It’s difficult now to separate the political from the personal in those events. The first was that terrorists hijacked four planes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center. And yet what? Well, I didn’t know then.Ī few enormous things happened in the autumn of 2001. I had been raised to expect to live that life, I had all the skills to do it – from fluent Hebrew to the ability to cook dinner for 30 at the drop of a hat – and yet. It’s not a bad life in fact the frum life can be a very good one – purposeful and filled with meaning, warm social bonds and the comforting joyful round of ritual and routine. There was a mapped-out life I knew I was supposed to try to have: marry an appropriate frum man, have the kind of steady-but-flexible career that would mean we could buy a house and raise a family, join a synagogue, make Friday night dinner every week, volunteer for charitable causes, take part in the life of the community by visiting the sick, welcoming guests to our table. I was attending synagogue at least twice a week, going on dates with suitable men, working at a proper responsible job. No one frum says “observant” or “Orthodox” to describe themselves. I was frum – that’s the word for rules-observant, kosher-food-only, sabbath-keeping Jewish people. I was in my mid-20s and trying to be good. I’d moved to Manhattan from London a year earlier and was working for a corporate law firm, practising the Orthodox Judaism I was raised in. I was a stranger to myself in the autumn of 2001. And it was only seeing it on screen, transformed into a movie starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, that I started to understand what it’s actually about. So in certain ways it’s only now, 17 years after I started work on my first novel, Disobedience, that I really know why I wrote it. The subconscious worms its way into reality via stories you don’t understand yourself as they emerge. That’s more true for writing than anything else, I find. S ometimes in life, you don’t know why you did something until long after it’s over.

All who go do not return by shulem deen