Tragedies

Rather than write my own blog, I give the space to a brave Israeli who expresses both his outrage and courage in the face of the recent terrorist attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, an attack that killed seven Israelis and wounded 36 others.  

By Ami Baram*: 

Dear Friends,
             Can you imagine getting onto a plane , flying to a beautiful country where the people are nice and friendly , thinking that you are on your way to a relaxing vacation , go through security , which has become the norm around the globe, throwing out your water bottle that you forgot in your bag before passing security and trying to drink the last drops of it at the last second and eventually feeling safe.
            You arrive at your destination in one of Europe’s promising and growing countries , you are with friends that have been with you since childhood, school and army and have seen tragedy all your lives , together. You are with your loved ones, the ones you want to spend the rest of your lives with , holding each other , watching your children grow and have families of their own.
            Then it happens.
            Reality sets in.
            A deviate of mankind, with the guidance of evil itself, feels he has to end the lives of all of those people , who were picked because of who they are , and from where they come. He feels he has to do something , because he believes that he will be stopping so called injustices , which he truly believes Israel commits on a daily basis or he just believes he is on a true mission to end Israel????
            By killing and mutilating Israeli citizens on vacation he surely will bring down the entire Israeli Nation, he believes.!!
            He believes that it will produce fear in our hearts , that we will not wander the world , looking for time off from the troubles within Israel, that we will fear getting onto a plane , visiting cities around the world, because they , the deviates , will be waiting for us and when possible kill us.
            Well , I have one message to his mentors, since he is no longer alive.
            You do not scare us, we can endure pain and sorrow forever. We, with our friends (‘we’) who are on the right side of mankind will persevere. We will look you in the eye and hold you accountable for the atrocities that you have caused , and are planning to cause. We will be there when you show up , armed and ready to fight and defeat you. We will also not wait for you to come to us , we will learn of your plans and stop you before you even make your first move.
            True, you will succeed in some of your acts of terror, and we will lose loved ones as we have in the past, but for those loved ones , we will hunt you down and it will be you who will have fear in your hearts , it will be you who will fear to step out of your home , knowing that at any given time , your end will come.
            I wish that all of us would be able to wander the world freely, with no worries, being able to get on a plane with no need for security, to go to a movie and not be worried that someone will start shooting at us, just to be.
            But reality is different, and we all need to acknowledge that these times are difficult ones, which will bring us together because only together can we defeat the deviates who try to harm us and our families.
            I received a call from a father of a young girl player who will be traveling soon for tournaments and he was concerned about the security after the terrorist attack in Bulgaria. I thought to myself , before answering how do I calm his nerves, what do I say that will relieve him of this fear for his daughters life.
            I asked him, if there was an attack in Israel how many days would you keep your daughter at home. He bravely said , I wouldn't! He realized why I asked that question and said , she will be going , I just want to know that we are aware of the dangers, and I said we are. End of conversation.
            My friends, you all hang in there, trust yourselves, believe in yourselves and remember we are in this together , so we are stronger than any bomb , shooter or evil that comes our way.
            Your friend
            Ami
           
* Chicago-born, Israeli attorney, Ami Baram, is a son of Holocaust survivors. A Major [Ret.] in the Israeli Police Force and a star athlete, Ami represented Israel at international sports competitions as a champion Javelin thrower and now holds key positions in both domestic and international sports and security leadership.  

The Sole of a Shopper

       
           This week I shopped for three “must-have”s: a car, a computer, and a pair of sneakers.
            Researching a new car was simple. Searching various websites by the simple selection of number of doors and the color gave me a preliminary list. Adding the budget—and out popped a few cars. I weeded out those that failed to meet my Number One request that the passenger seat is endowed with every single adjustment as the driver’s. This is a deal breaker for me, since when my husband drives me around, I am relegated to the passenger seat. But it’s my car, where it is one place where I can choose not to be considered a second-class citizen.
            Only two cars matched my specification. At the first showroom, I sniffed the inside of the car for that delicious leather aroma, took out the car for a spin, signed a few papers, and became the official owner.
            Finding a notebook computer was a more demanding task, requiring me to refresh my terminology of as RAM and Megahertz, and understand what the number of pixels on my screen meant. I got the hang of it as I perused through several catalogues and sorted the models that matched my budget. Then I called online companies and got my deal—sight unseen, a free case included. The computer arrived in a box the next afternoon.
            Buying sneakers, though, demoted me to the class of dimwits. “Do you cross-train?” the salesman standing in front of a wall of sneakers asked me, and in the same breath produced a shoe whose top was crisscrossed by a straining pink mesh that reminded me of my late grandmother’s corset. 
            Cross-train. I mulled over the new term until I remembered someone at the gym where I take Pilates (barefoot) mentioning a cross-training machine. “No,” I shook my head. “But I’m size eight, medium.” Surely he’d appreciate an easy-to-fit customer.
            Unimpressed by my helpfulness, he pulled down another pair. “Do you need the sneakers for jogging? Walking on the treadmill?” He pointed at an air-bubble, like that in a plumb-ruler, set in the back of the heel.
            I thought of my nature walks—in the woods, by rivulets and on rocky inclines. How would I keep the air bubble centered? And if I did, how would I see it? “I just need sneakers.” I pointed to a white-and-blue pair that looked benign enough. “What about these?”
            “Do you do aerobics or jazz?”
                        “Yes, I dance.”
                        He drew my attention to the fact that the sole of the sneaker was broader than the top part, which would add balance if I did aerobics.
                        “But I won’t be able to pivot in a jazz routine.”
                        For that, he showed me a split-bottom, where the heel and toe parts were not connected. I could see all the large stones getting caught in the space should I walked on the graveled walkway, let alone in nature.
            He turned to a Lucite display, where, like a trophy, stood a sneaker whose 2-inch bottom seemed to have been made from stalagmites and stalactites meeting halfway, leaving miniature caves. “Shock absorbers,” he said.
            The caves seemed like a perfect refuge for small cockroaches or little snakes. “Too much sneaker,” I said.
            He turned away from the display in obvious dismissal of that option for me; I was undeserving of that special marvel of human engineering.
            Trying to save face I offered, “I have a high arch.”
            His eyes searched the ceiling and his brows crinkled as he considered that new obstacle. Then his gaze traveled back to the selection on the wall, and he pulled down a sneaker. He flexed it lengthwise and widthwise, explaining the technology involved in designing an arch support. I was grateful that at the car showroom no one had suggested I crawl underneath the axel for an engineering lesson.
            The salesman compared this Eighth-Wonder of shoe engineered against a more cushioned shoe, which would provide a better spring.
            If I were jumping hoops, that is. In my compassion toward the salesman, I scoured my brain to give him something to work with. “I’m planning to ride a bike.” Well, I used to, and they say I’d never forget.
            He handed me a single shoe with Day-Glo strips at the back and sides. Like a chef waiting to hear praise of his Banana Flambée, he watched me with eager eyes. Not knowing what to do with the shoe balanced in my hand—sniffing it as I did in the car seemed awkward—I weighed it in my palm. “It’s heavy,” I said.
            He pointed at the strips. “Reflectors. Good for riding after dusk.”
            “I need a pair that would be nothing special, you know, for everything.”
            It was no use. I would have to throw my own lot with good faith. I yanked a shoe off the wall. It had no mesh, or bubbles, or caves, or glow-in-the-dark features. The heel did not extend out. The gentle-looking sole would allow some toe-pointing. The stitching was a bit fancy, and purple-and-yellow combination was not my favorite color scheme, but this simple Neanderthal model, from times before shoe technology had become a university degree, seemed right. “What about these? How much?”
            “A hundred and twenty dollars.”
                       
            I left the store sneakerless. At least I have a car and a computer.
           
            ###
           
              Author Talia Carner's next novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, (HarperCollins, 2011.) Please check my website at www.TaliaCarner.comhttp://www.TaliaCarner.com

My mother, Reviva Yoffe (Lederberg), 1924-2012

Rivka. Riva. Reviva.
            Three versions of her name, each reflecting the progress my mother made in her rich, events-filled, and creative life. She never stood still; there was always a development to the next stage. 
            You’ve all known my mother as an artist whose tiny brushes created magnificent concerts of colors, shapes, emotions and movements in paintings that often jumped at the viewer with stories crying to be told. She’s sold literary thousands of paintings in her life. She remembered each one of them as one remembers each child.
            But most people may not know that my mother’s life’s adventures began when, right out of high school, she was recruited into the first graduating class of Wingate Institute! There, she was trained not only as a gym teacher, but also as a Haganah commander. The latter included Kapap—krav panim el panim—and crossing a zip line over a wadi. Years later, when my family was a member of the Country Club, she still performed headstands on a high beam.
            When economic necessity and fashion conjoint in the 1950s, she wove hundreds of straw handbags and hats in one summer, making them the latest fashion in Tel-Aviv—the first manifestation of her artistic talent and incredible innate marketing savvy.

            At her time, the only acceptable office position for a woman was to be a secretary. Yet her efficiency and cut-to-the-chase approach vaulted her to become the de facto manager of a branch of Shell Oil and Appliances. Several years later, with entrepreneurial spirit, she left her job to open a collection agency for this same former employer. The Tel-Aviv courthouse became my mother’s oyster. She knew her way around dark, long corridors and dusty filerooms. Everyone, from judges to file clerks, was her friend. In the evenings, she handed papers for my attorney father to sign. 
            Some time in between those early careers, my mother and I went through a horrific trauma that sealed our bond and brought out my mother’s hidden talent as a detective: During her divorce from my biological father, he kidnapped me and my sister Odelia and hid us for a very long time. With resourcefulness and courage my mother scouted Israel from north to south, checking every second-grade classroom—until she found me. For the rest of her life my mother pursued detective work to face adversity. Street-smart, she was unafraid to take on the president of a bank who had made a mistake but refused to correct it, or to challenge the DMV for a speeding ticket was wrongfully attributed to my sister.
            She was strong and courageous, and was undeterred by either closed doors or bureaucracy or high fences hiding the leaves of a mulberry tree that provided nourishment to her growing colony of silk worms.
            When most Tel-Aviv apartments were painted beige or drab gray, my mother had our walls in Rothschild Blvd. painted in  bright red, pulsating blue, and lemon yellow.
            She was vain and sensuous when she danced around the house wearing wide, billowing skirts. She loved flowers, especially tulips, and in my youth took me on long nature walks to admire them, never forgetting the crickets or the frogs. A good story-teller, over a lifetime she regaled me with stories of her youth until our last days and hours together.
            My mother was unlike any woman I knew, her presence strong and ever-lasting. Luckily, what will remain for future generations are her many paintings to testify to the vibrant, resourceful, intelligent, engaging, and life-affirming woman that she had been.
             
            I was blessed to be the daughter of a multi-talented and energetic Riva.

Talia
       

Reviva Yoffe, 2002 

    
           

MEMORIAL DAY IN TEL-AVIV

On a highway, Israelis stop their cars and stand next to them in honor of the fallen soldiers in its many wars for survival

          Ernest Hemingway said that each person is a product of the landscape of both his native land and his adoptive land.
          I feel the power of the statement as I glance at the car-clock and register that it is almost eleven o'clock. I squeeze my rented Mazda into a parking space in front of a beauty parlor when the melancholic music playing on the national radio since yesterday’s evening is abruptly cut. A siren pierces the Tel-Aviv skies. A long, sharp, straight B Minor shrill joins the echo of dozens of others, and together they weave a thick, pulsating blanket that holds the city in its demanding urgency.
          The signal for the moment of silence in honor of the men and women killed in the battles of Israel marks Memorial Day.
          My car is still lopsided against the sidewalk like a novocained grin. I fling the door open and jump out and stand at attention. As if in a surreal Medieval fable, I am reminded of the sleep curse cast upon a kingdom, where the citizens all fall asleep at the same instant, wherever they are: at the cooking pot, on the milking bench, by the water well.
          Across the street in the schoolyard, a group of soccer players is frozen into stillness as the ball continues its slow roll. The boys' expressions are solemn. No snickering, no sneak elbowing. Up and down the street, cars have stopped. Their owners are standing still outside the open doors. Through the beauty shop window I see the hairdresser standing erect. Two customers have ejected themselves from the bubbles of hair dryers and are glued to the spots where their feet have landed.
          Strangers to one another, we stand united by the images floating on the projection screens of our minds. We see fresh faces, taut bodies, eager eyes, optimistic smiles--men who are no longer with us. Carved in time, the dead remain forever young.
          I lower my head and allow a wave of sorrow for the soldiers I once knew to wash over me. Amiram, my high school classmate, with a mischievous grin, was fearless. The first to go, he was my first devastating loss, and got more tears than I had imagined my eyes could store. Asher will forever remain the tall, blond, and freckled fifteen-year-old I was in love with, and who, across the classroom, shyly let me know that he shared those feelings. The last time I bumped into him, we were both riding the city bus in military uniform, his a paratrooper officer’s. Asher inquired whether I still had the same boyfriend, and after my nod, rushed off at the next stop. Uri, with laughing green eyes, at twenty-eight loved the theater and, in between piloting warplanes, dove into the lecture halls at the university, accumulating credits in literature. He waited patiently for my improbable marriage to dissolve. When I finally separated, I learned that he had been killed three weeks before.
          The sirens continue to reverberate in the endless, open Memorial Day
sky, where nothing stops their piercing sound. I don't want the moment to pass; I want to stay with the young men who populate my world of "what ifs."
          I look around at the contemporary high-rises with colorful awnings and the artistically paved sidewalks. The gardens in the front yards of the buildings and in the street islands are that of fire: Birds of Paradise encircled by roses in red, orange, pink, and yellow. Yet, the fragrance that reaches my nostrils is soft. Rosemary and lavender.
          The breeze strokes the tree tops, nudging us all back to life. Unlike the citizens of the cursed kingdom who wake up unchanged and instantaneously resume life, the citizens of Israel, although they unfreeze to keep on walking, driving cars, playing ball, and blow-drying hair, will never wake up from the curse of the cutouts left by the disappearance of young lives.
And young lives are continuing to be claimed. The men I once knew and loved are being replaced by the sons of my friends. It never stops, however much we want it to.
          Next week, across the ocean, I will be back at my other land, whose landscape is comforting, undemanding. Its soil never blackmailed me for the blood of such as Amiram, Asher, and Uri. In three weeks, when Memorial Day will be celebrated in my adoptive land, only those whose losses are direct will remember the cemeteries. For the others, the day will be marked by baton-twirling parades, super sales at Macy's, and barbeques at the beaches.


Talia Carner’s recent novel is JERUSALEM MAIDEN. Please check www.TaliaCarner.com

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The Novelist's Hopes

Today I received a request from Chicken Soup for Writers to submit an inspirational, motivational story. Examining some of my old essays about my hopes and aspirations earlier on in my writing career, I came across the piece below. I wrote it in 1999 upon completing PUPPET CHILD and typing the magic words, "THE END."  To my consternation, I realized that my life as an author was just beginning:

THE NOVELIST'S HOPES
Copyright 1999 © Talia Carner

You've cut your wrists and bled all over the keyboard--for five years.
You’ve revised/overhauled the story thirty times. Edited eighty times.
You've sent hundreds of queries to agents.
Clumps of hair are missing from your scalp as rejections pour in. 
The noose of a rope is dangling from the ceiling just in case.
An agent working out of his jail cell (see ACLU v. Justice Department) agrees to represent you.
Your agent locates a Christian publisher in Pittsburgh, specializing in His Word, who says he'll read your manuscript.
The Christian publisher will reconsider your book if you make the protagonist go to church on Sunday and restore her virginity.
You do all that and then some.
You spend $42 at Kinko for each copy and $26 for mailing, round trip (they insist you include a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope.)
Two years go by. Your agent retired on royalties she’d made from other authors.
After sending fifty queries, you manage to get a new agent. You opt for a young, hungry one.
Twenty publishers later ($68 x 20=$1,360 in printing and mailing), your book is sold.
You frame the $1,000 check. (You can afford not to cash it; soon, you'll be a millionaire many times over.)
You accost that famous author at her locker room in the health club (you threaten to yank that towel away) and get a blurb for the back cover of your book.
You throw a party, and buy a gold pair of shoes to go with the champagne.
You purchase 300 copies (the publisher gives you a discount) to mail to reviewers and policy-makers.
You open a web site for all your future fans.

Your local book store buys two copies. Ditto the book store in your mother's town.
Your book is on the shelf! Hurray!
Then you discover it has the expiration date of YOGURT!

Whatever made me think books were forever?

P.S. The heart-wrenching suspense PUPPET CHILD was published in 2002. In the ten years that have passed, I learned that a well-written book that tells a story never told before can make it a decade past the three-week bookstore shelf-life. In fact, PUPPET CHILD was selected in "The Top Ten Best First Novels 2002" (BookBrowse.com) and then launched a law that became the platform for two State Senatorial candidates. While I’ve published two novels since, PUPPET CHILD is still selling every week—mostly in digital format—and readers have a great reading experience!

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Author Talia Carner’s latest novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN—inspired by her grandmother’s untapped artistic genius—is the story of a young woman’s struggle between passion and faith. www.TaliaCarner.com .

My Heart Father

Yitzhak Yoffe & Talia

[Note: Today, St Patrick's Day, is actually the 21st anniversary of my father's passing. As I light the "yortzeit" candle, I share with you our story.]

          My friend blew out the candles on her birthday cake. She was about to blow the ninth, the good luck one for next year, when someone tapped my shoulder and said that my mother was outside. I wanted to see the last candle blown out, because not blowing the good-luck one was bad luck, but I rushed out. My mother must have found a ride to the village outside Tel-Aviv where, since the divorce last year, I lived with a family that wasn't mine.
          It was a warm Saturday morning, one of those winter days when the woolen plaid pants and bright red sweater—my party outfit until I would outgrow all possible alterations—itched. But in winter you wore wool or caught pneumonia.
          In the bright sun, my mother stood next to a black Rover and a hatted man. She wore a flowing new skirt and was laughing, not like before, when my father had made her cry a lot. I hated him because he beat me if I forgot to brush my teeth. It was so much better not to be frightened any more.
          I buried my face in my mother’s skirt. Everything about her smelled like warm flowers.
          Frogs croaked in the scattered puddles and water holes. If we weren't dressed in our Sabbath best my mother would have suggested we chase the frogs or count their babies.
          I lifted my head. The man with the hat looked at me with interest. His smile created twin crescent-shaped creases that reached his gray eyes. He handed me a wooden box and I thanked him politely. My mother was shopping for a new husband, and I wanted him to know that the deal included a good kid.
          His smile widened. He had the largest, kindest eyes.
          "Open it." He pointed to the box.
          It was filled with an assortment of pencils, coloring pens, an eraser and a pencil-sharpener—each tucked in its own little pocket. No one in school owned a collection like this. And it wasn't even my birthday!
          I hated hugging people. I had to pretend to like hugging my birth father, a man I addressed only by his first name. Yet, wrapping my arms around this stranger's waist was easy. I breathed his lemon after-shave mingled with the smell of mothball in his tweed jacket.
          When I pulled away, he continued to examine my face. "I told your mother I must meet you."
          She giggled. "He had me climb up to the attic to bring down the photo albums."
          I no longer wanted to go back to the birthday party. I sat on the car hood and was careful not to swing my legs and chip the paint. I must have been difficult to talk to because in those post-divorce months I stuttered. I also wet my bed and had low grades in school.
          From across the field, the muffled hum of cars and trucks on the Tel-Aviv-Haifa Road reached us. It did not drown the calm, rich voice of this man who addressed me as though I were an adult. We started talking, and it was years before we stopped. He knew a lot of interesting things, like how Coca Cola was concocted by a pharmacist, and how a pearl was created inside an oyster. And I had lots of questions to ask.
***
          How could my mother resist this man's proposal of marriage? This forty-year-old bachelor must have fallen in love with her, but I was certain he wanted me for a daughter. He was a genie who popped into my life to save me.
          It was common knowledge that genies masked themselves as ordinary humans, so it was no surprise that mine was disguised as a Dad. But he was the real thing, I was certain, with baby blue chiffon dress and a magic wand with sparkling stars twittering around its top. It was all a matter of catching my genie at a moment she'd be dropping her guard. So I began spying on my new father during my weekend visits in their new home. I peeked at him in his sleep, spied on him when he got the morning paper, watched him while he sorted his stamp collection, and stood riveted while he clipped his toenails. All I caught was an ordinary man with eyes bathed in love.
          I wanted to come home. Permanently, not wait until the end of the school year.
          "Only four months," my mother said. "By then, your room will be ready."
          After the tenant evacuated the extra bedroom in my new father’s apartment, it was painted in every shade of pastel. The historical Tel-Aviv building was located on a divided, wide boulevard, shaded by huge sycamore trees bent with age and disease and flanked by two thoroughfares in which five bus lines made noise and puffed clouds of gray gas. The place looked cheerless and dark in the unrelenting rain the first time I went to visit. But I didn't care. It was home and that was where I wished to be. Summer was too far away.
          One day after school, instead of taking the bus back to the family that gave me food and shelter, I climbed onto the bus heading in the other direction. I had saved my allowance to pay for the ticket. It did not occur to me to be afraid; I was going to see my new father at his law office.
          Tel-Aviv central station was a ten-block area crammed with shops, warehouses and small factories. The streets teemed with buses, vendors' carts, beggars and shoppers—many people to ask for directions. I began to walk. I did not get lost, and some hours after I had left school, my father's secretary showed me in.
          I fell into his arms. "I want to stay with you," I sobbed.
          He did not scold me. Nor did he tell me that the police had been searching for me. Not until years later did he reveal that he had sat at his desk, staring at the phone, waiting for news of me.
          Instead, he took my hand. "Let's go home. Don't you want to see Mommy?"
          "She'll send me back. Will you talk to her?"
          He nodded. We became one front.
***
          One evening, several months after I had moved in, I hung about in the living room, observing my father on a ladder as he changed light bulbs in the chandelier. It was a chance to peek under the hem of his gabardine pants. Maybe this time I'd see the genie’s ballerina legs.
          I gathered the courage to say the magic word. "May I call you 'Daddy’?” I finally blurted.
          "Of course." From his height, his face lit up with an inner glow. "You're my daughter, aren't you?"
          "Abba." I rolled the word off my tongue. "Daddy." Then I skipped around his ladder, letting this sweet word scatter all around us, like marbles. "Abba. Abba. Abba." A genie could be anything she wanted to be. Even a Daddy.
          We developed little rituals, ours alone. In the mornings we walked together—I to my new school and he to his office. When we parted in the corner closest to school, I kissed him good-bye, hoping other kids would notice. In the evenings, he tucked me in bed and sat down for our "Question Corner." I loved listening to his rich, educated language when he told me how, as a child in Leningrad, his mother had bought him one section of an orange for his birthday. I loved hearing how his two older sisters got rid of their pestering baby brother by kissing him until he escaped. Were there families where people kissed instead of yelled?
          I stopped stuttering and I no longer wet my bed. Even though the city school was more demanding than the rural one I had left, I soon climbed close to the top of my class. My father rarely praised my high grades—he had expected nothing less, and soon, neither did I.
***
          My sister—his first natural child—was born when I was fourteen. He must have been delighted, but by then I was oblivious to my home life. Boys, the telephone, and Elvis Presley vied for my attention. Yet, my father and I continued our "Question Corner" with talks about distant planets or the unique pregnancy of the male seahorse.
          That was the time he showed me his poetry notebooks—two full volumes he had written when he had been young. The poems, in his small, neat handwriting, were beautiful, and he let me keep the notebooks for a while.
          I was sixteen when he tried to adopt me, but my birth father whom I rarely saw, refused to sign the papers.
          "Bureaucracy," my heart father said. "It doesn't matter."
          "It matters to me." Forever I cringe when asked for my maiden name. I lie.
***
          It’s decades later. My sister hands me a piece of paper. Section, lot, aisle, row, and finally, a grave number.
          The marble slab squeezed between thousands of similar impersonal ones, represents the small, unimportant life people live—except when they figure as large as my father had in mine. I am about to place the flowers on the white stone, when I know that this is not the place to mourn him.
          I drive to the prosperous suburb, once a village, where decades ago I left a classmate’s birthday party. The eight-lane highway has long claimed the field where I once sat on the hood of the Rover.
          It is here, in the second lane of the highway, at the spot where my little legs in itchy wool pants tried not to swing while talking to the hatted man with kind, gray eyes, that I raise my arm to spread the flowers. With trucks and cars speeding by, the grave for my memories of my father, for our shared life, lies under the asphalt.
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Author Talia Carner’s latest novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN— inspired by her grandmother’s untapped artistic genius—is the story of a young woman’s struggle between passion and faith. www.TaliaCarner.com .

"Unorthodox," a memoir by Deborah Feldman

An examination of an insular world is best described by an insider--especially one who's never felt she belonged in this world, yet was pinned to its dogmas and unbending religious fanaticism.

Deborah Feldman's difficult upbringing was clouded and severely compromised by the absence of her parents: Her borderline mentally disabled father had been matched to marry an impoverished yet intelligent teenager from a distant community, who took off shortly after Deborah was born to fend for herself and to get education and a life. As a result, the young Deborah was abandoned into the care of her grandparents, loving but bound to austerity both by religious norms and personal histories as Holocaust survivors.

What should have amazed me (but didn't) when reading Deborah Feldman's "Unorthodox," was how little had changed in that world set in Brooklyn, NY, from 100 years ago in a similar ultra-Orthodox society in Jerusalem, yet how much had.... In my research into the lives of women in Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman Empire rule of the Holy Land, I found women living in a highly restrictive Jewish religious society marked on the outside by its adherence to exaggerately modest clothing (and head-shaving for married women,) and subject to decrees, rules, male-dominant religious hierarchy and strict social expectations that forced the public into every private domain. Then and now, every transgression was watched closely by others, and manifestations of individuality cut at the bud. The difference was that in Jerusalem of the time, women suffered the lack of personal freedoms underpinned by shortages, plagues and pestilence with more stoic acceptance--even spiritual exuberance--because they had a mission: suffering and "building a home" in the holy city helped hasten the messiah's arrival and thus bring salvation to world Jewry. Not so in Feldman's milieu in the Satmar community in Brooklyn, just within sight of the Manhattan skyline. There was no apparent spiritual foundation to justify the imposition of extreme strict norms of conduct and of education that was no more than indoctrination to further stave off outside influences. At least it was not apparent to Feldman, nor instilled in girls and women relegated to the back of the synagogue and (then and now) excluded from active participation in religious services.

A free spirit, open-minded, intelligent Deborah suffered both from low social standing as a result of her dubious parentage and from emotional detachment that often accompanies parentless children. In the close-knit society of a few city blocks, she forever felt as an outcast. Her grandparents fed her well and clothed her in hand-me downs from her cousins, and loved her in their own distracted ways. And unlike the ceaseless labor often imposed on girls in large Satmar families, the grandparents made little physical demands of Deborah: her help in her grandmother's housecleaning and long days in the kitchen seemed more voluntary rather than forced. Society's total control came into young Deborah's life in the form of an aunt who made all important life decisions for her, control that baffled the young Deborah, yet was understandable in the absence of parents, the aunt's qualifications as the principal of the local girls' school, and the need to help the grandparents handle the unexpected gift of raising a grandchild long after their own children had left home. The glaring problem in this aunt-niece relationship was the fact that the aunt never became a parent figure, and the short time little Deborah had lived in her home among her cousins was a miserable experience for the girl. While the aunt didn't seem resentful of the added responsibility, the young Deborah hated the woman's ever-present authority that made no allowance for the girl's wants and individuality.

I had learned in my research that in old Jerusalem, where there was no running water, sanitation or electricity, girls were kept illiterate, which further isolated the already insular Jewish females so they could be married off soon after puberty. In the Satmar community one-hundred years later, though, all girls were educated--albeit in truncated programs that shunned English and offered a stilted religious world view via distorted facts (e.g., the Satmar believe that Jews should not create their own state until the messiah's arrival, and therefore object to Israel's existence.) Luckily for Deborah, there were public libraries available, and when she dared explore the world beyond her street, it was only a few subway stops from Manhattan.

Those freedoms took enormous courage, yet were available within a stone-throw away. If we stop to consider hundreds of million of women living today in Muslim societies that oppress and subjugate them in the name of religion, the hopelessness of their situations is evident as schools, accessible public libraries, piped music at discount clothing stores, subways where women need not be chaperoned by men, and colleges that offer scholarships are simply not available.

Once married at seventeen, Ms. Feldman learned to drive, owned a car, and in time, was able to enroll in college. As horrifically we view the notion of being married off as a teenager to a man she had met only once pre-engagement, and stepping into a marriage that turned out to be doomed by incompatibility, at the beginning the new bride embraced it all. She loved her new status, the adulation she was receiving during the engagement period, and the shower of new clothes, household gifts and furniture when her parsimonious grandfather's purse suddenly opened. Most importantly, marriage offered Deborah the chance to move away with her husband to a suburb where other young Orthodox families breathed a more relaxed atmosphere and Deborah enjoyed the loosening of the community's tight hold on her soul. When she decided to enroll in college, the question of child care of her baby never seems to come up as a problem.

At the end, it seemed that Deborah was never truly religious. She never fully bought into the doctrine and practices embraced by many other Satmars. Eventually, she found her comfort zone in secular Jewish living. This is not a fact her former community seems willing to accept as glimpsed by the vicious attacks on her. It is sad--and expected--that the one who self-expelled from the bonds of fanaticism would be considered a traitor by those who had shown her little compassion when she was living in their midst. There is never room for individual wants or personal freedoms within a fundamentalist religious society that reveres itself exactly for being what it is.

Author Talia Carner's latest novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, is set in the ultra-Orthodox community of Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman Empire rule of the Holy Land. www.TaliaCarner.com