My mother gifted me a book with a note that said ‘this is the one you mentioned, I think.’ No, it was not, I had never heard of this book, but in an effort to offload a pile of heavy books to avoid transferring them into a crate, down the stairs, outside, across Anchorage, up some more stairs and onto a different shelf in a different house, I read it last week.

The story is one of an ex-Hasid who really just could not manage the oppressive lifestyle and ended up leaving his wife, kids and community to wear jeans and read Wikipedia… etc. His community’s rules were insane, and really not specific to Judaism; there are crazy people everywhere. I imagine this is a group of people, especially in the US, a lot of people don’t have much insight into. I had the luxury of growing up in the beautiful Catskills, which are conveniently mentioned throughout the book (see also: Borscht Belt).

I enjoyed the story and I felt immense sympathy for the author (I have a soft spot for people who leave, in a broad sense, having done it myself); I think secular and even religious Americans have a tough time separating the individual liberty we’re born with from the fact that ultimately these insular communities, and parents who raise their kids in them, choose differently. It’s always hard to leave something you’ve known in your formative years. While the extreme conservatism seems oppressive to me, people do leave, and other than fleecing the government for welfare, I’m not sure as communities these people are harming anyone collectively (side note, I also grew up in a town with a Bruderhof compound, so I have a high tolerance for strangely clothed people who think technology is mostly the devil).

I think it’d be easy for someone to be shocked and to assume the extreme culture of this Hasidic community is the culture of all of them; the author did mention this briefly but it probably could have been articulated a bit more. It was a good read anyway. Review from Chicago Tribune.