Escaping burden of Holocaust in Germany
Author behind Netflix series ‘Unorthodox’ feels less threatened there by far-Right than in the US
THE author whose memoirs inspired a Netflix series has described how her adopted home of Germany has given her a feeling of refuge from the historical burden of the Holocaust.
Deborah Feldman escaped the traditional Hasidic Jewish community where she was raised in New York’s Williamsburg neighbourhood. The dramatised series of her struggle to break out of the stifling community, called Unorthodox, has captivated locked down audiences across the world, becoming an unexpected television hit.
Like Esty, the character in the series, Ms Feldman fled an arranged marriage and left behind a world in which she was forbidden to wear jeans or makeup, play the piano or drive a car.
But for Ms Feldman the move to Berlin turned out to offer another sort of escape, she said.
“If you had been brought up by Holocaust survivors, as I was, you grew up with this sense of responsibility to keep the memory of what happened alive,” she told The Sunday Telegraph from her home in Germany. “In America, where no one else is really doing that, memory becomes a kind of burden.
“But Germany is a place where that history is real for everyone. You don’t feel the same responsibility in a society where everyone is committed to that memory.”
It is something of a paradox that Ms Feldman felt freed of the burden of the Holocaust by moving to the country where her grandmother survived the concentration camps.
It wasn’t why she came. In 2014, she had long broken free of the Hasidic community. Her memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, was already a bestseller. The first time she visited Berlin, she didn’t like it. She found the city “grim” and “overshadowed by the memorial culture”.
But a second visit changed her mind. “I stayed in a real neighbourhood and started meeting people. Berlin society is much more open than other big cities like New York,” she said.
“And I found the city was full of people like me, who were there because they’d had to leave where they came from, whether they were war refugees or people fleeing the political situation in their country.”
Back in New York, she found herself talking about Berlin all the time. She applied for a German passport, which she was entitled to because her grandmother was forced out of the country by the Nazis. But with a young son in joint custody with her ex-husband in New York, she didn’t imagine she could move to Germany – until her former husband surprised her by telling her to go.
Ms Feldman still lives in the city with her 14-year-old son. Both have German nationality, and she said both see their future here. She says she is no more concerned by the far-Right in Germany than anywhere else.
“Frankly I feel safer in Germany than I would in the US,” she says. “I feel safer in a country where people are aware of the danger, where they understand how the far-Right operates.”