Patricia Kolesnicov
07/14/2020 - 13:53
- Clarín.com
- Culture
In the Zoom Deborah Feldman is seen so calm, so a middle-class woman in a comfortable middle-class apartment, so sure that it is difficult to think that she is the woman who lived what we met in the series Unorthodox. That this happy woman -that this Tuesday talks to several journalists through the web- is the real Esty .
But that's right: Feldman was born and raised in the tight-knit Satmar community of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn but he rejected his fate, secretly went to college, saw lawyers, and figured out how to escape. How to escape with your son, without losing tenure, as had happened to other women. The first lawyer told him that there was nothing to do, no chance, that he would raise his children and come back later. The second recommended something else: lots of publicity. If the case was known, if he had support beyond the community, he could succeed. Was reaching the media with a story useful? More or less, that would last a short time. She decided to write a book, she decided to become a writer.
What follows is known: the book - Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots - was published in 2012 and was a success in the United States. By then she had already put her things and the baby in a rental car and had gone to a new life, still in New York. She stayed with the son, in 2014 the husband also left the community and in 2020 the great success: Netflix turned his autobiography into a series and spread it around the world.
Those days. Deborah Feldman, the true protagonist of "Unorthodox", with her ex-husband and son.
This Thursday the book will be in bookstores on two continents and that's why from Berlin, where he lives in that bright and modern house, Feldman sits in front of a screen and talks to journalists.
Count the decision to leave. How much more difficult is that decision for women, particularly if they have children. And how she fought it.
-What was the most difficult thing to assume after leaving the community?
-There are different aspects: I am going to talk about the practical, survival. When you leave young, without contacts, without education, without knowing how the world works outside the community or what a bank account is ... From a practical point of view the most difficult thing is survival: eating, housing. In those years I was always on the edge of the precipice, looking at the precipice of hunger, catastrophe, being homeless.
How did you solve it? Doing many things. With the body itself.
-What I did was donate my eggs to an egg bank to survive. They paid me for it. But that was not the most difficult thing.
So?
-The difficult part is another. When you leave you have nothing, you have no identity, the feeling of being yourself. The community defines who you are, what is your identity. Who is one without it? This causes a true crisis, even a mental crisis. In 2015 a girl jumped from a skyscraper: she was smart, she had friends, she had a business, she had no children ... She had left the community and built a life for herself. I was jealous of her and she committed suicide. The real crisis is not the practical part but the mental crisis. How do you survive as a person when your identity is emptied and while rebuilding. Who will be the new family, what will be the new beliefs, the new house. Sometimes it seems that death is the only thing that represents you because it is nothing and you have nothing inside.
The Salvation
What did Feldman hold on to in that emptiness?
-I had a son and that gave me an identity: I am the mother of my son. And I had beliefs: I believed that my son deserved another life. My disadvantage became my blessing: I was able to survive thanks to my son.