Shia

Shia is Devorah’s father, a man whose cognitive impairment and unsteady place in the family become a source of both private distress and public embarrassment for his daughter. A brief nighttime episode shows him running barefoot after a captured teenager, exhilarated by the pursuit and unaware that his feet are bleeding. The family’s response is protective but also shaped by its refusal to treat his condition as something to investigate. Through Shia, the narrative exposes the gap between familial care and the community’s religious explanations of disability, while showing how Devorah’s effort to belong is burdened by a father she cannot simply disown.

Identity and Family Background

Shia is the son of Bubby and Zeidy and the father of Devorah. His parents are divorced, and Devorah’s mother came from an impoverished household in London. When Shia reached twenty-four without a successful match, Bubby and Zeidy looked overseas for a young woman who might accept marriage in exchange for the prospect of a more comfortable life in America. They found Devorah’s mother, then attending a Jewish girls’ seminary and living on the charity of a benefactor. She accepted the opportunity to leave her circumstances and travel to a new country.

The match was supported by a striking material promise. Shia’s parents prepared an entire seven-room apartment on the third floor of their brownstone, with new parquet floors, elegant wallpaper, comfortable furnishings, and luxurious rugs. They were willing to pay the wedding and travel expenses and to provide whatever else the prospective bride desired. The arrangement presents Shia’s marriage as something his parents could facilitate through money and housing, even after matchmakers had failed to find him a wife. It also links the family’s private difficulties to the marriage prospects of its children.

The Nighttime Chase

During the episode involving the theft of Mrs. Deutsch’s silver heirlooms, Shia arrives at Bubby’s home in the middle of the night, pounding up the steps and calling excitedly to ask whether she has seen what happened. He announces that he chased the teenager and was there when the boy was caught. His excitement is physical as well as verbal: he stands in creased, dirty pajamas, bouncing on the balls of his bare feet, his body quivering.

Bubby asks why he ran without shoes. By then, blood is seeping from Shia’s toes onto the doormat, but he appears not to notice. The contrast is sharp: he experiences the pursuit as a triumph, while his family sees the injury and the disordered scene he has brought to the door. Zeidy tells him sadly to go home and sleep, then closes the door gently, keeping his palms on the knob after Shia’s footsteps retreat. That lingering gesture gives the dismissal a tenderness absent from its practical effect: Shia is sent away, but not treated as an enemy or a stranger.

How the Family Understands His Condition

Devorah questions why nobody in her family tries to help Shia or obtain treatment for him. In her account, they let him wander and fend for himself, leaving her to bear the embarrassment of his behavior. Her frustration is intensified by the sense that he is an unavoidable tie: she can try to fit in and be perfect, but cannot escape being his daughter.

Bubby and Zeidy give the family’s inaction a religious explanation. Bubby calls a problem child a punishment, while Zeidy describes the situation as a test from God. In this framework, treating a problem would mean evading suffering that God intended the family to bear. Bubby also warns that naming a problem and attaching a medical diagnosis to it would make the condition publicly known. She fears the effect on the marriage prospects of the other children if the family is known to have a son with a diagnosed problem. Her preference is not to know, but to accept what she regards as God’s plan.

These explanations place spiritual endurance and family reputation ahead of diagnosis. The narrative does not present the family’s reasoning as a substitute for care that Devorah believes Shia receives: she specifically wonders why no one seeks treatment. Instead, its account sets the family’s theology against her perception of a man left to manage on his own, while making clear that the consequences of this silence fall on more than Shia alone.

Devorah’s Shame and the Narrative’s View

Devorah admits that she tries to avoid her father. She connects that distance to the shame she associates with his disability and unusual behavior. Walking with friends on Shabbos, she sees them cross the street to avoid people they regard as strange or disturbed; she wonders what they would do if Shia were the person approaching them on Lee Avenue, and whether they might already have encountered him without knowing who he was. The scene turns her fear of social exposure into a recognition that her father’s vulnerability is visible to others even when his identity is not.

Her anger is directed not only at Shia’s behavior but at the accumulation of circumstances she feels powerless to change: divorced parents, a mother she describes as an outsider to the community, and a father whose conduct threatens the appearance of normality she tries to maintain. Yet the chase episode also gives Shia a moment of initiative and excitement. He has acted, pursued the teenager, and returned eager to tell what he did; the blood on his feet and his family’s response complicate any simple portrait of him as merely a source of shame. Shia’s role in the narrative is thus inseparable from Devorah’s conflicted gaze: he is her father, a person whose needs she believes are neglected, and the tie that makes her imagined escape from family judgment feel incomplete.