![]() ![]() ![]() Feldman, who now attends Sarah Lawrence College, offers this engaging and at times gripping insight into Brooklyn’s Hasidic community. The Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. ![]() It’s when she finally does get pregnant and wants something more for her child that the full force of her uprising takes hold and she plots her escape. ![]() She starts to experience panic attacks and the stirrings of her final break with being Hasidic. The absence of a sex life and failure to produce a child dominate her life, with her family and in-laws supplying constant pressure. Instead, having received no sex education from a culture that promotes procreation and repression simultaneously, she and her husband are unable to consummate the relationship for a year. At 17, hoping to be free of the scrutiny and gossip of her circle, she enters into an arranged marriage with a man she meets once before the wedding. Her boldest childhood revolution: she buys an English translation of the Talmud, which would otherwise be kept from her, so that she might understand the prayers and stories that are the fabric of her existence. Feldman’s spark of rebellion started with sneaking off to the library and hiding paperback novels under her bed. Raised by devout grandparents who forbade her to read in English, the ever-curious child craved books outside the synagogue teaching. Born into the insular and exclusionary Hasidic community of Satmar in Brooklyn to a mentally disabled father and a mother who fled the sect, Feldman, as she recounts in this nicely written memoir, seemed doomed to be an outsider from the start. ![]()
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