Esther Perel Goes Off Script

She became today’s most famous couples therapist by ignoring all the rules of the trade.

- By Maya Binyam

In 1964, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, Icek Perel hosted two parties. The first, held on a Friday, was populated by friends from the neighborhood: working-class Belgians with whom he had formed a joyous, if circumstantial, alliance. Over beer, they told jokes in Flemish; his guests, who were also customers at the clothing shop he ran beneath his apartment, hardly knew he and his family were Jewish. The second party, held the next day, mimicked the first but was revived with a few crucial twists: The guests were all fellow Holocaust survivors, the punch lines were delivered in Yiddish, and the beer had been swapped out for vodka.

Icek and his wife, Sala, were the sole survivors of their respective families and met on the road to liberation before settling illegally as refugees in Antwerp. Their union was unlikely—she was born to aristocrats, he was functionally illiterate. As survivors, they were in a state of disbelief and started a family to prove to themselves they were still human. Their daughter, Esther, began working in the store as soon as she could speak. Her parents, she observed, were constantly shifting roles; depending on the time of day, they might speak to each other as colleagues or as a couple. Esther was their bridge and their best reader. Where others saw isolated traits, she recognized a grand narrative: of loss, of love, and of the strange and conflicting ways one’s identity can shift to accommodate its context.