Anna Winger is a Berlin-based American writer-producer whose new miniseries, “Unorthodox,” recently made its debut on Netflix. The show, in English and Yiddish, sees a young woman bravely leaving New York’s Satmar Hasidic Jewish community to start a new life in Berlin.

Winger co-created and co-wrote the four-part limited series with documentarian Alexa Karolinski, and also serves as executive producer. Based on Deborah Feldman’s bestselling memoir, “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” the series is directed by Maria Schrader and stars Israeli actress Shira Haas.

Best known for “Deutschland 83,” the German series she co-created, Winger’s other credits include “Deutschland 86,” “SOKO Leipzig,” and “Berlin Station.” She is also the founder of Studio Airlift, a production company based in Berlin.

We recently talked to Winger about her work on “Unorthodox,” the process of taking the book to the screen, and diving deep into Hasidic Jewish culture and history.

“Unorthodox” is now streaming on Netflix.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

W&H: “Unorthodox” is one of the most popular shows on Netflix right now. How do you explain its quick rise to fame?

AW: As a writer in general, I had this experience before with my other show [“Deutschland 83”], which is also about a relatively obscure topic. It’s about an East German spy from the Communist side who’s sent undercover in the West.

It might sound counterintuitive, but I’m always interested in things that are specific and character-driven, stories where I learn a lot and seek a shared humanity. We approached “Unorthodox” from the same place.

W&H: How did your background as a writer and photographer help you as a producer on this show?

AW: It’s interesting because I used to be a photographer and I had quite a bit to do with the Hasidic community because they run the backend of the business — equipment and rental houses, the stuff that you use as a professional. I knew very little about the community except I had done a lot of business with Hasidic men.

“Unorthodox” was such a deep dive. I was really struck by how many things about [Hasidic] culture are familiar to ours, like the community aspect, the family involvement, the relationship to parents, the siblings relationship, the intense kind of over-involvement. It’s not like there’s us and them. If’s a spectrum of experience of Jewishness between the secular way I grew up and the very religious way that Deborah [Feldman] grew up.

W&H: What inspired you to make this particular series?

AW: The thoughts around this project were in my mind and my conversations for a few years beforehand. Deborah is a friend of mine. So is Alexa [Karolinski], who created this show with me. She’s a documentary filmmaker, who made a film that I loved called “Oma & Bella,” and I had wanted to collaborate with her on something that spoke to the condition of being Jewish in Germany. 

Deborah asked us to make a TV show out of her book. It was all very much born out of our friendship circle and the conversation we were already having. 

W&H: What was it like going from book to screen?

AW: I wasn’t used to working with existing material. Deborah told us to take the freedom that we needed with the material. From the very beginning, we decided we would fictionalize the book heavily and take that liberty to turn it into a TV show. We animated certain characters, made up others, and broke the story apart and put it back together in a different way.

Something is compelling in a story that is genuinely universal that reaches across religious borders, even gender borders. 

W&H: What were the conversations like in the writer’s room about the choices you made regarding Jewish and Holocaust history?

AW: It’s an unusual situation, like doubling back on history. On the one hand, there’s a sense that people like us have always lived here [in Berlin]. There’s a sense of continuity that is undeniable. But at the same time, there is also this reckoning of the reality of the Holocaust. You always think about what happened on this corner, in this house, on this street. Everyone here has those thoughts. But on the flip side, there is a solid sense of cultural continuity and roots. 

“Unorthodox”: Anika Molnar/Netflix

W&H: How supportive was Netflix of the project and of delving deep into a particular point of view about the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, a world where Yiddish is mostly spoken?

AW: The women at Netflix are all American women, and we developed a friendship in the process of discussing what we wanted to do together. One day, they called me and said they’d agreed to a show in Yiddish, but it had to be delivered by the end of 2019. We started writing in November 2018 and delivered the presentation in December 2019.

Maria [Schrader], who directed it, stars in my other show. She had made a movie I liked called “Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe,” about an Austrian-Jewish writer who committed suicide in Brazil during WWII. We hired the whole team from her film. It was a real Women and Hollywood project; the entire team was made of women. I didn’t hire them because they were women; they were the most talented.

W&H: You also wrote Esty as fiercely non-conformist from the start. She was determined to stay true to herself, and I felt like she was trying not to follow in the footsteps of her mother. Why did it take her so long to reach out to her mother after arriving in Berlin?

AW: Part of it is a shame of how she treated her mother at her wedding. Then there’s a lot of shame in showing up and saying her mother was right — that it didn’t work out and she is miserable. There’s also a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about what happened when Esty was little. Until they have that conversation in Episode 4, Esty doesn’t understand that her mother wanted her to come with her when she left the Satmar community.

On the one hand, she feels guilty for being terrible to her mother; on the other hand, she feels angry at her mother for abandoning her. It goes both ways.

W&H: Esty’s shaved head is reminiscent of the Holocaust, the way inmates’ heads were shaved at Auschwitz. Was that intentional?

AW: We knew that was a massive thing for Deborah. When she left the community, it was a huge thing to take her wig off and let her hair be short. But of course, we thought about the fact that it’s Berlin.  These things are complicated about history. The repetition compulsion, the inherited trauma — that is what this show is about. It’s Freudian. Why are you doing this to people when people do this to you? How do you mitigate inherited trauma? The Satmars are a community created by traumatized people, and they’re passing trauma down. 

It was also hard to understand that the reason they want to have so many children is the desire to rebuild the six million lost, which is also so heartbreaking. I thought those things were very moving. But we were dealing with Germany. We wanted Esty to return to her community’s trauma to free herself.

W&H: In the show, it takes an Israeli friend from the conservatory to teach Esty about her talent and how to move forward. Can you talk about the relationship between these two women?

AW: Alexa and I felt it was essential that there be a secular Israeli character who fully understands who Esty is when everyone else doesn’t. The tension between religious and secular Jews is a reality. There had to be one person in the group who gets it. 

W&H: What do you want people watching to take away from the story?

AW: You have the power within you to find your community in the world. To be looking for something else, it doesn’t have to be a complete rejection of where you come from.

These things, simply put, are not black and white. I don’t think Esty is rejecting where she came from so much as looking for something else. It’s about this character and her search for herself in the world.