Shabbos

Shabbos is the weekly sacred time around which the narrator’s household and wider Hasidic community organize labor, meals, worship, family contact, and private life. Its rules are not simply a pause in ordinary activity: they determine when a bakery can restart, what relatives can carry through the streets, how the family spends Saturday evening, and what expectations attach to marriage. As the narrator grows older, the day’s repeated customs remain familiar, but their meaning changes—from childhood security and boredom to a view of religious law as both a source of care and a ground for conflict.

The Weekly Boundary

The weekly rhythm reaches beyond the home. Every Jewish business must close for Shabbos, and the kosher bakery where the narrator’s father works cannot resume production until a Jewish worker turns on the ovens after the day ends. On one visit, the narrator accompanies him through the quiet industrial streets of Williamsburg and watches him activate the equipment section by section. The gentile laborers are already preparing dough, but the work cannot properly begin until he arrives. The narrator feels important because the workers wait for her father, and because the humming machinery and moving production line make his role visible. At the end of the shift, they take baked goods home for Bubby, making the return to weekday work a source of food and family pleasure as well as a religiously regulated transition.

The weekly boundary also gives the calendar its own measured passage. After the eight days of Passover, Zeidy begins counting the forty-nine days of Sefirah toward Shavuos, when the Jewish people commemorate accepting the Torah at Mount Sinai. During this period, music, haircuts, and new clothes are prohibited. The rules set a somber religious interval against spring weather, making the calendar’s restrictions perceptible in ordinary choices. At the close of Shabbos, the havdalah ceremony marks the transition out of sacred time; Zeidy may remain at the table afterward, attending to the braided candle and spilled wine while the household’s appliances and cleaning carry on around him.

Food, Family, and Quiet Customs

The home’s weekly life is especially visible in Bubby’s cooking. The narrator watches her prepare chocolate cake and waits to lick the spatula; before Shabbos, Bubby grinds beef liver with onions, and on other mornings makes hot chocolate, eggs, and boondash, a Hungarian version of French toast. The smells travel through the railroad-style apartment, so that the child wakes in her room at the far end of the home already trying to guess what is being made. These preparations make the weekly observance tangible: Shabbos is anticipated through work completed in advance and experienced through meals shared at home.

The household’s music is governed by similarly delicate limits. When Zeidy is away, Bubby hums tunes associated with her childhood in Budapest, naming them as Viennese or Hungarian music. She stops when he comes home. Though singing is permitted within the family, Zeidy encourages it chiefly on Shabbos, and he teaches that music should otherwise be avoided except on special occasions. Bubby sometimes plays wedding music on a tape recorder at low volume, ready to turn it off at the first sound in the hallway. Zeidy, meanwhile, sings traditional melodies associated with his father and Europe, though his flat voice overwhelms the tune. Bubby remembers that her own father was a Kohain, with a family legacy reaching back to the Temple priests, and hopes that the narrator’s clear singing voice may come from her side of the family. The child tells her about receiving a school choir solo, wanting her grandmother to take pride in her.

Shabbos also sharpens the narrator’s sense of family isolation. The day is meant to be spent with relatives, but she has no siblings to care for or older siblings to visit; her grandparents are her principal company. Visits from married cousins offer a welcome break from boredom. When those cousins have babies, however, they stop coming because carrying children on Shabbos is forbidden and they cannot use strollers. A religious rule that governs movement therefore alters the narrator’s social world, reducing the visits she had counted on.

Law, Interpretation, and Public Space

The dispute over the new Eruv, the Sabbath boundary, brings the interpretation of Shabbos law into the streets of Williamsburg. Under the rule described in the narrative, carrying in a public domain is prohibited; an Eruv can symbolically enclose an area and make carrying necessary items, including children and keys, permissible. Some rabbis accept the new boundary, while others reject it, arguing that a place such as Brooklyn cannot be made into a private domain. Bedford Avenue, which runs through Williamsburg and continues across neighborhoods, is a central point of disagreement.

At first, residents hesitate to rely on the Eruv, wary that it might not remain intact in a neighborhood where walls are quickly marked with graffiti. As more rabbis approve it, women begin walking with baby carriages on Shabbos afternoons. Zeidy reports that angry young Hasids wait on main avenues to confront women they consider violators; some throw rocks. He condemns the young men’s behavior as a failure to care about religious law, even as the dispute itself concerns how that law should apply.

Zeidy has studied the question closely and believes the Eruv is valid. The narrator respects his combination of Talmudic learning and willingness to find flexibility in the law. In his view, a capable rabbi can identify a permissible course rather than defaulting to the strictest interpretation out of uncertainty. Yet he tells the narrator not to use the Eruv. Even if it is religiously valid, he worries that others will interpret its use as wrongdoing, a concern called Ma'aras ayin. His caution is shaped not just by abstract law but by the crowds’ angry reactions and the possibility that his family will draw their attention. The narrator accepts the restriction without much personal cost, since she has no baby to carry; the rule’s practical burden falls more heavily on the cousins whose children keep them at home.

Worship, Memory, and Unequal Experience

On Yom Kippur, the contrast between the day’s religious purpose and the narrator’s physical experience becomes especially pronounced. Zeidy goes to New Square as he does each year, while Bubby and the narrator remain in Williamsburg and attend shul together. It is the only day of the year when the women’s section is actually used. The fast is devoted to prayer for mercy, and those around the narrator are frightened that their futures are being decided in heaven. She is a poor faster, and standing through the day does little to quiet her hunger.

The narrator has been taught that suffering is measured out by God and that people must atone before the final call of the ram’s horn. She begins to see how this teaching can make people understand themselves as inherently sinful: if suffering is deserved, greater suffering can seem to imply greater guilt. But Bubby and Zeidy are among the most devout people she knows, and their lives have nevertheless contained profound loss. Bubby answers the narrator’s questions about hardship by recalling a childhood in which even a scrap of food was cause for gratitude because the family still had one another. The holy day thus becomes a moment when inherited explanations of suffering meet the narrator’s observation of her grandparents’ lives.

Changing Meanings in Adult Life

As the narrator marries Eli, Shabbos extends its influence into the couple’s private relationship. Friday night is treated as the expected time for marital intimacy, an expectation the narrator connects to a Talmudic schedule that varies according to a man’s occupation. Hasids understand themselves as scholars and follow the practice associated with Torah scholars. The narrator finds the expectation difficult: she is often tired and full after the Shabbos meal, and she cannot understand Eli’s ability to separate physical closeness from the state of their relationship. The weekly ritual therefore does not guarantee warmth or reconciliation; it can sit alongside recent coldness and unresolved disagreement.

The Friday-night meal is also a site of conflict over household observance. Eli criticizes how the narrator handles Kashrut, including mistakes in where she places kitchen utensils. She argues that the laws of peace in the household should take precedence over dietary-law criticism. Their arguments can spoil the meal she has prepared, while a rule against intimacy during a quarrel may allow her to refuse closeness until Eli apologizes. The same weekly structure that once meant anticipation, food, and the sound of family life now exposes tension over religious standards and whose needs those standards serve.

In later family life, the day continues to govern public appearances and private expectations. On Shabbos, the narrator puts Yitz in a stroller and walks to the synagogue to collect Eli after prayers. Men stare at her dress and heels and make lewd remarks. The episode sets a public form of religious visibility against the promise of modest conduct: the narrator is scrutinized rather than left undisturbed. Across the book, Shabbos remains a recurring measure of belonging, but its effects are uneven. It brings the narrator close to her grandparents’ food, songs, and traditions; it can keep relatives apart, expose women to public judgment, or intensify marital conflict. Its weekly return provides continuity, while the narrator’s changing experience reveals how the same sacred time can hold intimacy and isolation, devotion and doubt, together.