Holier Than Thou
"Foreskin's Lament" (Riverhead, 340 pages, $24.95) moves fast. I read the whole thing — furtively, gleefully — on Yom Kippur. It was a small gesture of solidarity with the book, a memoir about growing up in, and breaking away from, the Orthodox Jewish community of Monsey, N.Y. The getaway is not a clean one. As Shalom Auslander explains, he may no longer be observant, but he still feels religious: "painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious."
This pain is especially acute for Mr. Auslander because he gets tagteamed: his alcoholic, abusive human father acts as a double for the forbidding, destructive, Old Testament God. Dad is a woodworker more at home in the lumber store than in the synagogue. While working in the garage he releases a flood of obscenities worthy of Homer Simpson. He's a monster, and since their tradition holds that the wages of a boy's sins are borne by the father, Mr. Auslander cleverly attempts to commit patricide by mixing milk and meat and flicking the light switch during Shabbat. He's still trying to off them both.
The dad, like God, can't be erased from this story, and yet his presence is a shame because, though well-drawn, the drunk, angry dad is a familiar bildungsroman foe. Here, he clouds the more original story of growing up Orthodox. The behind-the-frum-curtain aspect of the book is what will attract a Reform and secular audience, but I kept wondering: How would strict religion play out with a kindly pop? It's hard to tell if the heavenly or earthly father does more to incite Mr. Auslander's rebellion.
The exuberant core of the book is that rebellion. Most Americans grow up without many strictures, so the childhood depicted here, with opportunities for transgression and subversion everywhere, seems vital, even oddly romantic. The mainstream lament is: How do you rebel against pot-smoking, free-loving parents? Here, it's hard not to make a move that will result in divine retribution. Mr. Auslander portrays observant Judaism as superstition run wild, an obsessive-compulsive disorder gone viral. He gets his hand slapped for making circles in the condensation on a pitcher of water, because writing is forbidden on the Sabbath. Masturbation? For that, heaven will consist of being "boiled alive" in a huge tank filled with all the semen wasted in life. Eating non-kosher food, such as a Charleston Chew, means he'll be "loathed" by God in this world and "tortured" in the next. At 9, Mr. Auslander decides to buy a Slim Jim at the snack bar of a local pool, and it feels as if he were a latent junkie deciding to try heroin for the first time.
Indeed, breaking the kosher taboo is a kind of gateway drug, and soon Mr. Auslander is on to other moral violations — namely, stealing from Macy's. Jewish tradition requires religious gear such as yarmulkes and tzitzit so the body is covered with a constant reminder of God and his rules, a coat of armor against temptation. In an inversion of this purpose, Mr. Auslander uses the costume of piety to get away with theft. Security guards don't suspect the outwardly holy — except, he notes, at porno shops.
The book has plenty of comingof-age tropes — withstanding a gamut of educators, from humorless scolds to reformed acidheads, undergoing torture by the school bully, coming upon a mysterious porn stash in the woods, fretting about being cool and having the right clothes, aching with adolescent desire. Mr. Auslander brilliantly executes a chapter where the dreary reality of a relationship is interspersed with the spicy version he charms his schoolmates with.
The present-day Mr. Auslander spends a lot of time cursing God and fearing holy vengeance. He worries about his baby son. He lives with a sense that calamity will befall him and his wife. He rues the conundrum of circumcision. This is a less engaging part of the book. That neurotic frame of mind is baseline now. Everyone is like that — you don't need to attend yeshiva to be George Costanza. But an epic Sabbath pilgrimage from New Jersey to Manhattan to see a Rangers playoff game on Madison Square Garden's Jumbotron — a set piece that appeared to some buzz in the New Yorker — effectively dramatizes a personal struggle with religion. Certainly more than any of the recent rash of atheist polemics, this book wrestles intimately with that struggle.
Mr. Selsberg teaches English at the City University of New York and has written for the Believer, GQ, and the Oxford American.
