My So-Called Un-Orthodox Life (@theTable: “Unorthodox Media”)
By Dory Fox.
Last summer, I was debating whether or not I should unpack my library. I had defended my dissertation, thus marking the end of the line for me in academia. Accordingly, I vowed that it would be a summer free of interpretation, free of intellectual inquiry, free of the books I had once devoted my life to. I would watch reality TV. I would stay out late. I would refashion myself as a person who doesn’t make winking references to Walter Benjamin at the top of a blog post. I allowed weekly scraps of exegesis—but only in the form of “The Bachelorette” recaps. I returned suitcases of books to the library and boxed up the ones I owned. The texts that I had once read and re-read like my life depended on it were taped up and shipped off like so much furniture. And still, that summer—my summer of facing reality, my summer of reality television—the books in my library and the narrative tropes I studied in graduate school somehow found their way back to me in the form of the Netflix reality series, “My Unorthodox Life.”
The show follows its heroine, Julia Haart, who at the age of forty left her life in an Orthodox Jewish community, which included her husband and four children, to make a name for herself in the world of fashion. She founded her own eponymous line of shoes, then went on to lead the high-end lingerie brand La Perla for several years before taking on her current role as the CEO of Elite Model World (a modeling agency co-run and owned by her husband, Silvio Scaglia Haart). She traded in child rearing for empire building, long skirts for short shorts, a sheitel (wig) for—well, what still appears to be a wig, but one that is worn as a nod to big city glamour rather than Orthodox Jewish modesty. Haart bills her story as a universal one of escaping a stultifying religious world (or her favored term, “fundamentalism”), and of re-making the self. It also happens to be the story of an individual and her family making their way into enormous wealth. In that way, hers is a story as American as apple pie. The rags-to-riches, or “rise,” story arc is beloved because it asserts America’s virtue as a place where these sorts of things are possible. In other ways, her story of total transformation gets undercut by her own, and others’, narratives of being in the midst of slow changes and in between multiple identities.
Consciously, or not, Haart also employs many tropes of Jewish American immigrant narratives from the early twentieth century. Some of these narratives—whether fiction or nonfiction—emphasize the privations of immigrant life in the United States. Others follow the “rise” trope, and combine details of economic transformation with linguistic, cultural, and religious change. Haart herself immigrated to the United States as a young child from the Soviet Union, but when she tells her story, her description of leaving Orthodoxy echoes these immigrant narrative tropes more than her description of arriving in the United States does, as though Orthodoxy is another country in its own right.
If someone were to tell me that they were going to re-write Abraham Cahan’s novel, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), a classic of Jewish American literature, and set it in 21st-century Manhattan, I would imagine that they’d tell me a story a lot like that of Julia Haart. For the fictional David Levinsky, too, the path away from the traditional world of the Jewish yeshivah leads toward capitalism, almost without intention or end, as he becomes a magnate in the American cloak-making industry. Cahan’s fictional character arrives in Manhattan not from Monsey, but from Eastern Europe, making him a more immediate immigrant who must assimilate into his new, non-Jewish, American surroundings. In America, David finds himself caught in the ceaseless grind of working and earning and outsmarting the competition. He comes to believe heartily in the Protestant work ethic and that he will turn out to be a “Victor of Existence.” The similarities between Cahan’s novel of the 1910s and this unscripted series released in 2021 astounded me when I watched the show. Haart believes in the power of capitalism! She regrets her religious upbringing and the traces it has left in her psyche! She is even in the shmateh (fashion; lit. rags) business for crying out loud! (The association between Jewish immigrants and the garment industry was strong at the start of the twentieth century, and has been well documented.)
Yet this is not the only Jewish immigrant rise narrative that reverberates surprisingly in “My Unorthodox Life.” Haart has repeatedly referred to herself as both forty-nine years old and eight years old, in the show and in publicity interviews for the series. These words echo the preface to Mary Antin’s 1912 autobiography, The Promised Land. Of her own assimilation from the world of Jewish tradition to American modernity, Antin writes that, “I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell.” Antin continues, “My life I have still to live; her life ended when mine began.” Julia, like this avowedly Americanized author, expresses that she has moved on from one life to another. Yet she will always be both of these people, the forty-nine-year-old and eight-year-old.
If Julia now has a doubled life, her children show us the fascinating in-betweenness of “un-Orthodoxy.” Her two older children can’t quite shake off practices like observing the Sabbath (no matter how convincingly she explains that it is “irrational” to do so!). Just like her, characters in Jewish immigrant stories from the early twentieth century felt frustrated that they couldn’t get rid of certain habits, like keeping kosher or making “yeshivah” gesticulations while speaking. Seeing this “My Unorthodox Life” in the context of immigrant narratives helps us remember that identity shifts are rarely absolute. There is still the Eastern European Jew within the American magnate, still some crumb of orthodoxy within the un-orthodoxy.
This is why I sometimes find myself referring to the series as “My So-called Unorthodox Life.” Even though some characters on the show exhibit a rigidness about Who They Are Now, there are just as many characters who are negotiating between who they once were, who they had once imagined they’d become, and who they still want to be. Immigrant narratives and rise narratives often hold this sort of tension—like Antin, the immigrant protagonist is re-made but remains a unified self enough to tell her own story.
Perhaps I found this show compelling because I want to believe that when people undergo great changes, we can still hold onto the parts of our old lives that gave us meaning (whether that is Julia’s son lighting the Sabbath candles, or me holding onto my academic tomes that I might never crack open again). Even though the show rehearses the trope of confidently tossing away one’s “old life” in favor of glitzier horizons, most of its characters demonstrate that we are all merely stumbling towards our own flourishing; that even acquiring one hundred t-shirts that say “Gucci” on the front in ornate lettering is not enough to dissolve your whole past and determine your whole future.
Dory Fox is a teacher who lives in Washington, DC. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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