It’s 1905, the shtetl in Odessa, the Russian Empire. Between Frieda’s worrying, her husband Mordechai’s strictness and mysterious meetings with the Rabbi to practice Kabbalah, and the fact that Jews are disappearing, it’s clear something very, very bad is about to happen.
This is the world the reader is thrust into in “Odessa,” Gabrielle Sher’s chilling debut novel. The book is filled with golems, grief and deep love, and it’s all centered around Yetta, Frieda and Mordechai’s teenage daughter; she’s a young Jewish girl striving for freedom. What she finds instead is both sinister and has the power to bring her family together.
The following is an excerpt from “Odessa” by Gabrielle Sher.
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. “
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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 under-growth 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 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.
Excerpted from ODESSA by Gabrielle Sher. Copyright © 2026 by Gabrielle Sher. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.
