Reviews - Exodus: A Memoir

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I read this right after reading Feldman's previous memoir, Unorthodox because I was eager to see if some of the questions left unanswered in that book were answered in this one. I gave Unorthodox 4 stars, which was generous -- it's probably really only worth 3, but I'm easier on memoirs because you can't really argue with someone's experience of their own life. I was hoping that some issues would be explored in greater depth, or we would at least see how Ms. Feldman was able to establish her life after leaving her community. Unfortunately, this book does not do that. Instead, it is rambling and disjointed, and doesn't give much insight at all into the author's life. A large segment of the book is devoted to her traveling to Hungary to see where her grandmother lived, but this seems rather pointless to me as a reader -- she has no great insight or revelation. Nothing shocking is discovered. I'm sure it was meaningful to her as a person, but I don't know why it was included in the memoir. Likewise, most of her travels within the U.S. don't enlighten us much and aren't even particularly interesting. I did, however, keep wondering just where her son was while she did all this traveling -- was he with his father? If so, how did that work? The Hassidim are generally not willing to grant religious divorces, and certainly not willing to relinquish custody of a child, so I was always left wondering just how this worked -- how did she convince her ex-husband and his family and community to allow her to take her son, and how did it work if he was constantly going back to the community?

Also, at the end of the last book, she indicates that she traveled to many places, but ultimately, Manhattan felt like home, and that was where she lived. In this book, Manhattan is too crowded and she moves someplace in remote New England (although she indicates that she jaunts off to NYC in short periods of time, so I don't know where, exactly, she lived -- it couldn't have been where I had guessed if NYC was close enough to go in for the evening). But, I know from her web page that she now lives in Berlin, so I don't know what happened to the angst regarding urban life and why rural New England wasn't the answer, after all. And again, how is it that she was able to leave not just Brooklyn, but the United States with her son? I also wonder if she kept up the relationship with the German man she writes about in this book -- it is not at all clear.

The author has clearly been traumatized by the events of her childhood, most especially the abandonment by her mother and the inability of her father to have any sort of meaningful relationship with her. Knowing that, though, doesn't make it any easier to read about her life as she navigates it while still trying to deal with her trauma.