On the terrible days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, kneytlakh legn takes place—the measuring of graves. The women measure out the cemeteries with a string, then wind the string back up around a bobbin, for later use as candlewicks; some of the women will also use it to tell fortunes. Each of them murmurs a prayer under her breath, and they look like witches in their wide, ruffled skirts, which catch on blackberry thorns and rustle among the dry yellow leaves.

Once, Yente herself measured the graves, believing it to be the duty of every woman to measure how much room was left for the dead, or whether there was any room at all, before any new living people were born. It is a kind of bookkeeping that women take care of—women are always better, in any case, at keeping the accounts.

But what reason do they have for measuring the graves and cemeteries? After all, the dead are not contained in their graves—Yente has learned this only now, however, after plunging thousands of wicks into wax. Graves are in fact altogether pointless, since the dead ignore them and roam—the dead are everywhere. Yente sees them all the time, as if through glass, for however much she might like to join their ranks, she can’t. Where is this? It’s hard to say. They behold the world as if from behind a windowpane, inspecting it and always coveting something inside it. Yente tries to figure out what the faces they make mean, likewise their gestures, and in the end, she gets it: The dead would like to be talked about; they are hungry, and that is their food. What they want from us is our attention.

And Yente notices something else—that that attention is inequitably distributed. Some people are spoken about a great deal, with myriad words pronounced about them. Of others, people utter not a single word, nary a syllable, ever. Those dead will flicker out after a while, moving away from the glass, disappearing somewhere into the back. There are a great many of that latter group, millions of them, completely forgotten. No one even knows they lived on earth. There is no trace of them, which is why they are freed faster, and depart. And maybe that’s a good thing. Yente would depart, as well, if only she could. If only she weren’t still bound by that powerful word she swallowed. The little piece of paper is gone, and there’s no trace left of the string. It’s all dissolved, and the tiniest particles of light have been absorbed into matter. All that remains is the word like a rock that reckless Elisha Shorr employed to tether Yente. (The Books of Jacob)