"I write what I write," Englander, who now
lives in Jerusalem, says simply. "It just happens to
be a world that I've spent a good part of my life in.
This was what I was drawn to write about."
Englander is sipping iced tea in the bar of a downtown
Washington, DC, hotel. It's the blurry middle of a blurry
day amid the blur of his May publicity tour following the
book's release. In the evening he'll appear at a local
bookstore, read one of his stories, answer questions and
sign copies of his book. Now, sitting in the sumptuous
dark leather of the bar, he looks like a guy who was on
your college Israel program—jeans, sneakers, Henley
sweater over a T-shirt. Not so different in dress from
what he described to Time Out New
York as the style of his "Gap
Orthodox" community in West Hempstead, Long Island:
tzitzit over khakis. Now though, he goes fringeless.
After graduation, some classmates from his modern
Orthodox yeshiva went to Israel to study and returned
wearing the black hats of the ultra-Orthodox. Englander
went to SUNY Binghamton for college because he wanted a
liberal arts education. He majored in literature and
Judaic studies and graduated a secular Jew.
With the apparent success of Orthodox Jewish outreach
organizations in attracting marginal Jews and mainstream
money to their institutions —Chabad and Aish Hatorah
are two of the best known—many people can't fathom
the idea of a Jew walking in the opposite direction.
"Do you still study Torah?" Englander is asked
at his reading.
"I need this stuff for my work," he says, and
with characteristic cheek paints a picture of himself
studying shoulder to shoulder with a table full of
yeshiva students. But while they're dialoguing with God,
he's mining material for a story.
"I need it," he says again, and grins. "I
write it off."
"What community keeps everyone?" he tells me,
this time dead serious. "I read these
articles—'He eats pork.' Well, why shouldn't I? I'm
a secular person. If you're not surprised that people go
into a community, you shouldn't be surprised that people
go out."
His family is more accepting of his choices than the
outside world seems to think. For
The Relief of Unbearable Urges is
dedicated to Englander's mother, who read all the
versions of his stories. Friends and family acted as his
fact checkers, he says, verifying such minutiae as, would
an Orthodox woman have had a creme de menthe at a hotel?
Stories of people getting religion tend to focus on the
newly religious, but the phenomenon also affects everyone
in that person's life, Englander points out. That's the
subtext of "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," which
appeared in the Atlantic Monthly
this year and is included in For The
Relief of Unbearable Urges. Like
everything in Englander's fiction, there's a sly twist.
The ba'al teshuva in this case is Charles Luger, an Upper
West Side gentile.
Ping! Like that it came. Like
a knife against the glass, Englander writes. And
Luger, riding home in the back seat of a cab, suddenly
realizes he's a Jew. Jewish, he tells the driver. Jewish,
here in the back.
"This is the greatest period of Jewish outreach in a
couple thousand years and you see things happen very
radically," Englander says. "That interests me.
And I guess Mr. Luger is sort of extreme, and I empathize
with him and those around him. That's what I wanted to
explore. It's hard enough for him. But there are other
people involved."
|
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I read these
articles—"He eats pork." Well, why
shouldn't I? |
