Talking Tuesday: Unorthodox

I had an endoscopy yesterday (routine, nothing new) and so spent the whole of yesterday afternoon parked on my bed with a DVD player and Netflix as my companions (and my knitting, natch).  I watched an older version of Persuasion with Sally Hawkins in the Anne Elliot role, and then turned to the Netflix limited series Unorthodox, based on the memoir of a woman who left a Satmar Hasidic community.  

 

I'm still thinking about the show today, and am now interested to read the book as well.  (A friend read it recently and enjoyed it).

The series follows a married 19-year-old Esther Shapiro (Esty for short) as she flees the confines of the extremely tight-knit and closed Satmar community in Williamsburg, NY for a new life in Berlin.  

The Satmars are unique in that they speak Yiddish as their first language, and emigrated from Hungary around the time of the second World War, fleeing the Nazi persecution.  Many of them lost family members to the Shoah.  The memory of that loss is very present in the community, and they see repopulating the Jewish people as one of their duties to God, hence the big families and intense focus on child-bearing and rearing.  They also view their separateness as their duty to God, since, in their view, assimilation to European society was what led to the Holocaust, which they see as God's punishment for abandoning their traditional ways of life.  The show is subtitled, as much of the dialogue is in Yiddish.

Shira Haas is unbelievably good as Esty.  She's tiny but has a powerful screen presence that keeps you riveted to your seat.  I love how the series wove together the story of her life before and after her marriage to Yacov, her young husband, with the new life she begins to build in Berlin.

The clever storytelling contrasts the two sides while managing to portray the Satmar community in a nuanced and largely sympathetic light.  (So often, these sorts of stories are grossly unbalanced).  I thought one of the great features of Esty's character is that she isn't a square peg in a round hole; she wants to live the life of an ultra-Orthodox wife and mother, but she has some dreams and marital troubles that get in the way of fully settling into it.  The costumes and sets are wonderful--so much detail and care went into it.  (There is a short "making of" show that follows the series that is an interesting look behind the scenes). 

I remember reading a memoir (or perhaps a novel) many years ago about a similar story, of a woman married in her late teens in an ultra-Orthodox community, who later left it for a secular milieu.  It was fascinating to me on a number of levels.  A late '90s arthouse film with Renee Zellweger called A Price Above Rubies explored similar themes to Unorthodox, and while I liked the Zellweger film very much, I liked Unorthodox even better.  

Shira Haas also appears in Shtisel, another Netflix show from Israel about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem.  I will probably give that a whirl at some point.  

Anyway, a bit of a blather for a Tuesday morning, but I recommend the show!