Deborah’s sense of alienation in the Satmar community

Devorah’s sense of alienation in the Satmar community takes shape as a contrast between places where she can briefly feel at home and the public religious and social worlds in which she feels unseen. Bubby’s kitchen offers sensory comfort and safety; books let her imagine a life made for someone strange and misunderstood. Neither refuge resolves the distance between Devorah and her community. At moments she hopes to be gathered into its shared faith, yet she increasingly suspects that its standards of belonging leave no place for the self she is becoming.

Refuge in Bubby’s Kitchen

The kitchen is the one place where Devorah says she has always felt safe. She cannot fully explain what she needs protection from, but elsewhere she feels lost in a strange land where no one knows who she is or what language she speaks. In Bubby’s small, white-tiled kitchen, by contrast, she feels she has reached the place from which she came. The room’s importance is not abstract: family members gather there to talk, while Bubby cooks amid the steam and the ever-present pots. Good news is shared in the kitchen; more somber conversations with Zeidy take place behind closed doors.

Devorah’s earliest memories make that refuge tangible. As a toddler, she crawls down one flight of stairs from the family’s third-floor apartment to Bubby’s kitchen on the second, hoping for cherry-flavored Jell-O. Later, she curls onto a small leather stool between the table and refrigerator, waiting to lick the spatula after Bubby mixes chocolate-cake batter. She watches chopped liver emerge from a meat grinder, and remembers hot chocolate, buttery scrambled eggs, and boondash, the Hungarian version of French toast. These details make the kitchen a place of care she can experience directly: she takes pleasure not only in eating, but in watching food being made and smelling it travel through the railroad-style apartment. Against the larger feeling of not belonging, this familiar room gives her a physical point of origin.

Books and the Imagined Elsewhere

Reading offers a different kind of shelter. Devorah wants books again because being read to is among her only happy memories, but she says her English is weak and she has no way to obtain books on her own. When she cannot read, she turns to cupcakes from Beigel’s and egg kichel; Bubby’s enthusiasm for food draws her into its pleasures. Books, however, give her a freedom food cannot: the sense that a story might explain her experience and carry her somewhere else.

The children in Roald Dahl’s stories seem to Devorah unfortunate, precocious, and misunderstood in ways that echo her own sense of being neglected by family and peers. After reading James and the Giant Peach, she dreams of escaping inside a fruit from Bubby’s garden. Stories teach her to expect transformation: a strange child may discover that the life that seemed inevitable was only a mistake, and that the child was extraordinary all along. She imagines falling into Wonderland or passing through a wardrobe into Narnia because she cannot picture becoming at home in her existing world.

Her response to Matilda sharpens that hope. Devorah longs for the sudden turning point in which a power hidden within a child appears just as hope seems lost. She imagines that she, too, might possess a secret ability and end up with Miss Honey. Because she has not yet begun to read adult books, the happy ending of children’s literature becomes, for a time, her model of how life works: a child can only accept a just world. Her long wait for rescue ends in painful recognition that no one will come to collect the glass slipper she has left behind. The books sustain her imagination, but they also give form to the disappointment of finding no rescuer in life.

Exclusion and the Wish to Belong

At school, Devorah’s isolation has a sharper social cost. She believes teachers know she is not important and that no one will defend her. Because she is not a rabbi’s daughter, she feels she can be made a scapegoat; behavior tolerated in a teacher’s more privileged pupils can bring Devorah immediate scrutiny. She keeps her eyes lowered to her prayer book and asks God, in her thoughts rather than through formal prayer, to make the day bearable. Her appeal is frank and practical: she wants divine support because she feels she has no human advocate.

Her experience of Simchas Torah briefly unsettles that distance. At the crowded synagogue, thousands of men sing and stamp together, and the force of their wordless melodies nearly sweeps her into the crowd’s rapture. For a moment, Devorah wonders whether the ceremony might reveal her role and common destiny, and whether the doubts separating her from her people could fall away. The hope is entangled with social pressure. She attends with five friends from her ninth-grade class and wants Miriam-Malka, the group’s admired and fickle queen bee, to see her as one of the other girls. Devorah is not there only to witness the rabbi’s dance; she also wants to demonstrate that she belongs among her peers.

That possibility fades on the walk home through the dark streets of Williamsburg. The night’s apparent magic becomes a temporary interruption in a longer pattern of disenchantment. The contrast is decisive: collective song can make Devorah feel close to a shared destiny, but it cannot overcome the more settled skepticism through which she understands her place. The next school day resumes its familiar prayers, and the fleeting intensity of the gathering does not alter her ordinary position in the community.

From Self-Doubt to Self-Ownership

Devorah turns the community’s explanations inward, wondering whether the alienation is her own fault. Zeidy warns that English can poison the soul, while she has secretly become attached to books he considers dangerous. Watching the public library from her classroom window, she asks whether those books have dulled her capacity to perceive holiness. The image makes her doubt more complicated than simple rejection: she fears that the very reading that brings her happiness has made her spiritually defective, and imagines that others remain pure while she has been defiled by words.

Her reading is also a secret she manages carefully. Devorah recalls sneaking into the library at ten, where the largely empty, cavernous rooms intensified her sense of being watched by God. As an older student, she fears returning to the forbidden building because discovery could cost her carefully cultivated social standing and make the remaining years of school unbearable. She instead travels by city bus for thirty minutes to the Mapleton branch, where she feels less likely to be caught. At home she hides her library card between the mattress and box spring, slips thin paperbacks there too, and pushes hardcovers behind the dresser. These acts do not erase her need for belonging; they show how much concealment that need requires.

The clearest expression of what Devorah wants comes after the brief religious exhilaration has passed. She rejects the prospect of becoming a rabbi’s wife if it means submitting to a husband’s will. Her hunger for power, she specifies, is not a wish to dominate other people but a wish to own herself. That distinction gathers the tensions of her alienation into a single desire: she has long sought safety, recognition, rescue, and a place in the shared life around her, but increasingly understands that belonging cannot be purchased by surrendering her own agency. The community remains both the world she hopes might receive her and the world from which she must imagine an independent self.