I Was Hannah — Sedonia 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.