THE KEY TO SURVIVAL IS PREPARATION
How Unorthodox captured one woman’s flight from Hasidic Brooklyn
Writer Deborah Feldman’s pantry was already stocked for the apocalypse. That’s how her Hasidic Holocaust survivor grandparents raised her. They “believed in the end of the world, had seen the end of the world and always prepared me to live through the end of the world”, she said by telephone from her Berlin apartment.
The day before, Chancellor Angela Merkel told Germans to self-isolate in hopes of slowing the spread of coronavirus. And while many were out panic shopping, she hadn’t been to the market once.
“I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for corona,” she said.
Anyone who’s read Feldman’s best-selling 2012 memoir, Unorthodox
— now the basis of a four-part Netflix series, which is now streaming — is likely to understand. The book is a stirring account of her struggles with and ultimate rejection of her Satmar community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
— an insular society of ultra-Orthodox Jews that rose in New York from the ashes of World War II. Culturally conservative and religiously strict, its members believe that their piety and refusal to assimilate will shield them from a repeat cataclysm.
The new Netflix series, also called Unorthodox, was created by Anna Winger (Deutschland 83 and
Deutschland 86) and Alexa Karolinski (Oma And Bella). In their version, much of which is in Feldman’s native Yiddish, we see a young woman, Esther Shapiro (Shira Haas), flee an arranged marriage that sours as she struggles to consummate the relationship and produce a baby. Esty heads to Berlin with little more than a passport and some cash, and she makes fast friends with a cohort of student musicians from around the world.
Back in Brooklyn, Esty’s family erupts in disbelief when they hear she is in Germany, of all places. They enact a plan to send her husband (Amit Rahav) and his mercurial cousin (Jeff Wilbusch) to track her down and force her return.
Feldman talked about seeing her story come to life and what it’s like to envy your on-screen counterpart.
The TV series is not an exact portrayal of your life, but it still hews to the original plot lines of the book, namely during the Brooklyn flashbacks. Given how personal the story is, was it unnerving for you to see it on screen?
The last two episodes were very hard for me. I thought I was prepared. I had experienced, written and talked about it for years, but these were other people — not me — interpreting it, putting it into images, playing the parts, and cutting the scenes.
For the first time, I was able to see how others would interpret, or receive, the experience, based on the images fed back to me. It’s kind of like if you talked to a therapist for years, and at the end of it all, she presented a book with all your experiences. You’d read them and struggle to recognise them because they’ve been given back to you from a foreign perspective.
You had no formal role in the making of the TV show, but were you tapped for your insights?
We had a lot of discussions about when can you sacrifice accuracy and when not. We agreed you can sacrifice accuracy as long as it doesn’t impact the narrative. And so we could not get real shtreimels (a fur hat worn by many Satmar men) because the real ones are made of mink; they’re expensive, shops wouldn’t have sold it to us, and we just didn’t have the budget. I was constantly in touch with the costume designer to make fake ones that look real.
Making them look real was really hard, and at some point we thought, they’re never going to look 100% like the real thing. But the only people who are going to know that are going to be Hasidic Jews. And guess what? It doesn’t change the story if the shtreimels are fake.
What were you homing in on while watching the TV adaptation?
I was concerned about the dignity of Esty, which is also one of the things I was concerned about when writing
Unorthodox; how do you write about the things that are most shameful and painful in a way that retains dignity? I was worried how Shira would manage to juggle the experience of humiliation and the kind of shattering of all hope while still maintaining some sense of dignity as a woman and human being. I was so scared for her the whole time as I watched the episodes. I felt really anxious because I knew that if she failed, then it would be like I had failed, like I would not have dignity anymore in my story. It’s scary to give someone your story for the screen because you can’t control it. On the other hand, I knew I didn’t want a part in controlling it.
How do you thread the needle and tell a story like this one without vilifying an entire culture?
In German they have this great saying, “alle über einen Kamm scheren”, which is a way of saying “generalising about everyone through the prism of one experience”. I think Anna and Alexa were even more concerned and sensitive than I was about this. I’m coming from this world. All I can really tell is my own story and perspective. I’m almost disadvantaged because I have this extremely subjective perspective. But Anna and Alexa have this incredible advantage of not coming from there.
And what about you?
For me, it was more a question of, ‘Oh my God, how am I ever going to tell my story in a way that people will believe and understand me, and it will reach them’. Whereas Anna and Alexa were like, ‘How are we going to make the story come across in all of its unique specificity without somehow telling a story about an entire community or tradition?’. I think that the solution to this problem is zooming in and staying zoomed in. When you’re watching the series, you don’t really meet anyone far beyond Esty’s family. The community is there in the background, but it never confronts you. You have a rabbi, but you don’t see her in school. You don’t see anyone in the synagogue. It’s not about explaining the world in which the story takes place. It’s just about the story itself.
Was there a particular scene that stood out as your favourite?
The scene when Esty explodes in the bedroom with her husband, because it’s the most powerful. She finally says everything that has been going on in her head. She finally lets loose: It’s like a volcano. To me, the series climaxes in this moment. I also felt jealous because I never had a moment like that — I had many small moments where I tried to express myself, and I tried to speak up for myself, but I love how she just lets it all out. It really touched me, and it made me wish I had been the same way. It made me admire her. I hope that other people will see that scene and want to be like her, too.
I hope that other people will see that scene and want to be like her, too