The deaths of Roize and her unborn child are a remembered tragedy that turns a staircase into a witness to the cost of dynastic ambition. As Devorah leaves a religious celebration in the early morning, the account she carries of Roize’s death connects a past succession struggle to the rivalries of the present, and deepens her sense of alienation from a community that calls itself holy.

The remembered account

According to the story Devorah has heard, Roize, the first rabbi’s only daughter, was pushed to her death on the stairs. She was pregnant, and her unborn child—who was expected to inherit the coveted Satmar dynasty—also died, only weeks before the expected birth. The account places a family tragedy within a struggle over succession: others already had their eyes on the position the child might have inherited. The passage does not identify who pushed Roize or establish the circumstances beyond the report that she was pushed.

The staircase and Devorah’s memory

Devorah encounters this history as she walks down the very stairs associated with Roize’s death. She has left after the third dance, at 3:30 a.m., although four dances remain before the celebration ends at dawn. Tired of competing with other women for a view she does not truly want, she makes an excuse about meeting her grandmother outside; her friends cannot hear her in the noise. Now she must find her way home alone in the dark, and the stairs make the inherited account immediate rather than distant.

Devorah imagines Roize standing there, pregnant, and feels that Roize’s pain lives within her. She says she cannot forget, unlike others. The memory therefore marks a difference between Devorah and the surrounding community: where public celebration and communal devotion seem to invite shared feeling, she remains fixed on an unresolved loss and the violence that, according to the story, accompanied it.

Succession and communal disillusionment

The remembered death informs Devorah’s judgment of the contemporary rabbinical succession struggle. By her account, the Satmar community was still young when Roize and her unborn child died; now the current rabbi’s sons quarrel over what she regards as a merely symbolic throne. The contrast makes the earlier tragedy feel less like a closed episode than a precedent: the struggle for rabbinical power has changed in scale, but it still troubles the ideal of brotherly love that Devorah believes God commanded Jews to show one another.

Devorah sets this spectacle against the humility Zeidy associates with rabbis in Europe, who, he says, might decline the position when it was offered. In the present, rabbis travel in black Cadillacs and have private ritual baths in their homes; children collect rabbi cards and imitate rabbis on Purim with cotton-ball beards, faux-fur coats, and shiny canes. These details turn religious authority into celebrity and aspiration, making the struggle over succession appear inseparable from status. As Devorah walks home through Williamsburg, the night’s brief possibility of belonging fades into what she recognizes as an established pattern of disenchantment.