Unorthodox:The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman, 2012, * * * *

Born into the insular and exclusionary Hasidic community of Satmar in Brooklyn to a mentally disabled father  and a mother who fled the sect, Feldman, as she recounts in this memoir, seemed doomed to be an outsider from the start.  Raised by her devout grandparents, who forbade her to read in English, the ever-curious child craved books outside the synagogue teachings.  Feldman's spark of rebellion started with sneaking off to the library and hiding paperback novels under her bed.  Her boldest childhood revolution was that she bought an English translation of the Talmud,which would otherwise be kept from her, so that she might understand the prayers and stories that are the fabric of her existence.  At 17, hoping to be free of the scrutiny and gossip of her circle, she enters into an arranged marriage with a man she meets once before the wedding. Instead, having received no sex education from a culture that promotes procreation and repression simultaneously, she and her husband are unable to consummate the relationship for a year.  The absence of a sex life and failure to produce a child dominate her life, with her family and in-laws supplying constant pressure, she starts to experience panic attacks and the stirrings of her final break with being Hasidic.  It's when she finally does get pregnant and wants something more for her child that the full force of her uprising takes hold and she plots her escape.  Feldman, who now attends Sarah Lawrence College, offers this engaging and at times gripping insight into Brooklyn's Hasidic community. 

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, 2009, * * * * *

It is Enniscorthy, in Ireland's County Wexford, in the early 1950s and Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home.  When a job is offered in America it is clear to everyone that she must go.  Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, however, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of her new life -- until she begins to realize that she as found a sort of happiness.  As she falls in love, news comes from home that forces her back to Enniscorthy, not to the constrictions of her old life, but to new possibilities which conflict deeply with the life she has left behind in Brooklyn.  In the quiet character of Eilis Lacey, Colm Toibin has created a memorable heroine and in Brooklyn he has written a luminous novel of devastating power.  The portrait Toibin paints of Brooklyn in the early '50s is affectionate but scarcely dewy-eyed.  Eilis encounters discrimnation in variouis forms -- against families, againsts blacks, against Jews, against lower-class Irish -- and finds Manhattan more intimidating than alluring. Toibin's prose is graceful but never showy, and his characters are interesting and believable.  As a study of the quest for home and the difficulty of figuring out where home really is, Brooklyn  has a universality that goes far beyond the specific details of Eilis's struggle.