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Product Details
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Hogarth; First Edition edition (May 8, 2012)
The Hasidic community is a world unknown to me. I couldn't resist a book that would reveal the exotic lives of those men with the side curls and long black coats - and their almost invisible women.
Now, after reading this intense novel, I at least know a few things that are forbidden: looking at statues of saints and Greek gods, switching on a light on the Sabbath, having marital intercourse on unclean days, reading this book. Anouk Markovits gives us glimpses of the countless rituals that guide Hasidic men, women, and children through every step of life. If you sin against the Law, your father can erase your name from the book of life and banish you to nonexistence.
I Am Forbidden focuses on the Satmar, the most insular Hasidic sect. It follows a Satmar clan from Transylvania to Paris, Manhattan, and Williamsburg. It opens just before World War II and brings us to the present day.
There's a terrific love story drenched in biblical imagery - a tense drama played out between a man and wife in the shadow of The Law. And there's a poignant tale of two sisters, one devout and one rebellious, estranged by the Law. Human love struggles mightily with the love of God in this book.
Memories of the Holocaust haunt these pages. We watch the murder of Jewish families in Transylvania - and we learn of a scandal linking prominent Jews and Nazis. Questions of right and wrong are a constant torment to the characters in I Am Forbidden. Guilt becomes a deadly force.
Like the rebel heroine of this book, Anouk Markovits left her Hasidic home to pursue personal freedom. The pain and the exhilaration of that decision can be deeply felt in I Am Forbidden. I found the book fascinating.
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52 of 55 people found the following review helpful
I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits is a brilliant, poetic novel that begins during World War II in eastern Europe and ends in contemporary Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
During World War II, two children become orphaned. One, a young boy named Josef, loses his parents and sister to storm troopers and is adopted by a peasant woman in Translylvania. Her name is Florina and the two of them forge a loving bond. She renames him Anghel and baptizes him to protect him from the Nazis. In yet another scene, a young girl named Mila watches as her pregnant mother runs toward an open railroad boxcar calling, "Rebbe, Rebbe", and is shot down mercilessly by the Nazis. She is taken in by a Satmar family, a sect of Hasidim. The Zalmans adopt her and bring her up with love and as one of their own. They have a daughter named Atari who is nearly the same age as Mila. Atari and Mila grow up together.
As time progresses, Mila becomes more and more observant of the Satmar beliefs along with its laws and observances. Atari seeks to leave the sect and make a secular life for herself. This is considered heinous and the title of the book comes from this leaving. For ten generations, she and her offspring are `forbidden'. They are estranged from the family and not permitted to participate in any of the Satmar rituals or be acknowledged by family members.
Marriages are arranged by the Satmar and Mila is matched with Josef who, as a young boy was separated from Florina and sent by the Zalmens to Williamsburg in order to study Torah. This is a marriage of love despite it being arranged. The goal of Satmar Hasidim is to be fruitful and multiply. If, after ten years of marriage, there are no children, the husband is permitted to leave his wife and file for divorce.Read more ›
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57 of 65 people found the following review helpful
This book reminded me why I dislike organized religion so much, especially any religion where the clergy believe they are the sole interpreters of god's word. To be sure, the Hassidic world it depicts is especially rigid, insular and intolerant, but I spent most of the book feeling absolutely suffocated. And given the subject matter, I'm not sure there's anything the author, who knows that world intimately, could have done to address it. I didn't find the book fascinating, as some might--it was bloody depressing.
I Am Forbidden traces the lives of an extended--and broken--family that has been ripped apart and reassembled by the Holocaust. It describes the endless rituals and restrictions that are part of everyday life in Hassidic communities, along with the guilt, brutality and destructiveness that can result when a member of the community, especially a female one, violates its numerous stifling laws and traditions.
Initially, the book is about the friendship and coming-of-age of two young stepsisters, Atara Stern and Mila Heller. Mila's parents are killed by the Nazis in Transylvania, but she makes her way to the home of her father's friend, Zalman Stern, where he and his wife take her in and raise her as their own. The friendship is reasonably interesting, set against the backdrop of Paris, where the family moves to to escape the Communist crackdown on Jews and religious practices generally. But most of the book is about Mila and her marriage to Josef, whose parents had also been killed, and who had been raised as a Christian for several years by the family's housekeeper. He is spirited back to his Jewish roots and sent to study the Talmud in Brooklyn's Hassidic community, where Mila joins him once they marry.Read more ›
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