A review by bluejayreads
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman

challenging emotional medium-paced

4.75

This is a story of living a strictly-regimented life in a strict religious sect, and the story of a girl growing up and realizing she didn't have to accept other people deciding she was lesser because she was female. 

Like Girl at the End of the World, the other leaving-a-strict-conservative-religion memoir I've read, I saw a lot of myself in this story. A large factor in me leaving religion I was raised in was also a slow realization that I deserved to be treated better than a baby-making bang mommy for my husband. There were enough differences between Deborah's experience of Satmar Hasidic Judaism and my experience of fundamentalist Christianity that I didn't relive my trauma with her, but I definitely related to many of her feelings and experiences. 

Since I know very little about Judaism, I don't know how many of the expectations, rules, and traditions Deborah details in this book are universal to Judaism, how many are Hasidic, and how many are specific to the Satmar sect, but I still found it all fascinating. Despite disagreeing with many of the rules and ultimately leaving the sect, this book doesn't disparage the practices and traditions detailed. She makes it clear that she wanted more than what the Satmar rules would allow her to do and to be happy she and her son needed to leave, but she doesn't claim that Judaism or even the Satmar sect is bad. She doesn't pass judgement on them at all, simply states them as factual happenings without moral or ethical judgement. Her follow-up memoir talks about her struggle for a personal Jewish identity, so she obviously isn't against being Jewish. 

This is a very good memoir. Personal, raw, and real, with information about a particular Jewish sect and Deborah's life within in. There's religious trauma, the struggles of marital sex when you learned you had a vagina one week before your wedding, the effects of surviving the Holocaust on the generations that came after, and a really compelling personal story. 
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