I read one of the stories from "Foreskin's Lament," in the New Yorker, prior to the publication of the book itself...
I was so stunned by the writing, the unerring rhythm of its telling and its language, the inerrant capturing of sight and sound, that I remember alerting a fair number of friends and relatives to its presence: "You MUST read this remarkable story !!
All agreed that it was a work of art wrapped in righteous indignation...and the greatest kind of humor: that makes you laugh and cry at the same time..
For those who are not Jewish, or for Jews who have grown up freed from the constraints of the religion altogether, by disillusioned parents (there are a lot of us) or with watered down versions that allow for lives not that different, religiously, from that of their fellow citizens in the Diaspora, much is revealed here.
For as funny and bitter Auslander is, the picture of tribal life is stark and real: Judaism is a demanding religion (when the 613 laws are observed to the letter) and the obsession with form (the endless rituals that go with) observance is often overly demanding and irrational... and the tribal elements are still so intrinsic to the religion that the combination of ethnic fears of "the others" and the time and energy it takes to be ritually observant combine to make normal life in the greater community virtually impossible.
Also the level of fantasy about what the outside world is really like is often crippling..
That Auslander was able to create his hilarious.. dangerously side-splitting saga.. of attending a forbidden hockey game at Madison Square Garden, many miles from his home, on the Sabbath when all forms of transportation other than one's legs are expressly forbidden as well, is testimony to his talent, what appeared to be his sensibility, and ability to be witheringly critical while at the same time having sympathy for what had reduced him to such a state of insanity ..
Now THAT's great writing...
And of course, I ordered the book from Amazon almost immediately, anxious to partake of the meal that had been suggested by the appetizer.. and waited impatiently for its arrival.
Alas, disappointment !
Sorry to say the rest of the stories were pallid, pedestrian, some even clumsy and uncertain.
Ordinary whining tales of children born into a world not of their choosing but who not only don't know how to get out of if other than by misbehaving, they don't really WANT to get out of it.. twisted by a combination of insecurity and an exceptionalism drummed into them in their clositered environment.
Sure the religion is a horror.... most religions that contract into uncritical orthodoxy are horrible, and wreak no improvement on the children or the adults who insist on their conforming...
And I don't blame Auslander for feeling bitter that as a man on the brink of middle age he still doesn't know how to deal with the trauma of his high strung environment while growing up.
But that is indeed a serious debility for an artist, for a writer.
On the other hand it HAS given him a subject and apparently his only one: it is hard to imagine Auslander growing into a great writer with a great talent for exploring the wide range of human experience, including the experience of being trapped by religion... not necessarily Judaism..
.
One last thing, for those who are not famiiar with what is a very significant religious detail: Auslander's family were not simply "Orthodox" Jews. (Mitnaged, as the Orthodox refer to themselves.)
That would be demanding enough... and has been addressed in many memoirs and novels...
The Auslanders were members of one of the various Chassidic sects.. (Satmars, perhaps, or Bobovers... really fanatic).. One or another of 14th or 15th century offshoots of Judaism that came to be in Eastern Europe, with their own sets of (fanatic) rules, clothing, habits...and who were virtually wiped out by the Nazis. between 1939 and 1945... Decimated, poverty stricken, displaced, homeless.
While they had some small recovery in post -war Europe, their greatest renaissance was here in the US.. Sects of varying numbers, all intense, febrile, with animosities toward one another as well as the outside world, and all led by their own Rebbes (Rabbis) to whom they owe the most intense unfaltering loyalty...
The Rebbe rules the roost... and as Auslander points out, the autonomy of parents, immutable in Judaism, including the culture, pales before the demands of the Rabbi.... what the Rabbi says goes... what these people, eat, read, do for entertainment, what they read or listen to, what they learn in school.
Of course the kids NEVER attend public schools, and usually they don't engage in sports... As boys grow up they even undertake as their lifetime jobs what the Rebbe suggest they should do.
So in that respect even the less well written, less artful stories in "Foreskin's Lament," are enlightening... if you are not taken aback by the unrelentingly sour tone,,,
Norma Manna Blum
