Within my Walls

This anger. This anger. It’s making her heart thump so hard that her body aches, and her face burns. Why did her mother not fight for her life? For her child? If she, Bilhah, were a mother, she would never have succumbed to illness and left a little one alone.

Why does she care? Why is she so filled with rage and sorrow?

Bilhah looks up. “I do not know what I think. Just that if I…if I ever had a child… I would love her and protect her until my last breath. With everything I had.”

She knows, then, why. Because she is an abandoned child. Abandoned by her mother. No, abandoned by her father. No, abandoned to her father.

And what of the Almighty? Her Third Parent, as Eliyahu liked to say. She can almost touch it, that great gash inside her.

Is there an answer? Can there be an answer?

Where is home when your people have been expelled, and those whom you love are dead?

Forty years after the Spanish Expulsion, the Jewish people are still haunted by forced conversions and false messiahs. Mashiach will come from the North… Leonora de Dabela knows this, and so she descends on Tzfat, intent on paving the way for the Final Redemption. It is the only way she can redeem herself from the unspeakable acts of her past. She sends letter after letter to the Imperial Palace of Istanbul, all with one goal: to convince Suleiman the Magnificent to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. And as Leonora begins shifting the bricks of change, she touches lives concealed underneath.

One is Eliyahu, a heartbroken shepherd, who for two years hid from grief within the walls of his cave in the Galil. When an old sage draws him back into the world of chaos and people, Eliyahu must cling to the truth in his heart even as Leonora pulls him into her schemes.

And then there is Bilhah, a scribe in the Imperial Palace who struggles to make peace with her past and with the Almighty Who has seemingly abandoned her. In this bastion of Islam, can she find the faith and trust to lead her home?

In this powerfully relevant historical novel, Leah Gebber weaves together three broken souls who must learn to bring down the walls around their hearts to make room for redemption.