World Trade Center Twin Towers

The World Trade Center Twin Towers are introduced through a newspaper photograph of them burning, then become the focus of a household’s first sustained encounter with news of the attack. Their appearance in the narrative marks a rupture in the ordinary order: Zeidy brings a secular newspaper into the home and buys a radio, which he normally does not allow the family to hear.

The Image in the Newspaper

Zeidy returns upstairs carrying a folded newspaper and spreads it across the flour-dusted kitchen table while Bubby is kneading challah dough. The cover shows the World Trade Center Twin Towers burning. The narrator initially does not understand why Zeidy has brought the paper into the house; the image makes an event beyond the household’s familiar surroundings suddenly present at its table.

News Heard Repeatedly

Zeidy explains that a plane flew into the towers that morning. The timing unsettles the narrator: it is already a quarter past two in the afternoon, and the household has heard nothing. Zeidy says the plane struck at around eight and decides to buy a radio so they can follow the news. His decision is striking because he never normally permits radio listening, and its reversal signals the gravity of what has happened.

The family spends the rest of the afternoon gathered around a tiny kitchen radio, hearing the same broadcast over and over. The report specifies that the first tower was struck at 8:46 that morning. The newspaper photograph and repeated broadcast give the towers two distinct presences in the scene: a visible image that first demands explanation, and a spoken account whose repetition fixes the attack’s time and sequence.

Blame and the Household Response

As they listen, Zeidy predicts that Jews will be blamed, while Bubby distinguishes blame directed at Israel from blame directed at Jews. Their exchange places the attack within the family’s immediate concern about how events outside the home may be turned against Jewish people. The towers therefore serve not only as the subject of the news but as the point from which the household confronts the threat of public blame. The scene’s significance lies in this collision of image, broadcast, and response: an event initially encountered as a photograph changes what the family is permitted to hear and what it fears others will say.