Entering Sarah Lawrence College’s continuing education program

Entering Sarah Lawrence College’s continuing education program gives Devorah a concrete route toward a life beyond the limits she has known. The step begins not as a dramatic break but as research undertaken while caring for Yitzy: she looks for an education that can fit motherhood, conceals the full extent of her plans from Eli, and enters a poetry class that changes how she understands reading. Its importance lies both in the learning itself and in the possibility it makes imaginable—a future in which her own intellectual interests can occupy space alongside family responsibilities.

A practical opening

In the fall, after losing enough of her pregnancy weight and after Yitzy begins sleeping through the night, Devorah starts researching colleges. Her stated aim is to secure a better life for the two of them. Hannah, a modern Orthodox neighbor who had returned to school at Ramapo College in New Jersey, recommends adult programs as more accommodating for a mother than a conventional undergraduate schedule. The suggestion makes higher education seem not merely desirable but potentially workable within Devorah’s daily obligations.

She investigates nearby colleges and identifies Pace, Sarah Lawrence, Bard, and Vassar as possibilities, each with adult education programs. Sarah Lawrence becomes her first choice to pursue because its website provides a number for arranging an interview. When she calls, she is told to come in on the first Monday in March; the fall application period has already passed. She prepares her essays in advance, drafting them by hand before typing them. The first two are autobiographical, and she recognizes that her own history can serve as material she knows how to use. Research, applications, and interview arrangements turn a private wish into a sequence of deliberate tasks.

Acceptance and guarded disclosure

Two and a half weeks after her interview, an acceptance letter arrives on ivory stationery bearing the Sarah Lawrence logo. It offers her a place in the college’s Continuing Education program. Devorah holds the letter through the day and imagines herself as a student, even picturing a different style of dress. The response is significant because it gives institutional form to a future that until then had existed chiefly as an aspiration.

She tells her mother that she has been accepted, partly because she expects the news will matter to her. Her mother’s congratulations carry pride, but also an unspoken question about whether Devorah’s choice reflects her sexuality. The college’s reputation prompts her mother to remark that it is gay-friendly; Devorah does not interpret that observation as a statement about her own identity. Their exchange reveals both the distance between their lives and the possibility of a point of connection in Devorah’s educational ambition.

Eli receives a more limited account. Devorah does not tell him that she is applying to college; she describes the plan as taking a business class and says she may not be admitted. After acceptance, she explains that she will learn bookkeeping and marketing, perhaps to qualify for a job or eventually open a business. Eli’s questions concern the time involved and whether she will still collect Yitzy from day care and prepare dinner. Her plan therefore has to fit around the domestic work expected of her, even as it opens a prospect beyond that work.

First steps into study

At an April open house, Devorah learns about the professors teaching the summer semester. She has already decided, from the syllabus, to take poetry. She wants to read, understand, and discuss poems and well-known poets, interests for which she has found no knowledgeable guide in her existing life. James, the poetry professor, reassures her that students often arrive without previous experience in the subject. His response eases one uncertainty: lack of preparation need not disqualify her from beginning.

Devorah orders The Norton Anthology of Poetry from the local library. On the first Monday in June, she drops Yitzy at day care and drives across the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Hudson River toward Westchester County for class. The journey marks a change in the geography of her days: childcare and study are joined in a single routine, and the classroom becomes a place she reaches through her own planning. There are only three people at the table when the class begins, a smaller group than she had expected. Its scale does not diminish the significance of her arrival as a student.

Learning to read with attention

The class opens with William Wordsworth’s poem “Anecdote for Fathers,” read aloud by James. His reverence for the language makes Devorah hear the poem differently. At first, she finds the story of a father walking with his son straightforward: the child prefers the seashore to the farm’s wooded hills because there is no weather vane there. The father’s response, however, unsettles that simple reading. James asks the students to consider why the boy’s choice moves his father and whether the explanation fully accounts for the preference.

Devorah does not immediately solve the question. James explains that a poem’s details are deliberate rather than casually placed, and that an element attracting a reader’s attention is likely to matter. The lesson gives her a method, not just an interpretation of one poem: close attention can uncover meaning in details that initially appear incidental. She begins to see poetry as accessible rather than inherently difficult, while also recognizing that reading requires patience and active thought. This practice contrasts with the intellectual restrictions that have shaped her education and gives her a new way to approach language.

Education within a widening horizon

The college program belongs to a larger struggle over what kind of future Devorah can pursue. As Yitzy approaches the age when he will receive payos and begin cheder, she fears that his education and life will be narrowed by the same community constraints she is questioning. She asks herself how she could condemn him to that future while seeking to broaden her own horizons. At this stage, however, she still feels trapped, without a clear alternative or the resources to change her circumstances; her new identity and thoughts remain largely private.

That conflict becomes more explicit as she considers leaving. Readers of her anonymous blog warn that a nonreligious mother may not be allowed to leave the community with her child, and one commenter says it has never been done. Devorah does not treat those warnings as proof that her own future is impossible, but they make clear that education and escape are bound up with the practical question of Yitzy’s care. She describes being exhausted by the years of pretending to be pious and by the shame attached to her true self, and longs for freedom to acknowledge herself openly. The college opportunity is one concrete part of this widening horizon, not a resolution of every constraint.

After leaving, Devorah changes her phone number and withholds her new address while she and Yitzy settle into an unfamiliar life. The closeness that develops between them becomes newly possible in that space, and she begins teaching him English through books and Sesame Street. Her later separation from her former life makes the stakes of her earlier educational effort clearer: learning was not an isolated ambition, but one expression of her determination to create a broader future for herself and her son. The program does not, by itself, settle the conflicts around belief, family, or security; it gives her a first sustained experience of entering a world of study on terms she has chosen.