Books

COMING OUT: NAOMI ALDERMAN

ON LEAVING ORTHODOX
JUDAISM BEHIND
As the film of her novel Disobedience is released,
the author reveals how writing about the strict
Jewish community she grew up in made her
realise she had to leave it
Naomi Alderman
Sat 24 Nov 2018

Homecoming … Rachel Weisz in Disobedience

Sometimes in life, you don’t know why you did something

until long after it’s over. That’s more true for writing than
anything else, I find. The subconscious worms its way into reality
via stories you don’t understand yourself as they emerge. So in
certain ways it’s only now, 17 years after I started work on my
first novel, Disobedience, that I really know why I wrote it. And
it was only seeing it on screen, transformed into a movie starring
Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, that I started to understand
what it’s actually about. I was a stranger to myself in the autumn
of 2001. I’d moved to Manhattan from London a year earlier and
was working for a corporate law firm, practising the Orthodox
Judaism I was raised in. I was in my mid-20s and trying to be
good. I was frum – that’s the word for rules-observant, kosher-
food-only, sabbath-keeping Jewish people. No one frum says
“observant” or “Orthodox” to describe themselves. I was
attending synagogue at least twice a week, going on dates with
suitable men, working at a proper responsible job. There was a
mapped-out life I knew I was supposed to try to have: marry an
appropriate frum man, have the kind of steady-but-flexible
career that would mean we could buy a house and raise a family,
join a synagogue, make Friday night dinner every week,
volunteer for charitable causes, take part in the life of the
community by visiting the sick, welcoming guests to our table.
It’s not a bad life; in fact the frum life can be a very good one –
purposeful and filled with meaning, warm social bonds and the
comforting joyful round of ritual and routine. I had been raised
to expect to live that life, I had all the skills to do it – from fluent
Hebrew to the ability to cook dinner for 30 at the drop of a hat –
and yet. And yet what? Well, I didn’t know then.
A few enormous things happened in the autumn of 2001.
The first was that terrorists hijacked four planes and flew two of
them into the World Trade Center. It’s difficult now to separate
the political from the personal in those events. Within a couple
of days it went from being an intensely intimate experience – the
smell of burning in the air, the sight of the buildings falling, the
friends whose friends never came home and the idea that one
might die, right then – to a global political one. Those
experiences – the sight of my friend covered in ash and debris,
the yellowing of the blue sky, the horrifying pathetic flyers that
appeared on every surface with photographs of the missing –
quickly became subsumed into a narrative about America, about
the world, about war and revenge and imperialism. But it wasn’t
like that if you lived through it. If you were there, those things
really happened: a sharp slap of mortality, close enough to smell
the overpowering aroma of death’s robes. The realisation that
one really could have died. That thousands of people had died
while sitting at their desks, doing their jobs. That I had seen
them die. Everyone had some reason to pass through the World
Trade Center once in a while. It could have been any of us,
happening to be there that morning getting coffee and a bagel.

‘There was a mapped-out life I knew I was supposed to have’ …

Naomi Alderman.
 I knew lots of people living in Manhattan then who
reassessed their lives. People got married, got divorced, decided
to have a baby, adopt a baby, foster a baby, to move to the
country, to change career, to reconnect with estranged family
members or to finally cut off their asshole dad. And people came
out. A lot of people I knew came out in those months. A brilliant,
moving documentary was released around that time, Trembling
Before God, which was about the lives of frum lesbian and gay
men and women. There was a routine that almost became
standard that autumn and winter: invite your parents to visit you
in Manhattan, everyone goes to see Trembling Before God
together, then you come out to them.
I didn’t need to come out: I’d already told my parents I
sometimes fancied girls. “And do you also fancy boys?” Oh yes,
I did. So that was all right then. Who you happen to fancy is no
bar to the frum life; Judaism, like most world religions, is much
more interested in practice than in what you happen to think,
believe or lust after quietly inside your mind. But I heard a lot of
coming-out stories in those emotionally intense months. Men
whose rabbis had told them that even though they were only
ever attracted to men they should try to get married to a woman
anyway. Women who’d been told that their lesbian desire would
vanish once they had a proper frum marriage. Rabbis who’d said
that there was no place for gay people in the frum world, that
they should be ashamed of themselves and pray to have the
desire removed. A rabbi who’d told a young gay man that if he
didn’t marry and have a family he’d be “completing Hitler’s
work”.
An encounter with mortality clarifies so many things. Who
you are and what’s important to you. What you would regret
having done if your life were to end today. In a funny way, I
recommend it. What I learned was that the frum world – so
warm, so communal, so sensible and safe in so many ways – was
doing great harm to some of our people.
 And I learned as well that life can be excruciatingly unfair.
That death will not necessarily wait for you to get your shit
together. I thought, in those days, that there must have been
people in the World Trade Center who were thinking what I’d
been thinking: “I’ll just do this job for another few years, and
then I’ll write that novel I’ve always meant to write.” Death
doesn’t go around asking if you have any business you need to
finish up, and sometimes death gives not a second’s warning –
not even time for a hurried wave goodbye. If you still have time,
right now, that’s a gift. If there’s something you meant to do,
start it now. Now. Now.
So I applied to do an MA in creative writing at the University
of East Anglia. And got in. And quit my job at the law firm –
people told me I was brave, so brave, but it felt more necessary
than anything I’d done in my life – and moved to Norwich to write
a novel.

I thought I’d written a book about faith, but it

turned out that I’d written a book about lesbians

What was there to write about for me, then, but the frum
life? I couldn’t have told you why I needed to write about it then
– it was below the level of conscious thought, just a deep
understanding that this was my subject. I began work on a novel
about two women – Ronit, who had left the community and
become a modern, secular woman, and Esti who had remained
within the frum world. They’d been lovers for a while, long ago.
They loved each other still, but it was complicated. When Ronit’s
father, the beloved rabbi, dies, Ronit comes home and she and
Esti rekindle their romance, talk, argue, make love and try to
work out if there’s any way for them both to get what they want
without hurting everyone around them. I had to think it out for
myself, on the page; it was the most urgent topic in my life and
I wrote intensely, almost unable to think about anything else
until it was done.
 I didn’t think anyone else had written a book like this about
the Jewish world before, but Jeanette Winterson’s seminal
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was in my mind – both in the
similarities of religious experience, hers in a Pentecostal
community, and in the very important differences. No one in the
frum world thinks gay people have demons inside them – the
problems are different and so are the possible solutions. Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple was an important influence on my
writing and thinking, but again, I needed to find a way to describe
the difficulties frum gay people experience in a non-Christian
religious context and without necessarily having been abused or
subject to violence. It was hugely important to me that Esti’s
husband Dovid not be a monster – because though monstrous
husbands do exist, that’s not everyone’s story.
I didn’t realise it would be an explosive book to publish. To
be honest, when I was writing it, I didn’t expect to get it
published at all. I was lucky in one important way: Zadie Smith’s
novel White Teeth had come out in 2000 and had ignited an
interest in books that portrayed the different cultures that now
live together in the UK. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane was published in
2003. I didn’t write Disobedience in an attempt to “catch a trend”
– it was just the story of my world and the people I knew. In
fact, I remember someone on my MA course asking me why I
was writing about Jewish people when “Jews are so boring” –
obviously the person asking was Jewish. We always think our
own worlds are dull and others’ are exotic and fascinating. But I
was inspired by the bold way a new generation of writers was
portraying its communities. I read Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s
novel The Mistress of Spices and felt excited and empowered by
the way she used words I didn’t know, and didn’t feel she had to
explain them to me. I began to feel that I could write the
language of the frum world, use words like frum, and trust my
readers to come with me even if they didn’t understand every
word, and it happened that my timing was good. When my novel
went out to publishers we had offers within a few days.
 I was a bit naive, I suppose: I thought I’d written a book
about faith, but it turned out that I’d written a book about
lesbians. I mean that in two ways. Of course, there was a
prurient interest in any book that might have a smidgen of
lesbian sex in it – not that there’s much in there – as if women
only ever make love with each other for the benefit of an
imagined man’s pleasure. So once the book started to be
received well – it won the Orange new writers’ prize in 2006 –
much was made in the press of the sexual content. But I also
hadn’t really understood how little representation of lesbian
relationships there has been in novels, movies and television. I
hadn’t dared to think that the book might be important to anyone
– I was moved by the letters I received saying that it had been.
I wished I’d thought harder about the resolution of Esti and
Ronit’s story, knowing how few lesbian romances in fiction have
the traditional heterosexual happy ending.

Giving up Orthodox Judaism was the major

event of my early 30s, an unravelling and
reknitting of self

It surprises people sometimes to learn that yes, I was still

frum while I wrote Disobedience. I kept the sabbath in Norwich,
I ate kosher food – I even learned to make my own kosher sushi,
because I had a yearning for it after years living in Manhattan. It
was only once the novel was published, once the loud boom had
started to echo away, that I found something unwinding within
me. It turned out that when I was done with the book, I was also
done with the frum. Not that it’s that simple. Giving up Orthodox
Judaism was the major event of my early 30s, an unravelling and
reknitting of self that took me the best part of a decade to feel
complete, solid and peaceful again.
There were other echoes, outside my own life. When
Disobedience was published, my historian father worked out that
it was the first novel about the frum community in Britain since
Daniel Deronda (1876). There have been more since then –
notably Francesca Segal’s Costa first novel award winner The
Innocents (2012) and Eve Harris’s Booker-longlisted The
Marrying of Chani Kaufman (2013) – which has pleased me
hugely. I feel vaguely maternal about the new crop of young
British Jewish authors writing fearlessly about their communities,
not tying themselves in knots wondering whether that
fascinating, rich and fierce world is “boring”. From America there
are deep and thoughtful books about people leaving the frum
world, such as Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament (2007) and
Shulem Deen’s All Who Go Do Not Return (2015). In Israel, there
have been brilliant television series set in the frum community
there: Shtisel and Srugim are fantastic pieces of work.
Disobedience now looks to be part of a larger movement, the
artistic opening up of the closed world of frumkeit.
And now Disobedience is a film. I had the first phone call
about it in 2013 – just after I’d moved into my new flat, so I have
a distinct memory of standing amid the full boxes and the empty
shelves receiving a call that went: “Hello, is that Naomi
Alderman? This is Rachel Weisz.” Which was exciting. But one
learns as a writer to take these things always with a pinch of salt.
Many books are “optioned” – that is, a producer pays to have a
few years where no one else can work on trying to put a film
together while they see if they can – but probably only one option
in a hundred ends up with a film. So all the way through the
process I was saying to myself: it still might not happen, it’ll
probably all go away. That’s how I am: I keep working, but I
don’t count my chickens. I had meetings with the director
Sebastián Lelio, as he tried to get his head around the
complexities of a community he knew little about. I read drafts
of the script, commenting on the accuracy of details of the frum
world. I took members of the production crew to meet my frum
friends – they even visited my parents’ house and saw my
childhood bedroom. And yet I still managed to be surprised on
the day the filming started.
 A new way forward … Ronit (Weisz) and Esti (Rachel
McAdams).

The experience was surreal – hyperreal. My father is in the

movie, as is my brother – he’s the choir-leader who sings a
moving solo in one of the film’s most emotionally intense
moments. The locations are places I know well – synagogues I’ve
visited, streets I’ve walked down. The story of Disobedience isn’t
the story of my life, but it is a story set where I come from, the
very specific frum world of Hendon in north London, which is
really quite different from the frumkeit of Golders Green or
Stamford Hill or Manchester or Gateshead. Like most worlds, the
one I come from has a thousand signifiers – invisible to outsiders
– of precisely who you are, from haircut to hat-style, to the exact
way your cupboards are laid out in the kitchen. We don’t even
know how we know what it means to be “a Daily Mail reader” or
“a person who eats venison” until we’re asked to analyse it.
Parsing a whole world of identity is complicated, and I’m still not
sure that I’ve ever managed to explain to non-frum people quite
how it is that Hendon frum really is different from Borehamwood
or Bushey.
 I had that feeling when I watched the completed film for the
first time. It was beautiful, moving, compassionate and filled with
love but … how could anybody who wasn’t me possibly
understand it? It was a movie set within my internal organs –
very nice of Hollywood actors to make it just for me, beautiful to
have a conversation with them about the meaning of my work.
But too personal to be comprehensible. Wrong again. It’s often
the most personal authentic stories that can be the most
universal. It’s been out in the US for a few months, has had a
slew of great reviews and has been nominated for several British
Independent Film awards.
The ending of the romantic story is different in the movie
from the book, which seems right to me. There is no single right
answer for frum LBGT+ people. If you leave the community, you
can have the sexual and romantic life you want, but may lose a
faith and a communal life that is dear to you. If you remain within
the frum world, you keep that warm connection but sacrifice sex
and companionship. No ending is really happy, and I don’t think
either answer is right or wrong; one can only feel compassion for
people caught in this horrible situation.
The only real happy ending would be for the community to
change. There have been signs over the past 17 years that it is
shifting, slowly, and I’m proud to feel that Disobedience may
have been a tiny part of that. The British chief rabbi recently
released a report calling on Jewish schools in the UK to end
homophobic and transphobic bullying and to teach all children to
regard others and themselves with respect and kindness. A good,
pragmatic approach. And one that has been condemned by the
chief rabbi in Har Nof, Jerusalem (yes, just as Hendon is different
from Edgware, so too are there very many chief rabbis), who
said this would be “damaging to the future of our children” and
suggested that Jewish leaders should “be willing to go to prison
rather than abandoning our sons and daughters”. I believe that
love will win in the end, but it’s going to take a long time and I
have nothing but admiration for the good people still within the
community trying to make a change.
 Change is long and painful – in communities but even in our
own lives – and the meaning of our own lives will not be known
until decades or centuries after we are gone. But, sitting in a
screening of Disobedience, I finally unravelled what it was in me
that had driven me to write the book in the first place. It is a
movie and a novel about three people who have reached a cul
de sac in their lives; who have to face the realisation that the
things they’ve been muddling along with all these years won’t
work any more. That, however painful it is, they’re going to have
to find a new way forward. A lot of people reach that point. Whole
communities, whole countries can get to that. That’s where I was
in 2001, without quite letting myself know it. But I worked it out
through the writing, like a splinter working its way out of the
skin. I made my own fable of the reconciliation and reintegration
of the hurting disparate parts of the self, and then I lived it out,
like a blueprint for an unknown journey. And having done it I
think – I hope – that the communities I come from can take that
journey too.

Disobedience is released on 30 November. The fee for this article

has been donated to KeshetUK, a charity that works to ensure
no one has to choose between their Jewish and LGBT+ identities.
keshetuk.org.