Unaware that I was choosing a splashy and controversial best-seller, I selected from the library's new book shelf something called Unorthodox (New York, 2012), by one Deborah Feldman, and a sadder, more dispiriting book I have rarely read.
Ms. Feldman had the misfortune to be raised in the Satmar branch of the Hasidic movement -- a sect that, at least as she describes it, is unhappy, puritanical, finicky, repressive, ferociously anti-rational, patriarchal, and bossy. Boys study Talmud but girls are not educated past a high school -- what would be the point, when, as Deborah's grandfather once told her, "girls belong in the kitchen?" Feldman's memoir is not just dreary, it's ostentatiously lurid. Its subtitle is "the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots" -- and the attention-mongering scandals that she recounts are mostly sexual in nature.
There is a old story that John Ruskin collapsed in a heap when he discovered, on his wedding night, that his bride had pubic hair. Feldman out-Victorians the great Victorian, claiming that she did not know that she had a vagina, an entrance, an opening, "down there." Is such ignorance possible in this age? And then she explores her sexual failings, mostly her vaginismus-induced post-honeymoon extended virginity -- which she blames on her Satmar upbringing (although want of curiosity might also be a factor).
Feldman's memoir has upset the Hasidic community and there is at least one website devoted entirely to attacking its veracity. And in fact the memoir does contain the commonplace omissions and elisions of autobiography -- none of which seem to invalidate the whole. However, the defenders of the sect miss the point (as does Ms. Feldman).
The Satmar movement isn't reprehensible because it dishonors brains and women and especially women's brains. It's reprehensible because it is erected on a lie. "We learn in school that God sent Hitler to punish the Jews for enlightening themselves. He came to clean us up, eliminate all the assimilated Jews...." What an absurd and odious doctrine! Are we expected to entertain the hypothesis that six million Jews died for eating lobster? "The first and greatest Satmar rebbe said that if we became model Jews, just like in the olden days, then something like the Holocaust wouldn't happen again, because God would be pleased with us." So Hitler and the Nazis and the SS and the camps are a) the fault of the Jews themselves, and b) God can be placated if all Jewish women wear thick stockings and wigs and cover themselves from collarbone to wrist and knee. It's a brainless argument, and one that, if you think about it for a few seconds, gives the victory to Hitler. Plus, it's an argument that creates a god who is even crueler and more idiotic than usual.
Indoctrinated with this criminal bullshit, the survivors of the Shoah and their descendants voluntarily re-ghettoize themselves and, of their own foolish accord, imprison themselves into a new dark age of their own invention.
Here's what I learned from this book. Satmar is a check-your-brains-at-the-door cult that controls 130,000 adherents who manifest all the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder. It's "bad things will happen to me if I step on a crack on the sidewalk" raised several painful orders of magnitude.
Ms. Feldman may have escaped the cult but she's still in the dark. She's left Satmar behind because she couldn't read the books she wanted to read or wear the clothes she wanted to wear and she couldn't locate her own vagina. But it's not her vagina that readers should worry about; it's her brain.
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