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Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, by Deborah Feldman
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The instant New York Times bestselling memoir of a young Jewish woman’s escape from a religious sect, in the tradition of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel and Carolyn Jessop’s Escape, featuring a new epilogue by the author.
As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. It was stolen moments spent with the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott that helped her to imagine an alternative way of life. Trapped as a teenager in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she barely knew, the tension between Deborah’s desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until she gave birth at nineteen and realized that, for the sake of herself and her son, she had to escape.
- Sales Rank: #41495 in Books
- Brand: Simon Schuster
- Published on: 2012-10-02
- Released on: 2012-10-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x .70" w x 5.50" l, .50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
- Simon Schuster
Review
"A remarkable tale."--"Kirkus Reviews"
One of "O" magazine's "10 Titles to Pick Up Now"
"Unorthodox is a fascinating book . . . Feldman's voice resonates throughout."--"The Jewish Daily Forward"
"Deborah Feldman was raised in an insular, oppressive world where she was taught that, as a woman, she wasn't capable of independent thought. But she found the pluck and determination needed to make the break from that world and has written a brave, riveting account of her journey. "Unorthodox "is harrowing, yet triumphant."--Jeannette Walls, #1 bestselling author of "The Glass Castle" and "Half Broke Horses"
"Feldman gives us special insight into a closed and repressive world. . . . Her memoir is fresh and tart and utterly absorbing."--"Library Journal"
"An unprecedented view into a Hasidic community that few outsiders ever experience. . . . "Unorthodox" reminds us that there are religious communities in the United States that restrict young women to marriage and motherhood. These women are expected to be obedient to their community and religion, without question or complaint, no matter the price."--"Minneapolis Star-Tribune"
"[Feldman's] no-holds-barred memoir bookstores on February 14th. And it's not exactly a Valentine to the insular world of shtreimels, sheitels and shtiebels. Instead, ["Unorthodox"] describes an oppressive community in which secular education is minimal, outsiders are feared and disdained, English-language books are forbidden, mental illness is left untreated, abuse and other crimes go unreported . . . a surprisingly moving, well-written and vivid coming-of-age tale."--"The Jewish Week"
"[Feldman's] matter-of-fact style masks some penetrating insights.""--The New York Times"
"Nicely written . . . [An] engaging and at times gripping insight into Brooklyn's Hasidic community."--"Publishers Weekly"
""Unorthodoz" is painfully good. . . .Unlike so many other authors who have left Orthodoxy and written about it, [Feldman's] heart is not hardened by hatred, and her spirit is wounded but intact. . . . She is a sensitive and talented writer."--JewishJournal.com
"Denied every kind of nourishment except the doughy, shimmering plates of food obsessively produced by her Holocaust-survivor grandmother . . . books nourish [Feldman's] spirit and put in her hands the liberatory power of storytelling. As she becomes a reader and then a writer, Feldman reinvents herself as a human being."--"Newsday" (New York)
"Compulsively readable, "Unorthodox" relates a unique coming-of-age story that manages to speak personally to anyone who has ever felt like an outsider in her own life. Feldman bravely lays her soul bare, unflinchingly sharing intimate thoughts and ideas unthinkable within the deeply religious existence of the Satmars. . . . Teens will devour this candid, detailed memoir of an insular way of life so unlike that of the surrounding society.""--School Library Journal"
"Eloquent, appealing, and just emotional enough . . . No doubt girls all over Brooklyn are buying this book, hiding it under their mattresses, reading it after lights out--and contemplating, perhaps for the first time, their own escape."--HuffingtonPost.com
"Riveting . . . extraordinary.""--Marie Claire"
"Deborah Feldman has stripped the cloak off the insular Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, offering outsiders a rare glimpse into the ultraconservative world in which she was raised."--"Globe and Mail "(Toronto)
"[Deborah Feldman's] is an extraordinary story of struggle and dream. . . . Both her escape and her decision to tell her story are magnificent acts of courage."--Anouk Markovits, author of "I Am Forbidden"
"Imagine Frank McCourt as a Jewish virgin, and you've got "Unorthodox" in a nutshell . . . a sensitive and memorable coming-of-age story.""--""Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"
About the Author
Deborah Feldman was raised in the Satmar Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. She attends Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City with her son.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
On the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday I interview my mother. We meet at a vegetarian restaurant in Manhattan, one that announces itself as organic and farm-fresh, and despite my recent penchant for all things pork and shellfish, I am looking forward to the simplicity the meal promises. The waiter who serves us is conspicuously gentile-looking, with scruffy blond hair and big blue eyes. He treats us like royalty because we are on the Upper East Side and are prepared to shell out a hundred bucks for a lunch consisting largely of vegetables. I think it is ironic that he doesn’t know that the two of us are outsiders, that he automatically takes our existence for granted. I never thought this day would come.
Before we met, I told my mother that I had some questions for her. Although we’ve spent more time together over the past year than we did in all my teenage years put together, thus far I’ve mostly avoided talking about the past. Perhaps I did not want to know. Maybe I didn’t want to find out that whatever information had been fed to me about my mother was wrong, or maybe I didn’t want to accept that it was right. Still, publishing my life story calls for scrupulous honesty, and not just my own.
A year ago to this date I left the Hasidic community for good. I am twenty-four and I still have my whole life ahead of me. My son’s future is chock-full of possibilities. I feel as if I have made it to the starting line of a race just in time to hear the gun go off. Looking at my mother, I understand that there might be similarities between us, but the differences are more glaringly obvious. She was older when she left, and she didn’t take me with her. Her journey speaks more of a struggle for security than happiness. Our dreams hover above us like clouds, and mine seem bigger and fluffier than her wispy strip of cirrus high in a winter sky.
As far back as I can remember, I have always wanted everything from life, everything it can possibly give me. This desire separates me from people who are willing to settle for less. I cannot even comprehend how people’s desires can be small, their ambitions narrow and limited, when the possibilities are so endless. I do not know my mother well enough to understand her dreams; for all I know, they seem big and important to her, and I want to respect that. Surely, for all our differences, there is that thread of common ground, that choice we both made for the better.
My mother was born and raised in a German Jewish community in England. While her family was religious, they were not Hasidic. A child of divorce, she describes her young self as troubled, awkward, and unhappy. Her chances of marrying, let alone marrying well, were slim, she tells me. The waiter puts a plate of polenta fries and some black beans in front of her, and she shoves her fork in a fry.
When the choice of marrying my father came along, it seemed like a dream, she says between bites. His family was wealthy, and they were desperate to marry him off. He had siblings waiting for him to get engaged so that they could start their own lives. He was twenty-four, unthinkably old for a good Jewish boy, too old to be single. The older they get, the less likely they are to be married off. Rachel, my mother, was my father’s last shot.
Everyone in my mother’s life was thrilled for her, she remembers. She would get to go to America! They were offering a beautiful, brand-new apartment, fully furnished. They offered to pay for everything. She would receive beautiful clothes and jewelry. There were many sisters-in-law who were excited to become her friends.
“So they were nice to you?” I ask, referring to my aunts and uncles, who, I remember, mostly looked down on me for reasons I could never fully grasp.
“In the beginning, yes,” she says. “I was the new toy from England, you know. The thin, pretty girl with the funny accent.”
She saved them all, the younger ones. They were spared the fate of getting older in their singlehood. In the beginning, they were grateful to see their brother married off.
“I made him into a mensch,” my mother tells me. “I made sure he always looked neat. He couldn’t take care of himself, but I did. I made him look better; they didn’t have to be so ashamed of him anymore.”
Shame is all I can recall of my feelings for my father. When I knew him, he was always shabby and dirty, and his behavior was childlike and inappropriate.
“What do you think of my father now?” I ask. “What do you think is wrong with him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Delusional, I suppose. Mentally ill.”
“Really? You think it’s all that? You don’t think he was just plain mentally retarded?”
“Well, he saw a psychiatrist once after we were married, and the psychiatrist told me he was pretty sure your father had some sort of personality disorder, but there was no way to tell, because your father refused to cooperate with further testing and never went back for treatment.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I say thoughtfully. “Aunt Chaya told me once that he was diagnosed as a child, with retardation. She said his IQ was sixty-six. There’s not much you can do about that.”
“They didn’t even try, though,” my mother insists. “They could have gotten him some treatment.”
I nod. “So in the beginning, they were nice to you. But what happened after?” I remember my aunts talking about my mother behind her back, saying hateful things.
“Well, after the fuss calmed down, they started to ignore me. They would do things and leave me out of it. They looked down on me because I was from a poor family, and they had all married money and come from money and they lived different lives. Your father couldn’t earn any money, and neither could I, so your grandfather supported us. But he was stingy, counting out the bare minimum for groceries. He was very smart, your zeide, but he didn’t understand people. He was out of touch with reality.”
I still feel a little sting when someone says something bad about my family, as if I have to defend them.
“Your bubbe, on the other hand, she had respect for me, I could tell. No one ever listened to her, and certainly she was more intelligent and open-minded than anyone gave her credit for.”
“Oh, I agree with that!” I’m thrilled to find we have some common ground, one family member whom we both see the same way. “She was like that to me too; she respected me even when everyone else thought I was just troublesome.”
“Yes, well . . . she had no power, though.”
“True.”
So in the end she had nothing to cling to, my mother. No husband, no family, no home. In college, she would exist, would have purpose, direction. You leave when there’s nothing left to stay for; you go where you can be useful, where people accept you.
The waiter comes to the table holding a chocolate brownie with a candle stuck in it. “Happy birthday to you . . . ,” he sings softly, meeting my eyes for a second. I look down, feeling my cheeks redden.
“Blow out the candle,” my mother urges, taking out her camera. I want to laugh. I bet the waiter thinks that I’m just like every other birthday girl going out with her mom, and that we do this every year. Would anyone guess that my mother missed most of my birthdays growing up? How can she be so quick to jump back into things? Does it feel natural to her? It certainly doesn’t feel that way to me.
After both of us have devoured the brownie, she pauses and wipes her mouth. She says that she wanted to take me with her, but she couldn’t. She had no money. My father’s family threatened to make her life miserable if she tried to take me away. Chaya, the oldest aunt, was the worst, she says. “I would visit you and she would treat me like garbage, like I wasn’t your mother, had never given birth to you. Who gave her the right, when she wasn’t even blood?” Chaya married the family’s oldest son and immediately took control of everything, my mother recalls. She always had to be the boss, arranging everything, asserting her opinions everywhere.
And when my mother left my father for good, Chaya took control of me too. She decided that I would live with my grandparents, that I would go to Satmar school, that I would marry a good Satmar boy from a religious family. It was Chaya who, in the end, taught me to take control of my own life, to become iron-fisted like she was, and not let anyone else force me to be unhappy.
It was Chaya who convinced Zeidy to talk to the matchmaker, I learned, even though I had only just turned seventeen. In essence, she was my matchmaker; she was the one who decided to whom I was to be married. I’d like to hold her responsible for everything I went through as a result, but I am too wise for that. I know the way of our world, and the way people get swept along in the powerful current of our age-old traditions.
August 2010
New York City
© 2012 Deborah Feldman
1In Search of My Secret Power
Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honourable and intelligent. The fact that they were none of those things was something she had to put up with. . . .
Being very small and very young, the only power Matilda had over anyone in her family was brainpower.
—From Matilda, by Roald Dahl
My father holds my hand as he fumbles with the keys to the warehouse. The streets are strangely empty and silent in this industrial section of Williamsburg. Above, the stars glow faintly in the night sky; nearby, occasional cars whoosh ghostlike along the expressway. I look down at ...
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful, relatable, sad. Ignore the personally motivated bad reviews
By Kindle Customer
I know what it's like to disown your family and leave your way of life, friends, community behind. I know what it's like to cut ties with the "good" family members and the "bad" at the same time, because there's no way to have one without the other.
This is a sad, clumsy, but ultimately beautiful story of growing up in a concentric circles of pretense and denial. First the author's own pressure to pretend to be the "good girl", then her immediate family pretending that nothing is wrong, despite being filled with abuse and pain and mental illness.
I noticed that a lot of the one star reviews seem to be from people with "skin in the game". This is very disturbing to me -- hasn't the author been through enough without people telling her she's a bad mom for getting divorced, that her husband is a nice man, that she is being a traitor, etc.? Seriously.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
The power of choice
By Claudia Moscovici
(Un)orthodox and Hasidic Judaism
Raised by her grandparents, aunts and uncles in the Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, even as a child Deborah Feldman felt oppressed and out of place. In her controversial memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), she casts light upon the secretive and mystical world of Orthodox Judaism. Hasidic Jews live in the midst of our contemporary world in a way that strictly observes the religious rituals of their eighteenth-century Polish orthodox roots. Hasidic Judaism, which in the Hebrew language means “piety” or “loving-kindness”, originated in the Pale of Settlement region of eighteenth-century Poland, part of a large area in Eastern Europe set up by Catherine the Great of Russia in 1791 for Jewish habitation. The Pale of Settlement included a large part of the Polish Commonwealth as well as regions in modern Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, the Ukraine and Russia.
Setting itself apart from the then prevalent Rabbinism, which had become a kind of religious formalism, Hasidic teachings emphasized Jewish mysticism and the strength of the religious community. It embraced the medieval tradition of Kabbalah and encouraged the religious study of the Torah by every Jewish male, an education that begins at the age of three and continues throughout their lives. Today there are approximately 30 large Hasidic groups, which rarely intermarry, and hundreds of smaller groups. Although similar in religious outlook, these groups tend to stick together to their own ethnic communities.
In the Hasidic religion, women are prohibited from religious study and even discouraged from reading lay books, which may corrupt their modesty. They are prescribed traditional roles as wives and mothers. Strict religious rituals govern the interaction between men and women. In the documentary entitled A Life Apart, PBS.org depicts the patriarchal microcosm of Hasidic Judaism:
“Orthodox women in particular are charged with a religious obligation to raise children and are "exempt" from all commandments that are considered "time-bound," i.e., those that must be performed at a certain time. These include the obligation to study Torah, and to attend daily prayer services. Men and women thus have considerably different experiences of spirituality and daily tasks. Most observers would not dispute that the Hasidim live in a traditionally patriarchal system. (http://www.pbs.org/alifeapart/intro_2.html)
Most members of Hasidic communities value deeply their traditional way of life and feel it is their duty to preserve it even in the midst of an increasingly egalitarian contemporary society. But what happens to those—particularly to women--who feel oppressed by the rules and patriarchal underpinnings of this atavistic way of life?
This is the predicament that Deborah Feldman, a young woman who feels trapped by the practices of her Hasidic community, finds herself in. Ignorant of sexuality and having had little contact with men outside her family, Deborah’s world dramatically changes for the worse when, according to the practices of the Satmar Sect of Hasidic Judaism to which her extended family belongs, she’s forced into an arranged marriage at the age of seventeen. Her husband, Eli, who although only 24 years old, is considered a late bloomer, is not a horrible man. But Deborah’s awakening feminist consciousness and her growing reluctance to embrace the world of Hasidic Judaism, combined with her husband’s strict observance of the traditional ways of his family, makes for a very unhappy marriage. Had Eli been paired up with a woman who was equally observant of the Hasidic religion, he might have made an excellent match. But his marriage to Deborah is, from the start, doomed to failure.
Their sexual inexperience–and Deborah’s ever-growing anxiety in living in a devoutly religious world she rejects—leads to sexual dysfunction for the couple. When, after several years of religious counseling and conventional therapy, Deborah and Eli have a baby (Yitzhak, whom they call Yitzy), the young mother finds herself as detached from their son as she is from her religiously observant husband. She’s alarmed by her own lack of maternal feeling, wondering, “Could I be so damaged by my childhood experiences that I was drained of the ability to love anything? It was one thing if I couldn’t manage to love a man I was arbitrarily arranged to marry. It was a whole other thing to feel detached from my own child” (217).
She looks within and considers exploring other paths in life, which could make her feel more fulfilled. Perhaps her lack of emotion is tied to her sense of dissatisfaction. Once she takes a poetry course at Sarah Lawrence College, she discovers her talent for writing and starts flourishing in a modern environment so different from the traditional society she was raised in. Deborah then realizes that a large part of her emotional unavailability is caused by the strain of living in a traditional culture to which she feels she doesn’t belong. Yet she feels torn, since the traditional way of life that she was brought up in is all she knows. For awhile, she leads a double life, struggling to change personas, from Hasidic to modern, as often as she changes her clothes: from the traditional long skirts prescribed by her religion to the jeans she changes into when she takes classes at Sarah Lawrence College. But only one persona reflects her true identity. Just as she feels more herself in jeans, she feels more at home in mainstream American society. Eventually, after much hesitation, Deborah takes a leap of faith, leaving the Hasidic way of life to begin a new, modern life with her son. The more at ease she feels with herself, the more bonded she feels to her baby. Deborah associates contemporary society with freedom: not the freedom to engage in excess, as it is for some youths who leave the Hasidic community, but the freedom to discover her talents and identity without shame and without having to hide.
When first published, Unorthodox was highly controversial, particularly for members of the Hasidic community, many of whom felt offended. This memoir offers a very critical and intimate perspective on a fundamentalist religion that many embrace wholeheartedly and willingly. For me, the most important aspect of this book was not so much its critique of orthodoxy as its emphasis upon individual choice: the freedom to choose one’s religion and way of life as an adult and, along with that, the freedom to choose one’s identity.
Claudia Moscovici,
Literature Salon
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
I liked it, but something
By Valerie Weiler
I liked it, but something, not sure exactly what, kept me from LOVING it. I'm Jewish, and have ALWAYS been FASCINATED by the Chasidic people and their culture. Though I grew up less than an hour away from this community, we're MILLIONS of miles apart.
As someone who grew up at times bored, annoyed, and bordering on "rejection" of my own (much more liberal/watered down) religion, a group that adheres this closely/narrowly to its cultural and religious practices is a source of wonder, disbelief, and (occasionally, I confess) annoyance. And THAT sums up (in part) how I felt about this book... Maybe I'm (not so secretly) envious of someone who was born into this fascinating world, some sort of "grass is greener on the other side of the fence thing," or maybe the author just didn't give me enough reason to identify with her, root for her, or even care too deeply whether she stayed or left "the fold."
I was not influenced by the HUGE controversy that seems to surround this book. She told HER story, and it's not even close to mine, so I'd never second-guess her or accuse her of stretching (or inventing) the truth. I really looked forward to this book, and I wish the author and her son the very best in their new lives, but I was less "scandalized" than "minimally surprised" by how things worked out for her, and found myself really wanting so much more. I'll keep an eye out for her follow-up book, but keep my expectations in check...
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