A critical look at Netflix’s “Unorthodox”
As a teenage pregnant Esty escapes her cloistered Brooklyn Hasidic Jewish community for 2019 Berlin, her past, both recent and ancestral, catches up with her.
Hot at her heals would be captors tag closely behind: her husband, Lanky, and her cousin in-law, Moishe. They track her slowly, street by street, across the pavements of Germany’s capital city in the hope of returning her to New York. In this cat and mouse game at the heart of what was once the power axis of the Nazi regime, all three lost souls are forced to reckon with their existence and faith being governed by the traumas of the Holocaust. Every building is a witness to the unfathomable that happened here, where their family was rounded up and murdered, and yet what they see as they move through the present is nothing like the horrors they carry with them deep within: the city is beaming with life, diversity and freedom beyond anything they can experience in their confines in Brooklyn.
Esty is shocked into this awakening from the moment she lands onto this hollow ground and befriends music conservatoire students of a duplicity of genders, nationalities, sexualities and faiths. Her new friends take her to the shores of the Großer Wannsee Lake where the “final solution” was planned, not for a history lesson or an act of remembrance but to frolic in the water on a warm summer’s day. Simultaneously, at the other end of the city, Moishe and Lanky get lost within Berlin’s Jewish cemetery where trees abound and birds sing: the dead are now a forest, a reincarnation of sorts.
Esty’s world in New York had been governed by a simple dictate: to make babies. As she poignantly tells her physician in Berlin during her first ultrasound appointment: “Where I come from children are the most precious thing…we’re rebuilding the six million lost.” It is tragic that even the act of bringing new life is tinted with the presence of the dead.
This absence is a spectre keenly felt across this series. We hear of relatives, of a people, a community, lost, yet we never see them, or hear them. We hear of them as distant memories, fables of times of lore. The ghosts of the past haunt everyone in Esty’s community, and walking through Berlin she is perturbed as to what to make of this post-war world: how can she reconcile her trauma with the reality of her needing to live too? How do we remember while living to enjoy life?
The path towards this healing comes to Esty through music. She is moved by seeing her friends play in the orchestra, a communal act of creation. She decides she too wants to join them and wriggles her way into signing up to audition at the conservatory. As she prepares for the day of judgment, she comes to learn that her family’s past is carried within her and that living in a modern world, embracing freedom and life with people of all religions and backgrounds is a source of strength. Eating ham won’t kill her, and sex outside marriage can be filled with love. She does not lose her Jewishness or her faith by moving forward with the times, or for living in the city that chose to exterminate her family. At her audition she sings a Jewish prayer, one sung at weddings to bless the bride and groom. Through her voice she releases her soul, and all those lost, towards a new beginning to embrace life with all its challenges. A spell is cast, where the past and present converge, to create art and move forward towards healing where escaping from fear is no longer needed. By embracing love, her love for music and her unborn child, she finds the courage and will to live. Life need not be governed by fear.