The September 11 attacks and Williamsburg’s response

The September 11 attacks and Williamsburg’s response are shown through a school dismissal that Devorah cannot explain and a family’s first, unsettled hours with the news. The attacks reach her not through a public announcement or a television image, but by way of a suddenly quiet street, a newspaper brought into a religious household, and a radio Zeidy would not ordinarily allow. The family’s reactions reveal how quickly the event becomes entangled with fears of Jewish persecution and with the approaching day of atonement.

An Unexplained Dismissal

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Devorah is late to school. At 10:15 she walks the three blocks to the high school at a fast pace, noticing as she turns toward Harrison Avenue that the sky seems unusually gray and heavy. The atmosphere does not feel like approaching rain; to her, the air seems clouded with construction dust. Inside, the windows are open because the building has no air-conditioning and autumn has not yet arrived. The usual street noise—drilling, horns, and trucks jolting over metal plates—is absent. In its place she hears only sparrows.

At one o’clock, the school’s rarely used public-address system crackles. The secretary announces that all the girls are dismissed, instructing them to gather their things and leave in orderly lines. Buses are waiting for students who live far away, and the school will notify them when classes resume. The girls around Devorah are glad to be released and giggle as they line up; she alone seems preoccupied with the reason. School is normally canceled only for a fire or another emergency, yet there are no alarms. The ordinary explanations do not fit the abrupt instruction.

Walking home, Devorah wonders whether Zeidy will believe that the school sent her back rather than suspecting that she is trying to skip class. She finds him away from his office. Upstairs, Bubby is kneading challah dough, her apron marked with sticky residue, while holding the phone to her ear and asking little beyond brief questions. The household’s work and routines continue, but the unanswered questions on the call and the unexplained dismissal signal that something has already disturbed the day.

The News Reaches the Household

Zeidy comes upstairs carrying a folded newspaper. He never brings secular newspapers into the house, although he sometimes crosses Broadway to a Mexican bodega to read the business section of The Wall Street Journal when he wants stock-market information. This time he spreads the paper across the flour-dusted kitchen table and motions for Bubby to put down the phone. Its cover shows the World Trade Center Twin Towers burning. Devorah does not understand why he has brought the image into the house until he explains that a plane has struck the towers in a terrorist attack that morning.

The timing is difficult for her to take in. At 2:15 in the afternoon, the news is already several hours old, and she questions how a plane could have hit a building in the morning without their hearing about it sooner. Zeidy says it happened around eight and announces that he will buy a radio so they can follow the news. His decision marks the gravity of the event for Devorah: he never lets the family listen to the radio. They spend the rest of the afternoon gathered around a tiny set in the kitchen, hearing the same broadcast repeated. Its account fixes the first impact at 8:46 that morning, giving a precise time to a catastrophe that had reached the household only after the school day was interrupted.

Fear of Antisemitism and Another Holocaust

As the family listens, Zeidy predicts that Jews will be blamed, insisting that this is what happens whenever disaster strikes. Bubby distinguishes Israel from Jews, but Zeidy answers that others will not make that distinction. Their exchange is not a debate over what caused the attack; it is an anxious forecast of how its consequences may be turned against Jews. The world beyond the household is still difficult to understand, but the prospect of collective blame is immediately legible to them.

Bubby fears that another Holocaust may follow. She imagines riots and Americans expelling Jews, and says she had always known such a catastrophe would happen again. Her response draws the present danger into the memory and expectation of persecution. The story does not establish that these fears come to pass; it records the family’s alarm as they encounter the news, before the scale and consequences of the attacks have settled into their understanding.

The approaching Yom Kippur gives Bubby’s fear a religious urgency. She begs Devorah to repent in time, warning that the world can turn upside down in a moment. Her appeal converts the family’s shock into an immediate demand for teshuvah. In the compressed span between the morning’s attack and the coming day of atonement, catastrophe is understood both as a threat to Jewish safety and as a summons to spiritual self-examination.

Catastrophe and the Search for a Warning

A further story circulating just after the attacks intensifies this atmosphere. In New Square, people say, a carp being killed and cleaned for the holiday opens its mouth and speaks before a fishmonger can bring down his cleaver. According to the account, Jewish and gentile workers witness the event; the fish identifies itself as a messenger warning the Jewish people to repent or face punishment. The tale is presented as a rumor embraced amid communal panic, not as an independently established explanation of the attacks.

Its timing makes the story seem especially meaningful to those who hear it: the attack has just taken place, and Yom Kippur is near. The speaking fish’s warning offers a religious pattern through which frightening events can be interpreted, while Bubby’s plea gives that pattern a personal address to Devorah. The sequence moves from an unexplained silence in the street to a radio report repeated in the kitchen, then from fear of renewed persecution to a miraculous-sounding call for atonement. Williamsburg’s response is thus rendered not as a single communal statement, but as the intimate process by which a family tries to make sense of sudden danger.