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The Netflix series Unorthodox has become another great success for the content platform.
Warning: This note reveals plot details from the Unorthodox series.
An environment in which fear contaminated everything.
This is how Deborah Feldman remembers what it was like to grow up within an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community in the Williamsburg neighborhood, in New York (United States).
This Berlin-based American-German writer was already well known in intellectual circles in the German capital, but has now gained international notoriety thanks to one of Netflix’s latest successes.
We talk about Unorthodox (“Unorthodox”), a four-episode miniseries that tells the story of a Jewish girl who breaks with the strict Satmar community to which she belongs and runs away to find his way, “his own voice”.
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Public and critics coincide in praising the series for its careful production, its narrative, the setting, the costumes and the photography, but above all for the excellent cast work, which highlights the Israeli Shira Haas, who plays the protagonist, Esther Shapiro, Esty.
The series, spoken in Yiddish and English, is an adaptation of Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (“The scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots”), an autobiographical book in which Feldman describes what his own breakup process was like.
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The writer Deborah Feldman is 33 years old and lives in Berlin.
Feldman appreciates the interest aroused in his particular biography, whose representation on the screens is a free adaptation that, nevertheless, honor the essence of your testimony.
As the creators of the series explain, creative licenses were necessary not only from an artistic point of view but also out of respect for the writer’s privacy at the present time.
Holocaust awareness
Feldman was born in August 1986 to a family in the Satmar Hasidic community in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York,
Her mother was kicked out of the community for being a lesbian and her father was mentally disabled, so she grew up with her grandparents, Bubbi and Zeidy, both Holocaust survivors.
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“I loved them very much,” Feldman said in a recent interview with Deutsche Welle. “My grandmother made me the person I am, without her influence I would never have achieved everything I have achieved.”
However, this devotion to his grandparents made him ignore his own needs.
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The women of the Satmar community are educated for marriage and family.
Since I was little I knew it was different. He liked to read in English, but he had to hide the books under the bed because Yiddish was spoken at home and in the community.
Secular education was forbidden to him, he could not go to the public library and her destiny was to get married and start a big family.
During adolescence, the disconnect between what was expected of her and her true desires caused her pain that she repressed when observing her grandparents.
“The fact that they were Holocaust survivors made me see that my suffering could not be compared to his. I never wanted to complain about what was happening to me because I was very aware of what they suffered, “Feldman told DW.
The fear of God
The Hasidic community in which Feldman grew up was founded by surviving Orthodox Jews from World War II who believed that the Holocaust was “a punishment from God for assimilation and Zionism”.
They settled in the middle of New York and they acquired the name of their place of origin, Satmar, a Hungarian city on the border with Romania.
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The Satmar settled in Willaimsburg, New York, after World War II.
To avoid another “divine punishment”, the Satmar established a strict lifestyle according to a rigorous interpretation dand the Jewish law.
For Feldman, that fear of punishment or the wrath of God dominated everything: “It is a constant state of terror, they teach you that God only exists to be feared.”
Unhappy marriage
When he was 17 years old, Feldman married a young man named Eli. It was an arranged marriage.
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Although Netflix does not reveal audience data, it is estimated that millions of people have watched the Unorthodox miniseries.
The lives of Feldman and the fictional character go hand in hand at this stage.
In the series we see Esty trapped in a relationship where you are not happy, subjected to overwhelming pressure to end sexual relations with her husband, something that is impossible for her due to the pain she feels.
This situation even requires the intervention of her mother-in-law, who considers that the young woman has a mental block.
For the Satmar, reproduction is of vital importance. Women are expected have between 10 and 20 children so that the group grows quickly and its survival is guaranteed.
In real life, Feldman also had trouble having painless sex with her husband, but – unlike Esty – it didn’t take long for her to get pregnant.
Total break
Feldman gave birth to her son in 2006, which was a turning point in relation to his stay in the community.
Is here where reality and fiction take roads separated.
In UnorthodoxEsty’s husband asks for a divorce just the day she discovers she is pregnant and decides to go to Berlin, the city where her mother lives.
Feldman didn’t cut everything so suddenly.
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The strict Satmar lifestyle made Deborah Feldman unbearable.
In a first step, the writer convinced her husband to move to another area of New York, leaving Williamsburg and the Satmar community behind.
Away from peer pressure, Feldman began studying literature at Sarah Lawrence College.
Within a few years, in 2010, she left her husband and took her son, although he remained in New York.
His main concern, according to his own words, was that the child’s custody be taken from him.
He was unaware of the case of any woman who had left the Satmar community and managed to keep their children, but she did.
Vertigo and self-knowledge
Feldman does not have contact with no member of your family since 2006, when she left Williamsburg with her still husband and newborn baby.
After the separation, she also lost her bond with her husband, although they have spoken again later.
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Esty Shapiro’s character, played by Israeli actress Shira Haas, finds her own voice in Berlin.
In 2012 he published the book on which the Netflix series is based, which became a bestseller.
Two years later, the writer moved to Berlin. She says that she traveled to Europe to keep track of her family, to investigate what her grandmother’s life had been like.
How did you feel after leaving such a fundamental part of your life behind?
“At first I felt almost nothing. I was in shock. I had immense fear and a feeling of floating, “Feldman explained.
“I didn’t know who I was as a person, without ties, without knowing what the future would hold for me. It was extremely scary. I survived because I didn’t think too much.”
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