From sheitel to shellfish

Full of juicy details about the Satmar community, this memoir just manages to stay on the right side of tasteful.

By NECHAMA VEEDER
Unorthodox 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Unorthodox 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
With the backlash against gender segregation in the ultra-Orthodox community here making regular headlines, it is fascinating to note that there are Diaspora communities that lead no less stringent lifestyles.
In a highly publicized – many would say sensationalized – memoir, Deborah Feldman, the formerly anonymous blogger Hasidic Feminist, describes her experiences in the Satmar community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section, the loneliness and disconnect she felt as a young mother and even younger wife in Kiryas Joel, and her journey to the secular world.
She introduces us to a world where young girls are sent home from school for wearing only one shirt, lest the female form be discerned beneath it, and girls of 17 are married off after meeting their future husbands no more than two or three times; the next day their hair is shaved so no stray strand escapes their head coverings.
The Satmar community – named for Satu Mare, the Romanian-Hungarian border city from which the first Satmar rebbe hailed – was established in America after the Holocaust. The rebbe’s followers see it as their personal duty to erase the Holocaust’s effects by procreating as prolifically as possible.
“With time it became clear to me that all of my children and grandchildren had to be born and it is my responsibility to make sure they grow up to be good Jews, ehrliche Yidden, to give meaning to my survival,” Feldman’s Zeidy tells her.
Her Bubby puts it more succinctly: “I survived only so that you could be born.”
SATMAR IS one of the most extreme hassidic sects, fiercely anti-Zionist and mandating increasing strictures on women’s modesty, as well as clear class divisions – talmudic scholars at the top, and near-outsiders like Feldman near the bottom.
With an absentee mother and a mentally disabled father, Feldman feels doomed from the start. Living with her Bubby and Zeidy, she has no illustrious parentage to boost her social life and secure a distinguished groom.
She is unmoved by the elementary-school curriculum that mostly focuses on Yiddish classes and Torah studies (also in Yiddish). The bright spot of her education is English; having smuggled library books from an early age, she outshines classmates who are described as barely literate.
Her fascination with English continues throughout high school, as she reads anything she can get her hands on and excels in class. Her command of the language will later turn out to be her ticket to freedom, allowing her to enroll in writing classes at Sarah Lawrence College. When she finally leaves her community behind, she is armed with a book deal.
When she finishes high school after three years – though like all Satmar members, without a diploma – she earns some limited freedom in the form of a job teaching sixth grade.
It is during this time that, at 17, she is matched up with Eli, an unremarkable but handsome marriage partner. As a married woman (well, teenager), she hopes, she will command respect; she will be able to display her books openly and own all the clothes, linens and dishes she covets.
But marriage turns out to be more nightmare than dream.
When Eli tells his father the day after the wedding that they were unable to consummate the marriage, their private lives become the business of both their families, to Feldman’s crushing humiliation.
Growing increasingly disillusioned, she leaves with their three-year-old son at 23.
Her decision is impulsive, but she has slowly prepared herself for the outside world – gaining her driver’s license, enrolling in college and road-testing her uncovered hair and a pair of jeans she hides under her mattress.
BOOKS PLAY a big part in her life, from her discovery of the pre-Victorian obsession with marriage in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to her identification with the protagonist of Anne of Green Gables, whose sparkling personality overcomes the disadvantage of her lack of family.
These literary discoveries are all the more sweet because they are in English, a language her Zeidy calls “impure.”
Although Feldman ultimately shuns the Satmar lifestyle, the book is fascinating for its insights into the community. We learn about the different head-covering customs among married women (such as the severe “shpitzel,” a turban that often comes with a synthetic hairpiece), and about the division between the “Aroinies,” followers of the rebbe’s eldest son, and the “Zollies,” those who believe the rabbi’s third son, Zalman Leib, is the successor of the Satmar dynasty.
For the author, these distinctions are obvious; more egregious were the day-to-day indignities that women suffered.
To unlock the secret of the books her Zeidy spends so many hours studying, she buys a Talmud by pretending it is for a male cousin, as “Zeidy won’t let me read the Hebrew books he keeps locked in his closet: they are only for men, he says; girls belong in the kitchen.”
She cringes at the indoctrination of her teachers, who lecture her about Rabbi Akiva’s wife Rachel, who once pinned her skirt to her calves so that it wouldn’t fly up in the wind.
“Is that really what God wanted of Rachel?” she asks. “For her to mutilate herself so that no one would catch a glimpse of her knees?” Equally distressing to her is her Bubby’s subservience. In one episode, she describes how her schizophrenic cousin Baruch was locked in a room in her grandparents’ house to avoid the shame of being institutionalized.
One night he escaped, smashing everything in sight and defecating on the carpet, which Bubby had to clean up.
Feldman’s heart “ached for Bubby, who had never thought it was a good idea to keep Baruch locked up downstairs but had acquiesced like she did every time Zeidy made a unilateral decision.”
SUCH INDIGNITIES will no doubt resonate with readers, but it is the scandalous – some are saying hyped-up – instances of cover-ups and sexual repression in the community that are gaining the most attention.
An episode of sexual abuse by a cousin that was hushed up by her aunt received much play in a recent New York Post interview with Feldman.
Her sad account of marital difficulties caused by a psychological barrier to penetration has elicited sympathy in the blogosphere, with many young brides and former hassidim relating to her tale.
A Jewish Week article, however, claims that the most scandalous anecdote related in the book is, in fact, untrue. In her memoir, Feldman recounts that a father castrated his son and slit his throat after catching him masturbating. The victim was allegedly buried within half an hour, and no death certificate was issued.
The Jewish Week article maintains that the coroner ruled the death of the victim – who was mentally ill, and 20, not 13 as Feldman wrote in 2008 on her Hasidic Feminist blog – a suicide. Her defenders point to the improbability of the cause of death, which the coroner described as “partial decapitation.”
Recent years have seen a spate of memoirs by Orthodox writers who have gone “off the derech,” as those on the inside call becoming secular. But Feldman’s book, written when she was just 24 and still finding her way, stands on its own. It is not an angry rant like Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament, nor a tawdry exposé like Reva Mann’s The Rabbi’s Daughter. It is only sexually explicit when it needs to be, articulating the problems that are typical of a sheltered upbringing and that were the cause of her marital unhappiness.
As she left her old life behind at 23, Feldman’s memories are fresh and vividly described. But one feels that the book would have benefited from some distance.
Experiences she considers pivotal now might take on less significance with the wisdom of time.
And one wonders if she will wish she’d portrayed her family differently, knowing that exposing their secrets would rule out any future rapprochement.
But for now, she is content discovering the wonders of a world she has coveted so long. She is raising her son as she chooses.
She has a “recent penchant for all things pork and shellfish,” and wears clothes that would make her Bubby and Zeidy choke on their kreplach. Yet perhaps it is the writing of this book, as an educated woman, in English, that is the final break with the Satmar community. Not only has she left its boundaries, she has empowered herself to thrive beyond them.