Excerpt from Odessa by Gabrielle Sher, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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.

Excerpted from Odessa by Gabrielle Sher. Copyright © 2026 by Gabrielle Sher. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.