Unorthodox--A Four-Part Film By Maria Schrader

In an age of cacophony, we forget how much emotion and story can be communicated with eyes and body language.  Unorthodox (Netflix, 2020) conveys so much of its power in the faces of the characters, and in scenes that illuminate the strangeness of the Hasidic Jewish community known as Satmar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  At the center of the plot is a woman trying to escape and fashion a future for herself in a faraway city in another country.  The miniseries, created by Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski based on the memoir by Deborah Feldman, and directed by Maria Schrader, rests on the capable shoulders of an extraordinary cast, led by Shira Haas as Esther “Esty” Shapiro.  In the first episode, Esty has decided to run away from her arranged marriage to Yanky, played by Amit Rahav, and seek out the mother she thinks abandoned her when she was young.  Esty’s journey takes her to Berlin, where she finds a new and promising world, one that also includes in its history the destruction of millions of Jewish lives, an event that haunts her and the community from which she is fleeing even now, more than 75 years later.  Can one ever escape the past?  That is the question running through the four-part series.

Shira Haas is transcendent.  She plays a tiny, fierce woman of nineteen who has been denied an education and is forced to live a sheltered, suffocating existence in which bearing children, keeping house, and pleasing Yanky are her sole responsibilities.  When she cannot consummate her marriage and get pregnant, her mother-in-law becomes involved.  She is subjected to uncomfortable and embarrassing sex lessons from a woman in the community charged with educating inexperienced, virgin brides on how to please their men according to the precepts of Torah and Talmud.  The community is claustrophobic, depriving Esty of air.

Esty relies on her non-Jewish piano teacher to help her plan her escape.  She knows her mother, Leah, lives in Berlin, and she has paperwork that will allow her to establish citizenship in Germany.  Her teacher secures an airline ticket and other documents she needs to flee.  Before leaving, the teacher gives her a compass, an important symbol for Esty finding her way.  Yanky and his sketchy cousin, Moishe, threaten the teacher as they attempt to track Esty down and forcibly take her back to Williamsburg.

Once Esty makes it to Berlin, the world seems to open up before her.  She is astounded by all she sees.  Her mother lives with another woman—Esty spies her on the street—a relationship forbidden in her old world.  Feeling she cannot abide her mother’s living arrangement, she instead seeks out shelter at a nearby music school.  There, she meets several students who take her to a popular beach.  After wading into the water and throwing away the awful wig she was forced to wear in her old life, her shaved head and her uniqueness bring her acceptance with these new friends.  She is transformed, baptized into a new life.

The writers and director take the time to develop the reunion between mother and daughter.  Leah is full of remorse for not being part of Esty’s life, but the child was literally ripped from her in a battle with her Hasidic alcoholic husband.  Theirs was also an arranged marriage.  Esty goes through a range of emotions before coming to accept and understand what happened in the past.  Again, her internal conflict between her old and new worlds often plays across her face and in her eyes.

 Meanwhile, in a too-convenient plot point, a professor from the music school offers Esty a chance to audition for a scholarship.  One can overlook the convenience of the plot for the heightened dramatic tension it creates:  Moishe and Yanky stalk her around Berlin; she struggles to rekindle her relationship with her mother; she discovers she is pregnant, which makes Yanky’s mission to get her back all the more urgent.  Having a child raises her value to him and the community.

The conclusion is stunning.  The surprises regarding her audition are unexpected and transformative.  The showdown between Yanky and his now very different wife reflects the hard choices we must make between happiness and family duty.  It is exhilarating to see Esty’s story play out in Berlin, a welcomed change from the closeness of her Brooklyn life.  One of her new music school friends asks her why she did not go to one of the excellent music schools in New York.  Sometimes even a big city can be a small world when one is a prisoner.  Berlin, a city of tragic history for Esty, also offers a brave new world that she can make her own on her own terms.

 

The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson

Are times of social change connected to notorious serial murders?  Was Charles Manson a product of the 1960s, the Hippie Movement, and the Summer of Love?  Was Ted Bundy a murderous response to the Feminist Movement of the 1970s?  In truth, serial murders and assassinations occur throughout history, and there is little correlative evidence that connects sociological upheaval with increased bloodshed.  Humans kill humans for various reasons, one of the most common being greed and jealousy.  Lizzie Borden did not hack her father and stepmother to death one hot August day, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, because of the burgeoning Women’s Suffragist Movement.  In Cara Robertson’s book, The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story (Simon & Schuster, 2019), the author takes us through the entire case, the murders, the trial, and the verdict.  Although Lizzie was a blank canvas for the townspeople to project their views of women and their role in society, it is clear that this bloody crime involved the more mundane familial greed and not any social revolution.

There were only two people in the Borden household that morning who survived the carnage:  Lizzie and a domestic servant named Bridget Sullivan.  Andrew Borden, her father, had his skull shattered with an ax as he lay napping on the sofa downstairs.  He was not the killer’s first victim.  That would be Lizzie’s stepmother, Abby, found dead from a crushed skull in the upstairs guest bedroom.  In the limited forensic crime scene technology of the day, investigators determined Abby died first, possibly as much as an hour and a half before Andrew.  Bridget was outside washing windows during that time; Lizzie was inside ironing, or out in the barn looking for fishing tackle, or was somewhere else in the home, depending on what story she was telling.  Her account changed during the investigation and trial.  Only Lizzie had motive, access, and the opportunity to kill her parents.  She hated her stepmother—she was jealous of her and afraid Abby would take all of Andrew’s money, leaving Lizzie and her sister, Emma, with nothing.

Townspeople described Lizzie as a sheltered, wealthy, privileged woman of thirty-two years, old enough to be considered a spinster.  She had no marriage or family of her own, and she had lived in her father’s home all her life.  She tried to keep up with her wealthy friends, but Andrew guarded his finances with an iron fist.  He bought the cheaper house in a not-as-fashionable neighborhood, an embarrassment for socially conscious Lizzie and sister, Emma.

Once she was on trial for the murders, the townspeople had even more to gossip about, namely that she was always so cool and calm during the proceedings.  She rarely cried or displayed any emotion, even when the testimony turned graphic.  Her parents’ skulls were cleaned of flesh and brought into the courtroom so that the prosecution could show how the ax fit into the shattered openings in the bone.  The people also argued about the murderer’s method of attack.  Hacking two people to death seemed more like the work of a maniac, someone in a rage.  No woman could do such a crime.  A woman’s method of murder was poisoning, something subtle and less gory.  Robertson traces how Lizzie allegedly went to a drugstore in the days leading up to the murders to purchase prussic acid, a potent poison.  When confronted by the druggist, she claimed she wanted it to clean a seal-skin cape.  She was refused service, and witnesses were not sure of the identity of the customer.  The prosecution had trouble getting that evidence into the trial.

Robertson spends time discussing the missing murder weapon.  Several axes were present in the Borden home, but none had telltale signs of blood on them.  One had a broken handle and the blade was covered in ash.  Another was found during the trial on the roof of a nearby barn.  These weapons matched the skull damage on both victims, but not conclusively.

Robertson’s forte is the trial itself, and she does a bang-up job taking the reader through each point of the proceedings.  The book would make an excellent teaching tool in a law class.  Not only is the crime subjected to intense scrutiny, but New England culture at the time also is part of the analysis.  She discusses theories of crime going back into history.  She writes about the cultural fascination with eugenics and the criminal element.  Does a murderer have a specific, animalistic body structure?  Do those descended from violent tribes have a genetic disposition to violent acts?  She dives into the criminal theories of Dr. Arthur MacDonald and Cesare Lombroso.

One interesting note about the trial concerns, of all things, menstruation.  Lizzie was in the throes of her “monthly illness,” as the male lawyers describe it.  There is a discussion about whether this could have incited Lizzie to commit such violent murders.  Robertson is good at tracing how women and their intellectual and physical lives were so mysterious to men at the time.  Could a woman lie?  Could she take up an ax and split someone’s skull?

Lizzie Borden got away with murder.  That’s no spoiler as the case is well known in history, but how she could be found not guilty in the face of such a preponderance of evidence is the real mystery unraveled here.  Cara Robertson presents a thorough, deeply analytical account of one of the most famous cases in U.S. history.  Every scrap of evidence, every nuance is explored.  The book is a study of the case and a thorough analysis of an enigmatic figure who has become legendary in American crime.

 

Notes From A Bottle Found On The Beach At Carmel by Evan S. Connell

 There are books that change lives.  Evan S. Connell’s book, Notes From A Bottle Found On The Beach At Carmel (North Point Press, 1962) is one of them.  First, there is an epigraph from Euripides:

“There be many shapes of mystery and many things God makes to be, past hope or fear.  And the end men looked for cometh not, and a path is there where no man sought.  So hath it fallen here.”

From that mysterious beginning, we discover a bottle of cryptic notes of found wisdom, the loose poetry of life and the universe.  The book is truly a remarkable piece of literature.  Is it poetry?  A religious tract?  A meditation?  It is fragmentary and rife with non-sequiturs, yet read together, preferably in one sitting, one is struck by the sheer breadth and insight offered in its totality.

We are travelers in this land of wakefulness and dreams, but our world is one out of joint.  “Each life is a myth, a song given out of darkness,” Connell writes, “a tale for children, the legend we create.  Are we not heroes, each of us in one fashion or another, wandering through the mysterious labyrinths?”  Why do we travel, and why does the legend of the traveler cross cultures and histories?  It is the consequence, Connell tells us, “of unbearable longing.”  He equates the traveler with one on a pilgrimage, one who is always the alien, the outsider.  One who seeks knowledge and wisdom in the face of what is essentially unknowable:  who are we and what is our place in this multiverse?

This is a book of poetic imagery and feral beauty.  Connell argues we must look at the world as it is, with its mysteries intact.  We must understand evil as a creation of God who invented everything in the universe.  It is part and parcel of the creation myth.  Nothing is as it seems, meaning that dualities exist in every atom.  Connell writes that “Suffering is of itself neither good nor evil.”  Suffering is, and it is the lot of all people and creatures to suffer.  He redeems the darkness of the message by also repeating several times in the book that all is possible for those who believe.  “Now is the time for a dreamer,” he writes.  Connell tells us repeatedly in the book that dream life and real life are the products of the same mind.  We dream ourselves into waking life and pass from waking life back into a dream state.  Behind it all, we recognize that existence in this realm ends, but not our essence.  Connell says that “There is a chain of fate that links us irrevocably to our own destruction.”

In many of the found notes, Connell reveals that there is a thread connecting all things.  “Myths, art, and dreams are but emanations from ancestral spheres,” he writes.  His evidence crosses species.  Honeybees die of loneliness.  Amoebas, if given a choice, turn to the light.  A Capuchin monk, pausing on his morning walk to hear a bird’s song, finds when he returns to the monastery that no one remembers him because he has been gone so long.  It is a mystical, magical world.  He believes that nothing exists that may be lost and all that will exist, exists now.  We are all part of a vast continuum.  Time is not linear because all of time is now.  When a note argues that journeys end and that even the beautiful must die, that seasons alter us, and that “Nothing escapes my notice, except the passage of time,” he speaks of the transitory nature of the universe.  Our lives change but do not end.  Our essence goes on.

What exactly will remain of us?  In a note, an artist tells us he has agreed to “paint a narrative on the city walls.”  He has been at it for several years because there is so much to be told.  Our stories survive us.  Existence is a long novel with many settings and characters.  Our mistake, another note tells us, is one we must avoid:  “Arbitrarily we circumscribe reality, choosing to limit the universe to the bounds of our apprehension.”  This rings of Hamlet’s lines to Horatio: “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  The notes reassure us that time was, time is, and time will be.  We cannot escape these parameters.  Yet “Nothing is born that does not pass away.”  Life is a paradox of intersecting journeys and encounters, endings and beginnings, and we must be open to them all.

Evan S. Connell presents us with a beautiful, poetic meditation on our existence.  The book defies classification, like most significant works of art.  His notes from the metaphorical bottle on the beach tell us this is a magical existence, and all things radiate wisdom and light as well as darkness.  The world is a teacher.  All we have to do is pay attention.