I’m so happy, after long last, I Was Hannah is now published. I have decided to offer the book exclusively through Amazon for the time being so that people who subscribe to Kindle Unlimited can read the book for free and people who buy the print copy through Amazon can buy the Kindle version for only 99 cents!
Here is more information (blurb and excerpt) so you can get to know more about the story and I really hope you will want to read it! Thank you so much. Best, Sedonia
I Was Hannah
Author: Sedonia Jacobs
Series: Journey of Souls, Book 1
Genre: Historical fiction; Spirituality; Judaica; Women’s Fiction; New Adult; Young Adult
eISBN: 978-1-937796-81-5
Price: 3.99
Length: Super novel
Trade paperback:
ISBN13: 978-1-937796-85-3
Page count: 314
Cover price: 12.99 USD
Cover art: Kim Jacobs
“I looked up. Now he was staring at me, looking past that veil between him and the forbidden realm. I saw his eyes. Never had I seen them so close up. They were unusual and beautiful, their color reminding me of the jar of honey my grandmother used to leave on the kitchen windowsill to warm in the sun. I used to love its color when the light poured through, a deep warm gold. I knew then, with a most eerie shiver, that God wasn’t always angry, not even with me, that He had moments of forgiveness and love, even if they were only moments.”
Nineteen year old Hannah lives in a shtetl outside Warsaw, waiting for the day her true love will come along. She bides her time, buried in a world of books, her passion in life. She has always felt like an outsider, especially since her one and only friend is a strange young religious man who used to trail her secretly, until a violent incident brings out his heroic nature and their friendship grew. Yet because Solomon, a Torah scholar destined to be a great religious leader, has been promised in marriage to the Rebbe’s daughter she remains always in conflict, unable to reconcile the unconventional person she really is with what she believes her life should be.
Set against the backdrop of the impending Holocaust and Solomon’s fierce determine to fulfill his sworn duty, I Was Hannah explores a young woman’s struggle to retain her humanity as the darkness of Hitler’s nightmare falls over her world and remain faithful to the one true thing she clings the redeeming, transcendent truths she has learned about love and friendship.
Excerpt:
In the winter of 1937, almost two years after Solomon had begun his self-appointed vigil, the day came when he saved my life.
One freezing Monday morning, I went to the market as usual to buy winter vegetables. Until that day, I had always enjoyed the marketplace in the cold weather, when you can enjoy the activity, the sounds of haggling in Polish and Yiddish without the disgusting smells of the livestock and sweating people simmering in the heat of summer. That morning, however, as I stood at one peasant’s cart, buying parsnips, someone began yelling, “Don’t buy from the Jews!”
I froze in my spot. Fear prickled the skin of my whole body. The shouts continued, and a fight broke out several stalls down from where I was. The peasant who’d sold me the parsnips began yelling curses at the troublemakers, threatening to turn them over to the police. He ran out from behind his cart, accidentally jostling me aside. Still I could not move even though the brawl threatened to spill over onto me.
“Hannah, come away from here!” Solomon appeared in front of me. I stared at him, my senses glazed in fear. He reached for my basket, grabbing part of the handle. “Hold onto this,” he said, as the shouts and grunts of fighting men and the screams of women grew louder. “Come.” He tugged on the basket, pulling me out of my stupor. Obediently I followed him and we ducked behind some wagons, away from the confusion and violence, the sounds of shattering glass, and the nauseating thuds of fists on flesh.
With both our hands on the handle of my basket, we threaded our way through side streets where the Polish gentiles lived, streets lined with wooden bungalows, their tiny patches of naked winter yards, colored only by laundry lines. The clothing, frozen stiff in the unmoving air, looked so strange to me, glassy and surreal, as if the world were passing before me on a movie screen. I stumbled on a rock.
He stopped. “Are you all right?”
I nodded and we continued, only this time I kept my gaze fixed on the small black knitted yarmulke on his head, taking a strangely familiar comfort in the way his earlocks brushed his cheeks as we hurried along.
We did not slow down until we were back in the Jewish Quarter, with its simple wooden bungalows and synagogues, the slats economically nailed together. Except for the synagogue’s ornately carved trimmings, our neighborhood looked as if it could be easily disassembled, moved, and put back together, the obvious legacy of a people forced to live as nomads for thousands of years.
At the door of my house we finally stopped, our breaths puffing heavily into the air. Solomon put his hand on the doorknob. “Is it locked?”
I shook my head and he pulled it open, ushering me in. Our hands both still grasped the basket, but once inside, Solomon took it and held it for me. I closed the door behind us, shutting out the cold and chaos, and the house enclosed us in its dark warmth. For the first time since I lived here, it felt like a sanctuary with its antique furniture, polished floors and nice oriental rugs, all meticulously cared for by Auntie Sylvia. She is quite the balabosteh who pays careful attention to details, down to the lace doilies put everywhere to protect the arms of the sofa and chairs as well as the dark smooth wood of table tops.
I leaned back against the door, waiting for the fear to pass, but the echoes of the hatred and fighting throbbed in my mind. I put my hands over my eyes, fighting back hysterical tears.
“What’s happening?” I whispered.
“It was the Endeks.”
I had heard of the Endecja, a group of anti-Semites who wanted to gain political power by causing trouble in Wolensk and other places, trying to turn our gentile neighbors against us.
“They want to take over the government,” he went on. “I read about them in the Yiddish paper.”
The quiet house filled with the sounds of my ragged breathing as I sought to regain my poise.
“It’s…it’s all right,” Solomon said, almost as if he were comforting a child. “You’re safe now. They will be arrested.”
The certainty in his voice calmed me a bit and I uncovered my eyes. Behind Solomon, Uncle Leo’s grandfather clock ticked with gentle echoes, making us both aware we were alone in the quiet house. “Would…would you like some tea?” I asked.
In the shadowy light, I saw Solomon’s Adam’s apple slide up and down as he swallowed nervously. “Yes, please.”
I hung up my coat and scarf and turned to him. He stood, watching me. I held out my hands. “I’ll hang your coat for you.”
He took off his coat and scarf and handed them to me as though he were afraid to touch me. I took his things and hung them up then led him into the kitchen. Warm and clean, it has always been my favorite room of this house. The small window above the sink shows almost the whole street in front of the house, including the synagogue where Solomon lives.
I gestured him to a seat, put up the kettle to boil and arranged a plate of almond cookies I had baked the day before. I set the cookies before him, remembering at the last second that he was much more religious than I and might not consider our kitchen kosher enough to eat in. I reached again for the plate, as if to take it away. “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling sudden anxiousness that he might refuse the cookies, but also eagerness to please him. “Our kitchen is kosher. I…I made them myself.”
Solomon smiled, perhaps the first time in all the times I ever had seen his face. “I did not give it a thought,” he answered. “They look really good, actually.”
I smiled and turned away, grimacing at my awkwardness. I busied myself with serving the tea before sitting down across from Solomon, my hands around my tea glass to warm the trembling out of them. I felt him studying me, and became self-conscious, especially of my hands with their thick twig-shaped fingers and bitten-down nails. “Do you take sugar?” I pushed the little sugar cube bowl with its delicate claw- shaped tongs in his direction. It had belonged to my grandmother. When I was little I loved to play with those tongs, going around and serving everyone their sugar cubes for tea after supper.
“Yes, thank you.” Gingerly he picked up the tongs and dropped a cube of sugar into the palm of his other hand. Then he did the strangest thing. He put his sugar cube between his teeth the way the older people still do and grinned widely, making an exaggerated show of sipping his tea. This seemed so out of character for him that I began to giggle in spite of everything, and for a few moments, our mutual awkwardness disappeared. Solomon later told me that he did it to make me smile, that he couldn’t stand how frightened and sad I looked sitting there, sipping my tea, traumatized by the fighting in the marketplace.
Sedonia Jacobs Fiction with Spirit 