Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (9)
Recommended Reading: 'Foreskin's Lament'
October 3, 2007
I hope my friends at Penguin will fore-give me:
Foreskin's Lament by
Shalom Auslander (while you're visiting his Web site, check out the book's video, too) isn't released until tomorrow, but I've been sitting on my hands for a couple of weeks, waiting to write about it, and I am incapable of waiting one second longer. You have to read this memoir! It's funny, it's poignant, it's disturbing -- what's not to love? Or as Auslander would say: That's so God.
Auslander is doubly gifted as a writer from the get-go: how great is it, first of all, to have a name that loosely translates as "Peace Foreigner?" Second, his Orthodox Jewish upbringing in Monsey, NY made him a foreigner to mainstream society and culture, and in this book, Auslander tells the tale of his own journey to America.
Tom Perrotta says that Auslander "writes like Philip Roth's angry nephew." Auslander, of course, has acknowledged his anxiety of influence to Roth everywhere from his title to his fascination with all things
trayf (growing up in the Hudson Valley, I often saw groups of Chasidim and Orthodox Jews shopping at Woodbury Commons, but I never saw Auslander or his ilk wolfing down forbidden cheeseburgers in the fast-food court, and now I know why: he took care to go far from home for these non-kosher outings).
Auslander could easily have written a slight, funny, angry book about growing up Orthodox and then leaving the fold, but instead, he waited to write a memoir until his difficult past had something to do with his happier present (the author is now a self-proclaimed atheist and a married father). But even as he rages against God, the reader is aware that he is struggling
with God -- and so he is that most Jewish of concepts, the
apikores -- a Jew who does not believe in the fundamentals of his faith, a heretic --
but still a Jew, the irony of which is not only not lost on Auslander, but forms the basis for his book. As the
Jewish Daily Forward review by David Kaufman put it, "Auslander rejects Orthodoxy not because he does not believe in God, but because he cannot stand the God he believes in."
Posted by Bethanne Patrick on October 3, 2007 | Comments (9)
