According to Feldman's uncle, she wasn't forced to marry her husband Joel – she was in love with him and insisted on the marriage.
Deborah Feldman and her family in what apparently were, despite her current claims, happier times
Unorthodox ‘betrayal’
GARY BUISO • NY Post
She’s got some chutzpah!
A gal who ditched her hubby and ultra-Orthodox Satmar community in Brooklyn left behind a trail of broken hearts and hurt feelings to pen a controversial yarn.
Deborah Feldman, 25, says she was choked by an antiquated religion and trapped in a loveless marriage — but that’s news to her husband, Joel Feldman, who friends and family say is “shattered” by the damning memoir.
“She was crazy about this boy,” Feldman’s uncle, Izzy Berkowitz, 58, told The Post. “She was dying to get married.
“He did everything and anything for her, but she never appreciated anything no matter what he did,” Berkowitz insisted. “She lacked happiness. Nothing was good enough for her.”
Feldman, who’s been on a whirlwind publicity tour for “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots” that’s included a powwow with Barbara Walters on “The View,” offers a clinical account of the couple’s marital intimacies.
“Whenever [Joel] feels libidinous . . . he approaches me much in the same way I imagine a dog pounces on a leg of furniture,” she writes.
Two years ago, Feldman left the marriage — and the Orthodox community in Williamsburg — with her infant son in tow.
“No more fighting,” she tells her boy, who she says never even asks about his father. “Mommy’s happy now.”
But daddy is not smiling.
“He feels betrayed,’ said an old friend of the jilted pop. “She wasn’t forced to marry him. They were madly in love.”
But Feldman told The Post this month that she never chose to be married.
“He’s a stranger to me. I just happen to have a child with him,” she said.
Pearl Engelman, 64, a neighbor of Feldman’s when she lived in Williamsburg, blasted the author.
“It paints the whole community in a bad light,” Engelman said. “We’re in an uproar. We feel insulted. I think she’s a lost soul.”
Pearl Engelman is alleged child sex abuse victim Joel Engelman's mother. Pearl has been outspokenly critical of the Satmar community's handling of abuse cases, and she is not afraid to speak her mind. She is not an apologist for Satmar.