Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 5, 2020

Photo credit: Anika Molnar/Netflix

From ELLE

In the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, audiences witness a transformation. The four-episode series follows the character Esther "Esty" Shapiro (played by Shira Haas), a young woman growing up in the Hasidic Satmar community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. An ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism, the Satmar group was founded after World War II by Holocaust survivors who believed the Holocaust was punishment for assimilation. As a result, Satmar rules are strict, and those in the community are kept from all secular education and culture. On Unorthodox, Esty decides to leave the only life she's ever known after a year in an arranged marriage. She travels to the root of her family's suffering: Berlin, Germany.

Esty's story is based on a real one, recounted in Deborah Feldman's 2012 memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. However, the Netflix series only follows Feldmans book to a point. Everything that takes place in Williamsburg is inspired by her life, whereas Estys journey to Germany is entirely fictionalized.

In Making Unorthodox, the short documentary episode that shows how the series was created, Anna Winger, co-creator and executive producer, said, "It was very important to us to make changes in the present-day story from Deborah Feldmans real life, because she is a young woman, shes a public figure, shes a public intellectual, and we wanted Esthers Berlin life to be very different from real Deborahs Berlin life."

Like Feldman, Esty's mother leaves when she is a child, and Esty is raised by her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Feldman's mother left the community, came out as gay, and now lives in Brooklyn, while Estys mother in Unorthodox leaves the community to move to Berlin, where she also came out as a lesbian.

Feldman entered into an arranged marriage at 17 and had a son when she was 19. Estys storyline follows a parallel path, with the character entering an arranged marriage and getting pregnant at 19.

Story continues

Both Feldman and Esty were under enormous pressure to consummate the marriage; family members and the community at large all knew the intimate details of Estys life and her struggle with sex because of a condition called vaginismusthought to be a primarily psychological condition that makes sex very painful. Feldman told ABC News, "It was the most humiliating year of my life. [The in-laws and family elders] were talking about it day after day." She also told People in a 2012 interview, "After that, being so pressured to get pregnant and finally getting pregnant, it was just emotionally overwhelming, knowing that I was going to bring a child into the same life that I had livedthat was the hardest experience of my life but it was also the experience that pushed me out, so Im grateful for it."

When Esty first meets her husband-to-be, she tells him shes different from other girls, and he responds that its good to be different. Feldman told a similar story to the New York Post in 2012.

When I met him, I warned him. I said, I have my opinions, you might not be able to handle that. But he was famous for getting along with everyone. So he said, No, I can handle you. He wasnt ready to handle me at all! After we got married, and I had my books in the house, he didnt mention them. He tolerated them. But he would tell his mother everything.

She also spoke to the Post about the time she bought a section of the Talmud even though her community follows a rule that states women are not allowed to read the Hebrew text of the Talmud. In the series, Esty quotes the Talmud to her husband, who then tells her women are not allowed to read it.

According to the Washington Post, Feldman's rejection of her community was more gradual than Esty's. She and her husband first moved to an Orthodox community in Rockland County, New York, and she started taking classes at Sarah Lawrence College. But after she got in a bad car accident, Feldman decided to leave for good. "I was convinced I was going to die," she told the New York Post. "And there was no way I was going to waste another minute of life." She told People, "The very next day, I sold my jewelry, I rented a car and I just left and it was that simple and I couldnt believe it after.

Feldman decided to get a divorce and told the Post in 2012 that she and her husband have joint custody of their son. She told ABC News in 2012 that her husband has changed a lot in regards to his religious viewshe's even started wearing jeans.

She traveled to Europe to research her family and her grandmothers life from before the war. Now, Feldman lives in Germany with her son. "As a metaphor, we wanted [Esty] to go directly to the source of that trauma and find herself," Winger told NPR. "Living in Germany has made me think about Jewishness, certainly about the Holocaust, about the legacy of violence, of trauma, in a way that I never thought about in America, ever."

Even with their differences, Feldman says she looks up to Esty. In an interview with the New York Times, she said her favorite scene was a fictional one. "The scene when Esty explodes in the bedroom with her husband, because its the most powerful," she said.

She finally says everything that has been going on in her head. She finally lets loose: Its like a volcano. To me, the series climaxes in this moment. I also felt jealous because I never had a moment like thatI had many small moments where I tried to express myself, and I tried to speak up for myself, but I love how she just lets it all out. It really touched me, and it made me wish I had been the same way. It made me admire her. I hope that other people will see that scene and want to be like her, too.

If you'd like to read more about Feldman, she wrote a second memoir titled Exodus, which details her journey after leaving the Satmar community.

You Might Also Like

Read the original:

Netflix's 'Unorthodox' Tells the True Story of One Woman's Escape from a Strict Hasidic Community - Yahoo Lifestyle

Category: Hasidic
Tags: