Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur is both a recurring religious observance and a turning point in the narrator’s understanding of obedience, suffering, and agency. First introduced as her first fast and a rehearsal for adult religious obligations, the day later becomes a charged setting for communal fear after the September 11 attacks. Its prayers and teachings ask her to repent and accept divine judgment; her experience instead leads her to question whether suffering is deserved and to imagine that she is not powerless.

Place in the Religious Calendar

Yom Kippur falls within a concentrated sequence of autumn holidays. In the narrator’s first year of fasting, Sukkot is only days away. Later, the school calendar is described as barely underway by mid-October because Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot have repeatedly interrupted classes. Once those holidays end, a long stretch of school days lies ahead before Passover in early spring. The sequence makes Yom Kippur part of the rhythm by which the school year and the household’s religious life are organized.

The observance also marks a threshold between childhood and adulthood. The narrator’s grandfather, Zeidy, tells her to repent before Yom Kippur so that she may begin the year transformed into a quiet, God-fearing girl. Although girls are religiously counted as women at twelve, they begin fasting at eleven as a trial. The first fast is therefore a practice run: a bodily introduction to the rules that will accumulate as she crosses into adult life. The day’s demands arrive before that transition is complete, making it both preparation and warning.

Prayer, Gender, and Communal Practice

The narrator’s later account distinguishes the observance expected of girls from the more regimented religious life of men. Girls pray at home or at school and do not attend the synagogue as part of ordinary practice. On Yom Kippur, however, the women’s section is used, and the narrator goes to the synagogue in Williamsburg with Bubby. The exception gives the fast day a particular communal significance: women who are otherwise excluded from synagogue attendance gather there to pray for mercy.

Prayer does not bring the narrator uncomplicated devotion. At school, she has difficulty keeping pace with the rapid morning prayers and sometimes only moves her lips to appear to join in. The loss of the melodies once used to help younger girls learn the prayers also drains their joy for her; after twelve, singing is forbidden to girls. Under the overseer’s watch, she continues through the motions, but the words no longer feel meaningful. On Yom Kippur, surrounded by people who are sincerely penitent, she remains physically hungry and finds that standing in the synagogue does little to distract her from the fast.

The Talking Carp and the Fear of Judgment

A story from New Square intensifies the Yom Kippur of the period just after the World Trade Center Twin Towers were attacked. According to the circulating account, a carp being prepared by a fishmonger spoke shortly before it was killed, warning Jews to seek forgiveness or face destruction. Workers in the fish market, both Jewish and gentile, were said to have heard it. Because the story appeared close to Yom Kippur, it was readily taken as a warning that the community must repent. Some treated the fish as evidence of reincarnation, and the story’s details shifted as people brought fresh versions to the narrator’s home. What mattered to many listeners was not whether every detail could be verified, but the frightening possibility that the warning was real.

Bubby fears that another Holocaust may come, with riots and Americans turning against Jews, and urges the narrator to repent before Yom Kippur. The surrounding anxiety makes repentance feel less like a routine obligation and more like a response to imminent catastrophe. The narrator, however, is drawn to the miraculous quality of the carp’s story rather than to its threat. She would rather imagine that a dead soul might return than accept hell as the only alternative. Zeidy rejects the account, reasoning that God no longer performs conspicuous miracles and works through the natural order instead. His skepticism does not settle the narrator’s doubts; it sharpens her question about why divine miracles should have ceased.

Suffering, Ancestry, and a New Sense of Agency

The teaching that shapes the day most deeply is that God measures out suffering justly, and that people must atone before the ram’s horn sounds its final call. The narrator follows the logic and sees its harsh consequence: if suffering is deserved, those who suffer most must be the most evil. Yet Bubby and Zeidy are among the most devout people she knows, and their lives contain profound hardship. Their example makes the doctrine difficult for her to accept.

Bubby sometimes recalls her mother, Chana Rachel, one of seven children in a family that lost several children to a diphtheria epidemic. When Chana Rachel became ill, her mother intervened to clear the obstruction in her throat, and she recovered. Bubby credits prayer for the recovery; the narrator instead sees a mother who acted urgently to save her child. The contrast gives her a different model of religious courage: not simply waiting for a miracle, but taking action. As Yom Kippur prayers continue around her, she does not ask for mercy or dwell on their meaning. She privately challenges the idea that she is inherently evil and refuses to approach God as though she has no choice but to submit.

The day ends not in a declared break with religious life, but in an inward change. During the fast, the narrator experiences a sudden resolution and a sense that she is not as helpless as others would have her believe. She imagines that, in her relationship with God, she may be able to persuade as well as plead. Yom Kippur thus holds two competing meanings for her: a communal demand for repentance under the shadow of judgment, and a moment in which questioning that judgment opens a path toward self-determination.