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lubomira13 's review for:
Exodus: A Memoir
by Deborah Feldman
At first I’d like to point out that I haven’t read Unorthodox and therefore I don’t know whether the shortcomings of this book are perhaps made up for in the other one.
To be honest I was very intrigued by this book since I’m naturally drawn to the books about people who had similar experiences and have at some point decided to leave everything behind in search for their authenticity. This book partly managed to satisfy this expectation, but I must say my expectations were far greater since I watched Unorthodox on Netflix and I was a big fan. In this book Feldman shares random moments and stages of her life after leaving, however they are all over the place and at times she even weaves in a flashback from her childhood. She writes about visiting a shaman, moving to a house in New England countryside, travelling through Europe and tracing her grandmother’s life before emigrating to the US. She is trying to figure out relationships with men and her sexuality after traumatic experiences in her old community and she is also dealing with the Holocaust trauma of her ancestors that still leaves her restless for a sense of belonging.
Overall I feel as though this book was a bit on the surface and didn’t have a central theme or resolution. I wanted it to be philosophically deeper rather than just going from place to place (both physically and metaphorically), meeting with random (often) toxic men, blaming the new generation for not caring about the German history, but then doing a Nazi-Jewish role play with some German men. But in the end, it is the account of someone’s life and I’m not in the place to judge what they should or shouldn’t do with their life especially within a totally different religious and historical tradition.
To be honest I was very intrigued by this book since I’m naturally drawn to the books about people who had similar experiences and have at some point decided to leave everything behind in search for their authenticity. This book partly managed to satisfy this expectation, but I must say my expectations were far greater since I watched Unorthodox on Netflix and I was a big fan. In this book Feldman shares random moments and stages of her life after leaving, however they are all over the place and at times she even weaves in a flashback from her childhood. She writes about visiting a shaman, moving to a house in New England countryside, travelling through Europe and tracing her grandmother’s life before emigrating to the US. She is trying to figure out relationships with men and her sexuality after traumatic experiences in her old community and she is also dealing with the Holocaust trauma of her ancestors that still leaves her restless for a sense of belonging.
Overall I feel as though this book was a bit on the surface and didn’t have a central theme or resolution. I wanted it to be philosophically deeper rather than just going from place to place (both physically and metaphorically), meeting with random (often) toxic men, blaming the new generation for not caring about the German history, but then doing a Nazi-Jewish role play with some German men. But in the end, it is the account of someone’s life and I’m not in the place to judge what they should or shouldn’t do with their life especially within a totally different religious and historical tradition.