September 9, 2009

September 9, 2009 marks both a car crash Deborah Feldman survived and a threshold she later treated as the dividing line between her old life and a new one. The accident occurred just as the date changed to 09/09/09, only days before she expected to leave her past behind. Its significance lies not only in her survival, but in the way she read that survival: first through fear that God meant to punish or deter her, then as evidence that she could begin again.

The Date as a Threshold

On September 8, Feldman stayed late at Sarah Lawrence College with friends. She felt energized by the prospect of abandoning her life and believed she had set the necessary changes in motion, though she was still waiting to take the first step. Her former way of interpreting events as spiritual messages no longer seemed to fit the person she was becoming. The memoir places this uncertainty immediately before the crash, making the accident a collision between an impending practical decision and the religious meanings through which she had once understood the world.

After leaving the college, Feldman began the hour-long drive back to Airmont. The date changed at midnight as she came off the Tappan Zee Bridge and veered onto the New York State Thruway. She heard a loud pop; the car went out of control, struck a barrier, and overturned. In the last moments before losing consciousness, she believed she was going to die and interpreted the prospect as divine punishment for standing on the edge of freedom. The crash did not establish what had caused it or what it meant, but it made those questions inseparable from her decision to leave.

Survival and Its Immediate Meaning

Feldman regained consciousness inside the overturned car. Unable to open its doors, she escaped through the broken passenger-side window and reached the road. No one had stopped at first; after she had got out, a passing driver pulled over. Police officers questioned whether she had been drinking. She laughed hysterically, although she had never been able to tolerate alcohol, and found the encounter confusing and painful. At the hospital, the question occupying her was why she was alive when the accident had seemed fatal.

She understood the timing as potentially significant. Because the crash came only a few days before she was supposed to leave her old life behind, she wondered whether it was meant to frighten her back into obedience. Yet the fact of surviving began to carry a contrary meaning: perhaps remaining alive was the miracle she had been waiting for. She recalled that a Kabbalist had associated nine with death and rebirth, endings and beginnings. The date, 09/09/09, therefore seemed to give the accident a symbolic shape, although Feldman’s interpretation changed from fear of a warning to a sense of invulnerability and separation from her past.

Conflict with Eli and the Break with Her Past

Eli came to the hospital, where Feldman confronted him about the car’s tires. He had told her they were too thin but had refused to replace them, saying he could not afford to do so. Feldman angrily asked whether he could have afforded to lose her, and pointed out that Yitzy could have been in the car. The account does not establish that the tires caused the crash; it does establish that Eli’s refusal became part of their confrontation. He showed no remorse and accepted no responsibility in Feldman’s view. She told him to go home and said she would ask a friend to stay with her instead.

In the aftermath, Feldman reconsidered the accident not as proof that she must return to her former life but as a possible sign that she could make a clean break from it. She described herself as no longer nervous or uncertain and felt that the previous twenty-three years belonged to someone she no longer knew. The change was an interpretation, not an immediate resolution of every practical tie: before leaving Airmont for good, she and Eli later attended a religious marriage counselor. By then, Feldman already knew she would not return to the marriage.

Memoir, Memory, and Retrospective Significance

The day after the crash, Feldman signed a contract to write a memoir. She framed the book as a final remembrance of the person she had been, linking the act of writing to the division she felt between her two identities. The accident thus precedes not only her departure but the beginning of a public account through which she could preserve her past without returning to it.

The memoir’s prefatory note cautions that names and identifying characteristics have been changed and that some events have been compressed, consolidated, or reordered; its dialogue is described as an approximation of remembered conversations. This qualification matters to the meaning of September 9: the episode is presented as a remembered turning point, while the book also acknowledges that its narrative has been shaped for continuity and protection of identities. In retrospect, Feldman calls the crash a day that divided her life in two. Later, she insists that freeing herself from the past did not mean letting it go: she continued to cherish the experiences that formed her. The date therefore signifies neither simple erasure nor a miraculous escape from every consequence, but the moment she began to treat survival as permission to choose what came next.