This is a story that’s embedded in my forthcoming novel, The Daughter Who Got Away. The novel will be published in March 2016 and can be pre-ordered from Amazon. Please forward this link to someone you know!
Miracle at Konotop
“We do have a tendency toward miracles,” Celia began. The room got quieter. Her guests knew that she did not offer them homemade gefilte fish chopped in a big wooden bowl, but she would offer them well-seasoned stories. She considered that the duty of a hostess, something she’d learned in her parents’ home.
“We had an ancestor who was a tzaddik, a type of saint,” Celia said. “He wasn’t the showy sort of tzaddik, with a court and a following, but a simple sort of person, an artisan, perhaps. And he lived in a town called Konotop, which means, ‘the-place-where-horses-sink,’ because the main street of this town had the reputation of being so muddy when it rained that horses could hardly walk through.
“One very rainy afternoon, it was time for our ancestor to go and pray in the synagogue. However, he had no shoes to wear that day because he’d given them to some poor soul who needed them more than he did. So he had to walk to the synagogue in his white woolen stockings, through Konotop. And the miracle was this: When he arrived, there was no mud on his feet at all. His stockings were as white as when he’d left his house.” Celia paused, thinking of Sharon alone in the woods, facing a landscape harsh as the steppes. She saw her daughter walking barefoot beneath the huge Canadian pine trees, the snow not chilling her feet at all; then Sharon flew across the crust of snow, buoyed by angels.
“That’s marvelous,” said Maxine.
“He must have been an extraordinary personality,” said Bernard. “I imagine that’s a type of repeating folk tale, told about each great man through the generations.”
“I like it because it’s not about anything flashy,” Celia remarked. “Just a nice, homey, unpretentious little miracle.”
Copyright © Leora Freedman 2016
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