Monday, May 11, 2020

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman – either book or Netflix series



DIFFERENT: We talked about the differences between book and min series.
  • Hides self from Eli
  • She is a redhead
  • Doesn’t escape to Germany
  • She doesn’t even get married until way into the book and doesn’t leave until the last page
  • She learned and knew how to drive
  • There is no obnoxious brother
  • She is always rebellious - She is a teacher and stays having a job
  • She has the baby and raises the child throughout the book in the community
  • She reaches out to mother after taking out a documentary film from the library that interviews Hassidic Jews who are gay and she sees her mother’s name in it
  • Her husband has something going on – he masturbated with other boys, he can’t get it up, maybe he is gay
  • She secretly goes to college for writing – there is no music
  • Writes a blog about sexual experiences and female body parts
  • They see a marriage counselor
Whereas Esty keeps her pregnancy a secret from Yanky in the show and runs away to Berlin while still pregnant, Feldman stayed with her husband throughout her pregnancy and the two of them raised their son together for the first few years of his life. 

Feldman and her husband moved out of Brooklyn together at first, because she didn't want to raise a child in their cramped Williamsburg apartment. They relocated to the town of Airmont in New York, where Feldman gave birth to a son, Yitzy.

She rented a car and packed many of her belongings into it, along with a three year-old Yitzy, and moved the two of them back to New York City. Feldman changed her phone number and didn't tell anyone her new address, so that she could not be tracked down as she was starting her new life.

Esty's life in Berlin as depicted in the show is mostly a work of fiction. Her music scholarship is effectively a stand-in for Feldman's acceptance to Sarah Lawrence, and her musical talent is an analog for Feldman's writing talent. Yanky and Moishe's pursuit of Esty didn't happen in real life, but is instead intended as a representation of how insular the Satmar community is and the pressure to conform to expectations

"It was very important to us to make changes in the present day story from Deborah Feldman's real life, because she is a young woman, she's a public figure, she's a public intellectual, and we wanted Esther's Berlin life to be very different from real Deborah's Berlin life. So in a sense the flashbacks are based on the book, but the present day story is entirely made up."

We, informally, went over questions and then discussed these comments from the group:
  • The Holocaust happened because Jews were too assimilated.
  • Satmar - Hungarian community transposed into New York
  • Shame is a big part of culture
  • Can they reform? They are extreme and eventually it will peter out? Hipsters already moving into that part of New York.