Deborah’s clandestine library reading

Deborah’s clandestine library reading is a recurring act of private escape in which books offer both immediate happiness and a way to imagine a life beyond the limits imposed on her. What begins as an unplanned visit during time she is expected to spend elsewhere grows into a deliberate routine: she travels farther to borrow books and hides the means of access at home. The episodes connect the pleasure of reading to the risks of being discovered and to her uncertainty about whether a person can leave the world in which she was raised.

An opening in the day

After leaving a session early, Deborah walks along Sixteenth Avenue as women and girls shop in preparation for Shabbos. She contrasts their apparent quiet and ingrained modesty with her own sense that her thoughts show on her face, even when she does not voice them. In that unsettled state, she realizes that she is not expected back in Williamsburg for another hour and a half and that the public library is only a few blocks away. The visit is not part of an approved plan; it is a possibility created by time temporarily unaccounted for.

The library initially offers a place to read, not a way to take books home. Deborah has no library card, and that limitation sharpens her wish to keep books with her. She describes reading as an unusually powerful source of happiness and freedom, imagining that continuous access could make the rest of her life bearable. The distinction between reading in the library and possessing books matters: the first gives her a temporary refuge, while the second would extend that refuge into the ordinary spaces of her life.

Stories of transformation

The books do more than occupy Deborah during forbidden visits. After reading James and the Giant Peach, she imagines escaping inside a fruit from Bubby’s garden. Children’s stories about strange, misunderstood protagonists give her a pattern for interpreting her own difference: a sudden transformation might reveal that the life in which she feels out of place was never the life meant for her. She imagines falling into Wonderland or passing through a wardrobe into Narnia, not as events that have happened, but as forms through which she can picture belonging elsewhere.

Matilda offers a more specific version of that hope. Deborah dwells on the moment when Matilda discovers her power at school, especially the turn from apparent hopelessness to unexpected possibility. She wonders whether an undiscovered ability might explain her own alienation and imagines a future in which she leaves with Miss Honey. Reading thus gives her a vocabulary for hope without giving her certainty: the imagined escape remains a question, not a plan she can yet carry out.

Books against the limits of education

When Deborah has time to pursue her interests before school begins, she takes a bus to Borough Park to sneak books home. She has read nothing all summer because bringing books to camp would have been too dangerous. The return of privacy and time to herself is therefore also a return to reading. At the library, school reading lists remain on display, and she chooses the newest Harry Potter book, the first book in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which the library recommends.

The last of these makes the distance between literary possibility and Deborah’s actual prospects especially visible. She recognizes a connection between herself and Francie, a girl growing up in Brooklyn, but the resemblance does not erase the difference in their opportunities. Francie goes to college; Deborah believes that she cannot. In her textbooks, the word college is censored, and the education is treated as dangerous because it could lead away from Williamsburg and from religious life. Zeidy has warned that departure from that path can become a succession of mistakes and spiritual estrangement. Deborah can therefore take pleasure in Francie’s story while questioning whether its ending can mean triumph for someone in her own circumstances. She wonders where Francie goes after college and whether she returns, turning a fictional character’s future into a question about whether leaving home is possible—or whether belonging requires staying.

A more cautious practice

The visits carry social risks as well as religious ones. Deborah recalls that she last sneaked into the forbidden building when she was ten. Even then, she knew not to be seen. The mostly empty library, its large rooms and silence, did not free her from self-consciousness; she felt watched by God. Later, the prospect of being caught seems more consequential because she believes that her carefully cultivated standing could collapse. She fears that Miriam-Malka might find out and that the discovery could affect the remaining years of her schooling. The desire to read persists, but so does the calculation of what exposure might cost.

Her later method reflects that calculation. She rides a city bus thirty minutes to the Mapleton branch, where she thinks discovery is less likely. She browses the back shelves before going to the front desk, combining the pleasure of choosing books with caution about how she is seen. A new library card makes borrowing possible, but it also becomes something that must be hidden: at home she slips it between the box spring and mattress, while thin paperbacks go there too and hardcovers are pushed behind the dresser. The reading practice has moved from a brief visit without a card to concealed borrowing, yet secrecy remains its condition.

Across these episodes, the library is neither a simple refuge nor a complete escape. Deborah’s reading gives her happiness, private time, and images of transformation; it also brings the possibility of exposure and makes the boundary around education more tangible. The books let her consider lives beyond Williamsburg even while she cannot tell whether leaving is possible, desirable, or compatible with belonging. Their importance lies in that unresolved space between an imagined elsewhere and the carefully hidden acts through which she approaches it.