Chinuch

Chinuch is presented as a Torah-based model of child-rearing in which parents are responsible for guiding children toward religious observance and obedience. In the narrator’s family, that responsibility makes harsh correction appear legitimate when it is undertaken for spiritual ends. The practice is meant to express concern for a child’s religious welfare, yet the narrator experiences its daily methods as close surveillance, intimidation, and a lack of affection.

Meaning and Family Practice

The narrator describes her aunts and uncles as routinely berating, embarrassing, and yelling at their children. This discipline is explained as Chinuch: because parents bear a spiritual duty to raise God-fearing, law-abiding Jews, severity can be accepted when it serves that purpose. Zeidy distinguishes such instruction from genuine anger, which he says is forbidden; in his account, a grandparent may need to perform anger to fulfill the obligation of correction.

That distinction shapes the family’s emotional habits. Hugs, kisses, and compliments are absent, while relatives watch one another for spiritual or physical shortcomings and point them out. Chaya describes this vigilance as compassion for another person’s spiritual welfare. The concept therefore recasts criticism as care, but it also leaves little space between religious guidance and the monitoring of ordinary behavior.

The Narrator and Chaya

The narrator’s account of Chaya shows how Chinuch feels from the child’s side. When Chaya visits Bubby, she watches the narrator closely and corrects her every few minutes. The narrator’s heart races in Chaya’s presence, and Chaya’s direct gaze and severe manner intensify her fear. Other relatives also criticize or physically jostle the narrator, but Chaya’s attention is especially focused and, as the narrator understands it, knowingly intimidating.

Chaya’s scrutiny extends into domestic tasks. She may invite the narrator to help bake a cherry pie, then watch her knead pastry in a large steel bowl for a mistake. A splash of soup on the narrator’s collar draws a disapproving click of the tongue. These small incidents give the family’s abstract account of spiritual responsibility a concrete form: the child is observed, evaluated, and corrected even in commonplace moments. The narrator also notices Chaya’s polished suits and shoes and her pride in her natural blonde appearance; alongside that outward composure, Chaya’s attention makes the narrator feel exposed to judgment.

Instruction, Authority, and the Body

Elsewhere, the narrator encounters religious instruction about adult women’s obligations. In marriage classes, a teacher explains Niddah and presents ritual rules governing menstruation, inspection, and preparation for immersion. The narrator objects internally to the humiliating implications of impurity and resists the assumption that her body is dirty. These lessons are not identified as Chinuch, but they show a related pattern in the book: religious knowledge is transmitted through teachers and family expectations, and rules about the body are accompanied by instructions about how women should act.

The same tension appears during pregnancy and after childbirth. Eli presents a religious prohibition as a reason the narrator is obligated to meet his needs, assigning her responsibility for preventing his sin. Six weeks after the birth, he presses her about returning to the mikvah, while she has not begun counting the clean days and does not feel ready to examine her changed body. Rather than immediately accept the timetable imposed by expectation, she tells Eli she wants Dr. Patrick’s approval before deciding. The doctor examines her and offers contraceptive samples, which the narrator keeps. These episodes concern adult marital and medical decisions, not child-rearing itself; set beside Chinuch, however, they underline how religious rules can define duties while the narrator searches for room to assess her own readiness.

Significance and Tension

Chinuch’s central tension lies in the distance between its declared purpose and its experienced effects. The family calls discipline compassion because it is intended to safeguard spiritual welfare. The narrator, meanwhile, registers its cost in fear, constant scrutiny, and the absence of ordinary tenderness. Chaya’s ability to present a pleasant invitation while remaining watchful sharpens that contradiction: care and inspection can occupy the same encounter.

The account does not describe Chinuch simply as anger or as an isolated harsh lecture. It is a family system that makes correction a standing duty and treats religious purpose as its justification. By placing the narrator’s apprehension beside relatives’ language of compassion, the narrative asks readers to see how an ethic of care can also authorize close control, and how the child being formed within that system may experience its protection as pressure.