Airmont

Airmont is the small town just outside Monsey where the narrator and Eli settle after leaving Williamsburg. At first, its country setting and relative privacy seem to offer a way out of a life shaped by scrutiny and restriction. But Airmont’s looser atmosphere changes the conditions of the narrator’s life without resolving her central conflict: she can break rules more easily when she keeps quiet, yet she still longs for a freedom that does not depend on concealment.

Setting and Arrival

The move begins as a practical possibility that the narrator deliberately cultivates. Eli is reluctant to take risks, so she reminds him that his two-hour commute cuts into time with their baby and that his siblings live upstate. Eli consults his brother Aaron, who is enthusiastic and knows of an available apartment at an excellent price. The narrator is not impressed by the apartment’s condition, but accepts it as a first step away from Williamsburg.

By the time she tells Aunt Chaya, the boxes are already halfway packed. Aunt Chaya responds with guarded approval, saying that Monsey could be a good place for them to move. The narrator understands that she will actually be living in Airmont, a small town just outside Monsey, and imagines distance from everyone’s attention as a chance to become truly independent.

Their new apartment occupies the bottom floor of a ranch-style house on a short dead-end street just off the New York State Thruway. The setting combines the quiet of a residential edge with the traffic passing at night; the narrator finds the cars’ steady sound, alongside the crickets’ persistent chirping, soothing. The detail marks a change from the city, but not a total retreat from its noise: the road remains close, while the house offers a more private place to live.

A Different Kind of Hasidic Community

The narrator grows fond of the country and cannot imagine returning to the city’s prying eyes and confined quarters. Everyday life in Airmont nonetheless presents practical questions. She walks along Route 59 to shop, then worries that walking everywhere may become harder as her pregnancy advances. Because some women in Monsey drive, she decides to take driving lessons and persuades Eli that learning would help on long road trips.

Three years after the move, the narrator describes a community that has grown from a small group of Hasidic families who came from places such as Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel, where the lifestyle had been too rigid for them. Some young couples live less conventionally: wives wear long human-hair wigs and jean skirts, while husbands drink beer and smoke marijuana at poker nights. People regarded as outsiders or religious dropouts in Williamsburg can become part of a broad, varied Jewish community in Rockland County.

Airmont’s distinction from Williamsburg is not that rules disappear, but that they can be broken without attracting notice. Residents can live as they choose if they do not talk about it or draw attention to themselves. The narrator drives, paints her toenails red, and sometimes sneaks out to see a movie. A private piece of land and the habit of minding one’s own business make these acts less visible; the freedom depends on discretion.

Privacy, Conflict, and the Limits of Freedom

That discretion coexists with public tension. The narrator recalls calling the Ramapo police after a neighbor shouted an antisemitic insult from his car and made Yitzy cry. The officer did not believe her, saying that he had known the man for years and that the man would never say such things. The incident exposes how the narrator’s sense of being trapped in communal life intersects with hostility from outside it: she wants to be different, but does not feel that outsiders can see the difference she is trying to express.

She also describes political conflict around Hasidic residents’ voting power and local zoning. In her account, community members vote according to rabbis’ instructions for politicians who will let them bend zoning regulations and direct funds and resources toward their own aims. She recognizes why non-Jewish neighbors may resent this influence, even as she wishes she could explain how much she wants to escape the role she feels forced to perform.

Eli believes that she will always find something to complain about and cannot be happy, even with greater freedom. The narrator’s own account identifies why the disagreement persists: each lifted restriction reveals another one behind it. Driving, choosing what to wear, and sometimes seeing a movie do not answer the larger fear that she may spend her life unable to do what she dreams of doing. Airmont offers a less restrictive version of Hasidic life, but she does not believe that this limited freedom can make her happy unless she becomes truly independent.

Departure and Narrative Significance

The narrator’s eventual departure gives Airmont a double meaning. It is both a real improvement over the scrutiny and confinement she associates with Williamsburg and an intermediate refuge that cannot contain her aspirations. When she leaves, she rents a small white Kia, packs it with what it can hold, and puts Yitzy in his booster seat. Stalled in traffic on the Tappan Zee, she grips the steering wheel and relives the sounds and sensations of the car crash from only days earlier. The escape from Airmont is therefore bound up with danger and distress, not presented as an effortless passage into a settled new life.

Airmont’s narrative importance lies in the difference between privacy and autonomy. The town lets the narrator test choices that had been difficult to make openly, and its community includes people whose religious lives are less rigid than those in Williamsburg. Yet the permission to live differently remains contingent on silence and invisibility. The place makes a freer life imaginable while clarifying why a quieter setting and a wider margin for rule-breaking are not, for the narrator, the same as being free.