Sarah Shapiro was born into one of America’s most renowned literary families. Her father, Norman Cousins, was editor of America’s most respected literary magazine, The Saturday Review of Books.  One can only imagine her childhood home, filled with writers, artists, critics and other members of the world of arts and letters.

When I was asked by Rabbi Dombey, my former editor at Targum Press and I man I liked and respected, to read her book and encourage her talent, I immediately agreed.   I did not know anything about Sarah Shapiro.  Her book is simply a day by day diary of a chozeret b’teshuva from a very successful secular family, to come to terms with her new life as a haredi woman with five children no older than seven, who becomes pregnant with her sixth while her baby is still nursing.  She feels out of control, hitting her children, screaming at them and at her husband.  She decides to curb these negative tendencies by attending a charedi parenting class run by a Rabbanit.  As part of the class, the participants are asked to keep a daily journal of their progress.  Mrs. Shapiro’s book, Growing with my Children, is her actual journal, a day by day account of life during that a period.  It is totally autobiographical.  At no time does Mrs. Shapiro suggest that the advice she received and wrote were her own thoughts or even her own words.  Indeed, she makes it clear in her introduction that she is quoting, listing some of the names of those whom she quotes, and apologizing to them if she “has misrepresented the ideas of any of the teachers who are quoted herein.” 

When I read Mrs. Shapiro’s book I was shocked and saddened and felt great compassion for her.  I was shocked by how many of the same people we knew in common, and how many of the same people had influenced our lives and our thinking.  Rabbi Nachum Bulman was the Rabbi of the Young Israel of Far Rockaway where I grew up. I attended both Rabbi Bulman’s lectures, and when, in 1968, he opened the Sara Schneirer Hebrew Teacher’s Seminary in Boro Park, I was one of his first students, boarding with a haredi Rabbi in Boro Park for a year to attend classes.  I continued to attend classes and lectures by Rabbi Bulman when I lived in Maalot Dafna near Ohr Someach Yeshiva.  Rebbitzin Chait was my neighbor in Bayswater. Her husband, Rabbi Chait, was the Rabbi of my synagogue, the Young Israel of Wavecrest and Bayswater, which I attended my entire childhood.  We kept up this connection for some time when Rabbi and Rebbitzen Chait also moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem.  I was friends with Tzipora Heller, and Miriam Adahan, who Mrs. Shapiro thanks “for the effect that they have had on my life.”  I also attended the lectures of Rabbi Zelig Pliskin, and read many of Rabbi Pliskin’s books.

In Growing with my Children, I found a woman truly out of control.  The number of times she records hitting and screaming at her small children was shocking.  The scene where she confronts her son’s rebbe about his tendency to hit his students, and her decision that although she is against hitting children, she also does it and sometimes loses control, and thus he too must be a “loving and caring man” was shocking.   It was clear from Mrs. Shapiro’s book that both she and I had been subject to similar rabbinical influences which encourage a woman to give up her personal desires for self-fulfillment to care for a husband and a family.  More than once, she expresses frustration with the success of her sisters in the working world, and her sense that she is not fulfilling her potential.  There is a sense of an inferiority complex towards the high expectations of her family and how that conflicts with the rabbinical view of women’s place.  A world that denied her efforts and desires to be a writer.  As she says a friend told her: “a Rebbitzen … told me to forget about writing …that each child is the most meaningful poem one could hope to create. That having a family is the greatest possible artistic venture.”   The friend continues: “There’s still something in me that wants to write a book. But I know I never will, because I don’t have the time or I don’t want to make the time….”(p. 4, “Our Lives”, edited by Sarah Shapiro).

I too was subject to these influences, to the exact words and philosophies that Mrs. Shapiro “quotes”. Hence, some of the similarities between her non-fiction portrayal of her world, and my fictional portrayal of a similar world.

I decided to go my own way. To raise my family, to be a religious woman, and also to make the time to write books, novels.   I have written seven books and a play, and numerous articles.  I continue to be a religious woman, a mother of four children, and now a grandmother of nine.  Mrs. Shapiro’s desire to connect her name to mine and to garner some of my accomplishments, as well as her desire to take my books off the shelves, or to gain ownership of them, or at the very least benefit from the financial fruits of my labor, stems from the need to destroy someone who took the path she gave up so many years ago to be a member in good standing of her community, a community whose unfair strictures on women, I decided to leave behind.

Mrs. Shapiro says that nothing she is doing to me has been done without direct rabbinical advice and direction. I believe her.  She is simply part of a haredi campaign against me for my honest and critical portrayal of it over the years, prompted by a personal animus whose roots are frustration and jealousy, and unending anger and  vindictiveness that is embedded deep in her nature, as she so clearly shows in her diary, despite all her sincere efforts to “transcend her nature.”  To pursue this, she has colluded with a lawyer who sent me a blackmail letter claiming I had plagiarized a book I’ve never read, who agreed to handle this suit for nothing in exchange for her cooperation.

 A columnist for the Jerusalem Post who in the past published personal attacks against me for which the editor personally apologized, who aired her libelous version of our contact on his website, CrossCurrents. By taking this case to a Beit Din, it was hoped that the personal enmity between certain elements in the haredi world upset with my honesty over the years, could be garnered and channeled to personal gain both for Mr. Corinaldi and Mrs. Shapiro.

As for the conversations Mrs. Shapiro remembers, I remember them quite differently.  I remember a vindictive and hysterical woman, not unlike the person she herself describes in her book, demanding that I remove large sections of a published book over which she claimed ownership; sections dealing with my own experiences, such as hoping a pregnancy was a flu, losing control and shouting at my baby, and rabbinical philosophies that I had heard in the same lectures, and among the same rabbis, Mrs. Shapiro attended. She took these claims to my publishing house, which I found deeply embarrassing.  I relied upon the decision of the copyright experts of Random House publishing to see if there were was any legal basis to give into Mrs. Shapiro’s demand that I remove three pages from my book.  There were none, and I refused. Mrs. Shapiro,  who had access to the best copyright lawyers in America because of her family, decided to drop the case.  That was over 12 years ago.  Her attempt to revive her claims is opportunistic, spurred on by the hatred of the haredi community which backs her because of my recent, public stand against the abuse of women on the mehadrin bus lines, a case filed with Israel’s Supreme Court awaiting decision, and which has received wide publicity world-wide.

Now she is asking for 1 million shekel, part of my lecture fees, removal of my books from the shelves, and many other completely unprecedented things that shows that her desire is not copyright protection, but simply to completely destroy me, my work and my financial security. She even makes it clear that were she to win this case, her attacks against me will continue.