In the western Ukrainian city of Dubno during the nineteenth century, a fifteen-year-old girl named Srula is coming of age, as her love for Leyb blossoms and collides with her Jewish traditions. Their love is thwarted by an Ashkenazi superstition that foretells death to Leyb's mother should the couple dare to choose each other over cultural tradition. Their community of friends call their love
bashert, destined, yet their parents call their love verboten, forbidden.
In this intergenerational novella, Srula recounts the tender beginnings of an undeniable love, the sorrows and hardships that reshape her, and the fragile renewal that emerges from tragedy. Through the unpredictable turns of fate and the ever-tightening dangers in Ukraine, her journey carries us into the next century and into the next generation to the uncertain promise of America. Through the interplay of superstition and destiny, loss and renewal, her story becomes one of resilience, migration, and the quiet courage required to begin again, if not for herself then for her progeny.
