Named one of "forty-three books to read before you die" by the Independent (UK)
2015 National Jewish Book Award Winner
2016 Winner of the GLCA New Writers Award in Nonfiction
One of Star Magazine's “Fab 5 Can't-Miss Entertainment Picks”
“Astonishing. . . . Deen's harrowing story . . . is also an indictment of those who are standing by and allowing it to be.” —The Washington Post
“With this book Deen has laid to rest the idea that a Hasid from New Square could never become a great writer in English, or an articulate chronicler of his own experiences.” —The New Republic
“All Who Go Do Not Return is an extraordinary memoir. The writing is beautiful. The journey it chronicles is poignant, relatable-and also unlike anything most readers will ever have experienced. . . . His voice is an important one in our generation.” —ZEEK
“A heartbreaking read as Deen fights to reconcile his identity and love for his family with his loss of faith in God. But it is also one of great courage and hope as Deen aspires to live openly and without fear for the first time.” —Publishers Weekly
“In this moving book, Deen lays bare his difficult, muddled wrestling with his faith, the challenges it posed to everything he thought he knew about himself, and the hard-won redemption he eventually found.” —Library Journal
“A clash of cultures made fascinating and personal.” —Booklist
“I understand that even if I did visit New Square I would have no greater access to Hasidic life than my occasional walk through Williamsburg, where I can see but can't penetrate its appeal, or its secrets. Deen's memoir, however, does grant me that access. It is the book's ticket to mass appeal as well as the seat of his disquiet in its writing.Though he writes because he has a story to tell, Deen's work, especially in his memoir, is clearly crafted to benefit others dealing with a wavering faith.” —Tablet Magazine
“Shulem Deen has a fascinating story to tell, and he tells it with exquisite sensitivity. All Who Go Do Not Return gives us not only an insider's glimpse into a shrouded world few outsiders get to see, but also a movingly told narrative of one man's struggle toward intellectual integrity. The setting may be the world of Hasidic Judaism, but the drama and the insights are universal.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
“All Who Go Do Not Return is a deeply honest and moving story about a man's decision to do something both so simple and so radical - to live in accordance with his own beliefs. Shulem Deen has written an enormously powerful and important memoir about faith, doubt and freedom.” —Tova Mirvis
“On the eve of his marriage, at eighteen, Shulem Deen knew how to slaughter an ox in Jerusalem's ancient temple, but he knew less than most seven-year-olds do about sex and movies and technology and literature—about the world that lay only miles away from him. Among the Skver Hasids, all who go do not return, but in writing this memoir, Deen has returned, and brought us, his lucky readers, with him. This is a heartbreaking book, and an important one, about the consequences of being true to yourself, and about a world and a community few of us know.” —Joshua Henkin
02/15/2015
Writing was Deen's way out of Hasidism and into secular life, first by early blogging experiments and then with unpious.com, a site dedicated to prose by former Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jews. This memoir, based on those narratives, follows Deen's journey from belief into atheism. Hasidic communities tend to be insular, and its members often lack a secular education and English-speaking ability. The threat of ostracism by family makes leaving a gut-wrenching decision, as Deen painfully describes here. The author initially found the joyful spirituality of Hasidic worship satisfying, but he could not believe unquestioningly and found his community stifling, which led to exploration of the more appealing outside world. The work jumps back and forth in time, and it eventually is obvious that Deen's desire to leave was present early on, but suppressed for many years. Deen is not always a sympathetic character, yet he delves into the challenges of his past with such careful honesty that we can forgive him. VERDICT A solid memoir that will be of interest to fans of that genre, as well as to readers curious about Judaism and Jewish life.—Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.
2014-12-21
A former member of an extremely insular Hasidic sect tells his story of becoming curious about the outside world—and the consequences of that curiosity. Unpious magazine founding editor Deen was raised in the Hasidic sect known as "the Skverers," an offshoot of Orthodox Judaism that shuns the outside world. Radio, TV, newspapers, the Internet—these are all gateways that, once opened, let forth a flood of sinful thought and action into one's heart. The author knows the story of how New Square, in Rockland County, New York, came to be and the travails faced by those seeking to establish it; he knows that even among strict, rigid devotees of Judaism, New Square is considered a place where the real fanaticism takes place. Like some who went before him, Deen's intellectual curiosity led him to pursuits considered borderline sacrilegious. As a young boy, he was scolded for reading Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume, and as an 11-year-old, he would sneak off to read Hardy Boys mysteries. Turning 13, however, meant putting those texts behind him and focusing more on religious studies. Deen did so, but his interest in the world outside New Square followed him into adulthood, marriage and children. In equal measure with his interest in how others lived was a growing dissatisfaction with some of the practices within the Skverers—how on one hand, the elders would speak of the importance of offspring, but when Deen's children arrived, it was treated as irrelevant. When instructed as a teacher to fudge the progress reports—to ensure continued approval that they were teaching, along with religion, the arithmetic and reading required—to the government, the author felt this untruth to be a betrayal. In this moving book, Deen lays bare his difficult, muddled wrestling with his faith, the challenges it posed to everything he thought he knew about himself, and the hard-won redemption he eventually found.
