Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots

Deborah attends her first Simchas Torah festivities, where she and the other women of the Satmar community wait to watch the rabbi dance with the Torah. Although she is not interested in the event, she realizes that she “need[s] to be seen here. There isn’t a woman in Williamsburg who would pass up the chance to see the Satmar Rebbe’s annual dance” (120). She reveals that the main person she needs to be seen by is her high school peer, a popular girl named Miriam-Malka. As she leaves the event early, she considers how the rabbis in the community have become “celebrities of Hasidic culture,” with prestige and lavish lifestyles (124).

Deborah is now in high school and, although she enjoys the opportunities that come with her age, she still considers herself an outsider, both because she cannot speak Hebrew quickly enough for prayers and because she is excluded from playing games with her peers. As she looks out the school window onto the local library, she considers how she now has secretly moved almost completely to English, instead of Yiddish, as her main language. However, she resists the temptation to go into the library, less because it is forbidden and more because she is concerned about her precarious popularity if Miriam-Malka finds out.