![]() ![]() When she pointed to objectionable Torah passages, such as one declaring that Eve was ruled over by Adam, she was told that she was misinterpreting the text. Her transformation was the stuff of legend in the Mirvis household, conveyed to the author and her two siblings “in storied tones, the religious equivalent of a fairy tale about a princess returned to her rightful home.”Īs a child, Mirvis felt “a low rumbling of anger,” particularly about the subservient role of women even within the more liberal strain of Modern Orthodoxy to which her family adhered. ![]() Her maternal grandmother, although raised in a secular Zionist household, chose as a teenager to embrace Orthodoxy. “It is braided through every memory, part of nearly every conversation and every relationship,” she writes. Mirvis was raised in Memphis, in a small Orthodox community dubbed “The Jerusalem of the South”-the flavor of which she captures in her first, bestselling novel, The Ladies Auxiliary-where most aspects of her childhood were imbued with “Jewishness,” from the contemporary Israeli art that hung on the walls to the Jewish-themed books on the shelves. With this latest contribution, Mirvis applies her novelist’s flair to what might otherwise be a narrative familiar to anyone who has wrestled with religious doubt, endured a troubled marriage-or simply felt trapped. Among the more notable books are Shulem Deen’s All Who Go Do Not Return, which won a 2015 National Jewish Book Award, and the best-selling Unorthodox, by Deborah Feldman. This dramatic scene is just one instance in The Book of Separation, a graceful and deeply affecting memoir by an author of three novels, in which Mirvis’s struggles with Orthodox Judaism and an increasingly unhappy marriage began to manifest physically, as if her body were sending distress signals to her more-cautious brain.Ĭhronicles of leaving Orthodoxy have been plentiful during the past few years, informally referred to as “Ex-Frum” or “Off the Derech” memoirs. ![]() One Shabbat, toward the end of the morning service, Tova Mirvis was stricken by a debilitating headache, in which “the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head.” She rushed from the synagogue, entertaining worst-case scenarios: Was this, perhaps, a brain tumor or an aneurysm? But once she stepped outside and removed her hat, the pain subsided.
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