Zeidy

Zeidy, the narrator’s grandfather, is a religious scholar and family authority whose habits express a life organized around study, ritual, and responsibility. To the narrator, he is at once attentive and distant: he asks whether she is behaving properly, helps shape the rules of her upbringing, and understands survival as a duty to the generations that follow. His influence rests not only on inherited authority, however. The narrator admires his Talmudic intelligence and willingness to interpret religious law flexibly, even as she comes to question the self-denial through which he seeks spiritual peace.

Identity and Daily Religious Life

Zeidy begins his day at four in the morning, walking to the synagogue across the street to study Torah. When the narrator wakes at eight, he has returned for a spare breakfast of whole-wheat toast, American cheese, and a slice of pale green Italian pepper. He cuts the food into small pieces and eats with such concentration that he sometimes does not respond when she speaks. Afterward, he says the blessing after meals and goes to his downstairs office, where he works on real-estate projects or finance deals. The narrator does not know what his work actually consists of, and wonders whether he is best understood as a merchant or a scholar.

That uncertainty leads her to consider the traditional exchange between Issachar, the Torah scholar, and Zebulon, the merchant who supports him in return for a share in the spiritual reward of his study. She sees the old arrangement as still alive in contemporary Williamsburg, while remaining unsure where Zeidy belongs within it. His life brings scholarship and business together without making their balance visible to his granddaughter.

Religious work is also among the few domestic tasks Zeidy willingly takes on. Before Sukkot, he builds the family’s sukkah, climbing a ladder to lay its bamboo roof while the narrator hands him the rods one by one. The work can keep her standing at the foot of the ladder for hours, but she likes feeling useful. The old rods, stored in the cellar through the year, are familiar objects in a holiday ritual Zeidy makes time to prepare. His care for religious observance is thus practical as well as intellectual: it appears in the daily rhythm of study and blessing, and in the labor of making a place for the holiday.

A Legacy of Survival and Austerity

Zeidy’s understanding of duty is rooted in a family history of persecution. His ancestors endured pogroms in Eastern Europe, and he sees his own survival as something that must be given meaning through the lives of his children and grandchildren. Bubby tells the narrator that she survived so the narrator could be born; Zeidy likewise reflects that the birth of the younger generations clarified why he had been allowed to live. In his view, raising them to become good Jews is a responsibility attached to that survival, not a private preference.

This sense of obligation extends to food. Zeidy will not let Bubby throw any away: he combines leftovers in a pot for his own dinner, while she cuts mold from vegetables and keeps them. Cakes and pies are frozen after being served, and even crumbs are wrapped and saved. For Zeidy, wastefulness would disregard a gift for which others were deprived. The narrator, by contrast, experiences persistent hunger as more than a physical need, and describes food as a temporary way of filling an emotional emptiness. The same household practice therefore carries different meanings: preservation is a moral duty to him, while for her the abundance on offer cannot satisfy the deeper absence she feels.

Zeidy also treats suffering as spiritually useful. He believes that souls come into the world to endure hardship and be cleansed for the world to come. On Friday nights he places his palms against the east wall of the dining room and prays; the narrator observes that he weeps during these prayers and seems comforted by them. She interprets his self-denial as a way to feel purified and to live with the abundance around him without being repelled by it. Yet the practice does not produce the same effect in her. Deprivation leaves her irritable and distressed, making their inherited connection to loss a point of difference as well as kinship.

Care, Authority, and the Narrator’s Upbringing

Zeidy’s interest in the narrator’s school life is chiefly a concern with conduct. Before Yom Kippur, he advises her to repent and begin the year as a quiet, God-fearing girl. She is having her first fast at eleven, a practice run before the age at which, according to the narrator’s account of the Torah, a girl becomes a woman. Zeidy’s attention to her behavior reflects both family pride and his expectation that she will enter a new world of religious rules as she grows older.

He is not the only adult who influences her upbringing. He continues to take advice from Aunt Chaya, who has been involved in major decisions about the narrator’s life. The narrator recalls having lived with Aunt Chaya after her mother left, and remembers that Aunt Chaya yelled when she cried. She begged to return to Bubby’s home, and eventually her grandparents allowed her to move back. Zeidy’s reliance on Aunt Chaya’s judgment remains difficult for the narrator to understand, particularly because she questions the authority of a relative whose daughters left some of the community’s customs after school and moved to Borough Park after marriage.

Religious etiquette further complicates the narrator’s closeness to her grandfather. At school, she learns that derech eretz requires addressing elders in the third person rather than saying “you.” She wonders whether she must ask if Zeidy wants tea by referring to him as though he were not present. To her, the rule risks placing rank ahead of affection and making family relationships feel impersonal. Her resistance reveals the strain between Zeidy’s world of ordered obligations and her wish to keep intimacy from being governed by hierarchy.

Judgment, Flexibility, and Public Conduct

The narrator’s respect for Zeidy is clearest when religious law is disputed. While other rabbis say that an eruv in Brooklyn cannot be kosher, Zeidy studies the question himself and concludes that it is valid. The narrator admires his combination of Talmudic intelligence and open-mindedness. In her account, he believes a knowledgeable rabbi should look for a permissible flexibility in the law rather than reject it automatically; excessive strictness, he suggests, can reflect uncertainty about one’s own learning.

His conclusion does not mean that he urges the narrator to use the eruv. He warns her that even an action he considers religiously permitted could appear sinful to others and violate Ma'aras ayin. He is also concerned about hostile reactions: people have shouted at women carrying baby carriages on Shabbos, and some have thrown rocks. Zeidy objects to the anger directed at those women, but does not want his family exposed to it. His position holds intellectual independence and social caution together: he reaches his own judgment, yet weighs the public consequences of being seen to act on it.

Later Conflict and Lasting Significance

As the narrator grows older, the distance between Zeidy’s ideals and her own needs becomes more pronounced. When she is distressed by her marriage to Eli, she includes Zeidy among those she blames, believing he was too unaware to recognize that she could not be happy married to a boy from a fanatical family. Later, when she tells Aunt Chaya that she and Eli are moving to Airmont, Aunt Chaya responds with cautious approval. The narrator’s account does not describe Zeidy’s response to the move; her hope is that distance from Williamsburg will allow her to become independent.

By March 2009, when the narrator visits Bubby and Zeidy for Purim, the brownstone where she grew up is deteriorating. Its hallway paint is peeling and the stairway linoleum is worn through. Bubby favors selling the house to a developer who has offered a seven-figure sum, while Zeidy, proud of what he considers his best investment, tries to find a way to retain an advantage. The narrator links the disrepair of the house to what she experiences as the collapse of her faith. She also sees that her grandparents have aged: Bubby moves slowly and seems disoriented, while Zeidy is more absentminded and less quick in speech than before.

Zeidy remains a measure by which the narrator tests competing ideas of a good life. He has pursued serenity and a broadened mind, and has taught that serenity matters more than comfort. The narrator doubts that the rebels who leave the community necessarily find peace, but she is unsure where her own search should lead. His example offers neither an easy model to follow nor a belief she can simply discard. It gives her a language for endurance and an ideal of inner calm, while her different experience of deprivation pushes her toward a life he could not have chosen for her.