Author Deborah Feldman

At first impression Deborah Feldman’s new memoir,”Unorthodox,” reviewed feels like déjà vu all over again: Girl breaks away from her insular Hasidic sect after a youth of illicitly reading library books and sneaking into movie theaters. With subtitle like “The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” it’s tempting to consider the book as a sexier, 21st-century version of Pearl Abraham’s novel “The Romance Reader.”

But that would be a disservice to Feldman, 25, who has succeeded in writing a heart-rending sexual polemic.

“I’ve never felt more Jewish than I do now,” Feldman told me, as nibbled on a scone at a whimsical Manhattan café called Alice’s Teacup.“I love mainstream Judaism. I’m still acclimating, but I love the diversity in a Modern Orthodox society.”

Her early life among the Satmar Hasidim was still exceptionally difficult. Her mentally unstable father was eventually matched with a hapless young British woman who had apparently been lured with gifts and promises of financial security. The marriage self-destructed soon after Feldman was born.

Feldman’s mother left Hasidism and her father retreated further into mental illness. Her paternal grandparents — stern, sturdy and idiosyncratically loving to her — raised Feldman. But her questionable family history made her an outsider in a community where social status affects a girl’s chances for a suitable marriage partner.

Temporarily breaking out of her private chrysalis, Feldman would haunt public libraries on long bus rides away from Williamsburg, checking out novels by Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott. At home, she read in secret and stashed her bounty under her mattress.

She married at 17 to a boy she had only met twice. After her marriage she was baffled by her body’s rejection of sex itself. Between her husband’s sexual dysfunction and her own anxieties about her genitalia, it took the couple over a year to consummate their marriage. “In all that time I had no idea what my vagina looked like,” she said.

Cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, Feldman began a blog called Hasidic Feminist. She posted essays about her challenging sexual experiences, her troubled marriage, and the hardships of teenage motherhood. Within weeks the blog went viral and was inundated with comments by Hasidic women who were in similar straits. The blog also attracted the attention of an agent who helped Feldman write a book proposal.

She began taking literature classes at Sarah Lawrence College, but told her husband she was taking business classes. “Sarah Lawrence was where I eventually came out of my cocoon,” she told me, recalling how she’d take off her wig and long skirt, and change into jeans before classes.

“I took a theater class where we did a writing exercise in which we had to elaborate on the sentence: My vagina is beautiful. In effect, I wrote an extended Vagina Monologue.”

Shortly thereafter, Feldman left Hasidism for good with her young son, Yitzi, who was almost three at the time. “One of the first things I did when I left the community was to teach my [Yiddish-speaking] son to speak English.”

A kindergartner at a Modern Orthodox Jewish Day School in Manhattan, Yitzi spends most Shabbats with his father, who has also broken away from the Satmar community.

“Unorthodox” is distinctive for the way Feldman’s narrative emphasizes discovering her body, cultivating her own Jewish identity and initiating relationships with men on her own terms.

Still mastering the social learning curve, on our way out of Alice’s Teacup Feldman invited the handsome host at Alice’s Teachup to her book party. “I’m still figuring out the difference between flirting and being social,” she said.

This interview was originally pubished on the Sisterhood Blog of the Forward

When I first heard that an admissions officer at Claremont McKenna College in California inflated SAT scores for a better ranking, I thought: How did college admissions get to be such a boondoggle? Claremont McKenna is a fine school, ranked No. 9 on the list of liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News & World Report ratings. A top-10 spot on the magazine’s college lists is an admissions office’s equivalent of the Holy Grail. But as C-M’s president explained, a rogue admissions officer had been inflating SAT scores by 10 to 20 points since 2005 to upgrade the college’s percentile score.

The C-M story broke on the heels of the Vassar College admissions debacle. I wrote about the Vassar fiasco for The New York Times Motherlode Blog. My piece detailed the story of the 122 students who logged onto Vassar’s admission site (college admissions these days is pretty much paperless) and learned they were accepted. An hour later, citing a computer error, the college rescinded 76 of those acceptances – and the fireworks started.

The Vassar story makes a parent like me – who just finished the college admissions process with her oldest child – cringe. I can only imagine the crushing blow to those kids and their parents. When Vassar initially realized the mistake, the school was extremely insensitive. For starters, no one from the school was available until Monday to sort things out for those unfortunate applicants.

I was fascinated by the comments that were posted on my blog entry. A retired admissions director said that had this happened on her watch, her office would have stayed open the entire weekend to field the distress calls. Finally, a voice of reason and empathy.

A number of other readers suggested that Vassar make good on the original acceptances and let in the 76 kids it ultimately rejected. One comment even detailed how these kids should be tracked for all four years to determine if they were Vassar material after all. But an equally vocal group thought these kids should learn earlier rather than later that life is sometimes unfair. In the end, the school contacted the affected kids and offered to refund the application fee as well as help them with their college search. Too little, too late, in my view. I’m almost tempted to advocate for letting the kids in, for goodness sake.

The Vassar incident reinforced my feeling that the college admissions process is like a lottery. It also saps a kid’s strength and makes a pretty big dent in his self-esteem. How many times does a student hear that thousands of excellent candidates have very similar profiles? Color me naïve, but I believe that everyone is as unique as his or her DNA.

I got raked over the coals for a couple of points I made in the piece. The first was that this whole affair was traumatic for the students and their families. More than a few commenters stated that I was badly in need of some perspective. I appreciate that many worse things can happen to a person than to be mistakenly admitted and then declined by her dream college. A couple of presumptuous readers said that what happened to the 76 Vassar applicants was an upper middle-class problem.

I don’t see this as a class issue, but as a meritocratic one. I know it sounds Pollyannaish to believe that if you work hard enough, you’ll attain your goals. I also know there’s some random luck involved. For Woody Allen it’s even simpler: 90 percent of life is just about showing up.

But what really got me into trouble with the Times readers was disclosing that I had my daughter’s acceptance letter framed. The day after the formal congratulations arrived the old fashioned way, stamped and postmarked, I headed to the frame store. A couple of readers thought I was ridiculous. In fact, the framer asked me if I would have been so particular about the right mat if the letter had been from a state school. I’d like to think that I would have been.

A couple of people generously pointed out that I was simply rewarding my kid’s hard work by not stuffing the letter in a drawer. Others acknowledged that in the end, a college acceptance touches the parents, too. After all, we didn’t have the budget to hire a college coach, so Ken and I were the ones nagging our girl to finish her applications. Reminding a teenager to do anything isn’t pretty. There were a bunch of Sundays when it was all too much, and Ken and I avoided Anna for most of the day. There were also moments of clarity when we realized how ridiculous we were behaving.

As for the bit of the perspective some readers thought I lacked, here’s some from my dear, late father. He used to say you can get a great education anywhere.

Geometry gives me bad flashbacks. Abstract theorems and impossible proofs are still the stuff of nightmares. And yes, my teacher was a nun who rapped your knuckles with a ruler when you were on the edge of making a mistake. When it was Anna’s turn to have a go at the dreaded subject a couple of years ago, she and my husband bickered their way to solving a proof.

Why then did I commit soon after to sitting through at least one on-line tutorial on basic geometry? Field work or, to be more exact, virtual field work to check out the latest sensation in on-line education—Khan Academy. Could Khan Academy live up to its intense hype? You tell me. Four tutorials later I was answering SAT-level questions on angles. Correctly.

There are thousands of success stories like mine. A middle school student pegged as mediocre in math moved into an honors class a couple of months after working from early prototypes of Khan Academy’s videos. A grateful mother reported that her autistic son stumbled on one of the Academy’s videos and finally understood decimals and fractions. On-line, there are any number of exclamation-filled comments gleefully announcing, “I finally get this!!”

Khan Academy itself is a growing collection of 2200 videos—ten-minute lessons ranging from basic arithmetic to vector calculus. Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst, is the founder of the virtual academy. Khan began his excellent adventure in education 7 years ago when he remotely tutored a young cousin in algebra. Logistics soon made it difficult to schedule their lessons in real time. A natural problem solver, Khan posted his lessons on YouTube so his cousin could watch at her convenience.  He soon realized that his cousin preferred to see him on YouTube rather than interact with him in person. On YouTube she could pause the video or watch it multiple times until she understood the lesson. After a couple of postings the videos went viral and Khan Academy was launched.

Much of Khan’s success lies in the fact that each of his videos tightly focuses on one concept. He coolly narrates every step of a problem with simple illustrations he sketches on a simulated blackboard. By 2009 Khan quit his job to build an educational video library that further encompassed subjects such as United States history, finance and biology. Since its inception, the virtual Khan Academy has attracted over 50 million views and its videos have been translated into 7 languages.

What makes Sal Khan at just 35 qualified to teach so many diverse subjects? With a dual degree in mathematics and electrical engineering from MIT as well as an MBA from Harvard, he’s obviously a smart guy. Perhaps most importantly, Khan is a gifted educator willing to immerse himself in various disciplines. He’s the sole voice of all the Academy’s videos and his affability stems from his endless patience and clear teaching style. He’s also strategically self-deprecating, humanizing him as both a person and a teacher.

But Khan is also data driven and tracks how engaged viewers are during a lesson. For example, if he notices that a number of users fall off at the same point in a video, he’ll go back and tweak the content. He also captures information on students’ progress, demonstrating the success of self-paced instruction for a struggling pupil.

A couple of years ago Khan Academy debuted in the classroom in California.  Part of the experiment was to flip homework assignments and in-class time by assigning students to watch Khan Academy videos for homework. The actual nuts and bolts of problem solving took place the next day in the classroom. When Khan’s self-paced lessons replaced the “one-size-fits-all” educational model a couple of things happened: supportive peer groups evolved in the classroom and students who were “behind” caught up more quickly.

Khan doesn’t follow a particular curriculum. His only goal is to impart “a deep understanding” of a given subject. Deep understanding goes hand in hand with mastery. And mastery happens when a student has the opportunity to delve into a subject. Khan’s latest software can generate hundreds of exercises until a student solidly understands a concept. For me, it was figuring out the value of interior angles in a given shape. My basic understanding began with knowing that a circle is 360°–a fact that Khan repeated until it felt natural and intuitive.

Khan has thus far passed on taking venture capital money. His funding currently comes from the Gates Foundation and Google. “When I’m 80,” says Khan, “I want to feel that I helped give access to a world-class education to billions of students around the world.” To that end Khan Academy’s videos are free to anyone who can get an Internet connection.

This year Adam is taking geometry and Anna is tackling calculus. When they get testy over math homework, I send them to Khan Academy. Or better yet, I offer them more than moral support after viewing the relevant video myself.

I’m in a south Florida state of mind today. I’m craving some of that sunny warm weather up here in chilly New England, but more importantly, today is a Republican primary day down there. Although I’m as curious as the next person to see who will come out on top, there’s something deeper going on that intrigues me, and it has to do with my sister and brother Latinos. True, they comprise an influential voting bloc, but I think the Latinos in this country have done something even more profound—they’ve pierced the American consciousness like no other ethnic group that’s come to this country. Latinos have brought a bilingualism that doesn’t melt into the muddying swirl of the proverbial melting pot, but bubbles to the top. It’s a bilingualism that is uniquely American.

Governor Jeb Bush, who is spearheading the GOP’s Latino outreach, recently recognized that unique bilingualism in an op-ed in the Washington Post:

We must be able to assure new Americans the opportunity to succeed and contribute their talents. And when they come, as surely they will, we must welcome them, no matter whether they speak Spanish or Creole or Portuguese. When we hear foreign languages in the streets of America that is a validation of the Republican vision to create a place where people want to come and make their lives. Hispanics here speak or are learning English — not French, Chinese or Hindi. There is a lesson in that, and Republicans should be the ones to champion it.

Over a decade ago, when Anna was six-years old, we stayed in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale where the housekeeper left an envelope with a note thanking us in advance for a tip. Please for tip, I try for good, she wrote in a barely legible scrawl. I showed this to my young daughter who went wide-eyed as she deciphered the words. “A grown up wrote that?” she asked.

I showed her that note to her to develop empathy.  I showed her that note so that she’d never forget that America is a place where immigrants strive for a better life, and in doing so they grace our streets with their languages and their customs.

Governor Bush’s vision is not just a Republican one. And I’d like to think that he also believes in the housekeeper and her intentions of, I try for good.

In that spirit I offer a few caveats that I wrote to my children a couple of years ago when the war against immigrants, Latinos in particular, raged in Arizona.

Take note of this verse from the Torah: “You shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike: for I, ADONAI, am your God” (Lev. 24:17-22). Your Cuban refugee relatives wouldn’t have passed muster in Arizona. They didn’t have papers when they came to this country 50 years ago. Your Israelite ancestors and your brothers and sisters in the Holocaust were paperless too.

 People are neither illegal nor alien. And while I’m on the subject, they’re not illegitimate either.  

 It’s not a crime to be poor. It’s a crime to marginalize the poor.

Learn Spanish. It’s part of your heritage and it’s practical. Given that there are 20 countries to our south where Spanish is the national language. Feel anew the old commandment to Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

Revel in deep, meaningful translation as a way to engage with others. If you don’t believe me then turn to God, who happily listens to the Sh’ma, Judaism’s central tenet, in 70 languages. God is an equal-opportunity linguist.

The memory palace of Mira Bartók’s eponymous memoir is a place that she visualizes: “[T]wisted hallways . . . improbable stairs, like an Escher print, leading to doors that do not open, rooms too dark to see. This is how the memory of trauma works, how we glimpse forgotten years trapped inside the amygdala, that almond-shaped center of fear in our brain. Years are erased or condensed into hazy snapshots.’’

Bartók’s mother, Norma Herr, was a schizophrenic who felt both haunted and hunted. But Norma was also a musical prodigy whose concert career was abruptly halted after her first breakdown at the age of 19. By the time she divorced Paul Herr in 1963 she had two young daughters whom she shuttled between her parents’ home shadowed with memories of abuse to a dump of an apartment on the other side of Cleveland.

The ineffable functioning of memory and the brain itself is integral to Bartók’s complex story. She brilliantly teases out the emotional and physical fallout of her mother’s brain, damaged by illness. Within the memoir is also an autobiography of her own brain, traumatized in childhood and then injured in a car accident a decade ago. Cognitive function or lack thereof in her life is represented by “a palimpsest — a piece of parchment from which someone had rubbed off the words, leaving only a ghost image behind.’’

Bartók’s childhood is a continuous maelstrom powered by Norma’s violent rages and hallucinations. The will to survive the storm leads to the desperate moment when Bartók and her sister legally change their names as young adults so that their mother cannot track them down. Thus begins 17 years of homelessness for Norma and 17 years of wandering for Mira Bartók, who was born Myra Herr.

The Herr sisters’ name change is the foundation of the memoir — an action and reaction that calls to mind the Jewish superstition of changing a dying person’s name to hide her from the angel of death. For that was what Norma Herr was for her daughters — messenger of death who in one of their last encounters in 1990 chased Bartók with the jagged end of a bottle as her nearly hysterical sister Natalia, formerly Rachel, called the police for help.

Over the years Bartók lived in Italy, Israel, and Norway. Along the way she penned a series of children’s books on ancient and living cultures. She became an accomplished artist who taught herself the art of illumination. She remembers being transfixed by Queen Isabella’s Book of Hours — a devotional on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She also remembers wandering among ancient art, searching for the mother who forgot to come back for her.

From 1990 to 2007, Bartók set up post office boxes to both evade Norma and stay in touch with her. Their correspondence is a paradoxical record of a tragic yet fierce, loving relationship. Norma wrote to her daughter on the backs of greasy fast food bags about subjects as eclectic as art, religion, and geology. Her formidable intellect mingled with her insanity. She kept detailed notebooks on her peripatetic studies that at the brink of Norma’s death Bartók and her sister excavated from a storage locker.

Bartók eventually learns from a friend who maintains her post office box that her mother is dying. She and Natalia rush to Cleveland from their respective homes in Western Massachusetts and upstate New York to keep vigil by their mother’s bedside. During those intense three weeks Bartók utters the most wrenching yet bravest words in this memoir: “You know, I always loved you, Mommy.’’ The fact that Bartók can convey how and why she still loves her mother is perhaps the book’s greatest triumph.

A version of this review first appeared in a January 2011 of the Boston Globe

IN ITS ESSENCE, THE FEMINIST literary scholar Nancy K. Miller’s  memoir encompasses a genealogical quest, excavations into attics and makeshift archives, and attempts at sorting drawers. Miller, the author of more than a dozen books, is the distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. her industry culminates in two topsy-turvy trips to Kishinev, now the capital of Moldova, then her ancestral home in Russia. at its most brilliant, Miller’s book is a writer’s memoir – a book brimming with passion and intelligence – a book that makes the weary and often opaque process of writing about one’s family story appear more translucent. And yes, even buoyant. Miller achieves what every memoirist strives for. her story engages the reader because she uncovers an unvarnished truth by sifting, assembling and ordering, and then willingly reordering the facts of a life, of many lives. “despite my intense desire to know the truth, however partial or incomplete,” writes Miller, “I am forced to recognize that the process of finding the story continues to change the story.” And therein lies the fun of reading this book, which casts both writer and reader as avid detectives at credibly formulating Miller’s story.

The motivation for writing “What They Saved” took hold of Miller after the death of her father, Louis Kipnis, a first-generation American born in 1906 “close to the memory of the immigrant experience,” who excelled in school and became an attorney. Within the alternate vastness and claustrophobia of a long marriage, he was a constant presence in Miller’s life. But he effectively had no extended family – having lost touch with a brother who moved to Arizona in 1934 – and she spent her childhood under the “leafy” part of the maternal family tree. The old world, “gloomy” Kipnisses were represented by a solitary maternal grandmother who barely spoke English. Louis’s only sibling Sam found relief for his son Julian’s severe asthma out west. The move severed contact between the brothers, leaving a gaping hole in the Kipnis family story, as well as in Miller’s imagination. in light of her deep connection to her mother’s family, after her father died she saw no point in keeping the Kipnis name – a name for which Miller had no seemingly natural affinity.

But K for Kipnis is her  stalwart middle initial and the K stands ramrod straight, distinctive between her first and last names. Miller may be the bloom on the family tree, but Kipnis are the deep, buried roots. To find the Kipnisses, Miller sifts through familial and “urban archeology.” Her father’s high school report card, long-forgotten photographs stashed in drawers. “Little by little,” writes Miller, “I’m moving the contents of the drawer into a shareable story.” In Miller’s case, “little by little” translates into years of yearning and questing. It was easy to get mired in research and more research, to become distracted with travel from New York City to meet long-lost cousin Julian in Memphis. Miller’s father died when she was 48 years old. Twenty-two years later she writes that she “has something like a recognizable story line – a familiar immigrant’s tale of displacement and renewal [of which] I have already assembled the bits and pieces of a scattered archive and gathered them into a design of my own.” Miller’s idiosyncratic narrative – nonlinear yet distinctly chronological – pivots on the discoveries she makes as a memoirist.

She strews aphorisms throughout her story. Early in the book she informs her readers: “The hardest thing to find is what you think you are looking for.” Miller was initially confronted by the silence of ignorance cum mystery when it came to her father’s story. Yet she sensed that there were signposts from her father’s past that she had yet to recognize – pictures of austere relatives, her paternal grandfather’s correspondence to a friend in Yiddish about buying show tickets, that same grandfather’s correspondence to and from a Lower East Side synagogue. There were pictures of her mysterious uncle Sam Kipnis snapped in the Arizona desert. Miller learns that he was the elected mayor of a small district of Phoenix. But how will she connect the dots in this story? Her stepson, a scientist, offers a strangely apt word to bridge the disconnect – splines. “Splines,” explains Miller, “fill in the blanks between isolated points, construct a complete object from limited information.” The notion of splines leads Miller to another insight about writing memoir: “You don’t necessarily know what it is you’ll want to know.” That’s why Miller finally unearthed information about Kishinev. Just the sound of the word propelled Miller from the “glamorous vagueness of ancestral myth – Russia – and into the banal realities of historical factness, the concreteness of geographical DNA.” Emerging information about Kishinev and its pogroms makes a trip there imperative – a trip underscored by her observation: “In the matter of quest, location means everything.”

In Kishinev, Miller is an Amerikanka looking for her babushka. Her translator asks anyone she can collar if he recognizes the pictures that Miller brandishes of her grandparents. While not exactly paralleling Jonathan Safran Foer’s satiric novel, “Everything is Illuminated,” the overall bumbling feel of the trip calls up some of the mishaps in the novel. In Miller’s case there are missed ferries, strange museum guides and a reckless driver who speaks no English. In fact, Miller goes back to Kishinev a second time to attempt to excavate what lies “‘under the story,’ as my yoga teacher likes to say about meditation. Maybe that should be a term: understory – not ‘backstory,’ with its overtones of Hollywood gossip and glamor. The understory. That would suit these characters in my family, who are something like understudies – practicing for parts that they never quite get to play on stage, or not for long.”

The understory is very much the bailiwick of a memoirist. One could say that there is an understory in every photograph, every letter, every business contract that Miller comes across. She has also, in essence, created her own geniza – a repository of her family’s historical and holy artifacts. What is a geniza but the accumulation of life’s holy and ordinary detritus? A sacred heap of stuff, which brings the reader to Miller’s next assertion: “The truth of the past comes in pieces, but not all of the pieces fit together.” Miller finds far-flung cousins in Canada who expand the Kipnis story, but don’t provide a through line. Uncle Sam worked for gangsters in New York. When he moved to Arizona he owned a bar, probably jointly with some of those old mobsters. Why hadn’t Lou Kipnis bothered to visit his brother when he made business trips out west? Did Sam and his son Julian really serve in the same Air Force unit during World War II ? Sam told himself this story until he believed it so thoroughly that he convinced a local reporter to write about him.

Self-conflation – the struggle to establish a personal multiculturalism (which is not the same as its notorious cousin self-aggrandizement) may get in the way of constructing a coherent family story. But the helter-skelter way that a life plays out is key to understanding the functioning of memory. “In retrieving the past, there is no straight line.” Miller comes up with a neater, more selfcontained mathematical descriptor of mucking in the past – asymptotic. An asymptote is a line that a curve perpetually approaches. But in the end the asymptote and the curve never meet, they never touch. There are objects and more objects retrieved from dusty archives and lined drawers that never quite touch. How do ticket stubs, wedding invitations, birthday cards and old prescriptions convey a life, define an identity? I think Nancy K. Miller continuously poses those questions when she notes: “ …the past continues to reshape our ideas of who we are in the present.” This marvelous memoir pinpoints the elusive phenomenon whereby memories get through to our consciousness and how they ultimately influence our lives. Capturing moments of transformation is what happens over and over in an adept memoir like “What They Saved.” Miller’s intent is not to establish a definitive family history – but to scatter the incidents and events that she unearths the way memory itself functions.

A version of this review was published in the Jerusalem Report