Part 2: On Censorship

 All Orthodox Jewish publications are censored. That’s a fact of life I grew up with. Our newspapers were founded by political parties, our magazines are independent, but still establish a ‘rabbinical board’ in order to pass muster. The goal is always to be worthy to be brought into any Frum home, to be left on a coffee table in front of the Shabbos candles, and read by readers of any age and any grade, without raising awkward questions.

 My mother is a writer, so from my childhood I was privy to behind the scenes debates between writers and editors and rabbinical boards.

One particularly right-wing newspaper made her take out all physical descriptions of women from her serial. “Golden braid”. “Hazel eyes”. It all had to go.

We joked about it around the Shabbos table, the changes each editor and each rabbi asked for, not caring about historical accuracy or craft, their only goal a preset template of modesty. I accepted the censorship as a given, as the way it had to be. It didn’t bother me, because I could always read the forbidden non-Jewish books, hidden from my teachers but scattered freely around my home.

Then I started writing for those same Orthodox publications. My first story was published while I was dating TCO. I nervously slid over the magazine. It was a window into my soul. He loved it.

In my early years of marriage, I gradually stopped blogging, and started writing short stories.  The magazines eagerly clamored for more. I savored seeing my name in print, listed in the Yom Tov story editions with the top writers in the Orthodox world. I wrote satire and Jewish sci-fi, experimenting and pushing limits.

I’m grateful to my editors from that period. Writing short stories pushed me past my blog posts, into story arcs and character arcs and word counts in the thousands instead of the hundreds. Stories forced me to learn how to find precious stretches of hours and weave together scenes.

But my initial run dried up, I wanted to dive deeper, past dating and matchmaking and into marriage and all the experiences that come along with that- the cycles of family purity, Mikvah and intimacy, pregnancy loss, the challenges of Kollel life - the experiences that made up the fabric of my life.

And I hit a wall. Because- it wasn’t modest. Or it wasn’t ‘positive’ enough. I lived through it, but I couldn’t write about it.  I could only talk about it in whispers on park benches and anonymous posts in online forums.

Every story idea I sent came back rejected, dubbed too intimate or too graphic or too critical of our society.

I gave up. For a stretch of years I stopped writing. I was busy, overwhelmed, but maybe that wasn’t the only reason I quit.

Until something happened, and I had to make sense of my life, of who I was, of the guilt. And writing was my way through that.

Once I started writing, without thinking who would publish it, I remembered how good that feeling was, I experienced again the rush of freedom I used to get from blogging. So I made a decision- no more trying to meet the approval of a rabbinical board, no more self-censorship of my words to get them onto the printed page.

 I would write my novel, and I wouldn’t worry ahead who would publish it. I would write a story about my world, knowing that no editor in my world would touch it with a ten-foot pole. They may secretly read it one day in the privacy of their bedroom. Maybe even, if my book is successful enough, it will earn an Op-Ed criticism or a rabbinical ban  (hey no publicity is bad publicity, right?) but no Frum editor will ever publish it or positively review it.

I sat down and wrote about Nidah, and Bedikos and dipping in a Mikvah under the gaze of a stranger’s eyes. I wrote about yearning to marry a Kollel husband, while immersed in the secular world. Of sacrifices women make in the name of Torah, of choices we face.

And I felt incredibly liberated.

It’s not my intention to “bash” the Orthodox world, as so many writers who write for the general press are accused of.

I just want to capture my world, write about my world, and the journeys women take, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And it has to be my truth. Without censorship.