Members found a lot of interest and issues to discuss in this memoir by a young woman about her upbringing by her grandparents as a strict Hasidic Jew living in the Satmar community in Williamsburg, a part of Brooklyn in New York.
For those of you who have seen the Netflix miniseries set in Berlin, the book predates that and details the young woman’s childhood and teens, arranged marriage and eventual escape at the age of 19 from an ultra orthodox way of life.
Members were fascinated by the strict religious rituals and customs which governed every aspect of Deborah’s Hasidic life - dictating what she could wear, what she could eat, who she could mix with, and what she could read. Her rebelliousness was fuelled by her secret reading of forbidden English language books obtained from the local library, such as Matilda, Little Women and Pride and Prejudice which presented feisty, more positive roles for girls and women. As one member pointed out: Hooray for reading!
She grew up with a limited education and without qualifications for a life outside the sect, controlled by the constrained role for Hasidic women. Her life was made more difficult by being a virtual outcast in her own community due to the fact of her mother’s own scandalous but unexplained escape from the sect and her father’s apparent untreated personality disorder. In addition, her grandparents’ parsimony meant that she dressed in hand-me- downs. Deborah was looked down upon by other members of her family who were better off materially and who acted towards her as morally superior and strict about what her behaviour should be.
Deborah’s family arranged for her to marry at the age of 17 to a young man she hardly knew, from an unsympathetic, critical family, and without the least knowledge of sex. The couple eventually moved out of Williamsburg and Deborah began to study literature under the ruse of undertaking business courses to supplement the family income. However, it was the issues raised in her own mind after the birth of her son which eventually saw Deborah find the courage to flee to start a new life at 19, taking her son with her.
Members discussed the fact that both Deborah’s grandparents had survived the Holocaust and whether this had led to them adopting a stricter fundamentalism, founded by the anxious belief that deviating even momentarily from the True Path might somehow cause God’s wrath against them again. The sect is particularly interesting because the dictates they follow, such as the need for women to shave their heads and wear wigs, have been decreed by influential Rabbis - however, these tenets of the sect have apparently not all been taken up in other parts of the world. Some of us were surprised to learn that the sect is anti-Zionist, too. The details of pedophilia and even murder in the community were concerning. It is not surprising that the book caused much hostility and was denounced by members of the sect as untrue when it was published. Feldman has a disclaimer on the book which states that certain events have been “compressed, consolidated or reordered.”
Who is Deborah Feldman?
Deborah Feldman is an American-born German writer living in Berlin. She published her most well known book, Unorthodox, initially as a blog in 2012.
After leaving the Hasidic sect in 2006, she eventually arrived in Berlin in 2014 and initially found it confronting due to her family’s persecution by the Nazis. She later embraced the city’s openness to refugees and because of its literary culture. She adapted to speaking and writing in German quickly due to its similarity to Yiddish, her mother tongue.
Following her departure in 2006 and the publishing of her book she has apparently not seen or spoken to any of her Hasidic family back in the United States, however, she states that she is still proud of being Jewish because she believes it is where her indomitable spirit comes from.
She has become a German citizen and lives with her boyfriend who is not Jewish. She continues to work as a writer and published Exodus: A Memoir in 2014. She published Uberbitten (Reconcile), a German-language expanded edition of Exodus in 2017. It is unclear whether her son still lives with her.
The 2020 Netflix miniseries, Unorthodox, is loosely based on her memoir.
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