United Talmudical Academy of Satmar

United Talmudical Academy of Satmar is the girls’ school the narrator attends in Williamsburg, an institution whose physical setting and educational boundaries make the pressures of her religious community concrete. It offers her a place in a designated high-achieving class, but also places her under the scrutiny of Chaya, the elementary division’s principal, and within a school culture that limits contact with secular learning.

Institutional Setting

The academy occupies a former public-school building. The narrator’s high-school classroom retains traces of its earlier use as a bathroom: white-tiled patches cover the walls, and cut-off pipes remain visible. The building had been PS 16, the Eastern District public school, before the neighborhood became heavily populated by Hasidic families and the school district’s zoning collapsed. The empty building was then taken over by United Talmudical Academy of Satmar and converted into a private girls’ school.

The converted classroom belongs to a much larger, older structure. The Gothic building spans a full square block and contains more than eighty classrooms. Its gargoyles were removed after the rabbi pronounced them idols. Nearly half a century after the building was first purchased, rising enrollment had made it severely overcrowded: pressurized walls subdivided classrooms, and classes commonly held thirty to forty students. The narrator’s grade had one of the larger rooms because its class of thirty-seven needed space; classmates could play kugelech at the back, although she usually lasted no more than three rounds.

School Life and Supervision

When the narrator enters Satmar school, Chaya decides which class she will join. Chaya, who is also the elementary division’s principal, places her in the smart class, explaining that the work will challenge her. The narrator understands the placement differently as well: it gives Chaya another opportunity to keep tabs on her and report back to her grandparents. The other students initially assume that the narrator has been given special privileges, while the girls in her class prove dedicated and studious but do not share her appetite for excitement.

The academy’s authority is also felt beyond the classroom lesson. From a window, the narrator can see the Williamsburg public library, a redbrick building enclosed by ivy and a high wrought-iron fence, with its entrance facing the highway. Students are forbidden to enter it, and those who pass nearby take care to walk behind it. The library is thus visible from school yet marked as inaccessible, a physical reminder of the boundary between the academy’s religious education and the secular books beyond it.

Belonging and Difference

The school’s social environment makes the narrator’s family circumstances conspicuous. She is the only girl in her class who does not live with her parents, and the only other girl in the grade in a similar situation lives with an aunt after her parents’ deaths. The narrator fears that classmates may treat her as an object of pity. When a teacher approaches to ask whether she needs someone to talk to, she asks not to be made a charity case. Her difference, she feels, surrounds her and complicates the ordinary status and future expectations shared by her peers, whose older sisters are beginning to get engaged.

The academy forms part of a wider community whose judgments continue to shape the narrator’s sense of appearance and belonging. Years later, while walking through Williamsburg with her baby, she hears children question whether a woman dressed as she is could be Jewish; another child insists that she is Jewish but only looks like a non-Jew. The moment turns the community’s visual boundary back on her: she recognizes that she no longer fits its expectations and feels herself cast as an outsider. The episode does not describe a school policy, but it shows how the distinctions surrounding her upbringing remain legible in the neighborhood after her life has begun to diverge from its norms.

Narrative Significance

United Talmudical Academy of Satmar is presented through specific spaces and routines rather than through a formal account of its administration. The former public-school building, divided and crowded classrooms, watched class placement, and forbidden library together show how the narrator’s education is organized: religious instruction takes place in a repurposed institution, while access to secular reading is kept just across a visible boundary.

The academy also anchors the narrator’s experience of being marked as different. At school, her living situation sets her apart from classmates and makes her wary of pity; later, in Williamsburg, her appearance makes her seem out of place to children who grew up within the same community. The institution’s significance therefore extends beyond schooling: it is one of the settings in which the book traces how religious education, social belonging, and the narrator’s changing identity meet.