Within a few years, she’d fled Williamsburg with her son, to forge a new life in Berlin. It was then that she knew she had to find the courage to leave the Satmar. Then after some years trapped in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage, Deborah gave birth to a son at the age of 19. A central tenet of the sect was a complete rejection of modern culture.ĭespite this, Deborah grew up into an intelligent and independent-minded young woman who loved the novels of Jane Austen.Īs a teenager she was married off to a man she barely knew. Most members were Holocaust survivors or their descendants, lived under a strict religious code governing what they could wear, who they could speak to and what they could read. The Hasidic sect she grew up in had been created by a charismatic Rabbi in the years after WWII. (Feb.Deborah Feldman was 23 when she walked away from the closed-off world of the Satmar sect in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Feldman, who now attends Sarah Lawrence College, offers this engaging and at times gripping insight into Brooklyn’s Hasidic community. 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. As fictionalized Feldman stand-in Esty, Haas encapsulates an intimate saga defined by the limbo of feeling trapped between two worlds: As the story begins, she slips away from her community in the.
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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