Odessa

by Gabrielle Sher

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Literary Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

In a powerfully imagined Russia at the height of the pogroms, a grief-stricken family turn to ancient magic to bring their daughter back from the grave.

Yetta is a bright, quick teenage girl with a wild, searching spirit. Stifled by her mother's anxiety, her father’s rules, and the path that’s been laid out for her, she craves the kind of freedom she doesn’t know the edges of. But her family has reason to be cautious and restrictive. Fear has wrapped itself around their shtetl. Jews are mysteriously disappearing, and there are whispers of an impending Gentile attack. When violence comes to their door, Yetta is killed.

Her father, in his grief, fumbles through his nascent knowledge of ancient texts and old magic to bring her back. By some miracle, Yetta is returned—but although she looks the same, Yetta is not the girl she once was. She knows there is a secret her family is keeping from her. The answer resides, in part, in the monstruous being stalking the villagers and their enemies, lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl, something that may be of her father’s making, and a being which has plans of its own.

Release date: April 21, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 288

Sample

FRIEDA WAS UNDERWATER. HER MUSCLES contracted, shocked from the cold, and she was reminded suddenly of giving birth to her children: the way her own body had been a stranger to her, knowing things she had never learned, moving without her command. She opened her lips and exhaled, forcing her muscles to relax. The pain turned to pleasure. Miriam’s warm hand pressed gently on the top of her head and she opened her eyes, seeing her own pale hands illuminated by thin veins of light in the dark water. Frieda turned her hands over, the lines on her palms like tree roots, and began to pray, her chest aching from holding her breath. “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech haolam shehecheyanu v’kiy’manu v’higiyanu laz’man hazeh. Blessed are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and allowed us to reach this day.” She could hear her own voice in her head.

Two warm hands held on to hers and lifted her up. She always loved this moment, the first breath after the immersion. The thought of drowning filled her with gratitude. Thank you, she thought. Thank you for this air, thank you for these lungs. She grasped the grass in her fists and pulled her body up onto the bank, rolling onto her back and letting her legs drift in the spring.

This was her favorite spot in the world—half of her body in the water of the mikvah, half on land. Above her the sky was split into pale blue and rich red autumn trees. The spring had one bank on grassy fields and one bank in the shadowed forest, and Frieda always thought of the ritual bath like a living thing, a creature with arms and legs and a foot in each world. It was far enough away from the city that she felt safe enough to close her eyes and rest.

The sun warmed her face and her veins were illuminated like branches behind her closed eyelids, bright orange and yellow like they were on fire. But she could feel the shadows from the forest on her cold legs like they were reaching out to her, the scent of undergrowth and fallen leaves like the sweet rotting of a tooth. Frieda took a deep breath. She loved it. The decay was its own blooming thing.

She heard Miriam’s steady steps in the grass and felt a warm dry cloth draped over her body.

“I did not tell my husband we were coming today,” Frieda said, her eyes still closed. “He does not know where I am.”

It was the first time she had gone somewhere without telling him, but she knew if she had asked, he would have said no and she did not want to worry him. The secret attached itself to her like a tick. She could feel its tiny fangs lodged in her skin and its small body slowly ballooning with her blood. She could not ignore it.

“Husbands can only handle so much truth,” Miriam said. “Mine never asks where I go. If I told him he would not believe me. I suppose that is the beauty of it.”

Frieda opened her eyes. Miriam sat down beside her. Her profile was silhouetted against the sun, and Frieda thought she looked like some ancient stone statue. The statue turned slowly toward her. “We are here to pray,” Miriam said. “You should not feel guilt for that.” Miriam lay down next to her.

“Do you feel guilt?” Frieda asked. “For what you do? For where you go? For the lies?”

“Guilt is useless to me,” Miriam answered.

Their hair was dripping wet, and they waited with their faces in the sun and their legs in the shadow until most of the moisture in their hair had fed the grass beneath them.

Somewhere inside her, Frieda felt a gentle tugging trying to pull her toward home, a loose strand of her dress she imagined her husband pulling, pulling, the thread dragging across the open grass, across the jagged cobblestones of the shtetl at the dark edges of the city, through a crack under the door with four locks, to Mordechai’s broad callused hands. She knew the longer she lay there the more her dress would unravel until there was nothing left at all.

Reluctantly, she pulled her feet from the water, wrung out the dampness of her long dark hair, and put her dress back on, buttoning it up to her throat. Miriam mirrored her silently.

“The market today?” Miriam said it like a question, but Frieda knew it was not.

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“No, thank you.”

Frieda knew she would have felt safer with Miriam there. Miriam’s presence was sturdy, like a tree too large to wrap your arms around, too tall to see the top of. But with the children at home her opportunities to be alone were few and she took them whenever she could—and she knew it was more helpful to Miriam if she went on her own.

She preferred to walk barefoot in the yellowing grass and held her shoes in one hand and hung her empty shopping basket over the crook of her other arm. Miriam had brought her own basket, piled with cloth to dry with after the immersion. From underneath the cloth, she pulled three small burlap parcels and placed them wordlessly into Frieda’s basket. Frieda’s heart beat faster, but she said nothing, and covered the parcels with her scarf. In her mind she repeated the names she had memorized: Goldberg, Kreamer, Bronski.

As they walked back toward the city in silence, she felt blades of grass still stuck to her damp back and smiled. Sometimes, at night, Mordechai would find one pressed to her skin. His horror at the things he found after she’d been to the mikvah—a blade of grass, a fragment of a leaf, a crushed petal, once even the iridescent wing of an insect—had always made her laugh.

Frieda’s smile fell as the shtetl, the Jewish part of town, grew larger and larger before her. Soon, she thought, he will say it is not safe enough for me to go outside at all. She stopped, and Miriam stopped beside her. To her left in the distance stood Miriam’s house, a lone wooden raft out on the sea of grass, disconnected from the Jewish quarter, from the city, from everything. Frieda liked imagining Miriam there as if it were a world of its own, a peaceful moon orbiting the city, where Miriam could observe the terror of the world and not be touched by it, where she could make her plans in contemplative solitude like the author of a great play. Miriam squeezed her hand.

“I will see you again,” Miriam said.

Frieda squeezed back. “I will see you again,” she repeated. She watched Miriam’s back for a while as she walked away.

She could remember the first time they made that promise to each other, back when she was pregnant and so terrified she could not sleep. Ever since they were children, she had always been able to tell Miriam her fears, the ones she could not say aloud to anyone else. She was afraid of the big men in their long dark coats, she was afraid her father would hit her if she was bad. She was afraid that God could not hear her prayers. She was afraid her baby would wither and die. She was afraid the pregnancy would kill her, or the birth would kill her, the same as her mother; she was afraid her husband would be attacked and die just like her father had when she was a child. She was afraid her family looked too Jewish, that her daughter would be stalked and harassed by the Cossacks in the street, just like she had been. She was afraid the invisible boundaries that made her safe were closing in around her.

I will see you again. Now she could not bear to say goodbye to Miriam without saying those words—if she did not say them then she could be certain they would never see each other again. Speaking the words was a ritual and a spell.

Every time Frieda reached the shtetl on this walk, she would place her shoes onto the first cobblestones and step into them so that her bare feet would never touch the cold stone. She had done this so often it had become a superstition, and every time her stomach filled with dread. Do not touch your bare feet to the stone or someone will die—the thought seemed to come from outside her. She sometimes tried to reason with it but never could bring herself to prove it wrong, just in case. Someone will die, someone will die, the voice chanted as she entered the Jewish quarter at the edge of the city, and she swatted with her hand the way she would to keep flies away from fruit.

The small houses in the shtetl were made of dark wood and stone; slapdash and crooked, they had been patched with spare lumber and rocks each time they were damaged, all leaning slightly the wrong way like infected trees twisting and turning to find the sun. Frieda had already decided not to stop at home on her way into town, although she had to pass the house again on the way. But as it came up on her left something made her stop and look. She had always thought of her home like a face—two windows for eyes, the door a dark closed mouth—and it looked back at her with intention, as though it were trying to speak.

Frieda looked into the right window of her home and saw the profile of her daughter holding her son, Ephraim’s head resting on Yetta’s shoulder while she rocked him back and forth. Frieda could not hear but she saw Yetta’s lips moving and knew she was either singing or telling him a story to put him to sleep for his nap. Frieda watched them move in silence and felt the sting of tears behind her eyes. Yetta looked like she could be Ephraim’s mother. Yetta’s curls fell down her back, her strong arms holding Ephraim though he was too old and heavy to be held like an infant.

Frieda thought of the stories she used to tell Yetta when she was a girl and wondered if Yetta told them to Ephraim now. She remembered Yetta’s brown eyes looking up at her as she told her the story of Rahab, the whore who hid Jewish spies from the king of Jericho and hung a scarlet cord from her window to save her family. After that, Yetta had been obsessed with the color red, and when Frieda had been cleaning, she found a collection of small red objects underneath Yetta’s pillow—a stone, a berry, a leaf, one of her own baby teeth still stained with blood.

Frieda watched as Yetta turned away from the window and walked into the shadows of the house carrying a sleeping Ephraim. Both windows were empty now. Both eyes closed and its mouth shut too—Frieda could not shake the image of a corpse with coins over its eyes and lips—she shook her head and walked on toward town, this time faster.

The street began to look a bit cleaner, the houses straighter, the colors brighter. Even the smell was less oppressive. She felt her shoulders tightening and kept her eyes on her feet, until she could not ignore the brightness anymore and finally raised her head. The town square lay before her, bright white stone, the straight lines of the buildings meeting at perfect angles. Her husband spoke fondly of the square, but she could never love it. Nowhere did she feel more exposed or vulnerable than here; there was nowhere to hide.

She looked up to her left and the grand synagogue, with its arched doors and stained-glass windows, looked back down on her with divine indifference. Her husband loved the synagogue like a person—like the bride of Shabbat, he used to say—but she remembered the inside of the cavernous limestone building, cold like a tomb, echoing with the voices of men as she watched them sing to God from her seat in the women’s section in the balcony.

When she was a girl up in that balcony with her mother, she had heard those voices ringing in her ears and closed her eyes and tried very hard to speak to God in her mind, since only the men were permitted to pray aloud. But she quickly learned that she would never be able to speak to God in the synagogue. She found her own places to pray, in the forest, in the grass, in the spring with Miriam, her best friend in the world.

She turned and began to cross the square, eager to leave it and go back to the narrow winding side streets. The smooth white stone reflected the sunlight like a mirror, and even the smallest sound bounced from the walls and the ground so that a whisper across the square could sound like it had come from right behind you.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the vast white stairs rising up so high the top was impossible to see from the street below. She had never climbed them, and had only heard stories of the wealthiest neighborhood hidden at the top. Sometimes she imagined it like a palace of clouds that floated just above the city, safe from the dark uniforms that dotted the lower steps like crows. She kept her head down until she was out of the square and safely in the shadows.

As she walked through the alleys she passed other women with their baskets. She had begun to play a game with herself over the last few years, guessing which were Jewish and which were not by looking at their backs. She could always tell. The Jewish women kept their heads lowered, their shoulders curved inward as if they were trying to form a protective shell around their bodies. Sometimes she pretended she was not a Jew, walking with her back straight, her chin raised, and she felt like she had stepped into someone else’s body and saw the world around her with a stranger’s eyes.

When she did this, she saw things she had never seen before—bread left on a windowsill to cool, a woman sweeping her doorstep, children playing with sticks like swords. The gentiles who lived toward the harbor seemed just as poor as the Jews in the shtetl, but Frieda thought there was still something different, perhaps the way they walked, looked up at the city instead of down at the ground, relaxed their shoulders like they were always at home.

The air began to stink like fish, and it was how Frieda knew she was getting close to the market. She always joked to Miriam that she went every week to the fish market yet never saw the sea—only smelled it. Frieda wrinkled her nose. The stench was overwhelming. She turned the corner to the rush of the market. She had to choose carefully. There must be four of the fish she wanted to buy, or two. She counted on her fingers, tapping each one. Yetta, Ephraim, Mordechai, me. Four of us. If I buy three fish, something bad will happen to one of us. Two fish is all right, I have two children; but I can never buy just one, or something bad will happen to one of them… the numbers flooded her mind and she forgot everything else.

On the way home Frieda repeated the names in her mind again: Goldberg, Kreamer, Bronski. She knew where their houses were in the shtetl, she knew what the doorsteps looked like where she would drop off the parcels hidden in her basket, concealed by food from the market where only the women in the household would have reason to look.

Her task made her panic if she thought about it too much. What if a Cossack stops me and searches my basket? What if their husbands come to the door? What if someone in the shtetl questions me about the amount of food I am carrying? What if I dropped something on the way but did not notice? She reached into the basket again and again to feel that the parcels were still there, but worried if she did it too often she would draw more attention to herself.

To distract herself from these thoughts, Frieda liked to imagine she was walking somewhere else. Another country, another city, another town. The sun was out. Women left their doors unlocked and laughed with their friends on their way to the shop. The houses were made of shingled wood painted different colors, and each had a neat green garden to grow vegetables and herbs. The streets were lined with trees, and golden sunlight filtered through the leaves.

The image of Mordechai passed through her reverie, his broad chest, dark hair brushing his shoulders, thick dark beard she liked to run her fingers through, heavy brow like an ancient warrior. Frieda saw him like Judah with a great hammer and shield. She stopped on the spot and the dream fell away, but her husband remained, standing before her down the street. He did not see her.

She watched him from a distance as he locked the door of the furniture shop, an old clothbound book tucked under his arm, looking three times over his shoulder as if he felt a presence behind him. She knew he had been leaving work early and coming home late—he had told her something elusive about his efforts to protect the shtetl—but he was leaving even earlier than Frieda had thought. The smell of fish wafted up from her basket and a wave of nausea washed over her. She watched as Mordechai hurried across the street to catch up with the rabbi, who before they disappeared down another alley turned to check that they were not followed.

EVERY MORNING FOR THE PAST five years, Mordechai had woken up suddenly. There was no gradual coming-to. The way he thought of it, sleep was black and waking was white, and they no longer bled into each other the way they had when he was a young man. The moment his eyes opened, he leapt out of bed with the energy of a wild horse. Frieda handed him a slice of brown bread with cheese for breakfast, and he kissed her and was out the door with only one sleeve of his coat on.

It was not work he looked forward to. The slow turning, carving, staining, and polishing of wood in the furniture shop used to bring him a great sense of accomplishment, the rough, wild objects becoming smooth and elegant under his hands. But now it was monotonous and without purpose. Now he resented his customers for their frivolity, and for taking up his precious time. He felt the days too short and the time it took to carve spirals into table legs too long.

It was the secret work he yearned for that snapped him out of sleep. It had been five years since the last pogrom, five years since he and his pregnant wife and young daughter hid in fear listening to the screams of their neighbors. Mordechai sat at his workbench and began to stain a pale armoire a shade of deep red-brown. He had thought he would die that day, using his body as a shield to protect his family. But he did not, and the next morning he had opened his eyes—the world went from black to white—and suddenly knew his purpose, knew it down to the depths of his soul as if an angel had carried to him a message from God.

He stopped painting. The red stain dripped down from his brush, but he left it where it was and went to the back room of the shop. He spent as much time as he could in the back, because there, what he made had a purpose. Instead of beautiful, pointless objects, he made tools—clubs and handles for hammers, daggers, spears, anything that could be used as a weapon.

It was one of his two ideas he had brought to the rabbi the day after the pogrom: one, that the Jewish men must arm themselves, and two, that they must learn how to fight. The third idea was the rabbi’s. Mordechai never let himself think too deeply about it, in case looking the thing dead in the eye could make it disappear. Sometimes his rational mind could not accept that it could be real. But he reminded himself that in the time of Moses, God’s miracles must have seemed like magic, too.

Once Mordechai finished with the handles in his shop, Josef the blacksmith would come and take them and add the mallet, blade, spearhead. It took time, but they were building up quite an armory in the abandoned synagogue, nearly enough to arm a man from every household in the shtetl.

He worked for a few hours, until the shopkeeper called that it was time to stop for lunch. He patted the wood shavings from his hands onto his apron and hung the apron on its hook. He knelt down on the floor. There was a small board near the wall that was loose, and he pried it open with his fingers. In the space underneath lay a book, bound in faded red cloth so the title was hidden. When he saw it each time, it w. . .