Summary

Nineteen-year-old Ester searches the docks of London for her brother, Isaac, who has been missing from the rabbi’s household for three days. The rabbi had sent her to find him, as he had no scribe to record his thoughts. She knew to look for Isaac there, as their father used to take him to the docks in Amsterdam.

Isaac had shaved off his beard, “a reminder that he’d cast off the last remains of home,” and Ester fears she is “not exempt from that purging” (70). Isaac tells her he has left his “scribing hand across the channel,” and his expression indicates his allegiance to her has also been left behind (70). Ester thinks of their youth when she had gone along with his mischievous ways and “relished the freedom Isaac claimed in boyhood, freedom she herself was denied” (71). Now Isaac was a...