Aviva Jacobs

Aviva is the narrator and protagonist of the novel. She is an eleven-year-old girl on the cusp of her Bas Mitzvah Bash. She grew up in a happy Jewish home with her loving parents, and she always liked to go to the Shul where her father worked on Friday nights. One night, a group of antisemitic young men attacked her father and pushed him into the street where he was hit by a car. Aviva witnessed the entire incident when she was only six. However, she blocked out the memory and did not speak for several months afterwards.

When she and her mother moved to the mikvah, Aviva snuck into the pool and saw the dybbuk for the first time. Although she did not realize it, the dybbuk looked exactly like her father as a boy. Aviva assumed that the mikvah was haunted, and she excitedly told...