Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

Author photo © Gregg Zuman

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“Zendik Farm has long been both mysterious and intriguing. Helen Zuman has given us her wrenchingly personal and deeply insightful story of her time in this most unusual of communes. Others might see the group and their own experience differently, but few will provide a better-written or more probing account of Zendik.”

“How timely, how telling this story of an inexperienced young woman who fell prey to a cult because of the abuse to which she’d been subjected by male strangers. Only within the fold, where there were rules protecting the women, did she feel safe enough to explore her sexuality and learn to love. So she surrendered her possessions, her will, her youth. Read Mating in Captivity as a cautionary tale, one I hope will spark a desire to create a better world for our daughters.”

“Helen Zuman was a believer. She believed in the perfectibility of community, in the ability of young dreamers to transform traditional sexual norms by getting back to the land. That Zendik Farm was ultimately exposed as a tyranny built on lies does not destroy the idealism of Zuman’s original impulses; she holds up her youthful self alongside her wiser older self, without useless moralizing, and thereby shows respect for the young people drawn to this cult, while shedding light on the long history of American pastoral communal experiments. She does all this with restraint and wit, and a deft instinct for entertaining incident and character. A page-turner, with purpose!”

“Like Animal Farm and 1984 , Mating in Captivity shows how shared delusion feeds creeping oppression. A keen study of tyranny in microcosm, and the costs of acquiescence.”

“Zuman… retains her sense of agency (and humor) as she weighs Zendik’s weird creed and power plays against the sense of righteousness and belonging that drew her in. Her whip-smart prose… conveys the squalid exuberance of Zendik’s blend of idealism and fraud [in this] engrossing and offbeat story of ideological bonds that chafe—and sometimes liberate.”

Copyright © 2018 by Helen Zuman

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Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-337-3

E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-338-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955354

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