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Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, Keeping My Family

A heartfelt and inspiring personal account of a woman raised as a Lubavitcher Hasid who leaves that world without leaving the family that remains within it.

 

Even as a child, Chaya Deitsch felt that she didn’t belong in the Hasidic world into which she’d been born. She spent her teenage years outwardly conforming to but secretly rebelling against the rules that tell you what and when to eat, how to dress, whom you can befriend, and what you must believe. Loving her parents, grandparents, and extended family, Chaya struggled to fit in but instead felt angry, stifled, and frustrated. Upon receiving permission from her bewildered but supportive parents to attend Barnard College, she discovered a wider world in which she could establish an independent identity and fulfill her dream of a life unconfined by the strictures imposed upon her by a belief system that she had never bought into, a life that would be filled with the secular knowledge and culture that were anathema to her friends and relatives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. As she gradually shed the physical and spiritual trappings of Hasidic life — the long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, the rules of kashrus, the meticulous observance of the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays — Chaya found herself torn between her desire to be honest with her parents about who she now was and her need to maintain loving relationships with the family that she still very much wanted to be part of.

 

As she navigated the complexities of her new life, Chaya and her parents eventually came to an understanding that was based on unqualified love and a hard-won but fragile form of acceptance. With honesty, sensitivity, and intelligence, Chaya Deitsch movingly shows us that lives lived differently do not have to be lives lived apart.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 224
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780805243178
  • Genres
  • memoir, religion, jewish, judaism
  • Release date
  • 2015