A memoir and Netflix series partially based on a memoir, both popular in these Coronavirus times, deal with young women overcoming very difficult childhoods that kept them apart from normal life in the US in parallel but, on the surface at least, widely divergent situations.
The first, Educated, by Tara Westover, which has spent several months on the New York Times bestseller list, deals with the narrator's departure from a survivalist family in Idaho. Her family lived at the edge of the wilderness. Although near a small town, Ms.
Westover and her brothers were isolated from the LDS society of their families and other 
inhabitants of the town, both physically and psychologically. Her father owned a salvage yard at the foot of their property, in which all of his children worked alongside of him, sorting heavy machinery and machinery parts for resale. His wife was a midwife and an herbalist, whose tinctures of essential oils would later develop into a successful business, operated out of her home. The children were all home-schooled.
The term "survivalist" has many connotations, but one of these refer to people who basically live isolated from society and strive to be as totally self-sufficient as possible. Though both parents were Mormon in their upbringing, Tara's Father developed his own religious philosophy, based on his own interpretations of the Old and New Testament, upon which he expounded frequently, and spent his time when not working laying in supplies for the inevitable day of judgement. He particularly identified with the Weaver Family of Ruby Ridge fame and was obsessed with the idea that the Feds would come for him and his family sooner or later, and that he needed to be prepared to resist--and perhaps martyred--if the Day of Judgement didn't come first.
There was a great deal of physical abuse in Tara's background, partially from injuries in the junkyard and various family construction projects. She herself was severely injured in the process, her father nearly died, and there were also two harrowing car accidents. All of this was complicated by the fact that her parents did not believe in doctors and trusted only her mother's herbal preparations to pull them through. What is remarkable that these remedies worked, though family members suffered scarring that medicine probably would have made less extensive.
In addition, she was repeatedly abused by one of her brothers over a considerable amount of time. As the children grew, their paths diverged in two directions. Tara and two of her brothers, in spite of haphazard homeschooling, were motivated to self-educate; all three three went on to receive Ph.Ds. The others remained largely illiterate and stayed in their father's business.
I don't want to say more here, if you haven't read the book, please do. Tara's story is extraordinary, and her drive to secure her education is a study beyond impressive, for not only did she achieve all of this without initially having a high school diploma, but she had to experience severe culture shock as she literally hit the world running at Brigham Young University, and later beyond even that world at Cambridge. In the process, she had to separate from her domineering father and some of her brothers, and then make some sort of emotional and psychological peace with that, a process that involved years of overcoming what was virtually PTSD.
Deborah Feldman's memoir Unorthodox and its sequel, Exodus narrate her equally harrowing departure from a confining situation, except here it is not the microcosm of a country family, but the macrocosm of a closed urban community: the Satmar Hasidim of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The Satmars are one of the most extreme sects of the ultra-orthodox wing of Judaism. Organized around hereditary Charismatic Rabbis who each maintain their own communities of adherents, they are self-separated from American secular society, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The men wear distinctive black dress and hats, do not trim their beards, and have curled sidelocks. Women dress modestly, with long sleeves, modest skirts or dresses, and opaque stockings. Upon marriage they cut off their hair and wear wigs or other head coverings. Their everyday language is Yiddish, and they educate their children in that language. They marry only among themselves and arrange their children's marriages. Most have large families, and the Satmars believe that this is one of the essentials of their existence is to replace the six million Jews who were murdered during the holocaust, and the great fear that something like this might happen again. Their entire lives are dictated by strict halacha, or Jewish law. As a society within America, they are as closed as the Old Order Amish or polygamous members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Ms. Feldman was born into this community, and her two memoirs chronicle her early life among the Satmars, and her leaving the community. Like Westover, she came from a dysfunctional family: her father was mentally flawed, and her mother deserted the community when Deborah was a child; her mother was gay, completely unacceptable in the eyes of her family. Unlike Westover, Feldman was married off at seventeen to a member of the community and suffered a great deal of trauma consummating her marriage because of anatomical abnormalities, though she eventually bore a son. Unusual among the Satmars, she was able to keep custody of her son after she obtained a divorce and left.
Feldman had an equally difficult time adjusting to mainstream life; her trauma stems from the Satmar Community, holocaust survivors, and in many ways, she was as much a victim of post-Holocaust survivors as her grandparents, who raised her (like Westover, one grandmother provided some positive influence). Through persistence and an inner strength, she too was able to get a college education and is now a writer. After much moving around, she has finally settled in Berlin, where she writes in both English and German. Like Westover, she is a strong and articulate woman, and like her, has journeyed through the tribulations of PTSD. Her two volumes are also worth reading.
In 2020, the Satmar part of Deborah's life became the initial part of the Netflix series, also entitled Unorthodox, and she was a consultant on its production. However, the series' heroine, named Esther Shapiro (Esty's) process of adjustment to the outside world is different. In it, she is married, but escapes the community when she finds out that she's pregnant, and she flees directly to Berlin, where her mother has settled with her partner. It is as if she has entered not only a totally different place, but a new century. She is taken in by a group of multicultural music students, and eventually gains admittance to their elite conservatory via her extraordinary voice. She reconciles with her mother, is able to part from her husband, who follows her to try and bring her back, and leaves us to make her place in her new world.
Except for exteriors in the Satmar area of Williamsburg, the series, including the interior "Brooklyn" scenes was entirely recreated in studios in Berlin. If you do watch the series, also watch the additional "Making Unorthodox" episode, that shows how it was done. The Berlin footage is a love letter to that wonderful city, which incidentally has a growing Jewish population again.
I am writing this as a privileged American Jewish woman who has suffered little hardship, and who has had a successful American career and a comfortable, loving family life. I salute these two extraordinary women, who have overcome so much to be who they now are. Their books and the miniseries too, will transform your vision.
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Tara Westover, Educated, Random House (2018) is still on the New York Times Bestseller List, and is available in all formats.
Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox, Simon and Schuster, now available as a 2012 reprint: ISBN-10: 1439187010. You can also find it in a Kindle edition on Amazon.
Deborah Feldman Exodus (2014), is available in a Kindle Edition, and used print ones are available.
If you read German, Deborah Feldman's Überbitten, her revised and expanded memoir, written with Christian Ruzicska, just published by btb Verlag (2020), is also available in a Kindle edition.
Both the series, Unorthodox, and The Making of Unorthodox are currently screening on Netflix.
Tara Westover has her own website with information and links to interviews, etc. https://tarawestover.com
Interview with Deborah Feldman since she moved to Germany in 2013 can be found at:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/books/an-american-jewish-author-now-calls-germany-home.html
