A young, conservatively-dressed woman stares out a window apprehensively. She takes a gulp of water before silently uncovering an assortment of hidden items – cash in an envelope, a bag of toiletries, foreign cash hidden in a mannequin head. She wraps it all in a t-shirt before heading downstairs to a room full of her Hasidic Jewish relatives and neighbours.
It is clear early on what her plan is. We are implicated in her actions, from the moment that she starts packing to when she finally boards a plane. During those tense moments in between, she dodges family members, convincing them that nothing is out of the ordinary. The stakes and the tension are evident – what we are missing is the motivation. Unorthodox spends its four episodes examining this, cutting between Esty’s new liberated life in Berlin and her old life in Williamsburg’s ultra-religious Jewish community to understand the courage, insecurities, and desires of a woman driven to reject the only lifestyle she has ever known.
The Netflix series is based on the 2012 memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman. Creative licence is taken not only in the use of the character Esty to represent Feldman, but also in taking her story to Berlin where she finds new friends, explores the city’s vibrant culture, and cultivates her passion for music. Feldman didn’t actually move to Germany until 2014, two years after her book was published, but Unorthodox condenses her story and uses music as a means through which Esty is able to craft herself a new identity, while expressing the pain and sadness that has become inextricably bound to her.
In this role, Israeli actress Shira Haas excels. Her performance is at first contained within Esty’s passive body language and face that has become skilled at withholding her emotions, and yet over time she grows more expressive as she learns to embrace openness and honesty. For a long time she exists on that border, constantly conflicted with her learned behaviour and her natural instincts. In one scene after she gets married, her head is shaved as per Orthodox Jewish custom, and her expression bears a torturous split between ecstatic joy, fear, and confusion. Later, after moving to Berlin, she walks into the ocean and dispenses of her sheitel (the wig worn by married Jewish women), and for the first time we see her relax into a meditative state, embracing a baptism that brings liberation rather than subjugation.
Key to the story is Esty’s pregnancy, which largely drives her own search for freedom and her husband’s desire to bring her back into the folds of their community. To her, it represents both a terrifying deadline by which she must find stability, as well as a way forward to continue building a new life separated from her past. To her husband, Yanky, the unborn child is the fulfilment of his religion’s and family’s expectations. He too struggles with Williamsburg’s rigid patriarchal culture, insecure with his own inadequacy and uncertain of whether his actions are truly justified, and yet he is unable to summon the same courage that drove Esty to independence. He is perhaps the most tragic character of them all.
Unorthodox doesn’t delve very far into many specific positive attributes of belonging to a tight-knit community, siding firmly with the individuals who break free of it. Perhaps a little more nuance in these areas would have afforded viewers some empathy for those more conservative characters, though it is clear that the show is far more interested in the memoir as an acute character study than a broad cultural critique. It ultimately succeeds where it places its focus, that being on Esty’s two escapes – the first being from Williamsburg, the second being from her own repressive mindset. Constructing an entirely new identity from the scraps of confidence and strength she has held onto is a harrowing process, and in leaving certain plot threads incomplete Unorthodox does well to show that this evolution doesn’t end with the final episode. It is a journey that she may spend the rest of her life navigating.
