When their parents are forced to travel to a neighboring town, the sisters learn they can shift into animal forms: a swan and bear, respectively. Laya is flighty and restless, eager to experience life outside their insular Jewish shtetl plodding Liba relishes Jewish study with her father and hews closely to tradition. Set in an anxious, rumor-filled backdrop preceding those pogroms, The Sisters of the Winter Wood tells the story of vastly different sisters Laya and Liba. “When I read that, I said, Oxkay-this is my story.” This incited pogroms in the nearby town of Kishniev that injured or killed over 600 Jews. In 1903, the body of a young Christian boy was found there on a Jewish fruit orchard, drained of blood.
“So then I started to think about, Well, where do I want to set this, and what story do I want to tell?” Aided by relatives’ genealogy books, she began researching her own family history and learned her grandfather originated in Dubossary, a small town that then straddled the border between Moldova and the Ukraine. I remember waking my husband up in the middle of the night, and I said, ‘I need to put Yiddish into my book.’ ”
“I read it over and realized my book didn’t have a soul. She’d been working on a retelling of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market-a dreamy, languorous poem full of sensory detail (the goblins sell “plump unpeck’d cherries” and “pellucid grapes”) that turns on the power of sisterly love, but felt her story lacked an emotional core.
Rena Rossner didn’t know she was writing a Jewish fantasy novel till the Yiddish sneaked up on her in the middle of the night.
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