Zalman Leib faction

The Zalman Leib faction is the Satmar camp aligned with the rabbi’s third son, Zalman Leib, whom its adherents regard as the true successor to the Satmar dynasty. The narrator describes her own family as Zollies through and through, placing the factional divide inside family identity as well as communal politics. Its significance in the memoir becomes especially personal when the narrator learns that the family arranging her marriage belongs to the opposing camp.

Identity and Allegiance

The faction’s defining allegiance is support for Zalman Leib in a succession dispute with the rabbi’s eldest son, Aaron. The narrator’s family is firmly on Zalman Leib’s side; she recalls that her grandfather, Zeidy, disapproved of Aaron and what he considered Aaron’s extreme ways. By contrast, the prospective groom’s family comes from Kiryas Joel, where the narrator estimates that ninety percent of residents support Aaron. The opposing alignment is visibly signaled by a plotchik hat, which marks its wearer as an Aroiny.

The Succession Dispute

The contest between the two sons has reached the secular courts. Zeidy regards the public litigation as an embarrassment to God and to Satmar, objecting to the community’s internal conflict being exposed before outsiders. He predicts that by the time a winner is chosen, little will remain to govern. The faction therefore appears not only as a label of allegiance but as one side in a dispute whose public course, in Zeidy’s view, threatens the standing of the whole community.

Significance to the Narrator

At the meeting with her prospective in-laws, the narrator recognizes the plotchik and realizes that the family is Aroiny-aligned. She is startled that Zeidy would arrange her marriage into a faction he opposed, particularly since their own family’s Zollie allegiance had seemed unquestioned. The discovery makes the political split an immediate feature of her future marriage rather than distant communal news. It also sharpens her separate uncertainty about belonging: she wonders whether Satmar identity is something inherited and ineradicable, while insisting to herself that she could remove that label if she chose. The faction thus marks both a real communal division and a boundary the narrator is beginning to question.