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2:30 p.m. I leave my house to beat the traffic.
3 p.m. Park on Colorado Blvd in Pasadena with four hours to kill.
I go for a walk. I consume three Passion iced teas at Starbucks (refills are only 50c) and reread Chaim Potok’s "The Book of Lights."
6 p.m. I hit Vroman’s and scan the biography and current events sections.
6:40 p.m. I smuggle my bag upstairs with my cameras. I hope this enormous expenditure of time and gas is worth it.
7:10 p.m. About 40 people sit in the audience (I’m the only one wearing a yarmulke).
Shalom Auslander (middle child) walks in. He’s compact and tightly coiled.
He looks up only once during his 26-minutes of reading.
At the end he says, "I’m available for weddings and bar mitzvahs."
"Questions? Accusations?"
Question: "How did you escape from your upbringing?"
Shalom: "I got lucky. I married someone who was also on the run… It took about 15 years. It wasn’t easy."
"When you leave [that community], they slam the door behind you."
Shalom says his son "believes in Spiderman."
Question: "Did you consider having photographs in the memoir?"
Shalom: "I don’t have any photographs of myself. I had a bad break-off with my family and as I was leaving the house, it didn’t occur to me to take some pictures off the wall."
Shalom sells about 50 books. About 20 people line up to get Shalom to sign their books.
Earlier today, Auslander appeared on Patt Morrison’s radio show.
"You know NPR," says Shalom. "They love those self-hating Jews. I’m on there all the time."
Shalom says he doesn’t read reviews. About three months ago, he stopped reading about himself online.
After his signing, Shalom talks to lit blogger Mark Sarvas (his novel Harry, Revised comes out next year) for about 20 minutes.
I hover on the outside of the conversation, feeling excluded.
Although I thought Shalom Auslander’s Nextbook column on Los Angeles was a compendium of every tedious, banal cliche ever hurled at this city, I’m really not – despite some perceptions – one to hold a grudge. I thought his memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, was just terrific, and I say so in my review in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
Auslander succeeds because, although superficially extreme in its concerns – God is a thug and Judaism can be ridiculous – Foreskin’s Lament manages to occupy a station left open in the current Religion Debates. At one end we find the True Believers and at the other we find Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins denouncing religion as the root of all evil, the solace of dupes. For all his asperity, Auslander reports to us from the middle, as one who can’t deny religion’s contradictions and lunacies yet has been unable to entirely do away with belief and its necessity. In this, he is probably more representative of most Americans than either of the extremes, and it is in those moments that Foreskin’s Lament is most heartfelt and effective.
As Auslander recently said in an interview at Bookslut.com, "It’s easy to just slam the door on it, but there are people I know who find solace in it. And, certainly, the idea that there’s a God should be right." Perhaps beneath all the name-calling fury and scabrous wit, Foreskin’s Lament is intended as a parable on the strange durability of faith. That would be so Auslander.
Auslander explains his Nextbook column ripping LA as a rant. It was the only way to meet his deadline.
When I extend my hand and say my name, Shalom says, "I know."
When I introduce myself to Mark and his friend, there’s no light of recognition. Why should there be? I don’t write literature.
Sarvas tells Auslander that his blogging doesn’t distract him from his more serious writing. "Some days I do it in half an hour. Some days I do it in three or four hours. It motivates me. People are waiting for something."
"Have there been many angry folks who’ve written?"
Shalom: "No. They all go to Amazon."
His average customer review for Foreskin’s Lament is 3.5 out of a possible 5 (18 reviews).
There are five one-star reviews.
Theorist writes on Amazon: "Shalom Auslander was abused by his father as a child. In response, he attacks not only his father, but God and Judaism as well. He writes in a breezy style. It’s sort of what "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" would sound like if it were read on "This American Life"."
An Aussie in the US for 20 years (Mark’s friend) says to Shalom: "You’re going to have to deal with them in the real world."
Shalom: "I used to fear they’d come to my house and throw a brick. But I’ve got big dogs and big guns."
Mark says his upbringing was the opposite of Shalom’s. His grandparents were holocaust survivors and his parents were agnostic.
Shalom met a German-Jewish couple in a German restaurant.
He said to the Jew, "Your parents must love her."
The man said they did. His parents were Holocaust survivors. Shalom met them. They did indeed love their German shiksa daughter in law.
When Shalom related how as a child he was told that eating trafe and violating the Torah gave Hitler post-humous victories, the survivors were horrified.
Shalom: "It’s like being raised by homosexuals who say that all straight sex is bad."
After Mark leaves, Shalom sits with me for ten minutes.
"I saw out of the corner of my eye a guy wearing tzitzit and a yarmulke… You get worried. Then I recognized you."
"I get picked up at 4:30 a.m. It’s not a bad problem to have but I just want to get home and get this over with. This is the biggest trick God’s ever played on me. Spend 30 years getting out of it, write about it, and now I’m running around JCCs (Jewish Community Centers)…"
Luke: "I’ve been disappointed in all this positive stuff from all the Jewish publications except The Jewish Press."
Shalom: "Really? I haven’t been reading my reviews. I don’t know any writers who read that s—. It’s so unhealthy."
Luke: "Really? You don’t?"
Shalom: "I did when the pre-press was coming out. Unfortunately, the pre-press are the lunatics."
Luke: "You don’t Google your name?"
Shalom: "I’ve done it."
He says Amazon reviewers are bottom-feeders. "They’re people who can’t even be bothered to blog. It’s not that hard."
Luke: "All these understanding laudatory reviews in Jewish publications…"
Shalom: "It’s driving you crazy."
Luke: "I want some vitriol. What’s the fun in being a heretic unless people become vitriolic?"
Shalom: "Unless you’re really reactionary, you defend the Jews no matter… As I said on NPR today, there’s nowhere in the book that I’m saying that Judaism is wrong. I’m saying that what people taught me is f—– up. If you like Judaism and want to rant about how great it is, you don’t yell at the taught. Yell at the teacher.
"I feel like I pulled up next to a car on the road, told them they have a flat, they accuse me of hating cars. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s nowhere I say it is foolish to think that the God of Judaism isn’t God. It isn’t [Richard] Dawkins."
"I thought it would be OK when The New Yorker ran the hockey piece and people got f—– off and wrote angry letters… This was before I pulled myself off the web. And six months later they ran a chapter about my father trying to build an ark and there’s abuse and nothing. Not a word about that. You have to be a real prick to read that and say, ‘You shouldn’t be saying that.’
"Once you see that this is isn’t looking to staby anybody in the book…
"I’d say to people who think Judaism or Catholicism or Islam is a great religion, well, there are a lot of people out there who are teaching kids some f—— up stuff. So take all that religious fervor you have and go get ’em."
Luke: "Anybody bitch you out at your readings?"
Shalom: "No."
And he’s had a lot of Orthodox Jews show up to his readings (particularly in New York).
Shalom: "In London there’s a much stronger anger against the specific teachings of Orthodoxy. This ancient regressive God-is-punishing-us-every-day. They’re angry not because they’re assimilating but because they’re saying this is poisonous. This is why people are leaving.
"The people who are most upset [at Shalom’s memoir] are the Reform. Reform rabbis get upset because they think they’ve got the answer. They think Reform was created to answer this. But I don’t buy that either. My feeling is ‘Thanks but I’m not in the market right now.’
"The Reform rabbis come out and they want to be your buddy. ‘Hey, why don’t you come over to my temple?’"
"I’m not looking to change anybody’s mind."
Luke: "A lot of people in my Orthodox shul found it hilarious."
Shalom: "That’s good news."
Luke: "Are women sending you naked pictures of themselves?"
Shalom: "No. I’ve got to write about something else. One or two but you can see it in their eyes that they’re crazy."
"I had dreams of being a writer and looking out at the crowd and it being filled with hot black women. Instead it’s filled with old Jewish ladies. Good one, God.
"What do I need to write about? Rap?"
"You bleed on the page… Honestly, I tell people about your blog because it makes me laugh. I’m not interested in the goings on in Jewish life but the moments when you lose it. The moments of humanity. A lot of blogs are like, ‘Here’s my personality and I stick to it.’ I find it interesting."
Luke: "George Orwell said that the only parts of an autobiography that he believed were the shameful parts."
Shalom: "Yeah. And there are a lot of ways to do that. There’s the kind of NPR way where you make fun of yourself. You’re biggest fool in the room. I believe it letting it be angry. That’s what’s striking a chord with a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise come to readings… Frustration with the way life’s gone. ‘This isn’t in my script.’ That’s honest.
"It’s better than a joint. I was always going for that but this is better."
Luke: "You’ve given it up."
Shalom: "No. It’s not working for me. It’s having the opposite effect. It might just be because of touring. I’ve spoken to some people. They’re big pot smokers and writers. And they say, ‘Never on tour.’ You’re too anxious."
Shalom leaves with a woman for dinner in Silverlake.
I go home. I can’t sleep until past 3 a.m. Then I dream I’m having dinner with Dennis Prager and a bunch of friends. He gives example after example about how I’ve been a jerk to him. I justify my actions.
I wake up.
