The New York Post had a field day with this one – to say the least. This past Febraury, Deborah Feldman released her memoir. Now, Deborah Feldman sounds like a nice Jewish name for a nice Jewish girl. Well, in her case “nice” and “Jewish” do not quite do it justice.
Feldman’s memoir depicts her experiences within and eventual rebellion against the Satmar sect of Judaism. She describes growing up in her grand-parents’ home. She was unable to live with her parents for her father is an embarrassing mentally disabled man and her mother fled Williamsburg to live in a secular lifestyle. Most of the book Feldman chronicles her abused and terrible childhood and married life, informing the reader of many personal and unnecessary details. However, since the entire book is awash with contradictions, it becomes very difficult for a close reader to take Feldman’s claims seriously.
In the introduction Feldman declares that “Chaya took control of me… she decided that I would live with my grandparents.” Yet, in the first chapter, merely fifteen pages later, Deborah writes, “I was very unhappy living at my Aunt Chaya’s… I begged to come live with Bubby.” Within the introduction and first chapter there are three more times when she contradicts herself, saying at first things like, “I am convinced that my ability to feel deeply is what makes me extraordinary” while immediately opposite this, on the next page, writing “to think what I can do with [this skill]… to convince others of emotions I don’t really feel!” She admits to not being truthful, to her greatest strength being her ability to deceive and this, in my eyes, removes some of her credibility and forces me to read the harrowing accounts of her life with a disbelieving eye.
As a modern Orthodox reader, I despised that Feldman desecrates many of the most holy of Jewish customs and laws. When she learns the laws of family purity she feels “betrayed by all the women in… [her] life… [for by performing the laws they are] agreeing that… [they] are dirty because …[they] are a woman.” She describes going to synagogue on Simchat Torah to see the Satmar Rebbe dance, “how senseless it seems…my friends contort their limbs…how utterly ridiculous to expend so much effort for a…view of an old man swaying back and forth with a scroll.”
As well it was horrifying to read her account of a story that she heard from her husband who heard from someone else about a man who murdered his son for sinning. Writing such terrible things, which have been proven as false, as chronologed in the Jewish Week, only gives ammunition to those who already hate us.
Even worse, the people that knew nothing of Judaism until they opened
this book, for them none of its beauty is depicted.
The last chapter of her book, after she has left Williamsburg with her son, is where I find positivity as a modern Orthodox reader. She describes a relationship with God that is what we all aim for, where “God is no longer a prescription for paradise but an ally in…[her] heart.” She declares, “I am proud of being Jewish, because I think that’s where my indomitable spirit comes from.”
It is admirable that Deborah was able to break free of a society as tight as hers to follow her American Dream, and to provide for her son the life she wishes she could have had. However the constant attacks against all of Judaism and her constant contradictions ruin the book for a modern Orthodox reader.