Williamsburg

Williamsburg is both Devorah’s home and the landscape against which she measures the limits of her early life. Its close communal scrutiny, sharp boundaries, and streets divided by religious and social difference make leaving feel perilous; its later transformation into a neighborhood of glass condominiums gives physical form to the distance between the world she once longed for and the history she ultimately retains.

Neighborhood and Boundaries

For Devorah, Williamsburg is a place organized by both proximity and separation. After school, girls stream along Marcy Avenue toward homes where they are expected to help with dinner and care for younger siblings. Men generally know to keep off the street at that hour. The movement is ordinary and communal, but it also marks the narrow terms of girls’ public lives: dismissal releases them from school only to send them home to domestic responsibilities.

An elevated train line makes another boundary visible. Across the tracks lies an African-American neighborhood that Devorah is forbidden to wander into. Bubby describes it through a story of young Black people breaking into a neighboring apartment and taking its silver, and characterizes Williamsburg as an ugly place inhabited by the poor. Her account also expresses a wary view of social position: she says Jews benefit from being presumed poor and unintelligent, because visible wealth and education can provoke gentile resentment. The neighborhood’s boundaries thus carry more than physical meaning; they are reinforced by inherited fears, communal prohibitions, and racialized assumptions.

The built environment intensifies the sense of enclosure. From the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Devorah can see the Manhattan skyline across the river, bright and seemingly within reach. Yet the city looks like another world, separated from the neighborhood by more than distance. Williamsburg appears to her as a self-contained place from which escape might mean disappearing into an unfamiliar expanse. The river view makes the contrast immediate: a luminous elsewhere lies close by, while the neighborhood seems to keep its inhabitants turned inward.

Everyday Life and Public Scrutiny

Williamsburg’s routines shape Devorah’s childhood in small, concrete ways. When she reaches an empty house after school, she uses the time alone to read a hidden copy of Little Women, then conceals it under her mattress when she hears Zeidy coming upstairs. The book and the hiding place turn a private room into a temporary refuge, but even that refuge depends on anticipating discovery. The neighborhood’s rules reach beyond public streets into the management of what a girl may read and who might find out.

Public life can also make the community’s authority visible. Devorah sees members of the community guardians arrive on motorized bikes in armored jackets and drag a young Black teenager from the neighboring house. The scene occurs in the same divided streetscape where residents’ accounts of the other side of the tracks shape how outsiders are regarded. Williamsburg is not only a setting for Devorah’s private concealments; it is a place where communal power is enacted in view of its residents.

The neighborhood’s reputation for watching its own inhabitants persists into Devorah’s marriage. Even as an adult, she feels unable to keep anything private: neighbors stare and gossip, and the possibility of going bowling without attracting notice becomes a source of anxiety. She had imagined marriage would bring greater freedom, but Williamsburg’s scrutiny makes a married woman feel watched much as a child is. The crowded housing compounds that pressure. Devorah describes hearing neighbors argue through the wall, while Eli, who grew up where people lived farther apart, also finds Brooklyn’s cramped conditions difficult.

The Edge of Elsewhere

Williamsburg’s nearness to Manhattan gives Devorah an image of escape before she can comfortably attempt it. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the skyline seems almost dazzling against the river, and she wonders why anyone would leave such a city to live in Williamsburg. She studies subway, bus, and street maps at the library, trying to memorize a route while fearing both getting lost and being drawn into a place from which she might not return.

When she finally rides out, the elevated J train changes her view of the neighborhood. Looking down at Williamsburg’s dirty, sludge-colored rooftops, she feels tall enough to overcome its flatness and is exhilarated by the act of leaving. The emotional turn is striking: the streets that had contained her become a receding landscape beneath the train. But the journey does not erase her fear. On the F train, two Hasidic women opposite her make her worry that she will be recognized or connected to someone who knows her. Near Union Square, the crowded traffic, buses, and street-food smells overwhelm her until the sight of a Barnes & Noble gives her somewhere to seek refuge among books.

The city beyond Williamsburg is therefore not an uncomplicated freedom. Devorah approaches it through maps and secrecy, experiences exhilaration and panic in the same trip, and finds temporary safety in a bookstore. The crossing matters because it makes the neighborhood’s borders negotiable without making them disappear: even outside Williamsburg, the possibility of being identified follows her.

Work, Friendship, and Changing Possibilities

Williamsburg also contains the institution where Devorah’s position changes. As a child, she remembers fearing the powerful adults who patrolled the school’s corridors and controlled access to the creaky elevator. At seventeen, she returns to the building as a sixth-grade teacher, carrying its key and no longer needing to climb the crowded stairs. She earns $128 a week and dresses for the job in a navy wool skirt and blazer, a light-blue shirt, and leather loafers whose heels tap across the waxed floors. The familiar building has not changed its structure, but her access to it has: she now occupies a position of authority rather than merely passing under it.

The job brings her into closer friendship with Mindy. After teaching, they walk to Lee Avenue Pizza, drink hot coffee, and talk about their work and office politics. Their shared history of secretly finding books gives their friendship a point of recognition; Mindy has read many of the same titles and listens to FM radio on headphones. She shows Devorah how to tune her stereo, opening another route into sounds and cultural material that had been unfamiliar to her. Williamsburg’s institutions and streets can constrain her, but within them new relationships and forms of access also develop.

Return and Transformation

After leaving the life she had known, Devorah avoids Williamsburg during her first year away. Seeing Hasidic clothing across a busy street makes her cringe, and she is ashamed to tell outsiders where she comes from. When others criticize Hasidim to her without knowing her background, the judgment becomes personal, and the moment when her origins emerge brings panic. Distance does not immediately bring ease; it first makes the old neighborhood harder to acknowledge.

On a later visit, she returns to see Bubby and show her the baby. Devorah wears a long curled wig and a dress she bought at Ann Taylor and lengthened to cover her knees, though its narrow cut still expresses a taste that does not fit local expectations. A young boy asks why a gentile woman is walking there. His older companion corrects him: she is Jewish, though she looks like a gentile. Their exchange makes visible how appearance functions as a local sign of belonging—and how Devorah, though still Jewish, has become difficult for the neighborhood’s children to classify.

Eventually she walks through Williamsburg disguised by a scarf and sunglasses, no longer experiencing it as the only home available to her. Shame has not simply vanished; beneath it she discovers pride, and the neighborhood’s once-unbearable routines appear newly vivid and strange. On renovated Kent Avenue, the old warehouses have given way to glass condominiums, while men in tight jeans ride past on bicycles. This altered streetscape reflects the reversal in her own perspective: as a child, she stood by the river longing to be transported elsewhere and to sever her connection to Brooklyn. Now she recognizes that the distinctiveness of the life she wanted to escape is part of her history. Williamsburg remains difficult to visit because time there can make her feel trapped, yet she returns at times for the pleasure of memory and the knowledge of how improbable her journey has been. Leaving has freed her from the neighborhood’s claims without requiring her to discard the past it formed.