But critics argue it ignores the ultra-Orthodox community’s political power. The sleeper hit ‘is not a political opinion piece,’ says co-writer Ori Elon. Television Netflix’s apolitical ‘Shtisel’ faces a new test: The clout of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox “She’s the reason I’m alive today,” Haart says of Miriam, a student at Stanford and a proud bisexual whose active dating figures prominently in “My Unorthodox Life.” Like her mother, Miriam favors a bold personal style: She’s wearing platform sneakers and a Gucci track jacket with matching shorts. She is explaining her thought process - “What’s the most inoffensive way to commit suicide, where my kids will still be able to get married?” - when her daughter, Miriam, 21, enters the room. So she tried to starve herself to death, dropping down to 73 pounds. In the year before she left, Haart thought about committing suicide but worried how the stigma of mental illness would affect her children’s marriage prospects. (In fact, she’d secretly gone on birth control.) Later, as a married woman, she often was reprimanded for dressing in bright colors - to which she always had the same reply: “The day God stops making flowers, I’ll stop wearing colors.” (In an early episode of “My Unorthodox Life,” she returns to Monsey and goes grocery shopping while wearing a low-cut, shamrock green romper.) She once was pulled into the rabbi’s office for dancing too provocatively around other women at a wedding - where genders were always kept separate - and told she hadn’t been blessed by God with more children because her clothes were too form-fitting. She taught herself to sew at 16 and would make the tznius - modest - version of what she saw in the fashion magazines she smuggled into the house. Though she was outwardly obedient, Haart couldn’t completely repress her creative, inquisitive nature. She spent her days cooking, serving her husband and downplaying her interest in the books that lined the shelves of their home. They eventually had four children, a relatively small number by the standards of the community. A year later, she was married off to a near-stranger. When she was 18, Haart changed her name from Julia to the more Hebrew-sounding Talia in order to attract a match. By the time I was married, I already had seven children,” says Haart. “I changed their diapers and wiped their snotty noses. The eldest of eight children, she is 10 years older than her next sibling and, as an adolescent, was thrust into the role of caretaker. (As if to immediately disprove this notion, she responds to an offhand question about the differences between her Yeshivish community and the Hasidic sects that live in the same area with a concise history of 19th century European Judaism.) I was told, ‘Women’s minds are light’ - ‘nashim da’atan kalos,” she says in Hebrew.
Though her world was centered on the yeshiva, Haart, as a woman, was not encouraged to read religious literature, “because my mind wasn’t capable of grasping it, you see. But these are the basics: Haart was born in Moscow and moved around the world with her family as a child, eventually settling in Monsey at the age of 11. I wanted what I had done to define me.”Įven now, there are many details she is reluctant to divulge, at least until her memoir, “Brazen” - which she has whittled down to 400 or so pages from 1,700 - is released next year. “Until I felt that I had accomplished something, I didn’t want people to know about my past,” says Haart, who only started talking about her background once she’d been tapped as creative director of La Perla, the luxury lingerie line, in 2016, “because I didn’t want what was done to me to define me.
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