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Full Character Name: Chaya Weismann
Character Birthday & Age: April 24, 1998
City & Country of Birth: Finchley, London
Pureblood, Halfblood or Muggleborn: Muggleborn
House & Year: Hufflepuff first year
Wand: 10 inches, English oak with unicorn hair, somewhat pliable, knobby
Physical Description: Build/Body type: slim,
Estimated Height/Weight: 4' 11''/150cm
Hair color: brown
Eye color: dark brown
Skin color: pale
Chaya is a pretty girl, slim and pale with dark brown eyes and long, curly brown hair that she wears loose or up in a simple pony tail. Her cheeks are freckled from spending long hours outside. Her skin - a legacy of Eastern European ancestry on both sides of her family - burns rather than tans. She puts on extra-strength sunscreen every morning throughout the spring and summer.
She doesn't exercise, but gardening keeps her arms toned and strong. She walks lightly, but rarely in a straight line, and can carry lots of things at once without dropping them - a skill at odds with her general clumsiness and lack of awareness regarding her surroundings.
Largely unconcerned with fashion and appearance, Chaya dresses for comfort and function: denim and khaki, shorts and capris in the spring and summer and pants in the autumn and winter; t-shirts and sweatshirts, long-sleeve jerseys, and sometimes sweaters in the winter. She wears her green, daisy Wellingtons (boots) to garden, and trainers the rest of the time. Due to her sensitive skin, sh also has a collection of wide-brimmed hats to wear while gardening on sunny days. She'll dress nicely - skirts and blouses or sweaters, tights or white socks and nice shoes - for Shabbat services and holidays.
Despite her mother's ongoing campaign to keep her neat and clean, Chaya usually has dirt under her nails (and often elsewhere on her person), rumpled clothes, and messy, flyaway hair, occasionally with leaves in it.
When Chaya is upset, overstimulated, or otherwise overwhelmed, she wrings or flaps her hands. The more effected she is, the larger and more obvious these movements become. She is aware of this, having discussed it with her Muggle therapist.
Personality Description: Chaya has a passion (most people, her parents included, call it an obsession) for gardening. She has a vast knowledge of all aspects of gardening, and never tires of talking about it. She doesn't usually notice that the people around her are tired of hearing about it. She spends long hours tending the small vegetable patch and flower bed in the back garden of her home. She has a gift for growing things, what Muggles call a "green thumb," though at least some of her success with plants, especially when she was younger and more likely to forget to tend to them, she now knows to be the result of accidental magic triggered by her fierce love for her plants.
She is a fairly good student, well-behaved if the rules are explained to her in a way she understands. She could be an excellent student, if only she could apply the obsessive focus with which she pursues her interests to her schoolwork. She has a gift for memorizing facts and figures, which helps make up for the fact that she's easily distracted from things in which sh has no serious interest.
Chaya has Asperger Syndrome, an Autism Spectrum Disorder. She comes across as aloof and even unfeeling to some people, but she does have emotions which she feels very deeply. She doesn't always notice the body language, vocal tone, or other non-verbal cues of the people with whom she interacts, and even when she does, she does not understand these signals naturally the way most people do. She has difficulty both expressing and feeling empathy and avoids eye contact, which makes her very uncomfortable. She sometimes misses humor and sarcasm.
Chaya firmly believes in fairness, and is often disappointed by real life, which is, of course, very rarely fair. She thinks logically - though what she considers logical is often at odds with conventional logic - and she has little patience for complicated social conventions and rituals. She takes what people say literally. Without the extra information conveyed by nonverbal cues, she has to rely on the actual words people say to understand what they're trying to communicate, so she wishes everyone would simply say what they mean instead of always trying to be polite and appropriate. She herself always says what she actually means, not because she wants to be inappropriate or rude but because she usually doesn't realize or understand why her comments will be seen that way.
Chaya is independent and solitary, often preferring her own company over that of her peers. She spends most of her free time gardening and reading.
History: Chaya was born April 24, 1998, and grew up in Church End, a Finchley suburb in the London borough of Barnet, which, despite its name, has a sizable Jewish community. Her family is upper-middle class. Her parents raised her in a mildly observant, though not Kosher, Jewish home. They belong to the New North London Synagogue, a Masorti (conservative) synagogue in Finchley, and attend Shabbat services regularly. Chaya attended Akiva, a private Jewish primary school, from nursery through year six, after which she received her Hogwarts letter.
For her entire life before Hogwarts, most of the people Chaya interacted with regularly and knew well were Jewish. She attended a Jewish school and lived in a neighborhood with a high Jewish population. Her parents' friends are Jewish. Chaya has no problem with non-Jews, but she's never felt isolated by her religion before, let alone been the only Jew in a classroom or on the playground.
When she was 9, Chaya's parents took her to see a psychiatrist at the recommendation of her teachers at Akiva. Several months later Doctor Bloom diagnosed her with Asperger Syndrome. Chaya attended biweekly appointments with Doctor Bloom until she started at Hogwarts. Working with Doctor Bloom, Chaya has developed strategies to compensate for her weaknesses, but nothing will make her 'normal,' nor does she want to be. She read everything she could find and understand on Asperger Syndrome after she was diagnosed and given it a lot of thought, and come to the conclusion that all it means is that she thinks differently than most people, not that she thinks wrong.
When told Chaya was going away to a bordering school, Doctor Bloom recommended that she seek out the school's counseling services (not knowing that wizarding schools have no such thing) and arrange for regular therapy sessions. Both Chaya and her parents worried about the possible consequences of sending Chaya into a society that does not recognize the existence of, let alone know how to deal with or offer accommodations for, a condition that affects so much of her life.
Chaya is very excited to learn that magic is real, and dives into learning about the wizarding world with enthusiasm nearly bordering on obsessiveness. She is especially enthralled with the concept of herbology, which quickly becomes both her best and favorite subject upon starting at Hogwarts. Chaya was friendly enough with the other girls at Akiva, as well as some of the boys, but she didn't have any close friends, which always worried her parents and teachers, but made it easier for her to leave Akiva behind for Hogwarts.
Chaya has three living grandparents: her paternal grandparents, who live nearby in Edgware, London, and her maternal grandmother, who lives with Chaya and her parents. Her maternal grandfather died in a car crash when Chaya was barely two. She doesn't remember him, and therefore doesn't miss him. Chaya's Bubbe Weismann escaped Poland as a young girl on a kindertransport and grew up in a group home. Her Zayde Weismann survived Birkenau. Both lost their entire families in the Shoah (Holocaust). Her mother's parents, Nana and Papa, were both born and raised in England.
Classes: Core Classes
Astronomy
Charms
Defense Against the Dark Arts
Herbology
History of Magic
Potions
Transfiguration
Flying | Electives
No
No
No
No
No
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How Do You Fit Into Your House?: Gardening is all about patience and hard work and Chaya strongly values both. Chaya is well suited to gardening, which has honed her patience, dedication, and willingness to work, partly because of a natural inclination toward these characteristics. She's had her own little vegetable patch and a few flower beds in the back garden since she was eight years old, and before that she had flowers in a window box and a little bean plant that started in a Styrofoam cup and eventually had to be transplanted into a real pot.
Chaya also values honesty and fairness. She's a bad liar, and it rarely even occurs to her to try. She's honest to the point of bluntness; she says what she really thinks and feels and finds it irritating that other people don't do the same.
Writing Sample: Chaya didn't realize her mother was in the sitting room until she told her to "put the book down and go set the table. Dinner's almost ready and your father will be home any time now."
"In a minute, Mum." She didn't look up from Goshawk's Guide to Herbology, which lay open in her lap. She'd retreated to the sitting room with the thick volume, along with a hardcover text titled One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, the slightly smaller Encyclopedia of Toadstools, and the other herbology books she'd convinced her mother to buy for her during the trip to Diagon Alley a few days earlier, just after lunch. Only now, with her mum mentioning dinner, did she notice that afternoon had long since slipped into evening. She was still on the first of her new books, not even a third of the way through.
"Not in a minute, now."
"But Mum, I'm in the middle of a chapter!" She still hadn't looked up, or even stopped reading. This argument, familiar as it was, hardly required her full attention. Elladora Ketteridge's encounter with gillyweed was much more interesting.
"The book will still be there after dinner," her mum said, "unless, of course, you continue to ignore me."
She groaned and rolled her eyes, but finished the sentence she was reading and marked her place with a 'Church End Library' bookmark. Better to put the book aside for the span of a single meal than risk her mum taking it away for an entire day or more. She put the book on the coffee table and followed her mum into the kitchen.
Sum up your character in one paragraph: Muggle-born Chaya Weismann is thrilled to discover that she's a witch. She has a passion for (obsession with) gardening, which grows to encompass herbology once she learns about the wizarding world. As a conservative Jew with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Chaya has more setting her apart from British wizarding culture than most of Hogwarts' muggle-born students, but she is none the less eager to explore and find her place in the magical world.
Chaya Weismann: First Year Hufflepuff