56 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Funny, poignant, and very readable, October 7, 2007
This review is from: Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir (Hardcover)
Shalom Auslander grew up in the 1970s and 80s in Monsey, New York, in an Orthodox Jewish family, with all that entailed: the arcana of kosher dietary restrictions; the uniform of the Orthodox Jew--tzitzis and peyis and yarmulke; the mind-numbing bordeom of Sabbath, when most worthwhile human activitiy is forbidden by Jewish law.
"It was forbidden to watch TV, it was forbidden to write, it was forbidden to draw, it was forbidden to color. It was forbidden to play with trains because they used electricity. It was forbidden to play with Legos because it was considered building. It was forbidden to play with Silly Putty because if you pressed it against a newspaper it would transfer some of the ink to itself, and so it was considered printing."
More specifically, Auslander grew up in an unhappy Orthodox Jewish family. His father was belligerent and volatile and given to threats involving amputation. His mother wallowed in misery and home decorating. It's hardly surprising that in adulthood Auslander has complicated relationships with both his family and God, the latter an angry entity who, much like Auslander's father, specializes in inconsistent and disproportionate punishments. But Auslander still believes. He believes, for example, that God keeps a particularly careful eye on his misdemeanors, and he is always expecting God to screw him over.
Auslander writes about his fallings-out with both family and God in his very readable memoir Foreskin's Lament. (The reason for the title is made clear about halfway through the book.) He describes the various ways he acted out against both as a teenager; his back-and-forthing on the question of keeping kosher; his self-imposed, frankly shocking acts of penance. The book is a fast read and fascinating for the light it sheds on the lifestyle of the ultra-Orthodox and on Auslander in particular. It is both funny (with one of the most original acknowledgment pages you'll ever read) and poignant, especially when the author is describing his conflicted relationship with his father, whom he manages to portray as both unlikeable and tragic.
Auslander's book serves as a healthy reminder of the perverse influence of religion:
"Thousands of years ago, a terrified, half-made old man genitally mutilated his son, hoping it would buy him some points with the Being he hoped was running the show. Over the years, equally terrified men wrote blessings and composed prayers and devised rituals and ordained that an empty seat be left for Elijah. Six thousand years later, a father will not look his grandson in the face, and a mother and sister will defend such behavior, because the child wasn't mutilitated in precisely the right fashion.
"Come see what your sons are doing in the world."
The author is still not fully recovered from the effects of his religious instruction, but he's happier. It's just a shame that he had to waste so much energy and so much time undergoing that indoctrination and, in turn, in attempting to slough it off.
-- Debra Hamel
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
One trick pony, November 4, 2009
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
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
