Released in March, the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox tells the story of a young ḥasidic girl who runs away from her community, and her marriage, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn to start a new life in, of all places, Berlin. The show, based loosely on Deborah Feldman’s memoir of the same name, has received fawning reviews in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and much discussion in the Jewish press. A scholar of Jewish literature and herself a former Orthodox Jew, Naomi Seidman derides the “baselessly confident judgments” of those who praised Unorthodox for its supposed accuracy, and compares the show to some of its literary antecedents:
Modern Jewish literature began with memoirs [of leaving Orthodoxy], which right from the start performed a similar strip show for an enlightened audience. Solomon Maimon’s 1793 Autobiography contains both the earliest literary record of the nascent ḥasidic movement and a deep dive into the autobiographer’s years of unconsummated marital sex. (To be fair, he was still a young teenager.) A few decades later, Mordecai Aaron Günzburg’s Aviezer provided even more graphic detail not only about his impotence as a newlywed but also about his mother-in-law’s attempts to “cure” him with near-lethal concoctions.
It’s worth noting that Maimon “escaped” Poland for the same city Esty chose two-and-a-half centuries later and that he published his autobiography in German, not Hebrew. Even then, exotic Jews were a hot commodity.
Indeed, in the last episode’s climactic scene (spoiler ahead), the show’s protagonist seems to understand this when she wins her admission into a prestigious conservatory by singing a traditional Hebrew wedding hymn:
Maybe, just maybe, Esty . . . saw [that] the only way forward was through the one thing she had that everyone wanted, the story of the “insular community” she had left behind. Even the ḥasidic song was only what it was because it came with this story of a woman finally allowed to sing, a secret finally “scandalously” shared. Do you believe Esty is too naïve for such calculations? That’s only because she has to be, because only an Esty above calculation lets the secular viewer off the hook. Only an utterly naïve Esty—which is to say a truly authentic Esty—can obscure the nature of the queasy transaction that is the ex-Orthodox narrative.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/7564/telling-the-otd-tale-or-my-scandalous-rejection-of-unorthodox/