Deborah resolves to leave Williamsburg

Devorah’s resolve to leave Williamsburg takes shape while she reads A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The novel offers her both a companion in the streets they share and a possible route beyond the life she knows; even when the prospect of escape remains uncertain, she decides that she will leave one day.

Reading as a Possible Route Out

In the week before school begins, Devorah returns to reading after a summer in which she could not safely bring books to camp. At the library, she chooses the latest Harry Potter book, the first book in Philip Pullman’s popular trilogy, and the recommended A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The books restore a private space for her interests, but it is the story of Francie Nolan that gives her reading a sharper personal charge. Devorah remembers the comfort of The Chosen and wonders how different Francie can be from a girl growing up on the same Brooklyn streets.

Francie’s circumstances complicate that identification. Her world is crowded with hardship, and the elegance of literature seems almost out of place within it. Devorah follows Francie’s gradual movement toward greater material comfort, taking each setback personally because Francie’s prospects have come to stand, in part, for her own. If Francie can make her way out, Devorah hopes, some kind of escape might also be possible for her. The hope is not uncomplicated: she fears that the happy ending she wants for Francie may never arrive.

The Barrier of Education

Francie’s eventual departure for college brings Devorah’s own limits into focus. She cannot treat that ending as an uncomplicated triumph or assume that education guarantees the fulfillment of every dream. In her school, the word college is censored from textbooks, and education is presented as leading toward danger rather than opportunity. Zeidy has warned that leaving Williamsburg begins a cycle of missteps that distances a Jew from God and can leave the soul spiritually comatose. Education is therefore more than a denied credential: in the framework Devorah has been taught, it is a possible first step away from her community and faith.

The novel leaves Devorah with questions about whether a person can truly leave the place she comes from, and whether trying to belong elsewhere might end in failure. Those doubts do not cancel the force of Francie’s example. Instead, they make the contrast plain: Francie can go to college in the story, while Devorah understands that her own school has closed that route to her.

A Resolution in Small Steps

With high school beginning on Monday and three years of school still ahead, Devorah sets her intention against the life she fears will otherwise contain her. She does not know how she will leave, and she does not mistake a wish for an immediate plan. Francie’s progress suggests a different scale of change: small steps, repeated over time. Devorah allows that escape may take years, but she reaches certainty about its direction. The resolution turns the act of reading into more than a temporary refuge; Francie’s imagined path gives Devorah a way to picture leaving Williamsburg even when the permitted route of education is denied to her.