The powerful coming-of-age story of an ultra-Orthodox child who
was born to become a rabbinic leader and instead became a woman
Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn,
isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices
of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and
Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a
dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next
generation of Hasidic Jews.
But Abby felt
certain at a young age that she was a girl. She suppressed her desire
for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find
them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations
of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from
ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that
forced her to leave her home, her family, her way of life.
Powerful in the
truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity,
Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go
to become the person you were meant to be?