Exodus, Revisited

Description

The definitive follow-up to Unorthodox (the basis for the award-winning Netflix series)—now updated with more than 50 percent new material—the unforgettable story of what happened in the years after Deborah Feldman left a religious sect in Williamsburg in order to forge her own path in the world.

In 2009, at the age of twenty-three, Deborah Feldman packed up her young son and their few possessions and walked away from her insular Hasidic roots. She was determined to find a better life for herself, away from the oppression and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And in Exodus, Revisited she delves into what happened next—taking the reader on a journey that starts with her beginning life anew as a single mother, a religious refugee, and an independent woman in search of a place and a community where she can belong. 

Originally published in 2014, Deborah has now revisited and significantly expanded her story, and the result is greater insight into her quest to discover herself and the true meaning of home. Travels that start with making her way in New York expand into an exploration of America and eventually lead to trips across Europe to retrace her grandmother’s life during the Holocaust, before she finds a landing place in the unlikeliest of cities. Exodus, Revisited is a deeply moving examination of the nature of memory and generational trauma, and of reconciliation with both yourself and the world. Praise for Exodus, Revisited

“Exodus, Revisited is intriguing and intellectually satisfying… raises hard questions that are important to many people.”—The Washington Post

“Riveting…. Not only is the book beautifully written, but it deals with some of the most profound human emotions: longing to know one’s origins; anger at injustice; and romantic and parental love…. A barebones description of the storyline doesn’t even begin to do justice to this magnificent piece of literature, which will stand the test of time…. [A] captivating memoir that will find a wide audience.”—Library Reads (starred)

“An inspiring story of commitment to oneself follows a woman seeking true “home” after fleeing a repressive religious sect.”—Shelf Awareness (starred) 

“A satisfying story of self-discovery.”—Kirkus

“The perfect follow-up, delving deeper into what inspired Feldman’s initial decision. Beyond her literal choice, Feldman also considers what it means to be Jewish and to have a homeland. It, like Unorthodox, is a beautifully-written meditation about the very essence of community.”—Bitch Magazine, “13 Books Feminists Should Read in August”

“Exodus, Revisited is a remarkable work that throws sharp light on prejudices within and outside the Jewish faith.”—Authorlink

Praise for Exodus

“In her first memoir, Unorthodox, Feldman made the courageous choice to cut off ties with her family and the Satmar community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. . . . Now a divorced woman in her twenties, Feldman chronicles the next phase of her life in her new book [Exodus]. . . . A quest of self-discovery . . . Some of the most powerful scenes come when Feldman retraces the path of her female ancestors in Hungary and confronts the anti-Semitism of contemporary Europe. . . . Feldman ultimately discovers that her rightful place is wherever she happens to be.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Feldman’s journey is undeniably and explicitly Jewish, but the aching need to find both a welcoming community and a sense of individuality is one that readers from all walks of life will be able to identify with. Those left unsatisfied with the abrupt ending to Unorthodox will enjoy the more hopeful conclusion to Feldman’s second book as well as her more mature and increasingly eloquent writing style.”—Booklist

“Overall, Exodus is a satisfying sequel to Unorthodox, which shows how Deborah Feldman went on to the next step after getting her own freedom from the bonds of a strictly insular society. . . . [A] chronicle of a continuing journey of self-discovery . . . There are many satisfying finds and revelations along the road, but there are also plenty of bumps, frustrations, disappointments, and pitfalls, which is expected when one spends their formative years being closed off from the rest of the outside world, and is confined to the boundaries of a Brooklyn neighborhood. . . . This book is more about the liberation of Deborah Feldman, and how she copes with this newfound sense of freedom and self-discovery, that can be a shock to some, or a declaration of independence for others.”—Stuart Nulman, Montreal Times

“One woman’s search to understand herself and her Jewish heritage. . . . Rich in details of Jewish life and the lives of her grandparents in the World War II era, [Feldman] sensitively portrays the inner struggles of accepting the pervasive feeling of survivor guilt and her own desires to understand the woman she was becoming. . . . An enthralling account of how one Orthodox Jewish woman turned her back on her religion and found genuineness and validity in her new life.”—Kirkus


Deborah Feldman was raised in the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her first memoir, Unorthodox, was a New York Times bestseller and the inspiration for the hit Netflix series. She lives in Berlin with her son.

            1

            Fragen

                         

Questions

Bubby, am I one hundred percent Jewish?

I am eight years old when I first dare to formulate the question I had been turning over in my mind for such a long time. I have been worrying that there might be a sinister reason for the way my thoughts tend toward doubt instead of faith. This way of life we lead, it does not come naturally to me, although I know it should. Because no one else suffers from this affliction, I wonder if genealogical contamination can explain the anomaly. I suspect I am regarded as tainted by my mother’s actions, so it follows that she too could have been tainted by someone else, by some mysterious, forgotten ancestor in her past. This would explain why I am the way I am, and not like the others.

Bubby, am I one hundred percent Jewish? I ask. Because I think that whether I am or am not is a matter that defines my destiny. Because I need to know if I have a hope of fitting in.

What a silly question! she exclaims in response. Of course you are Jewish, she assures me. Everybody in our community is. She dismisses my earnest fear with a laugh. But how can she be so certain?

Look at our world, she says. Look at how separate we live. How we have always lived. Jews don’t mix with others, and others don’t mix with us, so how do you think you could be anything less than one hundred percent?

I didn’t think to inquire then why so many people in our community have light eyes, pale skin, and fair hair. My grandmother herself had always spoken proudly of her blond children. Pale, non-stereotypically Jewish features were valuable commodities among us. They meant one would be able to pass. It was the gift of disguise that God granted, seemingly at random, although we were led to believe that he had a precise system in terms of granting privileges, so perhaps lack of blondness denoted a spiritual inferiority, or perhaps it was actually the other way around, depending on how you looked at things. When I met my husband for the first time at the age of seventeen, I focused mostly on his golden hair and what that would mean for my genetic legacy. I wondered if the gene was strong enough to guarantee me golden-haired children, children who would be safe when the world, trapped in its unalterable pattern of orbit, turned against them.

Now I understand that those Eastern European features and fair coloring align perfectly with the genetic studies that have long since confirmed that none of us are one hundred percent of anything. But these findings never made it into our midst, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t have mattered. In our community, we believed that as long as we were separate, we were pure by default.

This word, though, “pure”-it doesn’t come from our language, from our vocabulary. Our word for “pure” is tuhor, and its original meaning applies only to spiritual purity. It means to be pure of intention, to be clean of sin. In the Hasidic tradition, this kind of purity ostensibly outweighs the importance of strong ancestry. The obsession with pure bloodlines would come later, perhaps as a by-product of the ideology and laws that defined us by exclusion. One drop of Jewish blood was all it took, not for the first time in Hitler’s Germany, so those who could, fought to hide that drop and deny its existence, but out of instinctive protectiveness, those who could not retreated into a perverse pride. They invented a kind of purity for themselves. They created family trees that went back a thousand years to show their intact stems. They discriminated against Jews who couldn’t prove their undiluted status. Just like the Nazis, they too withdrew into the false and treacherous cocoon of consanguineous identity. Since they couldn’t be a part of that other world, the next best thing was to create a special club to be a member of instead. We are tuhor, they said, and they meant our souls of course, but this time they also meant our blood.

If my blood is Jewish, then my soul is as well. This is why I want to know. I want to understand how exactly Jewishness is imprinted on me. What exactly is it that I have inherited? How can I force the concept of it into something graspable? But really, the question underneath all questions is this: How can I make my Jewishness bearable to me?

Bubby says to me, quite absentmindedly, while sitting at the table running individual cabbage leaves under a fluorescent light bulb to check for worms, which would render them unkosher, that God put the other nations onto the planet for the sole purpose of hating and persecuting the Jewish people. It is this opposing force in the end that defines us, like how God created night and day, darkness and light. We need one to define the other. Our Jewishness exists precisely in the context of the attempts to eradicate it.

This statement from her-which is supposed to explain the world to me, which says that everything out there is terrifying and will always be so, because it is the way things have to be in order to justify our existence-it is so extreme that I feel then that she can’t possibly mean it; she’s just parroting what the rabbi says, what everyone in the community is always repeating. Because wouldn’t it be a grave overestimation of ourselves to imagine that all the evil in the world was created for our suffering? Isn’t that kind of arrogance a sin in itself, to regard one’s suffering as the holiest of holies, submitting to it like an orchestra to its conductor, sacrificing personal will for the sake of some ultimate directorial vision?

Even though in our community we do not interact with gentiles unless there are exceptional circumstances, in which contact is strictly regulated, I know that Bubby had real relationships with non-Jewish people before she joined the Satmar sect. She’s mentioned the neighbors in the small village in which her parents ran a store, how they came to turn their water into seltzer by using the pump in the front yard and brought little gifts in exchange; how they traded eggs and milk and meat for the wares that Bubby’s parents sold. She remembers being sent off to live with her wealthy grandmother in the city when she was too old to sleep in the common bedroom with her ten siblings, and those elegant women with the fancy French hats and fur stoles her grandmother invited over for tea, tortes, and cards. She traveled with her grandmother to spa towns in Europe, where they stayed in resort hotels and socialized with people from all over the continent. But all that was before the war, and marrying my grandfather and joining Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum’s new community with him meant that the only people she was supposed to come into contact with were ones just like us.

But then I think of how she picked up that cleaning lady a short while ago, as we chanced across that ritual that most housewives in Williamsburg participate in. Every morning, at the corner of Marcy and Division Avenues, the illegal immigrant women from Poland, or sometimes Lithuania, Slovakia, or Ukraine, line up for a black-market job at the place where the street forms a bridge over the expressway. Over the noise of honking horns and tires thumping over shoddy roads, the humiliating negotiations are conducted. A Hasidic housewife approaches, looks each woman over carefully as if to assess their physical condition, and beckons to the one deemed satisfactory with a crooked finger, indicating for her to step forward. An offer is made, usually low: five dollars an hour. If the woman is feeling bold that day, if the group waiting is small and it is still early and she thinks her chances are good, she will counter with eight, but probably concede at six. Then off they go, the two of them, the cleaning lady walking behind the housewife in a show of subservience, following her to the home where she will perform the lowliest of chores so the lady of the house will be spared such indignities.

It does not escape me even now that this theater of selection is a bizarre mirror of a collective memory. I see it as an unconsciously inherited vendetta playing itself out in miniature against the backdrop of a wire highway fence. The story of our community founders, of survivors who had once been “selected” by the gentiles for a future among the living, is perversely inverted each time a gentile cleaning woman is beckoned forward. A small satisfaction, but a palpable one nonetheless. And yet, my grandmother had never taken part in the performance until that day.

We had been accidentally walking by that street corner on the way home, carrying the bags of groceries my grandmother had acquired, and suddenly my grandmother stopped in her tracks, staring fixedly at a woman behind the group of others pushing forward and clamoring at the housewives, a woman with dull brown hair streaked with gray who was leaning back against the fence with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes looking down at the floor, waiting to be selected but perhaps too proud to ask for it. My grandmother seemed frozen as if in some reverie. I set my bags down on the ground, regarding the scene with curiosity. Bubby pointed her finger at the woman.

You, she said. The woman looked up.

Magyar vagy, Bubby said, in a way that sounded like a statement rather than a question.

The woman looked surprised; she nodded and stepped forward. She issued a gushing stream of Hungarian words, as if she had been holding them back for hours and now someone had given her permission to finally let them all out. She grasped Bubby’s sleeve, her body arched away from the group of others standing there; she bowed before my grandmother as if performing an obsequious curtsy, as if she was begging us to free her from the dread of waiting, the shame of being the last one standing there, the fear of having to go back home with no prospect of earnings for the day.

I don’t know how my grandmother knew that the woman was Hungarian. There were very seldom any Hungarian women on that street corner, which my grandmother cited as the reason she refused to hire a cleaning lady. She didn’t like the fact that she couldn’t communicate with the Polish women; she didn’t trust them in her home. Instead she did the grunt work herself, bent on her knees with a rag, a brush, and a wash bucket. But now there was a Hungarian, and indeed, someone from her very own region, not too much younger than herself. Did she recognize this person from her past? Or perhaps this woman was simply a representation to my grandmother of all those neighbors from her childhood, the ones who had counted as friends before the political temperature changed and they gleefully assumed the homes and lives wrested from others, all loyalties forgotten. Goyim were all like that, she had said. Waiting to benefit from your destruction. That’s how God made them. They are helpless to go against their inborn natures.

But still I could not decide if it was pity or the personal desire for vindication that drove Bubby to take that cleaning lady home with us. There seemed to be some kind of human connection between her and that woman, who walked at Bubby’s side and babbled in that secret language that I had only ever heard my grandparents speak, vibrating with joy at being chosen by someone who could understand her. Did Bubby actually feel loyal to someone who shared her origins, even though that person wasn’t Jewish? Or rather, did she feel a need to prove to her how the circumstances of the past had been upended, to show that woman everything she had achieved for herself here in America, with her four-story brownstone house, her chandeliers and carpets and floor-length lace curtains? To show her on which side of history the real triumph lay?

I watched as she brought the woman into the kitchen, gave her various cleaning tools, and set her up with the tasks she normally did herself or handed off to me, the daily routine of ironing, dusting, and polishing. I was perturbed by the fact that she did not ask the woman to wash the floor. That would have been obvious, I surmised: my grandmother watching as a gentile woman from her home region got down on her knees in this large and comfortable home that she now owned. I didn’t necessarily want to see this random woman degraded, but I did think that the experience could give my grandmother a kind of closure. I thought it might temper the bitterness of that old, lingering betrayal that she only ever sparsely referred to in my presence, but which I knew still burned in her deepest store of memories.

After a few hours of moderate to light housework, my grandmother called the woman to the kitchen table for a lunch break. To my surprise she received the woman at her table and sat down across from her like an equal. She even served her on real porcelain plates. I was confused, wondering if this was part of some clever and elaborate scheme or an attestation to the nobility of my grandmother’s character. Bubby had defrosted some stuffed cabbage, a traditional dish back home that had been established as a culinary staple in our community, and I watched the woman sit down eagerly to eat it, chatting excitedly in Hungarian the whole while. I caught bits and pieces; they were talking about variations in recipes, the way her mother had cooked those rolls. She complimented Bubby’s cooking effusively. I sensed she was trying to ingratiate herself; surely there was an incentive to do so, because of course it was the goal of all those cleaning women to get a regular posting, so they would not have to return to that street corner every day in hopes of being selected. A regular position meant security, perhaps even a raise, and referrals to other families if the work was good. Too many weeks spent waiting at the fence were a sure sign you were not a valuable choice; then your hourly wage went lower and lower until no offers came at all. It was the fear of all cleaning women; you could see it in the eyes of some of them in the late morning as you walked past the last stragglers, that panic as time went by and the crowd thinned, and police cars drove ominously past. I was irritated by what I suspected were this woman’s ulterior motives.

AU

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7700 × 5.2700 × 7.9300 in
Imprint	Plume
ISBN-13	09780593185261
ISBN-10	0593185269
Author	Deborah Feldman
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO037000, REL075000
Subjects	hasidic, americana, memoirs, Judaism, Cold War, translation, exodus, autobiographies, genealogy, religious books, women authors, memoir books, Haiti, travel gifts, jewish books, autobiography books, road trip essentials, biographies and memoirs, orthodox, arranged marriage, REL075000, jewish book, unorthodox, unorthodox netflix, twins, religion, baby, crime, spirituality, marriage, family, writing, Memoir, BIO037000, motherhood, Food, parenting, brooklyn, road trip, pregnancy, german, wedding, holocaust, jewish, how to, autobiography, travel writing