Purim

Purim is a recurring holiday in Devorah’s account, but its importance lies less in a general description of observance than in the scenes it gathers around it. During her engagement to Eli, the holiday becomes a stage for costly family gifts, a short telephone conversation, and tentative intimacy. In March 2009, it frames a last visit to Bubby and Zeidy, where a festive meal unfolds alongside Devorah’s awareness that she may leave the life everyone assumes she will continue. Across these episodes, celebration and separation occupy the same calendar occasion.

Gifts and the Engagement

Gift-giving marks the engagement well beyond Purim. On special occasions and holidays, presents arrive from Eli’s family, wrapped and accompanied by sweets or flowers. The exchange is a longstanding custom in which brides and future mothers-in-law compete over the prestige of the gifts and the elaborateness of their presentation. Devorah, too, sends carefully arranged presents: for Tu B’Shvat she has already given Eli an ornate silver case for the citrus fruit he will use on Sukkot, packed in a gold-painted wooden crate with ferns, lemons, and gifts for his siblings. The exchange makes courtship visible through objects, displays, and family participation.

For Purim, Devorah sends Eli’s mother a silver tray bearing twenty miniature chocolate trifle cups, accompanied by wine and crystal goblets filled with layered chocolate mousse. She wraps the arrangement in clear cellophane and a large silver bow. A cousin drives it to Kiryas Joel, where the gift is wedged between the car’s front and back seats to keep it upright. For Eli, Devorah chooses a costly scroll of scripture read aloud on the holiday, purchased by Zeidy from a scribe for sixteen hundred dollars and housed in a leather case. She presents it in a glass ice bucket with champagne and rock candy arranged to resemble ice. The expense is not incidental: Devorah knows that the boys compare their gifts in the synagogue, and she is pleased that Eli can take pride in the valuable objects his family receives. Zeidy, unusually willing to spend freely for his future grandson-in-law, appears to have saved with this occasion in mind.

The presents also reveal the difference between a gift’s public prestige and its personal meaning. Eli’s family sends Devorah a huge cake shaped like a fiddle, delivered late in the afternoon from Kiryas Joel through Purim traffic in Williamsburg. Its fondant strings, edible musical notes, and purple raffia make the package a spectacle. Inside the cake is a heavy gold watch, set with diamonds and several links too large for Devorah’s wrist. She accepts the admiration of her relatives and displays it, yet sees the watch as an ostentatious object that draws attention to itself. Unlike the watch she chose and engraved for Eli, this one bears no mark of individual choice. Devorah understands it as intended for an imagined bride, not for her as she actually is. The pearls and watch feel temporarily pleasant, she reflects, but because they were selected without regard to her preferences, she expects that relinquishing them will one day feel like relief.

A Brief Conversation with Eli

Purim gives Devorah a rare chance to speak with Eli by telephone. Zeidy first calls the in-laws with holiday greetings, then lets Devorah use the kitchen telephone, whose short wire and limited time make the conversation tightly bounded. She is eager to hear Eli’s voice again, which she can scarcely remember, and privately hopes to preserve the sound in her mind. A photograph sent by Eli’s sister has already given her details to dwell on: his tanned arm and collarbone visible beside the gift she sent. Her curiosity and anticipation coexist with the formal limits governing their contact.

Eli greets her warmly and says that Purim is his favorite holiday, with its costumes, music, and drinking, because it is the day when people can let loose. Devorah asks whether he received her gifts and chose the wine especially for him. He thanks her for the beautiful presents but explains that his father took the wine because he considered it insufficiently kosher; in their household, only wine bearing the Satmar rabbinical seal meets his standard. The exchange brings the engagement’s polished generosity into contact with religious rules and family authority. Devorah’s short call ends under Zeidy’s impatient signal, with others listening nearby. When she says Eli’s name aloud for the first time, it feels unexpectedly intimate; the abrupt end of the call cuts that moment short.

The Last Purim Visit

In March 2009, Devorah visits Bubby and Zeidy for Purim, not knowing whether she will ultimately leave. She has begun to imagine that, if she does make an exit, separation may be easier if she starts saying goodbye early. The family home makes that uncertainty tangible. The brownstone is deteriorating: paint peels in the hallways and the stair linoleum is worn through. Bubby wants to sell it to a developer who has offered a seven-figure sum, while Zeidy is reluctant to surrender control of what he considers his best investment. For Devorah, the crumbling house becomes a parallel to her weakening attachment to the beliefs that shaped her childhood. She interprets the decay as confirmation that she is on a path toward leaving, though she still has no definite plan.

The visit also sharpens her sense of time passing. Bubby has lost the lively energy Devorah remembers, and Zeidy is more absentminded, with less precision in his speech. The people and home associated with her childhood no longer seem unchanged or securely available to return to. Against the abundance of the Purim table, crowded with platters of smoked meat and wine decanters, Devorah considers the possibility that her relatives may soon become distant memories. The holiday meal gathers a large extended family, but its apparent solidity cannot settle the question of whether she belongs to the life they take for granted.

During the meal, Devorah’s father arrives visibly intoxicated and approaches her. His heavy, unwanted embrace leaves her feeling distressed and reinforces her resentment at being expected to perform the role of daughter to a man she feels has not acted as her father. Eli watches without intervening. Devorah wishes he would help or distract her father, but afterward keeps her expression blank. The scene makes the limits of the engagement’s promise of mutual understanding newly concrete: the future husband she had hoped would treat her as an equal does not act when she wants support.

Celebration and the Possibility of Leaving

The two Purim episodes place lavish objects beside increasingly unsettled feelings. During the engagement, elaborate gifts affirm the families’ plans for the couple and give Devorah a role in a public exchange of prestige. Yet the unpersonalized watch exposes how little that role necessarily reflects her own tastes. In the later visit, the family’s meal and the old house’s worn surfaces belong to the same scene: one sustains the appearance of continuity, while the other makes change difficult to ignore.

By March 2009, relatives appear to assume that Devorah is settled into marriage and motherhood, and that the weight of her wig and care of her toddler have fixed her place. Her own conclusion is different. The security of those expectations, she recognizes, depends on her inward submission; if her dreams remain intact, outward restraints cannot guarantee her silence. Purim therefore marks both the persistence of communal family ritual and a turning point in Devorah’s private understanding of it. The holiday does not itself resolve her future, but the last visit becomes part of her preparation to imagine one beyond the life her family regards as settled.