A Stranger in Jerusalem
By Sasha Vasilyuk
As she made her way to the Wailing Wall in the middle of her mourning, a shopkeeper stopped her with a question.
The hot wind whistled quietly through the row of Jerusalem’s labyrinthine cemetery, built into the dusty yellow mountainside. I would have never found my grandmother’s grave if it weren’t for Inna, her college friend back from the Soviet Union, where we all had once lived. I called Inna as soon as I landed in Israel, the last stop on my year-long solo trip around the world.