A flight from tradition
Unorthodox carefully and beautifully depicts a young woman’s journey
Unorthodox Streaming, Netflix
“God expected too much of me,” says 19-year-old Esther Shapiro, who has fled her arranged marriage and strict life in a claustrophobic, ultraorthodox Hasidic Satmar sect in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attempts to start her life over. It’s the only way Esther — who goes by her nickname, Esty — knows how to explain what has happened, viewing her desires for personal freedom as part of a personal failure. It’s heartbreaking.
Unorthodox, a gripping and carefully constructed four-part Netflix drama, is a fictional story, but it is based on Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir of the same name. Rich in authentic details, it opens with Esty (Shira Haas) on her way to catch a flight to Berlin, with little more than a German passport, some cash, the traditional garb she’s wearing and the brunette wig that completes her compulsory presentation as a Hasidic wife.
A viewer is instantly worried for Esty. Her aggrieved in-laws and their rabbi have already ordered Esty’s shy husband Yakov (Amit Rahav) and a selfstyled heavy Moische (Jeff Wilbusch) to pursue Esty and bring her back.
Esty refuses to characterize her plight as an “escape,” but the story parallels so many other women we’ve encountered in literature, film and TV — the sister wives of fundamentalist cults, say, or the victims of honour killings and other punishments in patriarchal cultures. And yes, even Margaret Atwood’s Offred (of The Handmaid’s Tale), especially given the unsettling degree to which Esty’s in-laws are obsessed with her reproductive state.
It would be easy for Unorthodox to lean hard on a negative portrayal of this insular and rigid community; what’s impressive about the series, created by Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski, is how it indulges the viewer’s curiosity, in flashback form, in a way that adds shape and empathy to both the Hasidic tradition and Esty’s rejection of it.
It’s all in the details: the ritual purity bath, the requirements of keeping kosher, the customary blessings and harsh restraints of marriage — none of which are treated in a cavalier way.
We get the reasons Esty runs; what we also gain is an understanding of her grief over it.
In the first episode, Esty accompanies some of music conservatory students to a nearby lake for a swim. She tentatively and only partially disrobes and then slowly wades into the water. It’s Unorthodox’s most sublime scene, a new kind of cleansing.
The first thing Esty ditches is that wig, which symbolically floats away. There’s no going back for her, even as Yakov and Moische get closer to finding her. Here, too, Unorthodox chooses depth over disparagement, showing how the experience shakes some of Yakov’s firmest beliefs about what a marriage is — and isn’t.