BERLIN — Deborah Feldman has learned to follow the sun. December marks the 31-year-old Brooklyn-raised writer’s fourth winter living in Berlin, a place notorious for its long, gray months, and by now she has it down: On the rare days when the cloud cover breaks, she hurries to her local market hall, a 100-year-old, light-flooded space in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood. There, the sun shines around noon, for an hour.

Then, juggling TV interviews, photo shoots, newspaper deadlines, public readings, awards ceremonies, child care and work on her new novel, Ms. Feldman moves to a west-facing terrace in a nearby cemetery, before heading to her favorite cafe table at around 2 p.m. for a final 20-minute glimpse of the sun. “I try to get all the light I can,” Ms. Feldman said, with a smile.

This perseverance has characterized much of Ms. Feldman’s extraordinary life. Born into a Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jewish sect founded by Holocaust survivors, after World War II, in Brooklyn, Ms. Feldman was raised to believe that Hitler’s extermination of the Jews was God’s punishment for European Jewish assimilation. To save the Jewish nation, she was taught that Jews must live apart from society, and abide by old Jewish rules and traditions. She documented her repressive upbringing, the arranged marriage she entered into at 17 and her decision to take her young son and leave the community in her best-selling memoir, “Unorthodox,” which was published in the United States in 2012.

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But even after the success of her book, Ms. Feldman never felt quite at home in the United States. She found mainstream American life disorienting. “I grew up in a shtetl,” Ms. Feldman said, referring to the economic, political and cultural bubble she lived in. “It would have been really hopeless for me to try to become American.”