Table Of Content“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
orthodox:
From UN
I have secrets too. Maybe Bubby knows about them, but she won’t say
anything about mine if I don’t say anything about hers. Or perhaps I have
only imagined her complicity; there is a chance this agreement is only one-
sided. Would Bubby tattle on me? I hide my books under the bed, and she
hides hers in her lingerie, and once a year when Zeidy inspects the house
for Passover, poking through our things, we hover anxiously, terrified of
being found out. Zeidy even rifles through my underwear drawer. Only
when I tell him that this is my private female stuff does he desist, unwilling
to violate a woman’s privacy, and move on to my grandmother’s wardrobe.
She is as defensive as I am when he rummages through her lingerie. We
both know that our small stash of secular books would shock my
grandfather more than a pile of chametz, the forbidden leavening, ever
could. Bubby might get away with a scolding, but I would not be spared the
full extent of my grandfather’s wrath. When my zeide gets angry, his long
white beard seems to lift up and spread around his face like a fiery flame. I
wither instantly in the heat of his scorn.
“Der tumeneh shprach!” he thunders at me when he overhears me
speaking to my cousins in English. An impure language, Zeidy says, acts
like a poison to the soul. Reading an English book is even worse; it leaves
my soul vulnerable, a welcome mat put out for the devil.
“Feldman gives us special insight into a closed and repressive world . . .
Her memoir is fresh and tart and utterly absorbing.”
—Library Journal
In the tradition of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel and Carolyn Jessop’s Escape,
Unorthodox is a captivating story about a young woman determined to live
her own life at any cost.
T
he Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism is as mysterious as it is intriguing to
outsiders. In this arresting memoir, Deborah Feldman reveals what life is
like trapped within a religious tradition that values silence and suffering
over individual freedoms.
The child of a mentally disabled father and a mother who abandoned the
community while her daughter was still a toddler, Deborah was raised by
her strictly religious grandparents, Bubby and Zeidy. Along with a rotating
cast of aunts and uncles, they enforced customs with a relentless emphasis
on rules that governed everything from what Deborah could wear and to
whom she could speak, to what she was allowed to read. As she grew from
an inquisitive little girl to an independent-minded young woman, stolen
moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen
and Louisa May Alcott helped her to imagine an alternative way of life. She
had no idea how to seize this dream that seemed to beckon to her from the
skyscrapers of Manhattan, but she was determined to find a way.
The tension between Deborah’s desires and her responsibilities as a good
Satmar girl grew more explosive until, at the age of seventeen, she found
herself trapped in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a
man she had met for only thirty minutes before they became engaged. As a
result, she experienced debilitating anxiety that was exacerbated by the
public shame of having failed to immediately consummate her marriage and
thus serve her husband. But it wasn’t until she had a child at nineteen that
Deborah realized more than just her own future was at stake, and that,
regardless of the obstacles, she would have to forge a path—for herself and
her son—to happiness and freedom.
© BEN LAZARM
DEBORAH FELDMAN was raised in the Hasidic community of Satmar
in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. She attends Sarah
Lawrence College and lives in New York City with her son.
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Copyright © 2012 by Deborah Feldman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Feldman, Deborah.
Unorthodox : the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots / Deborah Feldman.
p. cm.
1. Feldman, Deborah, 1986– 2. Jews—New York (State)—New York—
Biography. 3. Hasidim—New York (State)—New York—
Biography. 4. Hasidim—New York (State)—New York—Social
conditions. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Religion. I. Title.
F128.9.J5F525 2012
974.7'044092—dc22
[B] 2011001386
ISBN 978-1-4391-8700-5
ISBN 978-1-43918702-9 (ebook)
A Note from the Author
Satu Mare (Hungarian for Saint Mary), or Satmar, in Yiddish, is a city on the
border of Hungary and Romania. So how did a Hasidic sect come to be named
after a Christian saint? Well, on his mission to rescue prominent Jews from
certain death during World War II, Hungarian Jewish lawyer and journalist
Rudolf Kasztner saved the life of the rabbi from that city. This rabbi later
emigrated to America and amassed a large following of other survivors, forming
a Hasidic sect that he named after his hometown. Other surviving rabbis
followed suit, naming their own sects after the towns they had come from in an
effort to preserve the memory of the shtetls and communities that had been
wiped out in the Holocaust.
Hasidic Jews in America eagerly returned to a heritage that had been on the
verge of disappearing, donning traditional dress and speaking only in Yiddish, as
their ancestors had done. Many deliberately opposed the creation of the State of
Israel, believing that the genocide of the Jews had come as a punishment for
assimilation and Zionism. Most important, though, Hasidic Jews focused on
reproduction, wanting to replace the many who had perished and to swell their
ranks once more. To this day, Hasidic communities continue to grow rapidly, in
what is seen as the ultimate revenge against Hitler.
