I don't know about you, but I am always suspicious of authors who refer to their own actions as scandalous. Feldman's story is intriguing, for sure. She was raised in a strict Hasidic home in Brooklyn by her grandparents, her mother having broken with the community and left when Deborah was a baby, and her father being mentally ill and apparently mentally retarded as well. Her grandparents are kind but distant, while the others in her family circle are openly critical and cruel, in Feldman's memory. Not optimal, clearly.
There are lots of interesting details about what it's like to grow up in a Hasidic family here: clothing and food, of course, as well as how to handle getting your period for the first time, how much education you're allowed to have, when and who you will marry, and how often you will have sex just for starters. And there's no question that Feldman experienced intense restrictions on her personal freedom. But the arc of this particular life seems just as much the story of a dysfunctional family as a Hasidic one. In the end I ended up feeling that I only had a small fraction of the story.
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