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. 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. 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 Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism is as mysterious as it is intriguing to outsiders. For a woman with little formal secular education, her writing is eloquent and stirring.In the tradition of Ayaan Hirsi Alis Infidel and Carolyn Jessops Escape, Unorthodox is a captivating story about a young woman determined to live her own life at any cost. Feldman is reflective, never mincing words, saying exactly how she feels about everything. Her story, slow at first, invites us into the homes and mindsets of the Satmar people, at times wholesome and warm and at others lonely, shocking, and disturbing.

However, it does provide a window into a world not many of us know about or can fathom. In general I have issues with authors who self-proclaim their stories as “scandalous.” In the Satmar world, what Feldman did was scandalous, but her story didn’t provide the drama and intrigue it seemed to have promised. She leaves her husband, takes her son, and starts a new life without the wigs, heavy clothes, and religious restrictions. After a car accident almost kills her, Feldman realizes what is most important to her. She learns to drive, grows out her once-shaved hair and attends Sarah Lawrence College. She is married off at seventeen to a man she meets once, and that’s when her rebellion begins. She describes her regret for lacking the “enlightenment” felt by the other girls in her school and community, and her struggles from a young age with the feeling that this life isn’t for her.

She writes about her secret trips to the public library, hiding books under her mattress and hoping her grandfather doesn’t find out. Raised by her grandparents after being abandoned by her mother (who leaves Satmar and is no longer religious) and her mentally unstable father, Feldman attends Satmar schools, where only Yiddish is spoken and reading books in English is forbidden. Feldman describes the deeply religious environment in which she grew up, closed off from the rest of society and kept from any type of secular education and upbringing. Unorthodox is a memoir by Deborah Feldman, a former member of the Satmar community in Brooklyn.

Unorthodox the scandalous