Summary

The narrator speaks of following her father out of Jerusalem after the fall of that city. They went into the desert where they wandered and lived like nomads. She felt she left behind all the good things life might have had in store for her when she left Jerusalem but she had no choice but to leave because it was her fate.

The narrator describes the building and destruction of the first temple, then the rebuilding of the temple. That temple had stood for hundreds of years, but the Romans were attacking Jerusalem and the Jews. The narrator writes she expected nothing but disaster as she was born in the month of Av, the month of destruction. Her mother died in childbirth and the narrator was born alive only because she was cut from her mother’s womb. She was born...