Unorthodox

Seeing the author go from a sheltered child in a strict Hasidic background all of the limitations on knowledge and learning allowed her (particularly as a girl) to a self-confident adult who knows what she has missed and wants to teach her own children is freeing. My own family background is Lubavitche, but my grandmother gave it up before my uncle or father were born, and my grandmother didn't start living with us until she was in her late 70s (and I was a preteen or teenager), so we didn't talk much about what her background had been. This book was informative, and it reiterated my own values and doubt of doing things just because some religious authority thinks that you should!
Stages of her childhood growing up and into her marriage or enlightening and encouraging. It was clear from the beginning that she not have any room in her own soul and person for the restrictive Hasidic life that she was expected to continue and live, and her resistance from that is revolutionary and freeing.

As a cultural artifact, this is a great document. As a literary memoir, it lacks nuance and self-awareness. The afterword, added years after the initial publication, does nothing to dispel the sense I got of a total lack of self-awareness.

A memoir is not just a recounting of events, it's a carefully crafted story, with reflection on past events and emotions. This book does not have that. Devorah refers to problematic statements and attitudes that she inhabited while a part of this community, but adds no reflection, makes no indication as to whether she still holds that attitudes. Most egregious are her terrible statements about other women's physical appearance, commenting on facial hair and calling girls ugly in a way that horrifies me to think she still maintains those views.

This book served a valuable role in breaking open the market for OTD memoirs, a valuable genre. On its own merit, however, this book does not stand as a great literary accomplishment.

The internet didn't invent the cultural bubbles which surround each of us. I'm talking about those worldviews which only allow in what we want to see and filter out all the rest. Google famously structures our searches in this insular way.

What the internet did was automate insulation and intensify it and make it more obviously problematic. It made the world smaller which meant both more clashes with those who are different from us, and it made us huddle more tightly together to fight that difference. And it made us more aware of the bubble phenomenon. That's where we find ourselves today, living in a world that not only has alternative points of view but alternative facts.

This mistitled book tells the story of a particularly exotic bubble--that of the Satmars. I'm assuming you're not a Satmar because, if you were, what are you doing on the forbidden internet?
I picked up this book after seeing the Netflix documentary "One of Us" which is about the lives of 3 Hasids attempting to break away from their community. It is told from the standpoint of those looking to escape. There's little to like about the Hasidic culture that is making their lives miserable. I was not so naive not to realize that by "Hasidic" they meant "Satmar" though they never clarify this.

This book isn't so polarized. At least that's my reading of it. But it's a topic on which people seem to have to take a position. The 2 available are: Satmars are bad so escaping is good, and Satmars are good and escapers are heretics and likely also liars about what they report.

The first position can often be generalized as secular is good, religion is bad. The later as secular is bad and those who choose it are damned. I refuse to take any of these positions. This being a first book by someone who grew up in relative isolation, I have trouble seeing the author as a mastermind scheming to bring down the Satmars. She has a naïveté which makes her a fresh observer. I attribute the problems she is condemned for more to inexperience than to malice.

I don't think this book makes the Satmars look any worse than a lot of other groups of people. Most of them seemed to mean as well as the secular people in our lives and be doing what they think of as their best (even if we would be making different decisions than the ones they made.) If they're at times mean spirited, selfish ignorant or intolerant, so are large swaths of the secular population. E.g. They aren't being cruel by keeping their children ignorant of secular culture, they imagine they're doing them a favor. (Indeed there are many aspect to secular culture that I wish I was ignorant of.)

The book is mostly not about "scandalous rejection". It's mostly about what it felt like to grow up a Satmar but somehow remaining skeptical. Still, what looks like exotic customs and ways of dress from the outside, look normal from the inside and it's we outsiders who look and act peculiarly. When the rejection happens, it's late in the book and it's not an "I hate you--I'm outahere!" kind of thing, but more of a gradual process and finally going too far to ever turn back.

The writing allowed me, who easily loses interest in a book, to finish it in a day and a half. That alone is worth the 4th star.