The Catskills serve as the secluded summer setting for Devorah’s camp, a landscape chosen to keep Satmar children far from outsiders and difficult to reach from town. The region’s damp valleys and remote roads frame a season of enforced separation, childhood mischief, and growing unease; when camp ends abruptly, the return to Williamsburg makes that isolation newly visible.

Setting and isolation

The camp lies in a sweltering valley in a far corner of the Catskills, miles from the main highway. Satmar organizers want the children distant from the gentiles who live in the region year-round and unable to walk into town or encounter the outside world. Reaching camp requires traveling along a primitive dirt road that stretches for miles and is difficult to find. The geography thus operates as more than scenery: distance and poor access help make the camp a contained world.

The grounds are saturated with moisture. Mushrooms grow in the shade, rain collects in low places, and puddles drain down the hillocks over weeks before thinning in the humid air. Only the raised fields stay dry enough for activities. This persistent wetness gives the camp a physical atmosphere of enclosure, while the open fields offer only limited, managed space within it.

Camp life and division

Devorah’s daily life at camp mixes prescribed routines with small acts of defiance. She avoids swimming by hiding in the bathroom during checks, unwilling to wear the long blue swimdress, marked with the palm-tree emblem associated with the Satmar name. Once wet, the heavy dress bags around her knees and slaps her calves. Its conspicuous emblem and uncomfortable fit make the rules of communal identity tangible in an ordinary summer activity.

At night, she turns the bunks into a stage for a prank: when the supervisor steps outside, Devorah pounds the underside of Layala’s mattress until its metal frame vibrates and Layala yells. The overnight-duty girls rush in with flashlights, searching between the beds, while Devorah lies still beneath her quilt, breathing slowly and appearing innocent. The episode captures her pleasure in mischief and in passing unnoticed within a closely supervised setting.

The Catskills also divide the children along the Satmar succession dispute. There are separate camps for families supporting Zalman Leib, the Rebbe’s youngest son, and Aaron, his eldest; their contest to inherit the dynasty has become bitter. Golda attends the Aroinies camp, so Devorah cannot see her during most of the summer despite their school-year friendship. On Devorah’s birthday, Golda visits, and the two walk away from the noise of the main cabins to sit in tall grass, make daisy chains, and share their dislike of camp’s yelling and hot-concrete games. Their private meeting briefly creates a friendship-shaped refuge inside a landscape organized by faction and routine.

Early return and significance

The campers are sent home a week earlier than expected after camp is ruined. The coach bus carries them back from the Catskills into Williamsburg, where Lee Avenue is crowded with returning Hasidim, buses, luggage, and fathers helping their daughters load taped cardboard boxes into minivans. After the mountain air and rain-soaked grounds, the city feels swollen with humidity, dust, and exhaust. Devorah looks up from the highway overpass and wonders whether the sky is the same one she saw at camp; she also questions whether the calamity meant divine punishment or whether ugliness and consequence might come from people instead.

The premature return ends the camp’s isolation but gives Devorah a week before school begins in which she can pursue interests unavailable there. Between shopping trips with Bubby, she takes a bus to Borough Park to sneak books home; bringing them to camp would have been too dangerous. In this contrast, the Catskills become both a retreat from the city and a place where private intellectual life is difficult to sustain. Its remoteness protects the community from outside contact, but the return to Williamsburg restores Devorah’s access to books and to time alone with her thoughts.