A Wedding Gift

The year was 1904. It was the coldest of Russian winter nights. Our village of Annapola lay frozen amidst the bitter wind and the drifting snow. High gabled rooftops, laden with their white mantels, jutted randomly into the murky darkness, the heavens threatening to unleash yet another winter deluge... The year is 2004. A young bride in America is bound for Israel to live on a remote kibbutz, trading the superlatives of a life in New York for the realities of age-old intolerance and violence in the pursuit of her ideal. Two lives, a century apart, are connected in time by the inheritance of a family heirloom given to each new bride on her wedding day to witness a chapter in their long history, one written by her own hand.