The suddenness with which I was consigned to irrelevance left me stunned.
A memoir about a Hasid’s gradual disassociation from the strictures of the Medieval world in which he feels stuck could easily turn confessional, yet all I felt while immersed in this late-coming-of-age tale was empathy for an obedient boy turned renegade when his intellect contradicts his blind faith.
For fifty years, my sparse knowledge of the Hasidic world was parsed from comments by progressive Jewish friends and glimpses of somber looking men in side-curls along the Jersey Turnpike. Then I read [and reviewed here] Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir Unorthodox, and felt grateful by comparison for the strictures of my Catholic upbringing. Here is the flip-side of her story, told from a man’s perspective: early entrapment in an arranged marriage where society insulates its youth from education—where a wife is not something to think about excessively; where poverty is the price one pays for the expected life of Torah scholarship memorizing the ancient Biblical laws that governed agrarian survival, where the things we believed could be sustained only by suspending our normal faculties of reason.
Listening to this story [11 hours, 9 min./ 288 pages], I was riveted at first by Deen’s poetic soul throughout his search for knowledge, love, and fulfillment in a world that punishes independent thought. Then he makes his break, and I was heart-broken along with him for his family estrangement. Small wonder that his crisp and provocative writing earned the 2015 National Jewish Book Award. For more insight, watch this brief video of the author touring his old neighborhood and discussing his journey.