Unorthodox: A Young Woman Makes a Choice

All photos and still from Unorthodox, Netflix (2020).

“...the past hovers, the future beckons, and the present is a cacophony of voices.”

Spoilers ahead

A young woman moves slowly into a lake, fully dressed, her long skirt and tight-fitting top ballooning around her. As symphonies swell in her head, she takes off her sheitel (a wig worn by orthodox Jewish women after marriage) and lets it float away as she unburdens herself of wifehood, throwing herself backwards into the water into her second mikveh (a bath used in Judaism for purification), as she begins a second life. The lake, its beach spotted with sunbathers and families enjoying the sun, is Wannsee Lake, a stone’s throw from where the Nazis plotted the extermination of the Jewish people. 

In another scene, the same young woman, in the toilets at a club with some friends, borrows red lipstick from a stranger. She smears the poppy colour across her lower lip and then rubs her lips together, marvelling at the brightness, in her almost, now, unrecognisable face. “Looks good,” the other woman tells her, and she thanks her in German, which is not that distant from her own mother tongue, Yiddish. This is the new life of Esty Shapiro, the protagonist of the four-part series Unorthodox on Netflix, played by the flawless Shira Haas, in Berlin. The Holocaust, lipstick, Yiddish, German and English; the past hovers, the future beckons, and the present is a cacophony of voices. 

Although writers Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski based the flashbacks throughout the episodes to Esty’s past in the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, New York, on Deborah Feldman’s 2012 autobiography Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, they diverged from Feldman’s story once Esty reached Berlin. When Feldman, presumably, found refuge in the words she could put upon the page, Esty discovers her voice through another medium and reaches towards another type of art: the music she was forbidden to practise (and yet did secretly) in Williamsburg. Finding refuge in a music school and understanding tutor, as well as a bed for the night under a table in an abandoned lower-floor room, she tries to begin a new life. Yet she is unaware that she is being pursued by her ex-husband, Yanky, and his cousin , prodigal son and near-outcast, Moishe. 

For a non-Jewish spectator, the beauty and poignancy of Unorthodox lay in the very blurring between the stark distinctions of “good and bad”. Frieda Vizel, in a review for Forward.com, disparages the “cartoonishly evil” Satmar Hasidic Jews in Unorthodox, disagreeing that life in the orthodox community is ever that “black and white.” I do not want to downplay Vizel’s own experiences as an orthodox Jewish woman, but I find it interesting that, for a non-Jewish spectator, the opposite is felt. Esty’s mother-in-law might be awful, but Esty herself tells her new friends in Berlin that she wasn’t “in prison”. The world she belonged to might not have been for her, but she misses it desperately. She is aware her departure is a sacrifice, hurtful not only to her grandmother and community, who have already lost so many, but also to herself. The women within the Hasidic community in Unorthodox aren’t silent or cowed; Esty’s aunt refuses to allow the brutish and physically imposing Moishe to enter her home, and her grandmother secretly plays classical music to Esty as she grows up. Esty is driven from the community, partly, due to the way she was looked down upon, from a young age, for her alcoholic father and mother who had fled the community. She is marginalised from the tight-knit world of Williamsburg, plucked apart by her future mother and sister-in-law’s exacting gazes in the grocery store like a piece of meat. Aside from the mother-in-law, couldn’t that be anyone’s story? There is an always outsider, in the smallest of towns and the streets of cities. That’s not to diminish the trauma Esty also suffers as a result of her marriage – the sex scenes in Unorthodox are painful to watch. 

Some have sold Unorthodox as the story of a young woman who rebuilds her life through making new friendships in Berlin, and this is true, to an extent. Esty meets a group of young music students in Berlin, far flung from their own birthplaces, Yael representing perhaps the young Jewish Americans and Israelis Deborah Feldman points out are moving to Berlin. Yet these friends aren’t perfect, just because they’re not Hasidic Jews, making jokes about the Holocaust which sit uncomfortably not only with Esty, but the spectator. Yael, particularly, gives Esty a dressing down when she finally performs for them, coming across as cruel in what she claims is an attempt to be kind. We see, too, their striking privilege as Yael says, “every one of us here have been practising our instruments every fucking day since we were children.” Yael’s attitude is mirrored in the incomprehension of tutors and administrative staff who profess to be on board with a scheme for applicants from traumatic circumstances and yet offer only barriers and harsh words to those same applicants. Despite these obstacles, Esty keeps going. She tries to reconcile the young, vulnerable girl who cried with relief and joy on the day she was married, discovering desire, freedom and ambition along the way, as she works towards an audition for a place at the music school. 

Although classical music runs as a major strain through the series, we are constantly thwarted from seeing Esty’s own performance. In one scene, she sits down at a piano, but the screen goes black before we can hear her play or even find out if she dared to touch the keys. The dread builds in the spectator as we begin to wonder, how could this girl, who taught herself chords and scales on a fold-out paper piano and took lessons in secret, possibly be any good? 

This delay, broken only by Esty’s a short recital for her friends, means her final performance is all the more powerful. The traditional wedding song she chooses to perform, Yanky tucked away at the back, her mother sitting in the audience, and her new friends crowding in the corner, surprises not only them, but us. In Esty’s powerful voice is her unbroken connection to her roots, both her family’s history with Nazism and her own upbringing in Williamsburg, and her declaration that she can and will speak up and out for herself. Yanky, watching, cannot possibly find her immodest for singing in public. As Leah, her mother, says to Yanky earlier, when he questions her self-image in the eyes of God: “What, you think you own him, too?”.

Esty’s outfits change throughout the series; from dressing conservatively, in long skirts and long-sleeved tops, she starts to dress in sharper lines, with shirts, trousers, blazers and, occasionally, bares her arms bravely to the sun, as if she is taking on courage with each item of the more professional, androgynous clothes she wears. At her final performance, she wears a simple summer dress that ties at the waist, with three-quarter length sleeves. It is more conservative than some of her other outfits, perhaps more feminine, and yet more modern, and exposing, than anything she would have worn as a wife in Williamsburg. Her new life, too, is led in the hybrid fashion many other Jewish people who move to Berlin might follow, attempting to reconcile past traumas with precarious presents and write their own hopeful, inchoate futures.

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Tilly Nevin completed her degree in English literature at the University of Oxford last year and plans to do an MA in Comparative Literature next year. After finishing her degree, she moved first to Germany for an editorial internship and then to France, where she divides her time between teaching overexcited children, city hopping on trains, trying to learn new languages and attempting to find the perfect café in which to lead the life of a young French existentialist (with more cake involved).