Traces the author's upbringing in the Satmar Hasidic community in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, New York, describing the strict rules that governed her life, her arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, and the birth of her son, which led to her plan to leave and forge her own path in life.

Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history-but many precedents among religious communities in the United States. This book tells the story of how this group of pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York. While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society, Kiryas Joel...

Como miembro de los Satmar, una comunidad de judíos ultraortodoxos en Williamsburg (Nueva York), Deborah Feldman crece bajo un estricto código de costumbres que rige desde su idioma -el yidis- o su indumentaria hasta sus lecturas y las personas con las que le es permitido relacionarse. Siendo adolescente, intuye que puede existir una forma de vida alternativa entre los rascacielos de Manhattan, y se debate entre la responsabilidad de ser una buena...

"As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything including what she could wear, who she could speak to, and what she was allowed to read. It was stolen moments spent with the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott that helped her imagine an alternative way of life. Trapped as a teenager in a dysfunctional marriage...