The last items-two pomelos-were included each Friday on the list Li Mei scribbled on Mama’s monogrammed stationery: no holes in the skin. � 2 medium yellow onions: Check the skin for mold. Check for bright red color with specks of fat. beef: Ask the butcher to show you the meat before he wraps it. Anya read aloud Li Mei’s description of the main ingredients: Predicting she would have a table full to feed, Li Mei had doubled her recipe for the fried meat pies. Madame Tarakanova counseled her to give up ballet she would never get her pointeshoes and attain grace without proper arches. The only bare feet she’d seen inside Mama’s house were her own flat pair. Hairy-toed feet padding across her gleaming floors revolted Mama.

Tonight was meat night and Li Mei was making beef piroshki.Would Papa drag home a surprise guest to share the meal? Last week the Sephardic man he invited removed his sandals at the front door.

Over an hour ago, Li Mei gave Anya the grocery list and demanded that she chop-chopto Katznelson’s, the kosher butcher. In the last photo, Grade 8, 1936, Anya was four feet, ten inches tall, the shortest girl-the Jewish girl-the one unlucky enough to have a head of frizz. When she felt lonely, she arranged the photos in a line on the dining room table, starting with Kindergarten, 1929, and compared where on the linden trunk the four friends’ heads reached from year to year. Anya was last because she was the youngest. Luba was oldest so she stood on the far left, then Angelica, then Lily. She would drink a bottle of Coca-Cola in the shade of the linden tree where Papa took the first day of school photo every year with her oldest friends, Luba, Angelica, and Lily.

So she imagined the day of her return to Odessa. When Anya mumbled a derogatory comment about Babushka under her breath, Li Mei said, “A bad word whispered will echo one hundred miles.” When Anya moped around the kitchen, missing Odessa, she said, “You cannot stop the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from nesting in your hair.” According to Li Mei, mosquitoes flew in and laid eggs on the tongues of foreign girls who stared at the Chinese with their lips apart.Īt first, Li Mei’s warnings had annoyed Anya. She almost asked, “Didn’t your mothers teach you it’s rude to point a hose at Stella Rosen’s daughter?” But she stopped the question from tumbling out. Thosewords were bad enough she didn’t want to repeat them in her mind. By her sixth month living in Shanghai, Anya could unscramble most Chinese phrases. Mama’s gardeners, Yat-sen and Pearl, stopped watering the row of drooping peonies and yelled at her. Anya pedaled her new red bicycle across the thirsty lawn to save her tires from melting on the hot cement.

Anya's War by Andrea Alban Gosline