The workers nod to him as he passes, smiling even if he is late, and they pat me on the head with powdery, gloved hands. I feel important just knowing that he is important too. This is one of the weeks he takes me with him, and I find it exciting to be surrounded by all this hustle and know that my father is at the center of it, that these people must wait for him to arrive before business can go on as usual. The gentile laborers are already working when he gets there, preparing the dough, shaping it into rolls and loaves, and when my father walks through the vast warehouse flipping the switches, a humming and whirring sound starts up and builds momentum as we move through the cavernous rooms. My father easily qualifies for a job with such simple requirements. Every Jewish business must cease for the duration of the Shabbos, and the law requires that a Jew be the one to set things in motion again.
One of my father’s many odd jobs is turning the ovens on at Beigel’s kosher bakery when Shabbos is over. It’s not every week that Tatty takes me with him. I look down at my patent leather shoes tapping impatiently on the sidewalk and I bite my lip to stop the impulse. Above, the stars glow faintly in the night sky nearby, occasional cars whoosh ghostlike along the expressway. The streets are strangely empty and silent in this industrial section of Williamsburg. My father holds my hand as he fumbles with the keys to the warehouse. The fact that they were none of those things was something she had to put up with.īeing very small and very young, the only power Matilda had over anyone in her family was brainpower. Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honourable and intelligent. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Trapped as a teenager in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she barely knew, the tension between Deborah’s desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until she gave birth at nineteen and realized that, for the sake of herself and her son, she had to escape. It was stolen moments spent with the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott that helped her to imagine an alternative way of life. In this arresting memoir, Deborah Feldman reveals what life is like trapped within a religious tradition that values silence and suffering over individual freedoms.ĭeborah grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read.
The Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism is as mysterious as it is intriguing to outsiders. The instant New York Times bestselling memoir of a young Jewish woman’s escape from a religious sect, in the tradition of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel and Carolyn Jessop’s Escape.
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