I have lost my home already, have lost my country, and now I must give up my name, too?

The Jewish ladies always call her Alana. Which is fine, really. She doesn’t overly care if they get her name right. The important part is that they have the supplies she needs and heavy-duty gloves so she doesn’t burn her skin on the toxic bleach that she uses to scrub their toilets. The important part is that, at the end of eight long hours, they put some cash in her hands that she can use for groceries and rent and Sofiya’s clothes.

It’s just a tiny bit irritating, this change of name. “Alina,” she says each time. She has seen her name in Mrs. Sontag’s phone, spelled correctly, though Mrs. Sontag still WhatsApps her each week with a hi alana, are we on for thursday?

Maybe it’s autocorrect. Maybe it’s that, in these Jewish homes, they don’t see anything beyond each other.

But a part of her wants to rail at it, to demand, I have lost my home already, have lost my country, and now I must give up my name, too? Kyiv burns, and Alina and Sofiya are its embers, drifting into a new abyss.

“My name is Ilana, too,” says a cheerful 11-year-old at the Hubermans, her newest clients. Alina had barely met Mrs. Huberman, who had been on her way out when Alina had arrived and had showed her around at record speed. You don’t mind if I leave the door unlocked for you from now on, do you? I’m late for work. And do you think you can find whatever’s making the closet downstairs smell so bad? She’d departed with nothing but a thank you.

Alina is sought after, she’s discovered from Mrs. Sontag. I told them you’re a hard worker. And that you speak English! The only two assets of hers that matter right now, in this new, unfamiliar place, where a girl Sofiya’s age, dressed in a dull blue dress that Sofiya would hate, sits back on her big bed and stares at Alina with interest. “Are you Jewish?”

“A little,” Alina concedes. She’s far more articulate in Ukrainian, but her English vocabulary doesn’t extend to the complexities of ethnicity and religion and culture.

It doesn’t satisfy Ilana, who screws up her nose and sits back on her bed, a luxurious wooden piece with heavy blankets that had been soft against Alina’s skin when she’d made the bed five minutes ago. Now, they are wrinkled and twisted, no match for Ilana’s fidgeting. “How can you be a bit Jewish? It’s, like, you are or you aren’t. Is your mother Jewish?”

“In a way.” Jewishness had been a stifled thing in the Soviet Union, best forgotten, and Alina’s mother had only discovered that she was Jewish when she applied for a passport, as the story went.

Ilana looks dissatisfied. “What does that mean? Do you keep Shabbos?”

Alina knows Shabbos: the night her work is cut short, the day she has no employment. It’s a relief, really, to have a day where she can rest, where she can spend time with Sofiya. “No.”

“Okay, so you must not be Jewish.” Ilana wanders off, leaving Alina to straighten her blankets again and crouch down, back aching, to pick up laundry from the floor.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1081)