“I know we’re the chosen people, but once in a while could you choose someone else?” pleads Tevye, Shalom Aleichem’s ironic, iconic dairyman, in one of his frequent arguments with the Almighty. The figures in Unchosen, Hella Winston’s new book on Hasidic Jews dissatisfied with their restrictive lifestyles, would undoubtedly echo his sentiment.
Despite an attachment to their religion and culture, the “unchoosers”—all members of various sects characterized by religious observance, distinctively modest dress, and affiliation with the teachings of particular rabbis—feel oppressed by the laws and pressures of their communities. Some lead double lives, secretly buying televisions or reading secular philosophy. Others, like the man on the book’s cover, stash civilian (i.e. non-Hasidic) garb in trash bags to wear across the river in the romanticized borough of Manhattan. Still others leave the community altogether.
Winston chronicles the lives of six people but always returns to a young man named Yossi. Yossi, whose shaving of his beard and attempt to leave the community opens the book, is both cynical and wide-eyed, making him a sympathetic guide through the otherwise disparate anecdotes that follow.
Another unifying element is the profound honesty with which Winston approaches the topic. She has a gift for capturing the impasses in which her subjects find themselves, and a keen sense of how to seamlessly integrate the background readers need to understand the worlds she describes.
In addition to Yossi, the book discusses five other defecting Hasids in depth: Dini, whose refusal to shave her hair under her wig challenges Hasidic norms of modesty; Chaim, who has not abandoned his community but provides a haven for those who have; Malkie Schwartz, the book’s only non-anonymous subject, a young woman who helps others who have recently left the community; Yitzchak, a great Hasidic scholar who secretly no longer believes in his own religion; and Leah, who maintains her faith on her own terms. In her introduction, Winston explains that she selects these particular stories to be generally representative of the “unchoosers” she met.If Unchosen does have a fault, it is that its author does not attempt to resolve of the many complications she brings up. Though Winston does a remarkable job of presenting her subjects in their own voices, she doesn’t provide enough interpretation to help steer the reader. Her conclusion reads like her introduction; both sum up the book’s themes rather than analyzing them or their ramifications.
Ultimately, Winston leaves her readers as unsatisfied as her subjects, for whom neat conclusions are but a distant dream. In spite of their difficulties, however, all of them maintain some faith—whether in God, themselves, or their futures. Perhaps, the book suggests, they’re not quite as unchosen as they fear.
