A PRAYER OF ESCAPING
‘Unorthodox’ goes inside insular Hasidic community
Esty Shapiro gathers up what she can carry and starts her getaway. She hits an unexpected obstacle and is forced to retreat, to rethink her tactics. Finally, she makes a clean escape, gaining, for now, her freedom.
With tense music pulsing underneath “Unorthodox” — a new Netflix miniseries dropping March 26 — opens like an action movie. While it features gambling, guns and a kidnapping, it is a quietly dramatic character study that offers a glimpse into a society usually closed to outsiders.
This gripping, nuanced show is based on the eponymous memoir by Deborah Feldman, who chafed against the oppressive and patriarchal rules of her Hasidic community in Williamsburg and fled for the secular world.
The series tells parallel narratives. In a flashback we see inside her arranged marriage to Yakov “Yanky” Shapiro (Amit Rahav). In Berlin, Esty (Shira Haas) takes her first tentative steps and missteps in a world she never imagined.
“It’s the most complex role I’ve ever played,” Haas said. “Esty is so vulnerable yet so strong and has so many conflicts inside her.”
Meanwhile, sweet but sheltered Yanky and his hard-boiled cousin Moische (Jeff Wilbusch), a sinner who once left the community himself and is trying to return to its good graces, are enlisted by the rabbi to take a road trip to force Esty’s return home.
“It is an escape story but it’s also a love story,” director Maria Schrader said. “We want you to feel for Yanky too.”
Anna LeVine, who lives in Berlin and is friendly with Feldman, said she and cocreator Alexa Karolinski strived to get the cultural details right but the themes grew out of the women’s daily conversations. “We were less interested in the anthropology of a community and more focused on the specific story,” she explained.
So, while the controlling cult-like traits of Williamsburg’s Satmar sect are on full display — Esty is purposely left untrained to survive outside her community while her marriage to Yanky, an overly obedient mama’s boy, is under relentless familial scrutiny — the series doesn’t condemn anyone and allows all three main characters struggle with their identities.
“We fleshed out Yanky and Moishe, who was a fictional creation, because we want you to see them all as humans,” said LeVine. “We don’t judge anyone.”
“I find it boring to tell audiences what to think or feel,” added Schrader. “I just let them experience it themselves.”
The team relied heavily on Eli Rosen, a New Yorker and former Hasid, who translated the script for LeVine and Karolinski and stayed by Schrader’s side each day to make sure the details were accurate. “He’d say, ‘They would say that in Borough Park but not in Williamsburg,’ ” LeVine explained. Rosen also plays the rabbi.
They sought actors with some feel for Yiddish and cast several former Hasids, including Wilbusch, who Schrader said contributed a great deal to Moishe’s deep sense of desperation and frustration. He gambles, he drinks, he packs heat like a noir detective, yet he remains devout and is sometimes dismayed by his inability to reconcile his desires.
The Israeli-born Haas and Rahav learned Yiddish from scratch, tutored by Rosen. “You’d have seen my darkest side when I was learning, my brain was melting,” Haas said, adding that she even substituted Yiddish lessons for music in her daily jogging routine. “I wanted to feel fluent when I got to the set so I could just act.” She now reads poetry in Yiddish.
Haas carries the series with a heartrending performance, which Schrader said relies on the actor’s endless ability to “access the emotions of her inner world but not overdo it.”
LeVine said Haas’ ability to shift between fragility and steely determination in a heartbeat captures the character.
“She had no money and no education but she felt something inside that she needed to express, to make her own life,” LeVine said of Feldman and Esty. “That is not easy. It takes real strength.”