What’s with the Goats?

When fictional Miriam Josefsohn meets Serakh for the first time in 1912, Miriam tells us:

She was thin, like me, but a head shorter, and she exuded a faint odor of farm animals. Goats?”

Goats indeed. Whenever Serakh enters a room, the smell of goats is not far behind, clinging to her body and her clothes—even clothes she has worn for a relatively short time:

A familiar gray dress hung near the men’s trousers. I stepped closer until I was sure, until I smelled goats. I pulled the dress from its h...