The four-part “Unorthodox” not only tells the stirring tale of a young woman’s escape from New York to Berlin. Made by the same people who brought us “Deutschland 83”, and celebrated by TV fans and critics alike, it also offers a fascinating insight into the parallel universe that is an ultra-orthodox Jewish community, where life is cut off from the rest of the world.
By Angela Zierow
Gott hat zu viel von mir erwartet. Nun muss ich meinen eigenen Weg finden.
"Esty" in Unorthodox
“God expected too much of me. Now I must find my own path.” In two matter-of-fact sentences, 19-year-old Esther Shapiro (Shira Haas), known as Esty, sums up why she “left without telling anyone”. This is a remarkably unemotional way to describe a young woman’s audacious bid for freedom that saw an ultra-orthodox Jew from Williamsburg in New York end up stranded in Berlin: while her Hasidic family gathered for their Friday sabbath meal, Esty made a bolt for JFK airport in only the clothes she stood up in – fleeing from an isolated, insular world that had become her prison, and whose conventions, moral principles, and patriarchal rules she found suffocating. It is an escape from a joyless arranged marriage with Yanky (Amit Rahav), a man who is kind-hearted but entirely under the thumb of his domineering mother, and into an unfamiliar but autonomous life. What she doesn’t yet know at this point is that she is pregnant.
A mini-series from Netflix, “Unorthodox” addresses a subject that is as complex as it is potentially explosive. The drama is based on the autobiographical bestseller “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots” (Simon and Schuster, 2012), in which New York-born Deborah Feldman recounts how she broke with the Hasidic Satmar community in Brooklyn. Born in 1986, Feldman had turned her back on her ultra-orthodox Jewish family shortly after her 23rd birthday to enable her young son to live an independent life. Both now live in Berlin.
“Unorthodox“ has the viewer riveted right from the very first scene – not least thanks to the outstanding Shira Haas (“Nobel Savage”). A star of cinema and series back home in Israel, Haas describes Esty as “probably the most complex character I’ve ever played”. A heart-rending performance is likewise given by Haas’ Israeli colleague Amit Rahav, who plays Esty’s soul-searching husband Yanky. Israeli-German actor Jeff Wilbusch’s portrayal of Yanky’s cousin Moishe, a man torn between his religious beliefs and his addictions, is all too realistic; perhaps this is because of the past that Wilbusch associates with “Unorthodox”. Known in Germany from the hit series “Bad Banks”, the actor grew up in an ultra-orthodox Haredi community in Mea Shearim (Jerusalem) that he left at the age of 13 to head for Amsterdam.
Netflix Original "Unorthodox"; 4 episodes @ 53 - 55 minutes.
The four-part German original mini series, written by Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski, is inspired by Deborah Feldman's bestseller of the same name.
Directed by Maria Schrader. Shira Haas, Jeff Wilbusch and Amit Rahav play the main roles.
Unorthodox was shot in Yiddish and English and has been running exclusively and worldwide on Netflix since March 2020.