AS THE FOURTH DAUGHTER OF A PROMINENT ORTHODOX JEWISH FAMILY IN NEW YORK…
I was expected to attend a religious seminary for girls, date the suitors my father sent to me, become engaged by 19, marry within 6 weeks, and have as many children as I could bear, raising my family in a house of Godly belief.
No one would have ever guessed that I, the most religious of my siblings, would be spellbound at 19 years old, in forbidden love with a non-Jewish man. I had never even held a boy’s hand, much less made love to a man; I had never been dancing, eaten a meal at a restaurant that didn’t adhere to Jewish dietary laws, or been close to a non-Jewish friend. This rhapsodic feeling of freedom, the sensual pleasure, and the decadence of newfound independence came at the price of almost unbearable heartbreak. In marrying the man I loved, I was considered a traitor, abandoning centuries of tradition and rabbinic law. My marriage began a mythic journey to what Hegel and Kierkegaard would call true selfhood.
Set during the Vietnam era through the present day, When Your Family Says No is my memoir about choice, about the complexity of family love and how desire cannot be stopped by the confines of rigid family and rabbinical rules. It is not a memoir about the repudiation of Judaism or religion in general. My marriage was not a protest or rebellion against my family or my Orthodoxy. I didn't plan on falling in love; it simply happened. I wanted to be with the man I loved and stay within the confines of my family. Behind the lush lawns and beautiful brick facades in which I was raised, lay a prejudice and conditional love that was both shocking and tragic.
The book is for anyone who has fallen in love, strayed from their family’s rules of conduct, or needed to break out; it’s for Muslims who do or don’t want to wear the headscarf, gay people raised in a born-again culture, teenagers just starting to have doubt, and mid-lifers who are about to make a change from a culture that presupposes their identity; for anyone who chooses love over tradition. The highly personal narrative mixed with historical insight gives the reader a snapshot into the secreted world of Orthodoxy where everything from how a girl puts on her socks in the morning to the prayer she recites after using the bathroom, to when her husband makes love to her, is determined by rabbinic law. And yet, its content is universal.
Who among us hasn't read illicit material? Attended a forbidden film? Held secrets? Been alienated? Dreamed of breaking away? How many are still following their community’s beliefs with the insistent feeling that something inside them might be dying? When Your Family Says No explores the terror and self-determination that comes from breaking taboo and tradition and finding the strength we need to discover the world and a family of our own. A family that says, yes.
