Enrolling in Sarah Lawrence College’s adult education program marks Devorah’s deliberate move toward education and a wider future while she is still balancing motherhood and life in a Hasidic community. She researches programs, applies without telling Eli the full purpose of her plans, and wins admission through an assessment centered on writing. At the college, she chooses poetry, entering a field in which she has long wanted to participate but has had little opportunity to learn.

A Future Planned Around Motherhood

In the fall, after losing enough of her pregnancy weight and once Yitzy is sleeping through the night, Devorah begins researching colleges. Her stated aim is practical and expansive at once: she is determined that she and her son should have a better life. Hannah, a modern Orthodox neighbor who had returned to school at Ramapo College in New Jersey, suggests that adult programs may better accommodate a parent than a traditional undergraduate schedule. Her advice gives Devorah a possible route into higher education that takes her responsibilities as a mother into account.

Devorah investigates nearby colleges and identifies Pace, Sarah Lawrence, Bard, and Vassar as institutions offering adult education programs. Rather than beginning with a broad application campaign, she follows the Sarah Lawrence website’s instruction to call for an interview. The college representative tells her that the fall application period has passed and schedules her to come in on the first Monday in March. The delay makes the prospect concrete: this is not an immediate escape from her present circumstances, but a step she can prepare for and pursue.

A Quiet Application

Devorah prepares her essays by handwriting drafts before typing them. The first two are autobiographical, and she recognizes that her own experience is material she can draw on. Her application therefore asks her not only to meet an academic requirement but also to present a life shaped by circumstances quite different from those of a typical college applicant.

She does not tell Eli that she is applying to college. Instead, she describes the possibility as a business class and suggests that she probably will not be admitted. Her account of this concealment connects the application to the limits within which she is planning: she is testing a route toward greater independence without openly announcing the scale of her ambitions. Eli does not object to the idea of a class. His questions concern how much time it will take and whether she will still be home to pick up Yitzy from day care and prepare dinner. The exchange shows that the proposed education is being fitted around existing domestic expectations, even as Devorah imagines a life beyond them.

Admission Through Writing

At the interview, Jane explains that Sarah Lawrence is a writing school, with no exams or grades; students are evaluated through essays and written work. She frames admission as dependent on whether applicants have the writing ability to manage the program, and warns that accepting someone unable to meet that central demand would be unfair to her. Devorah responds that she understands, submits three carefully prepared essays, and asks when she will hear the decision.

Two and a half weeks later, an envelope on ivory stationery bearing the Sarah Lawrence logo arrives. It announces that Devorah has been accepted into the Continuing Education program. She keeps the letter in her hands all day, imagining herself as a student at Sarah Lawrence and picturing herself in jeans and a J. Crew jacket. The acceptance is both an institutional decision and a vivid private possibility: the letter makes a future she had been considering feel real, while the clothes she imagines wearing suggest how closely education is associated in her mind with a less restricted way of living.

Devorah eventually tells her mother about the admission because she thinks her mother will want to know. She understands the news as a small way of showing that she wants something more than her current life. Her mother congratulates her with evident pride, while also raising, indirectly, a question about whether choosing Sarah Lawrence has anything to do with sexuality. The conversation reveals both a continuing distance between mother and daughter and a point of connection: the acceptance is news Devorah wants to share, even though their lives and assumptions remain different.

Choosing Poetry

Devorah gives Eli a practical account of her plans, describing business classes that might help her find a job or eventually open a business. His immediate concern is whether the study will interfere with her responsibilities at home. In April, however, she attends an open house for the adult students’ summer semester and has already settled on poetry after looking at the syllabus. She wants to read, understand, and discuss poems and famous poets, subjects she has long wished to explore but has not had anyone around her who could teach her.

The poetry professor, James, tells her that many students arrive without prior knowledge of poetry. Devorah’s first class begins with William Wordsworth’s Anecdote for Fathers. Hearing James read the poem changes how she attends to it: its language, rhymes, and compact stanzas become more legible to her, and a story that at first seems straightforward opens into questions about the boy’s choice and the father’s response. James emphasizes that details in a poem are deliberate rather than casually included. The lesson offers Devorah a method of reading: notice what draws attention, then ask why it matters. Her enrollment thus begins not only with institutional access but with a new practice of interpretation.

Significance in the Memoir

The college application follows Devorah’s first months of caring for Yitzy, when feeding him proved difficult and she felt unlike the more experienced mothers around her. The evidence does not present enrollment as a completed break from her community or as an uncomplicated transformation. She remains attentive to Eli’s expectations about childcare and household work, and initially conceals the application’s full purpose. What changes is that she takes concrete steps toward a future she can envision for herself and her son.

The memoir’s account also places the college decision within a longer process of questioning and self-direction. Elsewhere, the narrator describes realizing only later that she had begun to draw her own conclusions rather than accept authority for its own sake. She subsequently identifies September 9, 2009, as a day that divided her life in two, and looks back on her journey toward freedom as both improbable and inseparable from the past that formed her. Those later reflections do not make college admission the single cause of her eventual independence; they give the application a place in a developing arc in which private aspiration becomes action. The memoir also states that its names have been changed and that some events were compressed, consolidated, or reordered, a qualification relevant to reading its narrated chronology as a shaped life story rather than an unedited record.