Chava’s entire world is Hasidic—prayer, ritual, community, the understood rules of how life gets lived. Then Tova vanishes. Tova was supposed to marry someone chosen for her. Instead she ran, and the community closed around the absence like she’d never existed.
Chava leaves. She walks out of the only life she’s known because Tova matters more than anything else—more than family, more than God, more than the safety of staying put. She goes to New York City to find one person in a city of millions, armed with nothing but love and the knowledge that Tova is out there somewhere.
The streets are brutal in ways Chava wasn’t prepared for. Hundreds of LGBTQ+ kids sleeping in shelters, on subways, in parks. Winter arrives. Illness arrives. The cold doesn’t care that Chava’s faith taught her to be certain about things—it just works through her body like everything else.
She meets activists and street kids who know how to survive in ways the Hasidic community never taught her. They offer her perspective: community doesn’t have to look like what she came from. Survival doesn’t require obedience. You can be queer and faithful—not the way her rabbis would define it, but in a way that’s actually livable.
Finding Tova becomes the search. Staying alive becomes the search. Figuring out if there’s a version of faith that can hold both her sexuality and her love becomes the search. It’s not a clean resolution. It’s not a miracle in the way miracles usually get written. But it’s Hanukkah—the eight-day festival of light—and Chava is learning to make light in the dark, to find community among the broken, to build something that looks nothing like her grandmother’s faith but feels, impossibly, like coming home.
Details
| ISBN: 9783955333539 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Romance; Jewish Interests |
| Subject(s): Short Stories |
| Publication Date: 2015-01-27 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Ylva Publishing |
| Language: English |
| Format: eBook |
| Pages: 26 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: This is a standalone holiday-themed Sapphic novella (approx. 6,000 words) published by Ylva Publishing in 2015. It is notable for its exploration of LGBTQ+ identity within the Hasidic community. |
| Book_ID: 105947 |