“I was as high on God as I was on dope,” Reva Mann, right, says of her extraordinary transformation.
by Sandee Brawarsky Jewish Week Book Critic
Reva Mann never much liked her role as rabbi’s daughter. While growing up and attending her father’s London synagogue, she was scrutinized for her actions, expected to dress and act and speak a certain way. She rebelled, breaking as many rules as fellow memoirist Shalom Auslander. But later she found a more stringent Judaism, and then rebelled again, rebounding between worlds sacred and profane, pious and promiscuous. Unlike Auslander, who chronicled his repudiation of tradition in “Foreskin’s Lament,” Mann still loves Judaism, and is still seeking a place of meaning and comfort within Judaism. She wrote “The Rabbi’s Daughter: A Memoir” (Dial Press) under a pseudonym in order to protect the memory of her late parents, but she has been widely identified, first
in the London press and beyond, as Reva Unterman. Her father, Rabbi Maurice Unterman, was a prominent London rabbi, and her grandfather, Rabbi Isser Yehuda Unterman, was the second Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel and served in that position for 26 years. She grew up in a flat above the Marble Arch Synagogue, where her father served as rabbi. While there have been many memoirs in recent years of dysfunctional families, religious awakening and searching, sexual experience, overcoming addiction, surviving breast cancer, recovering from divorce and finding new equilibrium, rarely have all of these themes been taken up in one book. In fact, Mann has said that she thought of writing her story as a novel, but thought that no one would find it believable. As a child, she felt her parents’ attention was directed to congregants, with much grieving at home over her older sister’s severe mental disabilities. As she writes, it was as though she “had fallen between the cracks of their private and communal lives” and then turned her good girl life into one of sexual promiscuity, drug abuse and trouble with the law. Her parents bailed her out of many messes and supported her. But when she began dating a gentile man, they threw her out of their house. She returned home when she learned that they had been secretly subsidizing the rent on the apartment she shared with her boyfriend. Attempting to restart her life, she went to Israel with their encouragement to study midwifery, but instead was drawn to a fervently Orthodox seminary for women, with its daily regimen of soul-searching, prayer and study. She exchanged her carefree secular existence for the absolutes of the yeshiva and once again found the intensity and ecstasy she craved — this time in the pursuit of holiness. “I was as high on God as I was on dope,” she says in an interview in the Manhattan apartment of a relative, while she is visiting from her home in Jerusalem. “When you taste kedusha, holiness, and you see God — it’s not something you see often — when you have God consciousness, you want more.” While still a seminary student, she was matched up with a guy from the American Midwest who was a ba’al teshuvah, a Sheldon who became Simcha, deep into chasidic study. Her parents were stunned by her choice and thought she was making another mistake, but came to Jerusalem and hosted a large wedding with their distinguished London friends and extended Israeli family. In Simcha, she thought she had found a spiritual guide who would nourish her soul. Secretly, she was disappointed that he gave her a prayer book for their engagement rather than a diamond, but reminded herself that he was not of the material world. They had three children, but their marriage was strained: She found Simcha to be more devoted to God and his studies than to her. Drawn to her old life, she had an affair and ultimately got a divorce and returned to her less pious ways. But life was not easy: She returned to London where her father was dying, later learned she has breast cancer, convinced her mother to move to Israel and resettled her in an old-age home, where she committed suicide. While undergoing chemotherapy, she began writing, something she had never done before. “I felt completely lost, depleted,” she says. “When you go through chemotherapy, you tick off the treatments. Finally the last day came and I didn’t know what sort of life I was going back to, I had gone through so many extremes. I knew that I needed a healthy life. My path to wellness was writing the book.” It took five years. Her search, first for insight and depth and then for wholeness, is creative and empowering. She writes as though she is speaking directly to readers. The book is an unusual mix of things shocking and healing, of raw feelings and urges and experiences of holiness. She tells her story with commendable and sometimes painful honesty, making for compelling reading. To her credit, there’s no self-pity here, and even some humor. Jewish learning is tucked into these pages, as she explains and clarifies the meaning of the Jewish rituals and traditions she experiences. In a cover story, the London Sunday Times ran before and after photos side-by-side, with Mann posed in the modest dark clothing she used to wear with her hair tucked into a large turban-like hat, then dressed in the tight jeans, red leather boots and V-neck sweater she now favors. The book is also an intimate look into the closed fervently Orthodox world, as she experienced it. Looking back she says that she had built a very solid base in that world and didn’t question the community’s mores. But when she was pregnant, with chicken pox, and told that the fetus might be damaged, she turned to her father, who encouraged her to have an abortion. With strong feelings about her sister’s trauma, she followed his advice. “The moment that I didn’t go to the rebbe and went instead to my dad, when I took responsibility for my own life and made my own judgments, that life was over,” she says. Mann speaks highly of her father — “a man I loved even during the angriest moments of my rebellion against him” — as someone who successfully bridged secular and religious worlds, integrating contemporary concepts with ancient customs. She also speaks lovingly of her grandfather, to whom she always felt close, and muses that he is always pulling strings for her in heaven. “I had to peel back all of the layers,” says Mann, who has no regrets about what she has chosen to include. To those who condemn her for besmirching her parents’ good names, she asserts that many of those criticizing her have not read the book, only news accounts. She notes that British Jews have the tendency to sweep everything under the rug, and she’s done the opposite, lifting the carpets and exposing everything underneath. Mann encourages her critics to read her work; she believes that if they are brave enough to read, “what they will find is a woman struggling to come to terms with herself, her sexuality, her religion, her own values and beliefs and finding a deeper and more truthful love and respect for the teachings of the Torah and respect for her family.” “Even if the Orthodox community has rejected me, I don’t reject them. I love the Torah and love the community,” she adds. “I feel like I’m still searching. I keep as many of the laws as I can. Judaism is very family-oriented and the holidays and Shabbat are not easy for me. I’m alone and it’s a lonely place. But I would never want to go back,” she says, referring to the fervently Orthodox world of her marriage. For the last five years she’s been with her three children, with no man in her life, no drugs, no coffee, no sugar, no alcohol. She’s interested in yoga, meditation, nutrition and healthy living, and is now working on a novel about the End of Days and the coming of Messiah. Committed to living in Israel, she says, “I feel that Jerusalem is the last stop. It’s not a place you move from.” She continues, “This is how I must live if I am to find peace, bringing together the holy and the profane, merging them instead of ricocheting from one to the other.” “My book can help anyone who has fallen into the abyss,” she says.
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