Exodus, Revisited

were valuable commodities among us. They meant one would be able to pass. It was the gift of disguise that God granted, seemingly at random, although we were led to believe that he had a precise system in terms of granting privileges, so perhaps lack of blondness denoted a spiritual inferiority, or perhaps it was actually the other way around, depending on how you looked at things. When I met my husband for the first time at the age of seventeen, I focused mostly on his golden hair and what that would mean for my genetic legacy. I wondered if the gene was strong enough to guarantee me golden-haired children, children who would be safe when the world, trapped in its unalterable pattern of orbit, turned against them.



Now I understand that those Eastern European features and fair coloring align perfectly with the genetic studies that have long since confirmed that none of us are one hundred percent of anything. But these findings never made it into our midst, and if they did, they probably wouldn't have mattered. In our community, we believed that as long as we were separate, we were pure by default.



This word, though, "pure"-it doesn't come from our language, from our vocabulary. Our word for "pure" is tuhor, and its original meaning applies only to spiritual purity. It means to be pure of intention, to be clean of sin. In the Hasidic tradition, this kind of purity ostensibly outweighs the importance of strong ancestry. The obsession with pure bloodlines would come later, perhaps as a by-product of the ideology and laws that defined us by exclusion. One drop of Jewish blood was all it took, not for the first time in Hitler's Germany, so those who could, fought to hide that drop and deny its existence, but out of instinctive protectiveness, those who could not retreated into a perverse pride. They invented a kind of purity for themselves. They created family trees that went back a thousand years to show their intact stems. They discriminated against Jews who couldn't prove their undiluted

find both a welcoming community and a sense of individuality is one that readers from all walks of life will be able to identify with. Those left unsatisfied with the abrupt ending to Unorthodox will enjoy the more hopeful conclusion to Feldman s second book as well as her more mature and increasingly eloquent writing style. Booklist

Overall, Exodus is a satisfying sequel to Unorthodox, which shows how Deborah Feldman went on to the next step after getting her own freedom from the bonds of a strictly insular society. . . . [A] chronicle of a continuing journey of self-discovery . . . There are many satisfying finds and revelations along the road, but there are also plenty of bumps, frustrations, disappointments, and pitfalls, which is expected when one spends their formative years being closed off from the rest of the outside world, and is confined to the boundaries of a Brooklyn neighborhood. . . . This book is more about the liberation of Deborah Feldman, and how she copes with this newfound sense of freedom and self-discovery, that can be a shock to some, or a declaration of independence for others. Stuart Nulman, Montreal Times

One woman's search to understand herself and her Jewish heritage. . . . Rich in details of Jewish life and the lives of her grandparents in the World War II era, [Feldman] sensitively portrays the inner struggles of accepting the pervasive feeling of survivor guilt and her own desires to understand the woman she was becoming. . . . An enthralling account of how one Orthodox Jewish woman turned her back on her religion and found genuineness and validity in her new life. Kirkus