Unorthodox (Review) and an aside

Before I get to the review part, I can't help a remark on the bizarre shenanigans overseas otherwise known as the RNC this week. I mean, luckily we're spared the spectacle itself and just get summaries over here, and to comment on all the alternate reality stuff would take up all day and night, but one single detail I can't let pass unobserved. It is this. Richard Grenell was easily the most unpopular US ambassador in Germany ever pretty much from the moment the Orange Menace appointed him and Grenell started by getting chummy with our Neonazis in parliament, the AFD, before even having moved into the embassy. He then proceded the rest of his stint in this vein. (His successor as US ambassador to Germany, btw, seems to have decided to emulate him, since he also hadn't got here yet before declaring our Erinnerungskultur, i.e. the remembrance of the Holocaust and all the crimes the Third Reich, to be "sick". I can see how it would confuse a Trumpian that you're supposed to be taught in school about the crimes committed not just by "a few bad apples" but by the majority of your nation.) Well, this same Richard Grenell declared he watched the creature currently squatting in the White House "charm Angela Merkel". Okay, Grenell. Lie about everything from Trump's non-response to the Pandemic to his inciting violence among his armed to the teeth supporters, that's par the course and also there are enough Americans to notice. But slandering our chancellor, a woman whose most recent response to the Orange Menace trying to use her for a photo op by telling him "thanks but no thanks" when Trump wanted to hold a G7 summit in the US in June (Macron then had to break it to Trump that no Merkel means no summit, upon which the big toddler threw a temper tantrum in the form of US troop reduction in Germany)? That's personal. May you be condemned to an eternity of standing in supermarket queues with fellow nutty Trump supporters while someone plays Heino's collected songs in the background.

Now, on to the review. Unorthodox uses the credit "inspired by" rather than "based on" the memoirs of Deborah Feldman, which I thnk more productions should to, as it's usually more honest. Not having read the memoirs in question, I take it from a quick glance to the professional reviews that the main difference is that Deborah Feldman's leaving of the Hasidic community she was born into took far longer, and that the Berlin part of the story was more or less made up entirely, through Deborah Feldman did end up in Berlin. Which, fair enough: the main character in Unorthodox the tv miniseries is called Esty (for Esther), not Deborah, and fiction triggered by real events that becomes its own story has a long and fine tradition. (If occasionally a tragic one. Ask the Lwelleyn-Davies brothers.) I'm therefore basing my review simply on what is on screen, without a compare and contrast to the book which is still unknown to me.

( Spoilers have left Brooklyn and are taking Berlin )