Shalom Auslander (b. 1970) writes about the long shadow of a punitive God. He grew up in Monsey, New York, inside a strict Orthodox world that governed his food, his clothing, his calendar, and his sense of what waited for him if he failed. His books return to that world. They record what fear does to a child who believes an all-seeing authority counts his every sin and prepares a verdict.
His literary lineage runs from Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) to Philip Roth (1933-2018) and Groucho Marx (1890-1977). From the first two he takes dread and the sense of a sentence already entered. From the last two he takes timing and the refusal to let dread go unmocked. The result is a comic voice built on existential terror, where the joke and the wound arrive together.
Auslander was born into a home that placed him near the center of Modern Orthodox prestige. His maternal uncles were rabbis Norman Lamm (1927-2020), president of Yeshiva University, and Maurice Lamm (1930-2016), rabbi of Beth Jacob, a large synagogue in Los Angeles. In the memoir Foreskin’s Lament he renders Norman Lamm as a man of marble floors, a doorman, an elevator operator, a maid, a limousine and driver, and a habit of boasting about his visitors. The piano went unplayed. The art books went unread. The uncle announced that Herman Wouk (1915-2019) had come by the day before. The young Auslander watched the display and learned what religious eminence could look like up close.
Inside the home itself, the picture darkened. He describes a father whose rage frightened him when the wine ran out and frightened him more when it did not. He describes a mother whose own fears thickened the atmosphere. Over all of it stood the God he was taught to expect: watchful, easily offended, quick to punish a boy for mixing meat and cheese. In his telling, the father and the God blur into a single figure. Both keep accounts. Both wait.
He began his schooling at the Yeshiva of Spring Valley in Monsey and hated it. A boy named Avrumi Mendlowitz pinned him to the ground and squeezed his testicles, once after a low test score that Auslander had tried to console him over. In fifth grade he moved to a Modern Orthodox school, where the presence of girls registered as a revelation. He went on to the Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy in Manhattan. The countervailing education came from outside the classroom. In the woods behind his home he found a cache of pornographic magazines, studied them with the attention he had been trained to give Torah, then burned them, then found more. He found his father’s magazines and his mother’s vibrators and burned those too. The pattern held: appetite, secrecy, shame, destruction, return.
As a teenager he rebelled through petty crime, drugs, and truancy while reading widely and slipping into museums and secular culture. He enrolled at Queens College and left within weeks. He chose writing over the academy and over the world he came from. He has kept no friends from his Orthodox childhood.
His apprenticeship ran through magazines and radio. He published essays and short fiction in Esquire, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Tablet, and he became a regular contributor to This American Life, where his confessional storytelling found a national audience. A New Yorker piece about youth hockey drew angry letters. Months later the magazine ran a chapter about his father trying to build an ark, with the abuse in plain view, and the letters stopped. Auslander took the silence as proof that readers will tolerate cruelty inside a family while bristling at irreverence toward a game.
His first book, Beware of God (2005), collected interconnected stories of characters caught between religious obligation and modern life. The God of these stories is vindictive, petty, and bureaucratic. A.M. Homes (b. 1961) called him the freshest voice in Jewish writing since Roth. Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) praised the irreverence. The book set the terms of everything that followed: blasphemy and sacrilege turned toward emotional injury rather than mere provocation.
The breakthrough came with Foreskin’s Lament (2007). The title turns on his anxiety over whether to circumcise his unborn son, one more ritual stirring fear. The memoir traces how a man arrives at 34 believing what he believes and fearing what he fears. He insists the family history carries as much weight as the religious history, and he laughs at the reactionary readers who think they have caught him out by noticing that he hates his father as much as his God, as though he had left those stories in by accident. The book entered the New York Times list of the year’s best, and reviewers reached for David Sedaris (b. 1956) as a comparison, though Auslander runs darker and more metaphysical. The Jewish press mostly praised him. The Jewish Press, edited by Jason Maoz, called him a creepy sociopath and a self-hating Jew and judged that he could not tie Roth’s shoelaces.
His first novel, Hope: A Tragedy (2012), moved the comic vision into invention. An elderly, foul-mouthed Anne Frank (1929-1945) lives in the attic of an American family’s house decades after the war, and the premise opens onto inherited trauma and the impossibility of leaving history behind. The novel won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize and reached the Thurber Prize shortlist. A following gathered for it over the years.
Mother for Dinner (2020) carried the method further. A family of assimilated American cannibals preserves its identity by eating its dead. By swapping Jewishness for cannibalism, Auslander turns his attention to tribal loyalty, assimilation, and the arbitrary ground of group belonging. Reviewers found a serious argument under the grotesque comedy: communities survive by the stories and rituals they enforce. The Sunday Times and The Economist named it among the year’s best.
FEH (2024) returns to the territory of the first memoir and shifts the weight from religion to shame. The Yiddish word for disgust organizes a life spent believing oneself defective. Auslander argues that inherited stories of inadequacy keep shaping an adult until he rewrites them on purpose. The book reached the National Jewish Book Awards shortlist and won the 2026 James Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Outside publishing he created the Showtime series Happyish, developed for Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014). Hoffman’s death halted production, and Steve Coogan (b. 1965) took the role when the show resumed. It ran one season on disappointment, ambition, commerce, and death, and critics admired its refusal of sitcom comfort. In recent years Auslander has produced the YouTube series UNGODLY: Good Lessons from a Bad God, rereading the Hebrew Bible with God as the antagonist and asking viewers to separate ethics from obedience. The series extends the quarrel that runs through all his work, a quarrel with conceptions of power that breed fear instead of moral adulthood.
Across the books one question recurs for readers and reviewers: how much of the rage is felt and how much is craft. Auslander answers that he writes because not writing leaves him wanting to die, and because writing makes him a better husband and a kinder father. He describes his stance toward God as terror rather than belief. He fears that the God of his childhood might exist, and he casts the relationship in the grammar of abuse: the beatings, then the apology and the lovely dinner, then the certainty that tomorrow brings more of the same. He rejects the memoir label and the charge that he attacks Judaism. The book, he says, is the story of one man raised under a violent God and looking for peace. He offers a parable for it. He pulled alongside a car, told the driver about a flat tire, and got accused of hating cars. Yell at the teacher, he says, not at what was taught.
He guards himself against his readers in literal terms. He once feared that someone might come to his house and throw a brick. He answered that he keeps big dogs and big guns. He stopped reading reviews and stopped searching his own name, calling the pre-publication critics the lunatics and the Amazon reviewers bottom-feeders who cannot manage even to blog. He treats The New York Times as the arbiter that will tell him whether the work is good. Asked which award means the most, he said he had won none.
The firsthand record from 2006 and 2007 sharpens the portrait. He answered interview questions only by email, calling that the least bad form of the trade, and let two months pass before replying the first time. His answers swing between deflection and confession. Asked what he wanted to be as a child, he said somewhere else. Asked about his soul, he said, my what. Asked how he tells right from wrong, he described consulting a badly written book compiled by terrified ancient nomads, then turned the joke on the believer who claims the commandments are all that keep him from raping and killing. He invited William Faulkner (1897-1962) as his one permitted ancestor, citing the line that a poem outweighs any number of old ladies, since the work of art exists to reveal and to be honest. He said he did not want to hurt anyone, and noted that no one in the book takes a worse beating than he does.
At a reading in Pasadena in November 2007, about forty people came, and the writer in the audience wearing a yarmulke counted himself the only one. Auslander read for fifteen minutes, looked up once, took friendly questions, and sold around fifty books. He was compact and tightly wound. He talked afterward about the trick God had played on him: thirty years spent escaping the world of his childhood, a book written to be free of it, and now a touring schedule that carried him from one Jewish community center to the next. He said the angriest response to his work comes not from the Orthodox, many of whom show up to his readings and laugh, but from Reform rabbis who believe their movement already answered the problem and who want him to come to temple. He said he is not in the market.
Auslander is married to the artist and writer Orli Auslander. They have two children and live in Los Angeles. He has taught in the MFA program run jointly by the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University. The man who fled the rabbinic world of his uncles now lectures a few miles, in spirit, from where it raised him, still writing about the God he cannot prove and cannot leave.
While mainstream social scientists and polite commentators treat human strife as a series of grand misunderstandings to be cured by education or positive thinking, Auslander built his reputation by systematically exposing those assumptions as fraudulent comfort.
Pinsof argues that intellectuals desperately want to believe everything wrong with the world is a mistake, because that makes the people who correct mistakes the most important people alive. In his memoir Feh (2024), Auslander tackles this dynamic directly through the lens of deep-seated trauma and religious guilt. The Yiddish word “feh” represents the ambient, inescapable message he received from his ultra-Orthodox upbringing in Monsey, New York: the foundational story that humans are inherently wretched, broken, and unlovable. Where modern psychology or progressive interventions attempt to reframe such misery as a cognitive glitch that can be solved with gratitude journaling or mindfulness, Auslander rejects the intervention model. He treats human self-loathing not as an accidental brain-fart, but as a robust and deeply accurate adaptation to a hostile environment. The psychological pain is not an error in translation; it is the raw reality of survival in a world governed by manipulative forces.
A central theme of Pinsof’s essay is the gap between our high-minded mission statements and our actual goals, which revolve around dominating rivals under moralistic pretexts and seizing control of coercive mechanisms. Auslander’s breakthrough memoir, Foreskin’s Lament (2007), tracks this logic across the strict theological structures of his youth. Religious communities often present their rituals and laws as an pursuit of universal love, holiness, and spiritual purity. Auslander’s satire strips away this posture to reveal the underlying operation: religion functions as a high-stakes, zero-sum competition over intergroup status, social conformity, and tribal leverage. The strict strictures are not misunderstandings of God’s grace; they are savvy tools used by elites to police behavior, punish non-conformists, and secure status within the hierarchy. His ongoing YouTube project, UNGODLY: Good Lessons from a Bad God, reinforces this frame by portraying the biblical deity not as a misunderstood force of ultimate love, but as a cruel, short-tempered, and vindictive antagonist operating on pure power dynamics.
In his fiction, such as Hope: A Tragedy (2012) and Mother for Dinner (2020), Auslander routinely satirizes tribal identity and identity politics. Pinsof notes that partisan hatred and identity-based friction are not primitive whoopsies; they are rational strategies deployed to fight dirty in high-stakes competitions over resources and cultural dominance.
In Mother for Dinner, Auslander takes this to a grotesque literal extreme by examining identity and heritage through the lens of cannibalism. He demonstrates that cultural formation and the stated “hunger for meaning” are frequently masks for base-level consumption, exclusion, and social dominance.
Auslander’s characters do not suffer because they lack information or need their consciousness raised. They suffer because they are locked in evolutionary traps where self-interest, family alliances, and defensive behavior are paramount. By using pitch-black humor, Auslander implicitly sides with Pinsof’s bracing conclusion: humanity has no deep desire to fix its broken nature, and our grandest intellectual explanations are merely the study of the hole we are stuck in.
Mainstream literary critique reads Auslander through the lens of radical psychological trauma and dark, existential satire. He is celebrated as the ultimate ex-Orthodox iconoclast, a man who fled the crushing theological confinement of Monsey, New York, to wage a furious, lifelong war against a tyrannical God and the collective guilt of his upbringing. His writing treats this escape as a sovereign individual necessity, a struggle to achieve psychological autonomy through brutal, comedic text.
Mearsheimer’s realism slices through this therapeutic framing, showing that Auslander’s lifelong panic is not a unique theological crisis, but the predictable behavior of a social animal who cannot escape the structural programming of his childhood tribe.
In Foreskin’s Lament, Auslander chronicles a childhood dominated by a strict, punitive religious framework designed to police every thought, action, and bite of food. He frames this as a form of institutionalized abuse, an irrational system of theological terror that weaponizes the divine to crush individual freedom.
If Mearsheimer is right, the ultra-Orthodox community Auslander fled is not an irrational anomaly. It is an optimized, high-cohesion survival vehicle designed to withstand centuries of structural scarcity, hostility, and international anarchy. To protect its perimeter without a sovereign state vehicle of its own, the sub-tribe must enforce absolute internal conformity and strict boundary maintenance.The intense value infusion Auslander received as a boy—the hardwiring of existential stakes into daily routines—is the classic mechanism a group uses to ensure collective loyalty. Auslander treats the terror as a religious pathology; realism shows it is the psychological armor a vulnerable group requires to maximize its relative power and prevent its dissolution.
Auslander’s entire creative identity is built on his defection. He writes extensively about breaking dietary laws, mocking rituals, and raising his children completely outside the faith, positioning the individual as a rational actor who can use independent critique to detach himself from the group matrix.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences places independent reason and self-chosen identity last among human motivations, far behind the unreflective survival instincts of the group. Auslander’s books prove that defection is a structural illusion. Even as a secular, prosperous writer living in the American empire, his mind remains entirely captive to the original value infusion.
He cannot write a page without obsessing over the God he claims to reject, demonstrating that the brain programming of early socialization is permanent. He did not escape tribal logic; he merely moved to a different elite domestic sub-tribe—the secular, literary intelligentsia—where he uses his raw, blasphemous text to manage his new reputation, signal alignment to his peers, and secure a place on their status map.
In his novel Hope: A Tragedy, Auslander delivers a dark parable about a man who moves to the countryside to escape history, only to find an old, cynical Anne Frank hiding in his attic, typing out her own bitter memoirs. The book is a fierce attack on optimism, arguing that human obsession with past trauma and historical injury poisons the present and makes real hope an impossibility.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology reveals that Auslander’s satire is actually a description of structural reality. History cannot be outgrown or escaped because the anarchic structure of the world ensures that group competition is permanent.
A tribe does not preserve and narrate historical trauma because it lacks psychological insight or narrative resilience; it institutionalizes trauma as defensive armor. The memory of the catastrophe is the tool used to guarantee internal solidarity and justify the group’s defensive posture against potential predators. By mocking the persistence of historical memory, Auslander mistakes a vital mechanism of group survival for a simple cognitive error, while his own text proves that when the perimeter of absolute security contracts, the past always reclaims the individual.
Stephen Turner (b. 1951) spent a career arguing that the social sciences misuse the idea of tacit knowledge. The standard account treats a practice as a shared thing. A community holds it, hands it to the young, and the young internalize it, after which they carry a common substrate that explains why they act alike. Turner denies the shared thing. Nothing passes from one mind to another in the way the transmission story needs. What a child acquires is his own habit, built from his own history of exposure and correction. The likeness among members is functional. Each trains up a disposition close enough to the others to allow coordination, but no single object sits behind the family resemblance, and no warehouse issues the practice. Habit is causal. It runs below articulation. It answers to the history that built it, not to the opinions a man later comes to hold.
Shalom Auslander renounced the doctrine in full and kept the dread entire, and he narrates the split himself across five books.
He calls the God of his childhood insane and abusive. He describes the way he tells right from wrong: he consults a poorly written book compiled by terrified ancient nomads and checks what their violent and vengeful God said he should and should not do. He turns the joke on the believer who claims the commandments are all that keep him from raping and killing, and suggests the man turn himself in to the authorities. He treats the source text as a relic. Asked whether he believes in God, he answers that believe is too lofty a word. On the level of stated proposition, the case is closed. He holds none of it.
Auslander rents a sport utility vehicle to drive to Monsey on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, because being caught in the family car on a day no observant Jew would drive sits in the back of his mind the whole time. He worries on the Thruway that God might take the occasion to kill him in a wreck, and jokes that dying in Monsey as the book comes out would make a great punch line, since there is no sicker comic than God. He deleted the manuscript several times while writing it, afraid God would strike down his family. The line that holds the whole split is his own: he is terrified that the God he was raised with might actually exist. Terror without belief. The body keeps the calendar after the man has thrown the calendar out.
The dread was never a proposition Auslander held and could therefore drop. It was a trained response, laid down across a childhood of feedback and correction, and a trained response does not lift when a belief lifts, because the two run on separate causal tracks. He installed the unbelief himself, late, by reading and reasoning. The fear got installed early, by a father whose rage frightened him drunk or sober, by teachers who told a small child that a violent power in the sky would punish him for mixing meat and cheese, by years of waiting for the verdict. Argument can reach what argument built. It cannot reach what habit built, because it was never speaking that language.
This is why the books exist and why they fail to do the one thing that might end them. Auslander can articulate the dread without limit. He can name its source, trace its history, mock it, set it in the grammar of an abusive marriage where the beatings give way to an apology and a lovely dinner and then the certainty that tomorrow brings more of the same. Each book is a fresh act of articulation. None of it touches the disposition, because articulation is a belief-track operation and the fear lives on the habit track. He can say the fear in a hundred ways and the saying changes nothing, since only retraining would change it, and no retraining is on offer. The original training ran for two decades through a child’s nervous system. Nothing in adult life supplies a counterforce of that length or that depth.
Auslander left the community. He keeps no friends from his Orthodox childhood. He dropped the observance, the doctrine, the calendar as obligation. By the transmission story, exit should return the thing he was holding in trust, the way a man hands back a borrowed tool. It returns nothing. He carries the whole apparatus of fear into a house near Woodstock and then to Los Angeles, intact. Turner accounts for this where the standard story cannot. There was never a community possession to give back. What Auslander holds is his own residue, built in his own history, his alone. The fear did not live in Monsey. It lived in him. Leaving the place that trained the habit does as much for the habit as moving house does for a limp.
His own explanation runs half right by Turner’s measure and half wrong. He tells the angry reader to yell at the teacher, not at what was taught. He pulled up next to a car, he says, told the driver about a flat tire, and got accused of hating cars. He laughs at the reactionary who thinks he has caught him out by noticing he hates his father as much as his God, as though the family stories landed in the book by mistake. The location is correct. He puts the cause in the teaching and the teacher and the household, in the training rather than in Judaism as a set of claims, and Turner would endorse the move, because the training is where habit comes from. He overstates the distance. The teaching did not deposit a doctrine he could now disown from a safe remove. It built a disposition that is now him, not a position he occupies. He talks as though he stands outside the car pointing at the flat. He is the car.
Readers and reviewers ask whether the rage is felt or a device, whether a man this funny about his terror can be in any real distress. Turner answers it. If the dread were belief, the rage would be a pose, because a man can stop believing and stop being angry at what he no longer credits. The rage holds because the dread is habit, and habit persists against the will, and a man stays angry at what he cannot will away. The anger is the friction between a belief track that has moved on and a habit track that refuses to follow. He is not performing fear of a God he finds absurd. He finds the God absurd and fears Him anyway, and the gap between those two facts is the engine of every book.
He writes, he says, because not writing leaves him wanting to die, and because writing makes him a better husband and a kinder father. Read through Turner, the compulsion is the same kind of thing as the dread. Not a vocation he chose but a disposition that chose for him, a trained response he can describe and cannot switch off. The man who left can narrate the leaving for the rest of his life and never finish it, because the part of him that stayed was never the part that holds opinions.
The Other Set of Books
On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, Shalom Auslander rents a sport utility vehicle and drives down the Thruway toward Monsey. He rents it so the family will not catch him in the family car on a day no observant Jew would drive. He worries the length of the trip that God might use the occasion to kill him in a wreck. Dying in Monsey as the book comes out, he says, would make a great punch line, since there is no sicker comic than God. He does not believe a word of the system that built this fear. He has said so in print, at length, for money. He believes none of it and he braces for the verdict anyway.
That is the man. To read him through Ernest Becker (1924-1974) is to ask what immortality vehicle a man builds after he has smashed the one he was handed, and what he does when the smashing leaves the fear in place.
Becker’s argument starts from a creature who knows he will die and cannot live inside that knowledge. So the culture hands him a hero system, a scheme that lets his life count beyond his body, that promises significance against the rot. Every society runs one. The terms vary. The function holds. A man earns his place in the scheme and earns, with it, the sense that he will not be erased.
Monsey ran the most complete hero system a child could be given. Nothing fell outside the ledger. Food counted. Clothing counted. The hat, the sidelocks, the direction a boy faced when he prayed. An all-seeing keeper recorded each act and prepared a judgment. Becker would note the cost buried in the gift. A scheme that makes every act cosmically weighty makes every act cosmically dangerous. The boy who matters infinitely can fail infinitely. Auslander got the significance and the terror in one package, because they are the same package. He was trained for maximal weight, and a man trained for maximal weight cannot later tolerate weightlessness. This is why he cannot simply walk into unbelief and rest there. The training took.
He saw, up close, that the scheme came in more than one currency. His uncle Norman Lamm kept a three-story apartment with marble floors, a doorman, an elevator man, a maid, a driver. A grand piano nobody played. Art books nobody read. The uncle announced his visitors. You know who was here yesterday. Herman Wouk. You know who goes to my synagogue. Alan Alda. Big donor. Here the immortality currency runs on worldly eminence, on the famous name dropped at the door, on proximity to men the wider world already counts. The boy watched one hero system, the punitive God of the ledger, share a bloodline with another, the rabbi who measures his standing in celebrities. Both promise that you will be more than a creature who dies. They disagree on the coin.
Then the subtraction. Auslander throws out the doctrine. He calls the God of his childhood insane and abusive. He describes consulting a poorly written book compiled by terrified ancient nomads to learn right from wrong, and he turns the joke on the believer who claims the commandments are all that hold him back from raping and killing. He keeps no friends from the old world. He drops the observance, the calendar, the obligation. By any clean account he should now be free, and free men do not rent SUVs to hide from a God they have called a fiction.
Becker explains the residue. You cannot subtract a hero system and leave nothing in the hole. The creature still faces what the system was built to cover, and now he faces it without cover. Auslander faces it twice. Here are his two terrors, and they sit at opposite poles. The first is that the God of his childhood might actually exist, watchful, abusive, keeping the books, readying the wreck on the Thruway. He says he is terrified of exactly this. The second runs the other way. What if the big joke is that God has nothing to do with any of this and does not care about it at all. That is the terror of the void, the Becker terror in its raw form, the suspicion that the ledger was always blank and the suffering bought nothing. Most men fear one annihilation. Auslander is pinned between two. Punishment on one side, pointlessness on the other, and no third place to stand.
So he builds a new vehicle out of the wreckage of the old. He writes the book. And the book is not a confession and not a sermon. It is the other set of books. God keeps the record of his sins. Auslander keeps the counter-record, in print, where it can be read. Listen to what he says about publishing. When he wrote it for himself, anything could happen and no one would know. Now it is out there, so if He tries any shit, people are going to know. They will say, he is right, that Guy is a dick. The reader is the jury. The New York Times is the bench that will tell him whether the work is good and, with it, whether he gets to be more than a creature who dies in Monsey. He has named his consecrating authority and built his immortality bid as a case filed against the defendant, who may or may not exist, before the only court left to a man who threw out the original one.
This makes candor the sacred value of his system, and it makes the joke the sacred form. He invites William Faulkner (1897-1962) as his single permitted ancestor, citing the line that the work of art exists to reveal and to be honest, that an ode outweighs any number of old ladies. He praises George Orwell’s rule that only the shameful parts of an autobiography ring true. He says he bleeds on the page. The honesty is the point because the case requires evidence, and the evidence must be the shameful thing, the burned magazines, the father’s rage when the wine ran out and worse when it did not, the boy pinned to the ground and squeezed. And the joke carries it, because the joke is the one vessel that holds the terror without killing the man who carries it. In his system comedy is sacramental. It is the form candor takes when straight speech would burn the speaker down.
Now the word itself. Honesty looks like a single sacred value and turns out to mean something different inside every system that prizes it.
The Jesuit in the box treats truth as confession. He speaks the shameful thing in secret, to one ear, to be absolved and then erased, the soul washed and returned to grace. The dissident under a regime of lies treats truth as the forbidden fact spoken against the state, copied at night, passed hand to hand, an act that might cost him everything and means nothing if no cause receives it. The Method actor on the stage treats truth as emotion summoned on cue, behavior made truthful under invented circumstances, manufactured and real at once. The war correspondent treats truth as the verified dispatch, the body counted, the atrocity logged so the world cannot say it did not know. The analysand on the couch treats truth as free association, the unspeakable thing said aloud to drain its charge, honesty as cure. The Reform rabbi treats truth as the tradition read fresh for the present hour, candor about what the old words can mean now.
Auslander’s honesty is none of these. He wants no absolution, so it is not the Jesuit’s. He serves no cause, so it is not the dissident’s. He summons nothing on cue, so it is not the actor’s. He seeks no cure and says so, telling the man who asks after his soul, my what. He offers the Reform rabbi the answer he gives all of them, that he is not in the market. His honesty is testimony for the counter-record, the shameful thing said in public so the cosmos stands accused before a reader who will outlive the trial. The same five letters. Six men. Six terrors held at bay by six different uses of one word.
The rival systems crowd around him and he refuses each on its own terms. The Orthodox of Monsey want him back inside the ledger. Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) and Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) offer a clean hero system of reason against superstition, and Auslander declines it, since reason cannot reach a fear that reason did not install, and a man who is afraid of a God he calls absurd is not a New Atheist. The Reform rabbis, the angriest of his readers, believe their movement already solved his problem and want him at temple, and he tells them he is not buying. Each system asks him to trade his counter-record for membership. He keeps the record.
Three coordinates locate him. He stands between two terrors rather than behind one, which is why he can neither return to the God who would punish him nor relax into the void that would release him, and why the books keep coming, each a fresh entry in a case that cannot close while both terrors hold. He has made candor sacred and the joke its only safe container, so that the comedy critics take for a device is the load-bearing wall, the form without which the terror would take the man down with it. And he has named the New York Times where Monsey named God, which tells you the function survived the content, that he left the scheme and kept the shape of it, a man still earning a verdict from a higher authority, still keeping the books against the day he is called to account, no longer sure anyone is reading them and unable to stop writing them down.
The Set
Shalom Auslander writes from inside a world, and that world has a center of gravity. Call it literary New York and its satellites, the magazine and radio and publishing circuit that runs from the New Yorker offices through the better Brooklyn dinner tables out to Woodstock and the second homes upstate, with a Los Angeles annex for the ones who take television money. Auslander has lived the full arc of it. He published essays and fiction in Esquire, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Tablet. He became a regular on This American Life, the radio program that did more than any other to set the tone of the set, the confessional voice, the rueful self-implication, the small domestic shame opened up for a national audience. He created a Showtime series. He has taught in the MFA program the Jewish Theological Seminary runs with Columbia. He knows the world from the inside, and his books quarrel with it as much as they quarrel with Monsey.
What the set values, first, is the sentence. Prose is the coin. A man earns standing by the line he can write, and the highest praise routes through lineage. A.M. Homes (b. 1961) called Auslander the freshest voice in Jewish writing since Philip Roth (1933-2018), and the compliment lands because Roth is the saint of this calendar, the proof that a man can turn the embarrassing material of his own family and his own people into permanent literature. Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) praised the irreverence, and Hitchens carried his own kind of capital here, the writer as fearless sayer of the unsayable. The names a writer gets compared to are the names that rank the room. Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Roth above all. To be measured against them is to be admitted. Jason Maoz of the Jewish Press tried to expel Auslander from the company by the same logic, writing that he could not tie Roth’s shoelaces. The insult and the praise use the same yardstick.
The set values candor, the willingness to expose the self, and it has a preferred grammar for doing so. This is the David Sedaris (b. 1956) register, the public radio confession, the writer as the biggest fool in his own story, rueful and warm, the shame defanged by charm. Auslander has the candor and refuses the warmth. He told an interviewer there is the NPR way, where you make fun of yourself and you are the biggest fool in the room, and then there is letting it be angry, and he chooses anger. This matters for his place in the set. He meets its central demand, total exposure, and violates its tonal etiquette, which asks that exposure be softened into likability. He gives the wound without the reassurance that he is, underneath, a nice man you would want at your dinner.
The set values irreverence toward religion, and here Auslander sits in a precise spot the set finds harder to hold than it admits. The respectable position runs along an axis. At one end, the believers. At the far end, Hitchens and Dawkins, religion as the root of human evil. The set’s comfort lies near the Hitchens end, where faith is a thing intelligent people have grown out of and may now mock from a safe distance. Auslander does not sit there. He reports from the middle, the man who cannot believe and cannot stop fearing, who calls God insane and rents the SUV anyway. Mark Sarvas caught this in his review, that Auslander writes as one who can neither deny religion’s lunacies nor do away with its hold, and that this makes him more representative than either extreme. The set prefers the clean atheism. Auslander hands it something messier, a man still inside the thing he is attacking, and the discomfort is real.
Now the status games, which run on a few clear currencies.
The first is placement. Where you publish ranks you, and the hierarchy is known to everyone in it. The New Yorker tops it. Auslander treats the New York Times as the body that confers worth. Asked how he knows when he has done good work, he says he imagines the New York Times will tell him so. Asked which of his awards means the most, he says he has won none, which is itself a move, the writer too serious for prizes, ranking himself by refusing the lower currency. The set plays this game constantly and pretends not to.
The second currency is proximity to fame, and Auslander learned it young, watching his uncle Norman Lamm (1927-2020) play the rabbinic version. The uncle kept marble floors and a doorman and an elevator man and announced his visitors at the door. Herman Wouk (1915-2019) was here yesterday. Alan Alda goes to my synagogue, big donor. The boy watched a man measure his standing in celebrity names, and the literary set runs the same game in its own coin, the famous friend, the blurb from the bigger writer, the table at the right dinner. Sarvas talks to Auslander for twenty minutes at the Pasadena reading and Auslander hovers, then later tells Sarvas he reads the blog because it makes him laugh. The small jockeying for who recognizes whom, who knows the name and who does not, runs all through the scene. Auslander introduces himself and Sarvas’s friend shows no light of recognition, and the absence registers, because in this world recognition is the currency and its absence is a small wound.
The third currency is the angry letter, the controversy that proves you struck a nerve. Auslander has a sharp read on this. When the New Yorker ran his hockey piece, people wrote furious letters. Months later it ran a chapter about his father trying to build an ark, abuse in plain view, and nobody wrote. He concluded that readers will forgive cruelty inside a family and bristle at irreverence toward a game. The set treats the angry letter as a trophy, evidence of relevance, and Auslander both collects the trophy and analyzes the collecting.
The set holds a set of normative claims, the shoulds it enforces without quite stating them. A writer should tell the truth about himself, especially the shameful truth. George Orwell‘s rule, which Auslander cites approvingly, that the only believable parts of an autobiography are the shameful parts, is close to scripture here. A writer should not flatter his subjects, including himself. Faulkner‘s line, Auslander’s chosen ancestor on this point, that the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies, that art exists to reveal and to be honest whatever it costs the people in it. A writer should not write to please a movement or join a cause, and should hold the consoling answer in suspicion. When the Reform rabbis come to make him their poster child, he tells them he is not in the market, and the set respects this, the refusal of the easy affiliation, even as the set has its own affiliations it does not name.
Underneath the normative claims sit the essentialist ones, the beliefs about what people simply are. The set tends to hold that the examined life is higher than the unexamined one, that the writer who confronts his terror is more fully a person than the believer who is spared it by faith. Auslander shares this and complicates it. He says he is inspired by those who see themselves as more than just Jews and depressed by those who think being Jewish is all that matters. That is an essentialist claim with a hierarchy inside it, the cosmopolitan self ranked above the tribal self, the man who contains multitudes above the man content with one identity. The set holds this nearly universally and rarely says it aloud, because saying it aloud sounds like contempt for ordinary people, which it partly is.
The set carries one more essentialist belief, about itself, that it is the place where honesty lives, where the comforting lies of religion and family and nation get examined and named. The moral grammar follows from it. Good is exposure, complexity, the refusal of consolation, the well-made sentence that tells a hard truth. Bad is sentimentality, propaganda, the flattering lie, the easy uplift, writing that serves a tribe instead of the truth. Auslander speaks this grammar fluently. His whole quarrel with Monsey is conducted in it, the charge that the old world traded honesty for comfort and fear for thought.
And here the portrait turns, because Auslander aims the grammar at his own set too, though more quietly. He distrusts the dead-writer worship, telling an interviewer that coming from a world that fetishizes the dead, he has trouble looking to past writers for advice, which is a swipe at the lineage game the set plays with Roth and Bellow. He distrusts the public radio softness, choosing anger over the likable self-mockery the set rewards. He distrusts the clean atheism the set finds comfortable, planting himself in the middle where the fear still lives. He came from one total moral world, the Orthodoxy of Monsey, with its all-seeing keeper and its ledger of sins, and he landed in another moral world, literary New York, with its own saints and its own sins and its own promise of significance through the well-made confession. He serves the second world’s god, the truth told on the page, and he keeps enough distance to see that it is a world too, with its own consoling lies about how free of consoling lies it is.
That distance is his position. Inside the set, fluent in its values, ranked high in its currencies, and never quite a believer in it either, the same way he is never quite a believer in the God he fled and never quite free of Him. He is the man in both rooms who cannot fully sit down in either.
My latest posts on Shalom Auslander
Author Shalom Auslander – Beware of God
We did this via email (Shalom returned his answers to me in mid-December, 2006, after a two month wait during which time I feared I had offended him).
Q: When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A: Somewhere else.
Q: What did your parents want for you and from you?
A: That's probably a question for them.
Q: What have been your most significant sacrifices and rewards of devoting yourself to writing?
A: I'm not sure that I've devoted myself to writing. I write because when I don't, I want to kill myself. And because when I do, I'm a better husband and a kinder father. So I've devoted myself to not killing myself, and to being a better husband and a kinder father. If there were an easier way to achieve those things than writing, I'd do it.
Q: What message do you wish to send with your author photo?
A: That I dislike being photographed.
Q: In what ways are your perceptions of life keener than other people's?
A: I don't understand the question.
Q: How has your choice of vocation affected your relationships?
A: Only the one with my psychiatrist. We're much closer now.
Q: How do you know when you've done good work?
A: I imagine The New York Times will tell me so.
Q: What do you do best and worst as a writer?
A: I'm quite good at looking over my day's work and hating it all. I'm quite bad at refusing interviews.
Q: Why do you write what you write?
A: Because nobody else will.
Q: Which of your awards has the most meaning to you?
A: I haven't won any awards. I'd joke and say "Best Anal Gangbang, 2004," but you'd know better than most if I were lying about that.
Q: As you travel, what depresses you and what inspires you about jewish life?
A: I am inspired by those who see themselves as more than just Jews. I am depressed by those who think that being Jewish is all that matters.
Q: Have you kept any friends from your Orthodox upbringing?
A: No.
Q: What do you make of the disproportionate number of Jewish writers who come from an Orthodox background?
A: Reading is fundamental, even reading nutty books written by terrified ancient nomads.
Q: Is there something about orthodox belief that militates against good writing?
A: Probably not. It's just that so many who are raised with orthodox religious beliefs end up in pornography, it's really difficult to get a fair representation of their writing skills. They seem to give good head, though.
Q: Religion and the religious are only portrayed negatively in your writing. Is that a fair observation? Is that a problem or do you plan to keep on trashing religion and the religious until your dying day?
A: It's difficult to infer from that question just what your own personal opinions on religion and my writing might be. I have no problem with religion. I have no problem with guns, either. But thanks to rampant misuse, a hell of a lot of people seem to be getting killed by both.
Q: Is anger the best fuel for good writing?
A: Fuck you.
Q: If you praised a Republican, would your right hand whither? Are any of your friends Republican?
A: I'm trying to decide if this question is more embarrassing to the interviewer if he's a paranoid Republican or if he's a paranoid Democrat. Let's say "Push."
Q: Are you more comfortable dancing with men or women?
A: Finally, a question about writing.
Q Are there any mitzvahs you find yourself keeping but wish you did not?
A: Fearing God. I think I may be stuck with that all-mighty son of a bitch.
Q: Did a rabbi ever touch you inappropriately? Are priests or rabbis more likely to molest kids?
A: If telling a small child that a violent psychopath in the sky is going to punish him for eating cheese with meat passes as inappropriate touching – and I think that it does – then yes, I was touched inappropriately, and repeatedly, by many, many rabbis. Priests do seem to sexually abuse children more often than rabbis, but maybe that's probably because they use more E.
Q: Should man-dog sex be legal? What about man-dog marriage?
A: I'm in favor of anything that might improve humanity's gene pool.
Q: After you've finished trashing religion, what do you want to leave people with to live by? Are your kids going to have as rich a material to draw from as you did? Perhaps you should smack them more?
A: I've bookmarked your site. That oughta do it.
Q: There's nothing in halacah against burying a tattooed jew in a jewish cemetery, so why do you have a rabbi in The Metamorphosis claim there is?
A: Because that was what I was taught growing up. Also, on a related note, that wasn't the point of the story. (Hey, can I change my answer to Question #11? What depresses me most is getting dogmatic, legalistic, bickering questions about stories whose essential point is the intellectual stupidity and emotional damage caused by dogmatic, legalistic bickering. There, that's much better.)
July 1, 2007
Shalom Auslander (website, my interview) writes in his forthcoming memoir Foreskin's Lament:
My mother's brother was a famous rabbi. His name was Uncle Nathan [Norman Lamm, former president of Yeshiva University]. Her other brother was also a famous rabbi. His name was Uncle Mendel [Maurice Lamm]. Uncle Nathan lived in New York, and Uncle Mendel lived in Los Angeles. They both had the same goatees. They both wrote books. Uncle Nathan was also a doctor. Sometimes he called himself Rabbi Doctor and sometimes he called himself Doctor Rabbi. Uncle Mendel wasn't a doctor, but he was the rabbi of a very big synagogue in Los Angeles [Beth Jacob].
–You know who goes to my synagogue? he would say when he came to visit. — Alan Alda.
–Wow! my mother would say…
–Big donor, my uncle would say.
From Publisher's Weekly: "Auslander, a magazine writer, describes his Orthodox Jewish upbringing as theological abuse in this sardonic, twitchy memoir that waits for the other shoe to drop from on high. The title refers to his agitation over whether to circumcise his soon to be born son, yet another Jewish ritual stirring confusion and fear in his soul. Flitting haphazardly between expectant-father neuroses in Woodstock, N.Y., and childhood neuroses in Monsey, N.Y., Auslander labors mightily to channel Philip Roth with cutting, comically anxious spiels lamenting his claustrophobic house, off-kilter family and the temptations of all things nonkosher, from shiksas to Slim Jims. The irony of his name, Shalom (Hebrew for peace), isn't lost on him, a tormented soul gripped with dread, fending off an alcoholic, abusive father while imagining his heavenly one as a menacing, mocking, inescapable presence. Fond of tormenting himself with worst-case scenarios, he concludes, That would be so God. Like Roth's Portnoy, he commits minor acts of rebellion and awaits his punishment with youthful literal-mindedness. But this memoir is too wonky to engage the reader's sympathy or cut free Auslander's persona from the swath of stereotype—and he can't sublimate his rage into the cultural mischief that brightens Roth's oeuvre. That said, a surprisingly poignant ending awaits readers."
I found Auslander's memoir identical in tone to his debut collection of short stories, Beware of God. Both books are filled with rage against God, Judaism and Shalom's alcoholic father.
Most people seem to relate to God as they relate to their father. This cliche holds true for Auslander. Both his dad and his God appear in his books as sadistic, blood-thirsty psychopaths.
I have one major question about Shalom: Is his rage for real or is just a literary device?
Ron Stiskin responds to an interview Auslander did with Sarah Ivry of Nextbook: "Shalom: I ordered a copy of Beware of God and pre-ordered a copy of your memoir as well. We have a lot in common, as I mentioned in my post on your "Too Much Information" page. I grew up in Monsey at about the same time you did. I went to HIROC and got stuck with Rabbi Glatzer, just as you did. (And I admired Lintz Rivera, just as you did!) I would like to respond to those who accuse Shalom of blaspheming by blaming God for problems actually caused by his dysfunctional family and his emotional immaturity. Don't you wish. My own experience parallels his. Sure, my family was dysfunctional in some respects – whose isn't? But my Jewish education was far more traumatic, and ultimately far more damaging. Did Shalom and I just get a rotten apple for a teacher? Yes, we did, but that doesn't mean that the Jewish day school system as a whole is hunky-dory. Our school, HIROC, was full of teachers who were themselves deeply traumatized, dysfunctional, abusive, and obviously abnormal to even the most casual observer. To put such people in charge of young children is criminal. It's hard to believe that such things didn't go on in other Jewish day schools as well. To this day, walking into a shul is difficult for me, as is seeing men in Chasidic dress. I remind myself that that was then, and this is now, but it doesn't make it any easier. Meanwhile, cases of abuse in Jewish day schools continue to surface. What does the existence of so many "bad apples" – who, in some cases, were enabled for years by the schools they worked for – say about the system of Jewish education in general? Jewish education cannot be separated from Jewish belief or observance. If you're concerned about these things – or just care about children – take a hard look at Jewish education."
I was wondering if Auslander used real names in his memoir. This comment indicates that he did.
Here's a picture of the Lintz Rivera that young Shalom wanted so badly. She's now a teacher in New Orleans.
Author Marty Beckerman responds to an Auslander column on Nextbook: "The difference between a rottweiler and a Jewish mother: the rottweiler lets go eventually."
Andrew Silow-Carroll writes in the New Jersey Jewish News:
But if there is a cultural war among Jews, Auslander is a reluctant recruit. As he explained to me in an e-mail exchange, the essay is representative only of his own experiences. "The piece, as well as the forthcoming book it is taken from, is not a judgment on Judaism: it is the story of one person, raised under the thumb of a violent God, seeking some peace," he wrote.
The essay, he wrote, was not a satire, as I had suggested in my end of the exchange. "It's not a gag or a joke or a bit. It happened. It was felt. One man is raised with religion and finds it, later in his life, a comfort. Another; me, for example; finds it has left me paranoid, fearful, and ashamed. There's a whole section in the bookstore for the first guy, not many for the second."
It's too early to tell if someone will read Auslander's memoir, titled Foreskin's Lament, and accuse him of doing the anti-Semites' dirty work or of feeding what Jewish organizations insist is a "new anti-Semitism." More likely, critics will take a clue from Shalit, casting the novel as a symptom of a divide between secular and observant Jews, as opposed to Jews and gentiles.
Auslander began his schooling at the super-Orthodox Yeshiva of Spring Valley in Monsey. He hated it.
"My father's frustrated rage at not having his Manischewitz Concord Grape was fearsome, but it was far better than his drunken rage if he did have it."
One day in fourth grade, Avrumi Mendlowitz jumped on top of Shalom and squeezed his balls. For a long time.
Shalom's uncle Norman Lamm had a man at his apartment who opened the door for you, another man who asked your name before phoning upstairs, and another man who ran the elevator. Rabbi Lamm also had a maid, a limo and a driver. They were all black.
Norman Lamm, who liked to smoke cigars, had a three-story apartment with marble floors.
Rebbitzen Lamm said to Shalom's mom that Harrison Ford lived across the way.
In the den sat a grand piano that nobody played and the settee held a pile of books on art that nobody read.
Norman Lamm liked to boast.
"You know who was here yesterday?" he said. "Herman Wouk."
One day Shalom consoled Avrumi on his low test score. Shalom was rewarded by getting pushed to the ground and having his balls squeezed. For a long time.
For fifth grade, Shalom moved to Torah Academy, which was Modern Orthodox. There were girls at the school and they smelt great.
One day while playing in the woods behind his home, Shalom's life changed forever.
He found a pile of pornographic magazines. After getting jabbed by a stick, one magazine opened up to a picture of a Chinese lady lying naked on her back. The caption read, "Bang my honeypot."
Another day, Shalom found a pile of new magazines. He brought them (Oui, Juggs, Forum, etc) home and studied them like Torah. A few days later, he burned them.
One day, Shalom reached behind his brother's books and found Puritan magazine. He wondered "what was 'cum,' and why did the woman on the cover want me to shoot it all over her face?"
Eventually, Shalom found his dad's porn magazines and his mother's vibrators. Shalom burned them. His dad didn't appreciate it.
July 24, 2007
I emailed the author of Foreskin’s Lament for his opinion of Noah Feldman’s New York Times essay.
Norman Lamm’s nephew replied: "Luke – As someone who was raised Orthodox, I was appalled to read that someone would go through all that – all the accusations, all the emotional turmoil, all the social rejection – and not hook up with a black chick. I am deeply saddened."
Sept. 2, 2007
You deleted your manuscript several times out of fear that God would strike down your family. What about now that it’s being published?
SA: When I was writing it for myself, anything could happen and no one would know. Now it’s out there, so if He tries any shit, people are going to know. They’d be like, “Wow, he’s right, that Guy’s a dick.”
Do you resent Reform Jews who can be proud of their heritage without having had to endure the hard stuff?
SA: [Reform Jews] are not necessarily going to burn their porn, as I did, but psychologically they’re doing the same thing.
So why not throw your hat in with Christopher Hitchens and become an atheism advocate?
SA: I guess if you spin religion enough, it’s comforting to think God’s a decent guy. He’s not Archie Bunker, he’s Meathead.
Sept. 25, 2007: Jason Maoz (editor of The Jewish Press) emails: "Read an advance galley of Foreskin’s Lament. Disappointing. Auslander comes across as a creepy sociopath who gives new and literal meaning to the old and overused phrase "self-hating Jew." Also, I noticed at least one internal inconsistency in terms of the narrative’s chronology. And other parts of the book just seem less than genuine. He doesn’t tie Philip Roth’s shoelaces."
Charles McGrath writes Oct. 1, 2007 in the New York Times:
On the second day of the Rosh Hashana holiday last month, Mr. Auslander visited Monsey, a village in Rockland County, for the first time in years. Driving down the New York State Thruway from his new home near Woodstock, he worried that God might take this occasion to snare him in a fatal car wreck. He had even rented a sport utility vehicle, rather than risk being caught in the family wheels on a day when no observant Jew would even think of driving. “It was in the back of my mind the whole time,” he said. “That would be a great punch line — for me to die in Monsey just as the book is coming out. There is no sicker comic than God.”
Most people were on foot that day in Monsey, walking to and from the village’s many synagogues. There were mothers in long dresses and snoods pushing infants in strollers, with boys in suits and yarmulkes skipping alongside; men in black hats and prayer shawls, and some wearing fur hats, breeches and white silk stockings.
“It’s not just whether you’re Jewish or not — there’s a whole checklist,” Mr. Auslander said, trying to explain the differences among the various groups. “It’s like gang symbols. Your clothing, your hat, how you wear your payess,” or sidelocks. “This is Crips territory here,” he went on, “and just being in a car automatically makes you a Blood.” He added: “I try sometimes to see myself through their eyes — as someone who has made a huge mistake. On the other hand, what if the big joke is that God has nothing to do with any of this, and doesn’t care about it at all?”
Pausing at a stop sign or to let some people cross the street, Mr. Auslander did draw an occasional disapproving glance. But otherwise the morning passed uneventfully as he cruised through the leafy streets of Monsey, its neighborhoods of split-levels, raised ranches and the occasional stuccoed McMansion resembling any other Rockland County suburb unless you look carefully. Mr. Auslander pointed to the many yeshivas and synagogues, some quartered in ordinary houses, and to driveways crammed with Big Wheels and plastic playhouses: a sign, he said, of Orthodox families with lots of children.
October 18, 2007
Shalom responds to some of my email questions:
Q: What's new between you and God?
A: Nothing yet. But I have a flight tomorrow, so we'll see. Check Drudge around noon for news of the crash/hijacking/explosion/disappearance.
Q: What do you love and hate about your life now?
A: Love my wife, and love my son. Hate questions about what I love and hate in my life right now.
Q: What did you love and hate about writing your memoir? What were the toughest parts to write? Why?
A: The point of the book (I don't see it as a memoir, though it unfortunately falls into that genre) was to examine how I came, at 34 years of age, to believe the things I believe and fear the things that I fear. To do that, my family history was at least as important as my religious history (I love the reactionary believers who read the book and exclaim, "Wait! I caught him! He doesn't hate God! He hates his family!" As if I put those stories about them in there by mistake, Sherlock), and at the same time, I didn't want to hurt anyone. Fortunately, as it turned out, nobody takes a bigger beating in the book than I do.
Q: Did you receive any advice on your memoir that you found useful and you think might be useful to others?
A: Having come from a world that fetishizes the dead, I have a difficult time looking to past writers for advice. But William Faulkner had a great line about writing, specifically about the women in his books that were clearly based, unflatteringly, on his mother: he said that the purpose of art was to reveal and to be honest, and that the Ode on a Grecian Urn was "worth any number of old ladies." Go Bill.
Q: You believe in the existence of God? Do you feel grateful to Him for the good things in life?
A: "Believe" is probably too lofty a word. I am terrified that the God I was raised with might actually exist. He is insane, whether the people who believe in him want to admit that or not, and he is abusive; it is somewhat classic of an abusive relationship that after an evening of hits, slaps and drunken rages, the abuser apologizes, cleans up and makes a lovely dinner. But the abused knows that tomorrow will bring more of the same, and will not be surprised when it does.
Q: Which parts of the halachic life, if any, do you miss?
A: I miss the easy comfort of being told what to do and when to do it. I miss the security that absolute (if unfounded) faith offers. I also miss my blankey and pacifier, but I can't go back to them, either.
Q: How have family and friends from childhood reacted to your memoir?
A: Predictably.
Q: Do you find yourself repeating your father's fathering habits?
A: No. And you ask another smart-mouthed question like that, you little punk, and you'll get the back of my hand.
Q: Your all time favorite niggun?
A: Right now I'm really into Tool.
Q: How do you determine what is right and wrong?
A: I consult a poorly written book compiled by terrified, ancient nomads and check to see what their schizophrenic, completely immoral, violent, vengeful God said I should and shouldn't do. It's just that easy. (As a side note, I find it a strange admission when religious folks insist that there would be no morality without the Ten Commandments, that without those commandments, there would be only raping and killing. I always find myself thinking, "That's all that's keeping you from raping and killing, Padre? A book? Shit, maybe you ought to turn yourself in to the local authorities. Seems you've got a pretty tenuous grip on yourself there.")
Q: How is your soul?
A: My what?
I told Shalom to only answer the questions that interested him.
I gave him the same message on the first interview. He ended up answering all my questions, though not in great depth.
He wouldn't give me an interview over the phone, saying he hated interviews, and that email interviews were the least bad form of interview.
Joe says:
I heard several audio interviews with Auslander. WNYC This American Life BBC Fresh Air
He didn't sound like he hated it. Your questions were better.
What I thought was interesting about him was that he was married for 15 years before he had a child.
Shalom drove around with Charles McGrath of the New York Times on Rosh Hashanah but I was in shul then worshipping God and checking out the ladies.
Here are the questions Shalom did not answer this interview:
* Why do you hate interviews?
* If you were to write a script for a reality show, how would it go?
* Did this memoir reconnect you with anyone from childhood and was this
primarily good or bad?
* How would your closest friends describe you?
Nov. 5, 2007
2:30 p.m. I leave my house to beat the traffic.
3 p.m. I 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 walks in. He's compact and tightly coiled.
He looks up only once during his 15-minutes of reading.
Then he takes questions. They are all friendly and admiring.
He sells about 50 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.