Preface: Finding the Way Out

I couldn’t return to my community. I couldn’t seem to leave. I was trapped.

Torn by indecision. A friend of mine shot this photo in New Jersey in September 2007. I was spending a week with her there. I had just left teaching, was trying to make it as an insurance broker, and also trying to write a novel. I didn’t realize I really needed to write a memoir. Photo by Sandy Martin

I first glimpsed how my Amish-Mennonite community appeared from the outside when I listened to Chaim Potok's novel My Name Is Asher Lev on the way home from college, tears rolling down my cheeks.  His story of a child prodigy who grows up Hasidic Jewish, driven to draw and paint the world he sees, was gut wrenching.  I completely identified with the young boy as he struggled to escape his strict, insular culture.

For the first time, I’d met someone who faced the same demons I did, who could not understand any more than I could why he needed to leave to find his voice.  His family loved him every bit as much as mine did.  They fought him every step of the way out, just as mine did, for precisely that reason.  Thanks to Potak, I knew I didn’t belong there.

His story showed me the way out.

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I fled to London by way of a Rotary Foundation Scholarship and began the long process of assimilation into modern culture.  I’d found that assimilation impossible even to attempt with the hot breath of my dogmatic community scorching my backside.  I needed to find…