This said, Shulem Deen’s new memoir All Who Go Do Not Return, (Graywolf Press) chronicles the writer’s life in and eventual expulsion from an insular chassidic Skverer community, leaves the reader with few illusions about the challenges, but also the joys, of ultra-Orthodox and secular societies.įrom a liberal Jewish perspective, the environment depicted shows Jewish law taken to radical, sometimes cruel, extremes.Īnd yet, Deen, now 40 and a secular resident of hipster Brooklyn, writes of losing his faith, and ultimately his family, without demonizing those that came to shun him or romanticizing modern life. These books offer the alluring prospect of gaining an unfettered, if subjective, glimpse into a world ordinarily sealed off by stringent codes of propriety and ideology and, somewhat perversely, the chance to be absorbed without consequence into a society governed by zeal. This is evidenced by the popularity of memoirs like Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012) and Leah Vincent’s Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood (2014). There can be a certain voyeuristic pleasure in reading accounts of those who’ve left extremist religious sects.
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