Can you ever really leave the place you come from?
I first learned of Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir through the stunning Netflix mini-series chronicling her flight from an arranged marriage. I highly recommend the program and book, but spoilers are necessary to this comparison, so stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens.
In the film version, she goes from homeless in Berlin to finding her artistic raison d’être in a matter of days, complete with financial and emotional support, while also evading a stalker intent on retrieving her and her unborn child. It seemed too fairy-tale to be true, and indeed was. The real story is less Grimm’s and a shade grimmer. Her awakening is years in coming; she’s already a mother on a less-than-glamorous career path; her husband’s forgivable naïveté sours to unforgivable selfishness; and she never leaves New York.
I was disappointed at first, but in the long run better appreciated the effort it took for her to disassociate from an ultra-Orthodox community and assimilate into the greater world right there at home. The Torah, it seems, can be interpreted to govern every aspect of life; and the women make the necessary sacrifices. In a world of uneducated conformity, Feldman’s intellectual curiosity chafes so strongly we practically assume her fearful rebellion and wonder how anyone in her position endures.