Courtesy of Ben Lazar

As 25-year-old Deborah Feldman slides into a booth at an Upper East Side restaurant, wearing a trendy leather jacket and knitted blue sweater, it is difficult to imagine the path she took to get to this exact point in her life, a journey she details in her debut memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. In the memoir, Feldman describes how she was raised mainly by her grandparents in the Satmar community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Feldman writes about sneaking off to a library as a girl to consume illicit books such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda. When she was 17, she was married to a man preselected by her family, with whom she had only spent 30 minutes before the ceremony. At 19, Feldman gave birth to a son. Hoping for a different life, she started secretly attending classes at Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied a variety of fields including literature and feminism, and started an anonymous blog detailing her experiences. Through her blog, Feldman was connected with a literary agent and then, while still attending Sarah Lawrence, she finished her memoir and left her community with her son. The book, however, has experienced a fair share of criticism and sparked several conversations about Feldman’s portrayal of her upbringing.

On Thursday, May 17, Feldman will present the work in the Lower East Side at the Tenement Museum, but we sat down with her beforehand to learn more about her work and the community she comes from.

You have said you were surprised by the reaction to—or success of—the book. What do you think people are responding to?

I am surprised the book did well, because with a book like this [the subject] is niche and you expect the book to do at best mid-list. And then something very weird happened. My publicist set me up [with an interview] with the New York Post and I met this woman, [the writer] Sara Stewart, who I loved and adored. We had this great lunch together and I gave a lot to the interview. … Then the article came out and it was nothing like what I thought this person would write … but the Post I guess edited it so that it sounded like these shallow sound bites … but then the Post piece got picked up by three newspapers. Then someone at The View saw it and called me and booked me for the show. But the Post is what got the [people from my community] angry.

Is that a publication that your community reads?

A younger Feldman. Courtesy of Simon and Schuster.

They read whatever is written about them. They are obsessed with how they are portrayed in the media. They want to control everything that is said about them.

They took issue with a lot of things in the [Post] interview that are the truth, but the Post misconstrued it—but it is not misconstrued to a point where you can completely deny it.

So they picked the article apart. From there, the more publicity I got, the more they wanted to knock me down, [but] had the Post not published that article, the dominoes would not have fallen into place.

But then I went on The View and I talked about marital purity, which is a big secret. Nobody talks about it in public ever. It is like we all agree that it is the one thing you cannot talk about because if the rest of the world knows we do this they will never look at us the same. … That’s why their excuse is “they can never understand because it’s so beautiful.” … It all boils down to [one] view and everything is built on that view that women are unpure because they menstruate.

[On The View] I was talking from my experiences and trying to be as simple and clear as possible because a lot of these things are really hard to explain. The funny thing is that I could have said way worse things about the laws of sex and marital purity … I didn’t bring up all the details. I just gave them the basics … and some people can argue that that is beautiful, but it wasn’t beautiful for me.

Feldman poses for her wedding. Courtesy of Simon and Schuster.

You have spoken about going through these marriage rituals and finding them shocking. You couldn’t believe that the women in your community were all doing this. Do women not speak about this?

No one ever talks about it in public. You never discuss it with anyone.

Even among only women?

Well … first of all, people are so bored and have so little to do besides work and take care of babies … so gossip is rolled into a million times its natural size. [Gossip] is the only thing that is safe. You never talk about you. You never confide, so you talk about someone else. It’s how people bond … the women will get together with their babies and have play dates … and gossip about their own families, about their friends, about their neighbors … when you have that kind of attitude obviously everything you do everyone will know.

There is this attitude—it’s almost like communism—of “don’t ever show people how you really feel because everyone will know.” There is no privacy and I think that is why women don’t communicate because they don’t trust each other.

What do they gossip about?

People gossip about everything: Is someone having trouble in his or her marriage? Is someone’s child ill? They will gossip about whatever they can find. They will gossip about someone wearing a brightly colored turban.

You have said that things are changing in the community that you come from, that the girls in your community no longer have to sneak away to the library to find out about a book like yours.

A few things happened that really changed the community drastically. One of those things was Williamsburg becoming cool and cool people moving in, which filled the neighborhood with bars. The rabbis were terrified of this because they knew that it was very tempting for a man to leave his family on a Friday night, walk a couple blocks and go to a bar.

The second thing that happened was the Internet. The Internet arrived and then there were cellphones and smartphones. What happened was there was no longer an effective way to build a wall around the community, because before if you wanted information, you had to go get it and you didn’t want to be seen getting it.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster

You are working on a second book about people who leave religious groups both in America and abroad. What parallels do you find between your own story and theirs?

It’s funny that you say that, because when I wrote the proposal for my second book I didn’t think about it as anything more than a memoir, but when I wrote the memoir it was about other people’s stories, because I was meeting people and their stories where intersecting mine. When the publisher that I work with now, Penguin, read it, they said we see this as a much broader book than just a memoir. [They saw] this as a book about people who leave religion all over the world and what they have in common. Now this is a book about religious refugees.

While the West Side has the High Line, the East Side could get the LowLine

Over 80 years ago, Dan Barasch’s grandparents on both sides ended up in the Lower East Side after emigrating from Italy and Russia. While his family eventually set up stakes in other neighborhoods and he settled in the East Village—which was at one point considered the Lower East Side—the area still holds special significance for Barasch.

“My grandmother saw this neighborhood change to what it is today,” he said. “It’s an exciting neighborhood and it belongs to a lot of different people.”

It most likely would have seemed improbable to Barasch’s ancestors that he and James Ramsey would set out on what promises to be a long journey to create New York City’s first underground park, which the duo hopes to construct in an abandoned trolley terminal underneath Delancey Street. The idea has been in development since last year, and they have presented their proposal throughout the neighborhood, from the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street to the public school Essex Street Academy, and to city officials.

Photo courtesy of raad studio.

For Barasch and Ramsey, the proposal, officially called Delancey Underground but nicknamed The LowLine after the famous High Line park on the West Side, is chiefly about serving the Lower East Side and surrounding community. Ramsey, a NASA engineer turned architect, is the founder and owner of Raad Studio on Chrystie Street, while Barasch previously promoted social innovations with companies and organizations like Google and the 9/11 Survivors’ Fund.

Both men pointed to a lack of green space in the neighborhood. “The more we looked into it, the more we saw how the Lower East Side has been historically underserved,” said Ramsey. “It just happened that this space was here. It works in a number of ways and struck us as very strong from a community point of view.”

Ramsey went on to point out that community reaction to the proposal has been overwhelmingly positive and it has drawn praise from both the Lower East Side BID and City Council Member Margaret Chin.

Growing support for the project is evidenced by their recent Kickstarter campaign. Although the Internet drive, which kicked off in late February, was to raise $100,000 by April 6, 2,517 backers have already pledged $134,040 (as of press time). As Barasch and Ramsey point out on their Kickstarter site, this initial round of funding will allow the pair to build a full-scale installation—a “mini LowLine”—at the Essex Street Market in September. The demo will not only help them to perfect the solar technology that will be used to naturally illuminate the park, but convince potential funders, the city and the MTA, which owns the property, that the idea is feasible.

For the first phase of the project, Ramsey and Barasch hope to raise $500,000, which would be used not only the demonstration but also for a feasibility study. Barasch noted that they are often asked how much the project will cost, but without an initial study, it is difficult to arrive at a realistic number.

“We haven’t done constructability reviews, we haven’t paid land use experts,” Barasch explained, adding that a study would require coordination with roughly a dozen city agencies.

While the MTA has yet to sign off on the project, representatives from the authority have met with Barasch and Ramsey and escorted them on their first tour of the site last March. Ramsey points out that the space is slightly visible from the Brooklyn-bound side of the J/Z platform at the Essex Street Subway station.

“I am the kind of person, like a lot of New Yorkers, who loves to find secret spaces, abandoned lots and plots up for renewal…When we were underground, it was sort of like exploring a hidden gem,” Barasch recalled. “The sheer scale of it—we aren’t used to seeing that much unused real estate, and there were all of these architectural details, like cobblestones and crisscrossing rail lines. These exciting elements bring you back to a different era.”

According to Barasch and Ramsey, the space is around 60,000 square feet, nearly the size of Gramercy Park. It was constructed as a trolley terminal in 1903, the same year the Williamsburg Bridge was opened. At the time, streetcars were used to shuttle people back and forth from Williamsburg to the Lower East Side. Use of the trolleys and thus the terminal was discontinued in 1948. Ramsey and Barasch remain enamored of the unique historic aspects of the space, like the 20-foot vaulted ceilings and steel columns, but plan to incorporate cutting-edge technology that rivals science fiction.

“The space is so compelling from a historical and aesthetic standpoint, I very much would love to preserve, juxtapose and compliment it using technology,” Ramsey noted. As the pair explains on their Kickstarter page, the technology they hope to employ includes “a system of optics to gather sunlight, concentrate it and reflect it below ground, where it is dispersed by a solar distributor dish embedded in the ceiling. The light irrigated underground will carry the necessary wavelengths to support photosynthesis—meaning we can grow plants, trees and grasses underground.”

In addition to planning the demo and study, Barasch said they hope to continue meeting with members of the community to learn what they would like for the site. “We want to talk to as many residents as we can,” he said. “We would like to build something beautiful that is inclusive of everyone.”

To learn more about the Delancey Underground project, visit delanceyunderground.org.

By Courtney Holbrook

Whether he’s researching the strange methods of 19th-century scientists or on the trail of 17th-century pirates, author, historian and journalist Richard Zacks has an eye for the juicy bits in history.

Now, the bestselling author of The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd and three other books has a new tale about Theodore Roosevelt and the seedy world of 1890s New York. Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York follows Roosevelt in his years as New York’s police commissioner and his struggle to change Lower Manhattan.

What drew you to Roosevelt’s time as police commissioner of New York?

I didn’t start out as a Roosevelt expert; I came to the story through the vice angle. I was researching the 1890s and New York and stumbled upon Roosevelt as police commissioner. I was stunned to discover that it really didn’t go according to the fairy tale version that came out later— you know, he came in as police commissioner and reformed the whole city and stopped crime and cleaned up the police department. It was a much more interesting story than that.

In your mind, did Roosevelt’s time as police commissioner end in failure?

I wouldn’t say outright failure. I would say it was kind of a noble effort. He never backed down. It’s extraordinary—the will and the nerve of the man to continue to keep trying right up until the last moment to rout out all kinds of corruption, to try to clean up the saloons and the brothels and the rest of it. But you know, the city was just overwhelmingly oriented towards vice. And the fact that he succeeded pretty well for around eight or 10 months is just extraordinary.

Q: Roosevelt started out well as police commissioner; he cleaned up the lazy and bribe-happy police. What do you think was the turning point?

A: I think the turning point was the November election where the Republicans in New York lost to the Democrats and blamed it on Roosevelt’s tactics as police commissioner. He succeeded up until that point. He shut down the Sunday saloons—the fact that he did that was just astounding in New York City. It was the most entrenched custom. Saloons couldn’t legally be opened on Sundays, so everyone just went to the side door of the saloon on Sundays, the working man’s one day off a week.

If the Republicans had wound up winning that election in November, Roosevelt could have proved to his own party and to the world that New York City indeed wanted to be reformed and they wanted Roosevelt’s principles. But they lost.

Q: Was Roosevelt’s decision to reform the city a product of ambition or morality?

A: I think the morality motive was really strong. I think he really thought it would be a better life for everybody if Sundays were spent picnicking with the family instead of the husband and father going off to the saloon and getting drunk.

Q: Can you talk about your writing process for this book?

A: It was difficult figuring out how to structure it, because I wanted to create the city of vice before I brought Roosevelt in. So I had to create a narrative line that really moved forward and then introduce Roosevelt. I just had trouble figuring out those riddles a lot of the time.

What I like to do is research. New York in the 1890s had something like 20 very vigorous newspapers. The number is actually higher, but there are about 20 that you can get easily at the New York Public Library. It became addictive, because every newspaper had slightly different versions and slightly different quotes and different wise-guy phrasings. I got addicted to looking at seven versions of every event I was trying to research. It was a way to try to put off writing. I got the project in 2006 and it took about five years. I probably researched for four years, and wrote for one.

Q: What will you be presenting at your talk at the Tenement Museum?

A: I’m excited to give these talks, because it allows me to go and pull 50 photographs from the 1890s. I just love New York City scenes, like the streetcars with the horses pulling them and the men in hats and the women in the corseted dresses to the ground. It’s time travel and they’re just really great images. I also have some really great naughty and slightly risqué images that I just couldn’t resist putting in.

Richard Zacks will speak about Island of Vice at the Tenement Museum, 103 Orchard St. (betw. Delancey & Broome Sts.), www.tenement.org, March 20 at 6:30 p.m.