrating on Professor Barwick’s lecture on Flooshing Swonker trees; she could feel Millie’s eyes boring into the back of her head, as if trying to decipher her thoughts, and couldn’t help wondering whether she might actually succeed.