Autism in the insular world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism: "There were superstitions and things that God knows how many other mothers had to deal with"

Salon talks to author Judy Brown about her new memoir, "This Is Not a Love Story"

Published August 1, 2015 9:00PM (EDT)

      (judybrownhush.com)
(judybrownhush.com)

Using a pen name, Judy Brown wrote the controversial young-adult book "Hush," fiction that took on sexual child abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park. It’s easy to imagine that Brown’s next book -- a memoir with the title “This Is Not a Love Story” (read an excerpt here) and a cover graced with a photo of an impish child -- might be a tell-all memoir about even darker corners. But the memoir, told in a mesmerizing, old-world to the point of being otherworldly style, is a rare look into the world of Brown’s family, especially her unknowable “crazy” brother, and the comforting rituals and disturbing superstitions of her Chassidic community.

We spoke to Brown about family, leaving fundamentalism, the perils of ignorance, and the other concerns of her new book. The interview has been edited and condensed.

The book’s really unexpected. I was assuming that it was going to be a memoir and that it was going to delve into some really dark things, and the writing and content really took me by surprise. Are you getting that from other people too?

Inherently, if you’re writing a book about leaving the community, you left it because you weren’t happy. My book was never about leaving -- it’s about my autistic brother and the way it was handled within that planet. I really just said it the way it was. I don’t find the ultra-Orthodox world to be as inherently dark and traumatic as it could be. It could be in many ways, but for the 90 percent that stay, it is not. It’s a vibrant, weird little ecosystem of its own, but it makes perfect sense for those in it. When I speak about my autistic brother, that was instinctively my voice because my whole experience was through the Orthodox world. It wasn’t about leaving it. I didn’t think about that when I wrote it. I just wrote the experience the way it was and the way it unfolded.

Can you talk about the way love is perceived within that community and why you chose to call your book “This Is Not a Love Story?”

There’s no such thing as love. There’s only such a thing as life. Love is always considered a concept in relationship to God and spirituality. When it comes to couplehood, marriage, the most important form of what most people would call love would be transliterated by us to stability, commitment, work, the scene of a family sitting happily around a Sabbath dinner table and passing on the heritage. That’s the idea of love. It’s more the words stability and trust and commitment. I think it’s simply because of what is inherent to every religious and Jewish society. Because when it comes to marriage, the word love is connected to sexuality. So, if sexuality cannot be accepted on its own terms, then love cannot be either in that way. The whole reason why people get married in the Orthodox world is to have children and to pass on the heritage to the next generation. It’s not because of sexual attraction.

The title was the most complicated part of the book. I didn’t come up with the title. It was one of my agents that came up with it. We could not come up with the title. We simply could not think of a title because we had this ongoing internal debate if the title should portray the idea of autism, of Judaism, of love. We only came up with the title a short while ago. We went through many bad titles until this came out. I found it to be so perfect because this is a love story, but on our terms and in our language. But the word love as seen through the secular perspective is seen as a threat to the Orthodox way of thinking.

Which is very similar to Christian fundamentalism too, the same concept. Love is selfish, love is taking you away from God. It’s a different tradition, but the only goal is to spread the ideas and be devoted to God. If you’re in love with somebody, then it’s taking you away.

Right. I think it’s also linked to -- in the secular world the word love is linked to sexuality. If you love somebody it’s because you are attracted to them sexually. It’s not just selfish, it’s a very short-term prospect. Because what happens when you tire of them sexually? Now the commitment is allowed to be broken? You no longer need to love them? Not that I look at it that way, but it’s kind of true. That’s what happens. They fall in love and then they are no longer sexually attracted, and now there’s a reason to hate each other. They don’t see a need for commitment because their whole commitment was based on love, which was inherently based on something superficial, something that biologically doesn’t last past a certain amount of time. In any world that emphasizes family, you can’t have that.

Let’s talk about family a little bit -- let’s talk about your brother. The memoir talks about your parents' marriage a lot and the sort of family dynamic, but it focuses on your brother, who everybody believed was crazy. There was a lot of speculation about what caused it and there was even speculation that there was a family curse.

It’s something that happened very slowly for me, looking back. I didn’t look back for a long time. I just took it as it came. Another thing about having an autistic brother in this world -- because of the dynamics of our little planet and the ignorance of autism -- so many families gave their children away. I don’t know anyone with an autistic sibling. It was very isolating in that sense: I was the only one I knew who had an autistic sibling. I didn’t have these other reference points. It took me until adulthood, when autism in the last decade exploded as an issue. That was a massively surprising and revealing conversation for me to follow. I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly everybody had an autistic sibling. All these people were talking about it. It was in this magazine and that magazine. That was my real journey, when the issue exploded in the secular world in such a large way. When I look back I don’t look at it as frustration. I recognized very early on that when it came to special children, the Orthodox world, although peculiar in its own ways, it wasn’t that much different from the outside world.

I remember when I was a teenager I read at least two powerful books of parents and one of a teacher about a special child. The family dynamics were really familiar to me. In both books the father did not want the child. He wanted nothing to do with the child. He believed that it was the best thing to do for the family. The mother fought for the child. I think I recognized early on that this isn’t an Orthodox thing. Though we have our own thing, like marriage prospects, that triggered this reaction, it wasn’t that much different than the outside world. So, as soon as I began to follow these discussions and opened up my ideas about autism, since then looking back I realized how incredibly lucky my brother was. For me it’s one thing, but at the end of the day this could have gone down so badly. That he was 7 at the time he was diagnosed, it’s a miracle that he landed the right person. He wasn’t just diagnosed, but the person who diagnosed him, Dr. Shulman, was hands-on. The doctor guided my mother. If we are talking comparison to other children, they were never seen again. At the end of the day it ended well and my brother was one of the really lucky ones. I find it impossible to judge at the time given the general ignorance of the time.

When I started reading your book I would have guessed this was something written by somebody much older. I went and looked you up and realized that you’re in your 30s. What were you reading when you were young? How do you think your background helped you create your writer’s voice? It’s very strong and it’s unique. It doesn’t remind me of anybody in particular.

Ironically, I didn’t really learn how to write until I began to leave the ultra-Orthodox world. I always had this writing instinct in me. Obviously it’s something you are born with, but it was very frustrating to me because I came from a world -- part of being so enclosed was that we didn’t speak proper English. We speak what we call Yinglish, a combination of Yiddish and English and Talmudic ancient Hebrew. I’m not kidding. I was writing a little bit in Yiddish, I was writing a little bit in Hebrew, but I was trying to write in English and it was very frustrating to me. I knew I lacked words, but I didn’t even know what words they were that I lacked.

It was only when I was 19 or 20 that I began to get a little more guidance and began to read. For me, the influences were almost like an explosion because they were so powerful. Mark Twain was a massive eye-opener for me. I read "Huckleberry Finn" and then "Tom Sawyer" and everything he’s ever written. It was this immediate connection. I remember finishing "Huckleberry Finn" and running to my computer and writing my first bad imitation of Mark Twain. I began to read real powerful writers -- Toni Morrison, Elie Wiesel and Mark Twain. I was always instinctively compelled by powerful children’s voices. That’s something that Mark Twain employs. It connected me to an instinctive writing voice I had. Anything unique is because I come from a completely different world and perspective. It’s entirely the way of thinking. It’s a logical extension of that, of where I grew up.

I know that your first book, “Hush,” was not without some controversy because there are a lot of people who were upset about the representation of the ultra-Orthodox community. I’m wondering how you dealt with that criticism? How can you be an artist and your own person while you are representing this group with some people not wanting to be represented at all?

Most people in the group don’t want to be represented at all. I could say I dealt with it pretty badly. It was a nightmarish experience not to be repeated. I didn’t write the book as an artist. I didn’t write the book as some idea or some concept. I wrote the book to survive.

Sexual abuse was a plague in the community. The reason that it had become a plague in the community was because they denied its existence, allowing pedophiles the full freedom to sexually molest children. Ironically, it was being a writer in the ultra-Orthodox world that brought me to the awareness of the extent of this plague, the sexual abuse. Before I ever wrote a word of “Hush,” I had written for years in the ultra-Orthodox world. My writings were taught in their schools. But it was being a writer that brought me readers, and they would tell me their stories. And more and more of them were about sexual abuse. They were by far the most terrifying ones.

You begin to hear a pattern. Something happened, something I had with my close friend, and something I had to deal with as a teenager with a few people, but you can’t think about it in a world where it is denied. You deny it to yourself. That’s what happens and that’s what happened to me too. You just think about it as an isolated event. You think this isn’t the community. It’s just me or her or him. As a writer, it brought me stories and the denial was over. It became a matter of living with myself.

This isn’t some theoretical concept. It’s young adults committing suicide one after another. It’s people who go through hellish agony trying to untangle themselves and deal with the trauma. It’s knowing that as long as you are silent there’s another person you are literally killing. For me that book was survival. So the ugliness that it unleashed was a nightmare to deal with. It’s something that still hurts me to think about. I guess it always will. I never thought of it in terms of an artist. It was just something that was in existence in the most brutal way and the only thing I feared more than publishing it was not publishing it. That’s really what it came down to.

Do you think that this story came out of that story in some ways? In that story you are dealing with such dark things and in this story there is some darkness in there, but it’s a very loving world. It really shows you some of the beauty of that kind of community. Was there any conscious effort and is it possibly why you wrote it at this time?

That’s a hard question to answer because writing is a lot of instinct. It’s something that’s kind of there and it’s going to come out at some point. It’s a very organic process. The experience with my brother and story with my brother, it’s just reality. It was just an entirely different experience. The ultra-Orthodox world is a complicated world like every world is. I think it’s very easy, because it’s so peculiar, for people to put it into black and white. It isn’t. There are parts that are black. There are parts that are white. There are parts that are gray.

Within in its own little sphere there are all these different experiences and attitudes and stories. It wasn’t a conscious effort because it didn’t take an effort to portray this story positively. The story was positive. It was the way it was.

Some of the reaction is universal. It may come out in different forms, but the blaming of the family before people really understood it, it could be really painful. It sort of piles on pain on top of pain and difficulty. I think that’s why it speaks beyond to something that is universal in all communities.

We all know of the time where they were blaming mothers who weren’t nursing, or for being cold. The mother was blamed, though you had two or six other kids that were just fine. Somehow it was the mother’s fault. It’s ignorant, just ignorance. The process of ignorance has to be overcome. Right. That’s the way I see it. The Orthodox world has its ignorances. When it came to autism, there were superstitions and things that God knows how many other mothers had to deal with. There are universal things that just go through it. What may be surprising to readers is to see so much of what they empathize with, the parts [in which] you can see a little bit of a reflection of yourself. You don’t expect that in this weird place. That’s the way it is.

Has your brother read the book?

No. He’s not quite at the level where he can read such a book easily. But we speak about it.

How does he feel about it?

He’s very excited. It’s an exciting thing happening. We are very close today. We speak a lot. It’s a cool thing. That’s the way he looks at it.

I know you broke away from the ultra-Orthodox community. I’m wondering if you could talk about that break and why you made that decision. How long ago did that happen?

I can’t even answer that question because there isn’t a day to decide to leave. For me, there was never leaving the community. It was a process of transitioning out.

Let me clarify: I’m still Orthodox. There’s ultra-Orthodox and then there’s Orthodox. There’s a big bridge between the two. I didn’t leave religious Judaism. I just left the community I grew up in. Their world is such a conditional place. You are member of the society and there is a long list of conditions that you have to stay. Once you break, it’s a very automatic process. That break occurs whether or not you want it. You kind of lose control of it at that point. It forces you into a place where you have to encounter the unfamiliar, the larger world. You start to redefine your entire identity in terms of that. Like I said, when you violate any of the conditions of such a world it’s an automatic process that sets things into motion so that at the end of it you cannot stay. You are out. That’s it. It forces you to redefine yourself entirely and do things differently.

How did that work with your family? I’m assuming your family is still ultra-Orthodox.

I don’t want to get into private details, but I can just say that when you look at anyone who does this, it’s always a very painful process. It’s always traumatic. It’s never a pretty and simple thing.

I love the way you characterize yourself when you’re a child. Clearly you were a bit of a rebel. Is that how you saw yourself then?

No. I wasn’t a rebel. I was a troublemaker. I was totally not a rebel. I was an 8-year-old who cared a lot more about myself than anyone else on Earth. I didn’t see myself as a rebel. I was a typical, selfish, adorable little brat. That’s all it was.


By Sara Scribner

MORE FROM Sara Scribner


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