Sometimes we isolate ourselves to flee from external aggression and protect ourselves, but we do it to such an extent that later we need to break that isolation to flee from internal aggression. It is the clamorous lesson in Unorthodox, a splendid miniseries that recounts the escape of a young woman from the Hasidic community in New York trapped in an arranged marriage, in the imposition of ignorance and a reproductive practice of domination, not to mention sex.
Such is the archaism and the distance from the real world that the abandoned husband, at the first opportunity to look at a mobile with data and after having heard that you can ask him everything, he blurts out: "Where's Esty?"
But there are no Alexias or Siris who can answer such a question and thus begins a persecution charged with hidden violence and foul play that they are going to transfer to Berlin. We will not count more, they will have plenty of time to enjoy it on Netflix.
And why this series is useful to us now is not just to kill the time of confinement, but to rethink the layers of confinements that we each face without alarm, the territories in which we are each Orthodox in the warmth of a community that expects such behavior of us in exchange for an idea of belonging. The idea then of being "unorthodox", a "desortodoxia " that does not exist in Spanish but more interesting than "heterodox, nothing or little orthodox" (the translations offered by the Collins dictionary) is succulent. Perhaps it is not necessary to break with the dogma, the sect, the fixed idea, religion, but not allowing it to crush you.
Although the series is based on Deborah Feldman's autobiography, not translated in Spain, it has enormous similarity with Anouk Markovits's The Daughters of Zalman , which Salamandra published in 2014, a great testimony of how that same Jewish community retreated and became involved in their most seized traditions to protect themselves. In their flight from the pogroms and Nazism they locked themselves in so much that they became their own new oppressor.
How many dogmas do we embrace without flexibility? How many layers of running of the bulls are we willing to endure? How many havens from fear become scary when they wanted to protect us? These are questions that can accompany us in these days when not by accepting the necessary confinement we must accept other confinements. Malaysian women who were ordered by the government to put on makeup, be subservient and friendly and not provoke arguments with their husbands, managed to free themselves from that order, for example, although surely not from their husbands. In Europe, the pandemic has not freed us from lack of solidarity, which has become the dogma of non-mutualization of debt. In Spain, the harshness of confinement has not freed us from sectarianism and the trenches, for example, the common refuge of ignorance. It is a good approach for these days without escape: what orthodoxies should we send to look at? Interesting notion: let's all be unorthodox.
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