Once, not so very long ago, a dirt road named Barskaya Street ran down the center of Berezin, a Belarusian village on the banks of the Berezina River and surrounded by thick forests of silver birches and pines. Barskaya Street was lined with Jewish families huddled in tiny wooden structures—homes that seemed almost to lean on each other to stay standing. The town’s Gentiles were scattered on neighboring streets, but most lived on farms at the edge of town. In spring and autumn, snowmelt and rain turned the road into a sea of mud deep enough to suck the boots off pedestrians who stepped off rickety wooden plank sidewalks. In the summer, horse-drawn vegetable carts and the hooves of the Cossacks’ horses raised ribbons of gritty dust that settled on dishes stacked in pantries. Winter began early and ended late; in numberless blizzards, the snow heaped up in smooth mounds above the well at the end of the street, near the market square.
One winter evening back then, while everything on Barskaya Street was hushed, and clouds, white in the moonlight, sailed quietly across a violet sky, a Jewish woman named Anna Krevoshay gave birth on the earthen floor of her one-room log house to her first and only child, a girl. Because this girl was born after Anna had a series of miscarriages and a stillborn, glassy-eyed little boy, Anna and her husband, Shmuel, named the baby Nasya, “Miracle from God.” From that moment, Anna, a handsome woman with a narrow, angular face, high, sharp cheekbones, and slanted, gray Central-Asian eyes, lived in uneasiness, sure that unless she was vigilant, something terrible would happen to her daughter. Each morning, when Nasya opened her eyes, Anna whispered a prayer thanking God for returning her daughter’s soul to her body.
Eighteen years later, Nasya would leave her parents for a foreign land. But even after fifteen years in America, she sometimes fell into memories so deep that it took long seconds before she noticed that her children were talking to her. Sometimes she felt that she lived a double life—one in America with her four children and her husband, Louis, and one on Barskaya Street.
