Here's hoping that he can console himself over all he has lost - the worst loss being his children, who have been told that their father is lost and evil - with the faith that his memoir will help many others survive being caught in the merciless and ultimately irreconcilable squeeze between ancient and modern worlds. While his memoir is set in a small and undeniably suffocating culture few of us will ever experience, his story "of innocence slipping away" will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled with doubts and dreams that their family and community cannot accept, and in fact denounce.ĭeen is a profoundly intelligent thinker and writer whose sorrow is as deep as that in a sad Psalm. And yet, it could not have been otherwise, given Deen's questioning intellect and honesty. The result of his crisis of faith was the loss of his family - in fact, of the whole world he had known and once dearly loved. In this painful and elegiac memoir, Shulem Deen, a former Skverer Hasidic Jew from New York City, eloquently describes his agonizing fall from faith and ascendant longing to live in a less insular world than the subculture he grew up in and in which he became a husband and father of five.
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