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3.42 AVERAGE
3.42 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
The continuation of Deborah's story is just as interesting as the first installment. One wonders where she gets enough money to do this. Perhaps being a best selling author pays really well. But she's off to Europe several times to trace her grandmother's history, and to go on a holocaust tour to try to discover who she is as a Jew in the world without being a hasidic jew anymore. Then she starts travelling to New Orleans for weekends to see a boy. Sooner or later, I guess, she'll have to get a real job, but who knows?
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
I am a little surprised at myself that I picked this one up. I was not a huge fan of Unorthodox, but for some reason I felt drawn to read the next chapter in Feldman's story. There are a few chapters, especially in the beginning that were interesting, probably because I was legitimately curious about her story. But as I read on, she became, once again, so obsessed with her sex life and sexual fulfillment that I felt like I was on the verge of reading some steamy romance novel. Well, maybe it wasn't that bad -- but the fear that I would stumble into a view of her bedroom that I really didn't want to see made the book painful to read. But really -- I was so over her sexual exploits after the first page. And I lost interest in her vagina in the first book. Once again, it felt like she had little sense of who her audience really would be. This is a great journal for her, but really never should have been published for a wide audience.
The saving grace for this book, for me, or at least the only reason I gave this any stars at all is the section where she searches for her grandmother's history. This section gave some depth to Feldman and made her a more likable person. The first 3rd of the book had me thinking that her writing had improved, that her story was moving beyond herself in her struggle to move past the pain.
Ultimately, I think this book, like the first one, is too near the pain of her upbringing and divorce. She will continue to grow over the years and most likely write more books. And I will probably keep coming back to the train wreck found in these books because now I want to know if she will ever gain a sense that there is world out there beyond herself who is actually reading these books.
The saving grace for this book, for me, or at least the only reason I gave this any stars at all is the section where she searches for her grandmother's history. This section gave some depth to Feldman and made her a more likable person. The first 3rd of the book had me thinking that her writing had improved, that her story was moving beyond herself in her struggle to move past the pain.
Ultimately, I think this book, like the first one, is too near the pain of her upbringing and divorce. She will continue to grow over the years and most likely write more books. And I will probably keep coming back to the train wreck found in these books because now I want to know if she will ever gain a sense that there is world out there beyond herself who is actually reading these books.
Der Titel machte mich neugierig. Ich ergab mich der Lektüre, ohne zu wissen, was er bedeutete.
Feldman liess mich mit ihrem metaphorischen, bildhaften Stil ins Buch einsinken, jedes Kapitel berührte mich mehr.
Ich verfolgte den Weg der chassidischen Jüdin zur Frau mit deutscher Staatsbürgerschaft in Berlin. Ich nahm an ihrem Schmerz teil, bewunderte ihre Hartnäckigkeit, ihren Mut, ihre Gabe, sich auf neue Herausforderungen einzulassen und ihren Weg, ihre Identität zu suchen und zu finden.
Ein mitreissendes, aufrüttelnde Buch.
Feldman liess mich mit ihrem metaphorischen, bildhaften Stil ins Buch einsinken, jedes Kapitel berührte mich mehr.
Ich verfolgte den Weg der chassidischen Jüdin zur Frau mit deutscher Staatsbürgerschaft in Berlin. Ich nahm an ihrem Schmerz teil, bewunderte ihre Hartnäckigkeit, ihren Mut, ihre Gabe, sich auf neue Herausforderungen einzulassen und ihren Weg, ihre Identität zu suchen und zu finden.
Ein mitreissendes, aufrüttelnde Buch.
A Portrait of The Mental Patient As A Young Woman
Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2020
This book was not as good as "Unorthodox."
If I had to think of a combination of words to describe this book, it would be: delayed bildungsroman / cross-country self discovery/ cross-continent trip.
The author retraces her grandmother's early life in Europe, from the time that she was ejected from Hungary and ended up working in Sweden before her move to the United States.
It's interesting that even though the Satmar community is a snapshot in time *as the Satmar imagined it* from a couple of hundred years ago in Hungary, their notions may have been..... idealized
There are so many places and types of people in themes, that the whole book takes on a phantasmagoric quality.
She might have one or two good turns of phrase in here, but nothing particularly memorable.
Ironically, she also references Another Insane Jewish Woman who wrote a book that was turned into a movie. ("Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen.)
What do I myself learn from this?
Many things:
1. As much as some converts might romanticize Satmar (I myself once did), living in that dynasty is not a good option for anybody who is a convert, or even born Jewish but returns to the faith later in life. (p.119)
2. Too much of anything is not good.
a. This girl could have survived just fine in a Centrist / Modern Orthodox context, but because she was so soured by her experiences with Satmar she went off the deep end.
b. (p.176) Some Orthodox view the laws of family purity (things that women must do while they are menstruating and how to come out of that state) as a tradition, and something that must be handled in a matter-of-fact way. Others go off the deep end and imagine that women are filthy and contaminated during that time.
The end result is there somebody like Feldman rebelled by having people paint her menstruating muff. (Yeesh!)
3. If you are on the journey to be free from an unwanted self, you will find many other people in the same situation on your journey. Among the more interesting of MANY who had rejected their last lives: (p.119) Feldman found a Southern Hick from a devoutly Christian family who converted to become Ultra-Orthodox and yet would not accept a Jewish wife who was Baal Teshuva. (And thereby wasting many years without a spouse because most people who were frum from birth would not accept him.)
4. If you don't know who you are, it's probably a lot more trouble than it's worth to find out. (p. 181): "It struck me as strange that this fetishisizing of my Jewishness felt no different when it was positive than when it came in the form of ignorance and anti-semitism. Everyone wanted to me by my Jewishness, while I struggled to defend myself outside of it."
But then, just 12 pages earlier (p. 169) "And I walked out of that shop with that star on my neck...... I was Jewish. My roots were right here." (Spain?!?!?!)
Once you have worked out a logically consistent notion of your identity, what good does it do you?
Can your relation to reality be changed based on the way that you define yourself?
Is the car note / house note/light bill due any later then it otherwise would be?
5. Depending on the way you count, the United States is either the first or second largest Jewish country in the world.
And yet, very few people have actually met a traditionally practicing Jew.
And in many of these places that Feldman went on her cross-country trip, people looked at her in the same way they would a unicorn.
6. Some people (like our author!!!!) just cannot/WILL NOT be happy anywhere.
--She didn't like her family because they were too cloying/Haredi, and so she had to run away from them.
--She left New York, and therefore passed over a bunch of Centrist Orthodox / non-Orthodox synagogues and communities.
--Then she traveled all across the United States (over 9 million square miles) and she couldn't find a particular place that she wanted to settle.
--She traveled all around Europe Beating On Old Graves and trying to reconstruct the life of a dead relative. (Somehow, she wanted to assert her identity as a Jew there when she could just as easily have stayed in New York or any of these other outlying Jewish communities and done it there equally well.)
--Then, she moved to Germany. (And with the Muslim / Arab infestation there, I don't think that that is necessarily the safest place for her)
--She passed over any number of other men in her treadmill of relationships order to find an alcoholic and a German who was descended from Nazis. (Keep in mind at the time this was written she was about 23 years old, and not bad looking.)
7. I had never known that there was a such thing as an "unhappy vagina" until the author introduced us to hers (p.209--it was also "irascible" and "mutinous.")
8. A desire to go to a naturopathic doctor is a sign that you need to visit a psychiatrist.
Verdict: This meandering, discursive book takes about 3.5-4 hours to read (every bit of 286 pages of a woman blathering on about "finding herself"), which is just enough to finish it over a Shabbat and get started on something else.
Really, the only thing that saves this book is that it doesn't take too much time. I don't think this will be worth a reread, and that's because it really wasn't worth a first read.
Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2020
This book was not as good as "Unorthodox."
If I had to think of a combination of words to describe this book, it would be: delayed bildungsroman / cross-country self discovery/ cross-continent trip.
The author retraces her grandmother's early life in Europe, from the time that she was ejected from Hungary and ended up working in Sweden before her move to the United States.
It's interesting that even though the Satmar community is a snapshot in time *as the Satmar imagined it* from a couple of hundred years ago in Hungary, their notions may have been..... idealized
There are so many places and types of people in themes, that the whole book takes on a phantasmagoric quality.
She might have one or two good turns of phrase in here, but nothing particularly memorable.
Ironically, she also references Another Insane Jewish Woman who wrote a book that was turned into a movie. ("Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen.)
What do I myself learn from this?
Many things:
1. As much as some converts might romanticize Satmar (I myself once did), living in that dynasty is not a good option for anybody who is a convert, or even born Jewish but returns to the faith later in life. (p.119)
2. Too much of anything is not good.
a. This girl could have survived just fine in a Centrist / Modern Orthodox context, but because she was so soured by her experiences with Satmar she went off the deep end.
b. (p.176) Some Orthodox view the laws of family purity (things that women must do while they are menstruating and how to come out of that state) as a tradition, and something that must be handled in a matter-of-fact way. Others go off the deep end and imagine that women are filthy and contaminated during that time.
The end result is there somebody like Feldman rebelled by having people paint her menstruating muff. (Yeesh!)
3. If you are on the journey to be free from an unwanted self, you will find many other people in the same situation on your journey. Among the more interesting of MANY who had rejected their last lives: (p.119) Feldman found a Southern Hick from a devoutly Christian family who converted to become Ultra-Orthodox and yet would not accept a Jewish wife who was Baal Teshuva. (And thereby wasting many years without a spouse because most people who were frum from birth would not accept him.)
4. If you don't know who you are, it's probably a lot more trouble than it's worth to find out. (p. 181): "It struck me as strange that this fetishisizing of my Jewishness felt no different when it was positive than when it came in the form of ignorance and anti-semitism. Everyone wanted to me by my Jewishness, while I struggled to defend myself outside of it."
But then, just 12 pages earlier (p. 169) "And I walked out of that shop with that star on my neck...... I was Jewish. My roots were right here." (Spain?!?!?!)
Once you have worked out a logically consistent notion of your identity, what good does it do you?
Can your relation to reality be changed based on the way that you define yourself?
Is the car note / house note/light bill due any later then it otherwise would be?
5. Depending on the way you count, the United States is either the first or second largest Jewish country in the world.
And yet, very few people have actually met a traditionally practicing Jew.
And in many of these places that Feldman went on her cross-country trip, people looked at her in the same way they would a unicorn.
6. Some people (like our author!!!!) just cannot/WILL NOT be happy anywhere.
--She didn't like her family because they were too cloying/Haredi, and so she had to run away from them.
--She left New York, and therefore passed over a bunch of Centrist Orthodox / non-Orthodox synagogues and communities.
--Then she traveled all across the United States (over 9 million square miles) and she couldn't find a particular place that she wanted to settle.
--She traveled all around Europe Beating On Old Graves and trying to reconstruct the life of a dead relative. (Somehow, she wanted to assert her identity as a Jew there when she could just as easily have stayed in New York or any of these other outlying Jewish communities and done it there equally well.)
--Then, she moved to Germany. (And with the Muslim / Arab infestation there, I don't think that that is necessarily the safest place for her)
--She passed over any number of other men in her treadmill of relationships order to find an alcoholic and a German who was descended from Nazis. (Keep in mind at the time this was written she was about 23 years old, and not bad looking.)
7. I had never known that there was a such thing as an "unhappy vagina" until the author introduced us to hers (p.209--it was also "irascible" and "mutinous.")
8. A desire to go to a naturopathic doctor is a sign that you need to visit a psychiatrist.
Verdict: This meandering, discursive book takes about 3.5-4 hours to read (every bit of 286 pages of a woman blathering on about "finding herself"), which is just enough to finish it over a Shabbat and get started on something else.
Really, the only thing that saves this book is that it doesn't take too much time. I don't think this will be worth a reread, and that's because it really wasn't worth a first read.
Ein beeindruckendes Buch über einen beeindruckenden Prozess...
The scene when Deborah walks into her grandmother's house in Hungary is such a strong one. I feel like I have seen that scene, with the same old woman, same poverty, same orchards, and same wire fences. My mother comes from a one-street village in North-East Hungary, 80 kms North from Nyíregyháza, Alsóregmec. Alsóregmec is one village away from the important Hasidic site in Sátoraljaújhely, once a bustling commercial center, now impoverished and deprived, and still beautiful. My mom is of Rusyn heritage, as most of the village is. The village is only one street, yet before WWII it spoke four languages. The majority spoke Rusyn – a Slavic language close to Ukrainian – and was Greek Catholic. The village's nobleman and a few migrant families spoke Hungarian and worshipped in local Roman Catholic churches. There was also a Romani-speaking dynasty and six Yiddish-speaking Jewish families, with a Rabbi. I looked at a couple of papers and a census from 1861, where all the houses are listed with its inhabitants, income, occupation, level of education and religion. It's super exciting for many reasons. In 1861 both pubs were led by Jewish women, families of various religions lived under one roof, and the cemeteries are located on the two sides of the same road, facing each other. A couple of the gravestones are still standing, and someone is cutting the grass diligently. My family switched languages with my Mother's generation – she still speaks Rusyn and Slovak, but didn't teach any to us – and I'm so so interested in finding out what happened to the diversity and the individuals of that one street. The thought that people like Deborah might also be haunted by these places and walk up to the old cemetery is something extraordinary to read about.
Interesting follow up to Unorthodox, but it was more stream of consciousness in structure than what I had imagined it to be. Definitely not a chronological memoir but had some powerful parts about her life after leaving her family and religious community.