Rokhl

Avrom and Hinde lived in a small apartment in Brooklyn with three daughters—Sore, Beyle, and Gitele—already trained to keep quiet during prayers and to leave the table when meat and milk dishes were being sorted for kashrut. Avrom worked long days as a clerk in a neighborhood shop and came home smelling of street dust and flour sacks. Hinde ran the home. She lit Shabbes candles in brass sticks on Friday afternoons and kept a kerosene lamp trimmed for winter evenings. Yiddish filled the rooms, though the older girls were picking up English from the street.

On October 19, 1910, Hinde gave birth to twins—a girl and a boy. The boy, Yoysef, cried louder and latched easily. The girl was smaller. Hinde wrapped both babies in flannel and set them in a shared cradle near the stove, turning them so neither lay in a draft. A few days after the birth Avrom went to shul, where the gabbai called out the girl’s name, Rokhl, during the Torah reading.

Through the winter Hinde measured milk carefully and boiled water on the stove. Sore, the eldest at eight, fetched clean rags and kept Gitele from poking at the cradle. Rokhl’s breathing stayed fast, and her lips sometimes turned dark when she fed. Hinde noticed but did not know what it meant. By late February the baby had stopped gaining weight. On March 2, 1911, a doctor came and wrote a death certificate naming a congenital heart defect. Avrom arranged a burial at the Jewish cemetery, and Rokhl was placed in the ground the same day with psalms recited over her. She had lived four months.