Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the family’s transatlantic destination after Adam Wizman and his wife leave France, and later the setting of a rupture between Mila Wizman and her mother. In the ultrareligious Crown Heights neighborhood, the family’s move gives practical form to a search for security and religious belonging, but Mila experiences its social and domestic rules as suffocating. Her return to France changes the arrangement of Adam’s new household and makes Brooklyn a site of separation as well as refuge.

Migration and the Search for Safety

After the 2012 attack on the Jewish school attended by Adam and Valérie Berdah’s daughters, the couple abruptly withdrew the girls from school and left France. They moved to Israel, but the experience there proved unsuccessful: Adam felt unable to integrate without distorting himself and was troubled by what he saw as the denial of political realities by fellow emigrants. The family returned to France, where Adam resumed teaching at a Jewish school and the household became increasingly enclosed within communal life.

In this context, Brooklyn became Valérie’s later destination with the girls. By the time of the trial, she was living in Brooklyn with a new partner from an Orthodox Jewish milieu, and the younger daughter lived with them. The move extended the family’s search for security beyond the failed stay in Israel, but it also placed the daughters within a more strictly observant household and widened the distance between Mila and her parents’ competing choices.

Crown Heights and Mila’s Departure

A few weeks after Adam and Claire Farel separated from their former spouses, Adam’s ex-wife told him she was moving with their daughters to Brooklyn, to Crown Heights, described as a Jewish ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. Adam did not object. He preferred to have his former wife living far away, and Claire did not imagine sharing the everyday life of his daughters on an alternating-week basis, especially since she no longer had her own son in her care. Their decision left Adam’s daughters outside the newly concentrated life he and Claire were building together.

The arrangement changed when Mila arrived at their home with a suitcase. She could not bear life in New York or the religious milieu in which her mother now lived. She described increasingly long skirts and black stockings required regardless of season, while local shops sold goods that conformed to Jewish law; even toy stores divided their offerings into cooking sets for girls and prayer sets for boys. The pressure reached a decisive point when her mother said that, at eighteen, Mila was old enough to marry and that she might ask the community rabbi to introduce her to a prospective husband. Mila was legally an adult, preparing for her baccalaureate as an independent candidate, and chose to return to France. Adam told her she could live with him.

Family Consequences

Mila’s departure from Brooklyn brought her into Adam and Claire’s apartment, where she spent much of the day watching American television series and old films. Claire found her constant presence difficult and sensed, rightly or not, an underlying hostility. She tolerated Mila without attempting to create an affectionate bond. The move therefore did not simply reunite father and daughter: it inserted Mila into a household formed around Adam and Claire’s intense relationship, exposing the limits of their private retreat from family obligations.

At trial, a psychologist described Mila as having been close to her father and as having liked his new partner, while also resenting Claire for breaking up her parents’ family. Mila had almost no contact with her mother and felt guilty because her mother repeatedly told her that the assault would not have happened had Mila stayed in the United States. Brooklyn thus remained present in Mila’s life through both the separation from her mother and the accusation attached to her return to France.

Narrative Significance

Brooklyn is not presented as a neutral backdrop. Crown Heights embodies a form of religious community that Valérie embraces but Mila experiences through controls over clothing, movement, thought, and marriage. The contrast does not reduce the family’s religious life to a single position: Adam’s own earlier departure from France had been driven by fear for his children’s safety, while his daughter later left a household whose strict observance felt constraining to her.

The city’s role in the family’s history is therefore double. It offers a destination after fears of antisemitic violence and a setting in which Valérie rebuilds her life, yet it also becomes the place Mila leaves to reclaim a different kind of independence. That departure redirects the consequences of migration back into the Paris household, where family separation and religious difference persist in everyday life.