By 19, Sara – nee Malka – Glass got everything an ultra-religious Jewish woman from the insular Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn could want.
She’s married a God-fearing man and became a mother – her “true purpose” in life – while settling into the Hasidic enclave of Lakewood, NJ.
After growing up in a “Fiddler on the Roof”-style home among five sisters, she externally looked the part of the perfectly pious: modest wig, covered collarbone and kneecaps, prayer book permanently stashed in purse – but all was not well.
Between mining kosher cookbooks for gourmet recipes to please her emotionally unavailable husband, Malka unsuccessfully ignored an inconvenient truth: that despite her commitment to Judaism, she was a closeted lesbian who’d broken off a torrid affair with an equally religious woman just before her wedding.
“My devotion to God and my deep, well-tended fear of his wrath didn’t leave much room for choice,” Glass writes in her new memoir, “Kissing Girls on Shabbat.”
Her story is one of a woman trapped – in a loveless, arranged marriage, by the rules of her own faith, and by the self-denial she struggled with for years.
Her anemic sex education consisted of a lesson involving a tube of toothpaste and “bendy toy” that raised more questions than answers as she lay with the stranger she happened to be her spouse.
She was soon drowning deeper in a dire situation – burying burning secrets, both from herself and her cloistered world – while juggling two children in an increasingly untenable marriage.
Once her controlling husband finally granted her a religious divorce, Glass writes that she was 24 and already had “ruined my own life. Forgive me, I begged of God.”
Cognizant that one perceived slip-up would cost her her children, Glass forced herself to date men suitable for marriage.
But after 13 years of “living in fear” and leading a “double life,” it was over — Glass won custody of her children with help from a group that supports ultra-Orthodox who left the community. She remains committed to this purpose today.