Leaving Hasidic life and taking her son with her

Leaving Hasidic life and taking her son with her is not a single impulsive break but the outcome of years of constrained choices, private resistance, and growing fear for Yitzy’s future. Devorah’s departure from Eli and the life they shared becomes a practical escape and a claim to motherhood: away from the community’s watchful structures, she begins to know her son on terms of her own.

The life she was trying to leave

The pressures shaping Devorah’s decision reach back into a family world where marriage, reputation, and communal standing carry consequences beyond the couple. When Devorah’s father remained unmarried at twenty-four, her grandparents searched overseas for a young woman willing to come to America. They prepared a seven-room apartment and offered to pay for the wedding and travel. They found Devorah’s mother, the child of an impoverished divorcée, attending a Jewish girls’ seminary in London. The family’s history thus includes marriage arranged around material security and circumstance, not simply private desire.

As a young woman, Devorah understood that her own match was being shaped by family expectations. Her grandfather valued piety and a strong Satmar family background; her grandmother wanted a husband who would speak respectfully to her. Devorah privately wanted the freedom to read, write, and travel to Union Square. Yet she believed that knowing the details of the family’s marriage discussions would only intensify her anxiety: what her family wanted would happen regardless. Her later departure reverses that earlier posture of waiting for others to decide. Instead of treating her future as something that would arrive through family arrangements, she begins to act on what she wants for herself and her son.

A future for Yitzy

The immediate moral force of the decision comes from Devorah’s concern about what life in the community will make of Yitzy. At three, he is expected to receive side curls and begin cheder, spending the day studying Torah; as he grows older, she fears that his childhood will narrow into a religious education and a world of male authority from which she is increasingly excluded. She asks herself whether she can condemn him to that confinement while pursuing opportunities to broaden her own life. The question turns her private longing into a responsibility she can no longer set aside.

Leaving does not initially seem easy or even practicable. Devorah feels trapped, with nowhere to go and no resources to change her circumstances. She keeps kosher, dresses modestly, and outwardly performs devotion, while guarding her dissenting thoughts as a secret identity. When she publishes an account of her experience anonymously, readers warn that a woman who is not religious may not be allowed to leave with her child. One commenter claims to be a lawyer and says it has never been done; others warn that a rabbinical court would not consider her devout enough to parent Yitzy. Their warnings expose the custody risk attached to leaving, but they do not persuade her that staying is the only possible future. She comes to feel that both she and Yitzy will one day be free, even though she has no clear plan for how to make that happen.

The marriage reaches its end

Before leaving Airmont for good, Devorah and Eli attend a religious marriage counselor. The meeting comes after a history that, in Devorah’s account, includes Eli leaving during the first year of their marriage because she could not have intercourse and failing to defend her when his family disparaged her. The counselor, who is a rabbi rather than a therapist, says the difficulties are serious and recommends professional help. Eli then proposes that they divorce, acknowledging that he does not believe the marriage will work. Devorah does not try to persuade him otherwise. She says divorce is possible if that is what he wants; inwardly, she already knows she will not return.

A car crash just days before the departure sharpens the separation between the life she has inhabited and the one she is trying to begin. Eli refuses to take responsibility, and Devorah tells him to go home. In its aftermath, she interprets her survival as a possible sign and feels that the past no longer has a claim on her. The next day, she signs a contract to write a memoir. For her, writing becomes part of the break: the former self is not simply forgotten but given a final remembrance, while her two identities cease to be held together as one.

The physical departure

Devorah rents a small white Kia and packs it with what it can hold. Yitzy sits in his booster seat among the boxes and garbage bags, sucking his thumb before falling asleep on the highway. As the car stalls in traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge, the recent crash returns to her in sound and sensation. The crossing is therefore not presented as a clean, triumphant passage. She is carrying a child, possessions, fear, and the physical memory of danger into an uncertain life.

She sells her diamond ring and some wedding gifts to a jeweler in Westchester. Watching the items from her marriage being bagged up, she asks what will happen to them and feels relieved to learn they will probably be melted down. Other losses are harder to reduce to objects: dishes and linens she once chose with care, friendships she worked to build, and the extended family network she leaves behind. With few possessions to anchor her, she experiences rootlessness as both freedom and panic. The departure removes restraints, but it also removes the familiar structures that had given her a place in the world.

Motherhood and a new beginning

After leaving, Devorah changes her phone number and withholds her new address because she fears being tracked down. The privacy gives her and Yitzy room to form a closer relationship. She feels that only now, without others intervening between them, has she been allowed to become his mother in an honest way. That sense of recovered intimacy is one of the departure’s first consequences, distinct from the larger question of where their lives will lead.

She begins by teaching Yitzy English. They read books together and watch Sesame Street; he learns quickly, and she is grateful that he is still young enough to adapt. Within weeks, he speaks English with a childlike charm. They sleep in a queen bed she buys after leaving and talk before they fall asleep. When Yitzy notices her uncovered hair and tells her it is pretty, Devorah recognizes his effort to comfort her. His concern moves her, but it also makes her aware of how much he understands about their unsettled situation. He has not yet asked about his father. Once, after playing on a playground slide, he asks whether his parents are fighting anymore. His question leaves the separation present in their new life, even as mother and son begin to build a relationship beyond the community that had defined it.