Jewgrass Fiddler

CHAPTER ONE

Eliza

Mama said I was born to a fiddler playing Jewgrass, mountain psalms.

She told me the story so many times that it feels like a memory I borrowed from her — the rain on the roof, the smell of wet earth drifting through the cracks in our stone walls, the lantern flame bowing and straightening with every gust. “Between your cries,” she’d say, “I heard a little boy singing to you.”

It was Thanksgiving, 1910 — our first year in Pikeville, Kentucky. Back then, the town was little more than a handful of dirt roads, a rail line that cut through the valley like a silver thread, and houses built from stone and timber hauled down from the ridge. Coal dust clung to everything, even the laundry hung out on clear days. The mountains pressed close, steep and watchful, as if they were listening.

Fifty Jewish families lived there — enough to make a community, not enough to hide from one another. My father had just taken the post as their rabbi, fresh from seminary, still smoothing the creases of his new authority. My mother, Deanna, was a seamstress who stitched wedding dresses and burial shrouds with the same steady hands.

She said the contractions began halfway through the meal. The table was set with roast chicken, sweet potatoes, and the last of the apples she’d canned in September. My father had just lifted his cup to bless the holiday when she gripped the table edge and whispered, “It’s time.”

He ran into the rain without his coat, boots slipping in the mud as he sprinted to the Eisners’ house. They’d been in Pikeville five years already — the butcher’s family, the ones who knew how to make a life out of stubborn land. Miriam Eisner, the midwife, didn’t waste a breath. She grabbed her satchel and followed him back through the storm.

By the time they returned, neighbors had gathered outside our stone house, their breath fogging in the cold, their boots sinking into the soft earth. The smell of wet wool and coal smoke hung in the air. And Avner — five years old, solemn as a prophet — stepped onto the porch with his fiddle.

Imma said she heard him through the walls. Thin, earnest notes threading through the storm, the bow scraping just a little too hard, the way children play when they’re trying to be brave. Between her own cries, she caught pieces of the song he was singing:

Rain’s fallin’ soft on the old stone roof,

Lantern light shakin’ with the wind’s low woof…

She said the melody steadied her, even as the pain sharpened. That the chorus drifted in just as she felt me turn, the mountains echoing the boy’s soft chant:

Lai‑lai‑lai, the hills all sing,

Fiddle boy playin’ on a broken string…

And then, just before dawn, I arrived — red‑faced, furious, and wailing louder than the storm.

Imma swore that the moment I cried out, Avner’s fiddle fell silent. “As if he knew his work was done,” she’d say. “As if he’d played you into the world.”

I don’t remember any of it. But I’ve carried that story all my life — the rain, the fiddle, the boy on the porch. A beginning stitched with music and mountain air.

And sometimes I wonder if that was the first thread tying me to him.

Because years later, when he left Pikeville for Prestonsburg — to apprentice with a mountain fiddler, to study prayer‑song with a Jewish cantor, to learn ornamentation from a traveling klezmer musician — the whole town said he was chasing a dream. His parents encouraged it. His father had plenty of help in the butcher shed, and his mother believed music was a calling, not a hobby.

But while he was gone, life didn’t pause for him.

His mother had two more babies — Lillian with her wild curls and Yossi with his quiet, watchful eyes. My mother had three: Jennifer, who followed me like a shadow; Moshe, who never stopped asking questions; and Dassi, who arrived with a scream that could rattle windows.

And Tova — Avner’s sister, just a year older than me — became my closest friend. We spent afternoons gathering herbs by the creek, whispering secrets in the shul’s women’s gallery, and daring each other to climb the low branches of the walnut tree behind the Eisners’ house. She filled the space he left behind without meaning to.

Sometimes I wondered if he knew how much he’d missed. How much we’d grown. How the world had shifted in his absence.

And when he returned — older, changed, carrying shadows and songs I didn’t recognize — I felt that thread between us pull tight again.

But that is another story.

For now, this is how mine begins: with rain, and music, and a boy who didn’t yet know he mattered.