Did you hear about the new memoir by Deborah Feldman, “Unorthodox,” which is the sad and shocking tale of a lesbian who escaped her miserable, oppressive life in a New York Hasidic Jewish community? The book has received significant national attention — a gushy appearance on “The View,” for example — and made the NYT Bestseller List.

Whaddaya know, it looks like Feldman might have made a lot of it up. From the New York Daily News:

The problem is that much of her memoir may not be true, according to ardent critics. These include family members, neighbors and even New York State authorities.

In the book, Feldman charges her mother – who was apparently burdened by the pressures of Satmar life – with a “mysterious disappearance” when Feldman was a toddler.

In fact, it takes about 30 seconds to find Shoshana Berkovic on both Twitter and Facebook. She is a science teacher at New Utrecht High School and does not appear to have ever left Brooklyn. She did divorce her husband, as court records indicate. But that was in 2010, more than a decade after Feldman accuses her mother with leaving her behind. (Shoshana Berkovic / Facebook)

Feldman leaves out another relevant fact about her family – that she has a sister, now 17 and living with her mother. For reasons I cannot quite fathom, she entirely deletes her sister’s existence from what is supposed to be a truthful account of her life.

And while Feldman waxes poetic about how she had to sneak  secular literature (“Reading an English book is…a welcome mat put out for the devil”), neighbor Pearl Engleman distinctly remembers Berkovic taking both of her daughters to the public library on Fridays. “Flat-out lies” is what Engleman calls Feldman’s description of her family life.

Feldman writes in great detail about her strict religious education in Williamsburg. But she fails to mention that she only attended the supposedly restrictive UTA for four years – and that only after being kicked out of a much more lax yeshiva in Manhattan, Bas Yaakov of the lower East Side. A cousin says that Feldman was expelled for making comments about sex.

More:

But this is the worst of it: Feldman alleges that when she and her husband were living in Airmont, Eli learned from his brother Cheskel that a 13 year old boy had been murdered in nearby Kiryas Joel by his father for masturbating. The father, according to Feldman’s account, cut off the boy’s penis and let him bleed to death. The Jewish ambulance service, known as Hatzalah, supposedly helped cover up the crime.

Fascinating, but at the very least dubious. As Hella Winston of The Jewish Week first reported and the Daily News confirmed, the young man in question was seven years older than Feldman reported, and evidence from the coroner, the New York State police, ambulance workers who reported the crime and family members of the dead man all overwhelmingly suggest that the young man (an allegedly troubled individual) died from slitting his own throat.

An uncle of the dead man calls Feldman a “psychopath.”

Read the whole thing.  On her Tumblr feed, Feldman addresses the allegation that she made up the story about the boy who had his pizzle sliced off:

Regarding the story I relayed about the boy who died, I regret that information I did not include in my book has found its way into a discussion of the veracity of my memoir. In the book I do not offer any identifying information about this boy or his family. I do not state his age, and I do not state that his father murdered him. I relay a conversation that I had with my husband, showing that my mind went to a certain conclusion and stating that my husband urged me not to jump to conclusions. I felt this was a significant moment in my life, relating to my decision to leave Satmar with my son. I stand by what I wrote in Unorthodox regarding my feelings about the event as I experienced it then.

So, it may not have been true, and Feldman didn’t bother to check out whether or not such a terrifying thing had actually occurred before slandering the Satmar community by accusing it of covering up a father’s gruesome sex-related murder of his son. Now that it has been demonstrated that she lied about this, she’s claiming that well, she felt at the time that it might be true, which is what really counts.

The Daily News reports that Simon & Schuster, Feldman’s publisher, won’t make her available for interviews. Go figure. Actually, the person I’d like to see interviewed is an executive of Simon & Schuster, asking them to what extent they verified the lurid and even defamatory stories Feldman tells. Or is it this a case of confirmation bias? Did it ring true to editors at the publishing house because they figured that Hasidic Jews must be the sort of people who would do these kinds of things?