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Reviews of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander
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For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is an astonishment. Whether
Nathan Englander is creating the last days of 27 condemned Soviet
writers or the first in which a Park Avenue lawyer finds religion (in a
taxi,
no less), his gift is everywhere in evidence. Englander's specialty is
the
collision of Jewish law and tradition with secular realities, whether in
Brooklyn, Tel Aviv, or Stalinist Russia. In one tale, a wigmaker from an
ultra-orthodox Brooklyn enclave journeys into Manhattan for supplies
and, more importantly, inspiration--frequenting a newsstand where she
pays for the right to flip through forbidden fashion magazines. If all
Ruchama wants to do is be beautiful again and momentarily free of
communal constraints, others ask only to survive. In "The Tumblers," set
in World War II Poland (with a metafictional twist), followers of the
Mahmir Rebbe get into a train filled with circus performers rather than
into a cattle car. Their only chance is to camouflage themselves as part
of
the troupe:
Their acceptance as acrobats was a stretch, a first-glance
guess, a benefit of the doubt granted by circumstance and
only as valuable as their debut would prove. It was an
absurd undertaking. But then again, Mendel thought, no
more unbelievable than the reality from which they'd
escaped, no more unfathomable than the magic of
disappearing Jews.
Another story, "Reb Kringle," is almost breezy by comparison. Each
year, one Brooklynite dreads his holiday job from hell, playing Santa
Claus in a Manhattan department store: "There were elves posted on
each side of Itzik; one--a humorless, muscular midget--wore a pair of
combat boots that gave him the look of elf-at-arms. His companion might
have been a twin. He wore black high-tops but had the same vigilant
paramilitary demeanor." Itzik can put up with the children's accidents
and
greed, with his sciatica, and even with a mischief maker's attempt to cut
off his beard. But when one boy admits that what he really wants to do
is
celebrate Hanukkah, "the infamous Reb Santa" loses it. Though this is
undoubtedly the collection's lightest piece--proof positive that you have
to be a saint to be a Jewish Santa--it is no less piercing an examination
of
identity and obligation than Englander's more heavyweight entries.
--Kerry Fried
The New York Times Book Review, James E. Young
It turns out that Nathan Englander is as human as his brilliant stories
are
humane.
Buy For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander at Amazon by clicking here
The Wall Street Journal, Sharon Cleary
In For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander has
constructed a deeply affecting treatise on the caprices of fate and the
inevitability of laughter.
The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
...[an] accomplished debut collection.... Englander's voice is distinctively
his own--daring, funny and exuberant, keenly attuned to both the
absurdities of life and its undertow of sadness and disappointment.
Entertainment Weekly
Whether set in the past or present, all the pieces are affecting and
accessible, and they illuminate not just a specific community but universal
desires.
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From Kirkus Reviews , February 1, 1999
A debut collection of nine stories that explore the condition of being
Jewish with an often hallucinatory, epigrammatic eloquence that is, as
advertised, reminiscent of the fiction of Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow, and
especially Bernard Malamud. The pieces are set variously in
contemporary Brooklyn Heights and Jerusalem, Nazi-ravaged Europe,
and Stalinist Russia, and they feature such comically tormented characters
as the title story's sex-starved husband, who is granted ``relief'' from
his
wife's extended menstrual cycle by the rabbi who sends him to a
prostitute; a devoutly Orthodox Jew pressured by his materialistic wife
into moonlighting as a department-store Santa Claus (``Reb Kringle'');
and ``The Gilgul of Park Avenue,'' an unassuming Wasp who inexplicably
``realizes'' he has become an Orthodox Jewto the bellicose dismay of his
astonished wife (``You threw out all the cheese, Charles. How could
God hate cheese?''). As beguiling as Englander's comic tales are, though,
his skills are even more impressively displayed in several pieces that
strike more somber notes. ``Reunion,'' for example, paints a graphic
first-person picture of a manic-depressive Brooklynite whose travels in
and out of institutions make a living hell of his marriage and fatherhood.
``The Tumblers'' fashions its fable-like story of an insular city that
resists
contact with the outside world into a trenchant allegory of all the stages
of
Jewry under Nazism, from denial through martyrdom. ``The
Twenty-Seventh Man'' is unpublished writer Pinchas Pelovits, who finds
his voice, and completes the work he was born to create, after he is
mistakenly rounded up among a group of eminent writers doomed to
execution by Stalinist thugs. And the concluding ``In This Way We Are
Wise'' memorably dramatizes the emotions of an American Jew in
Jerusalem imperfectly adapting to both ongoing terrorist bombings and
the city's phlegmatic fatalism. An exemplary fusion of what T.S. Eliot
called ``Tradition and the Individual Talent,'' and a truly remarkable
debut. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved.
Book Description of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander
Already sold in eight countries around the world, these nine energized,
irreverent stories from Nathan Englander introduce an astonishing new
talent.
In Englander's amazingly taut and ambitious "The Twenty-seventh Man,"
a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison
with
twenty-six writers slated for execution at Stalin's command,
and in the grip of torture Pinchas composes a mini-masterpiece, which he
recites in one glorious moment before author and audience are
simultaneously annihilated. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a Protestant
has a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi. In the
collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man incensed by his wife's
interminable menstrual cycle gets a dispensation from his rabbi to see
a
prostitute.
The stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are powerfully
inventive and often haunting, steeped in the weight of Jewish history and
in the customs of Orthodox life. But it is in the largeness of their spirit--
a
spirit that finds in doubt a doorway to faith, that sees in despair a chance
for the heart to deepen--and in the wisdom that so prodigiously
transcends the author's twenty-eight years, that these stories are truly
remarkable. Nathan Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded
toward a train bound for Auschwitz and in a deft imaginative twist turns
them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way; he takes an elderly
wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. Again and
again, Englander does what feels impossible: he finds, wherever he looks,
a province beyond death's dominion.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of stunning authority
and imagination--a book that is
as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad, and that heralds the
arrival of a profoundly gifted new
storyteller.
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Synopsis of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander
A work of stunning authority and imagination, Englander's debut contains
ten energized, irreverent stories rooted in the weight of Jewish history
and
the customs of Orthodox life.
From the Publisher of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan
Englander
"A debut collection of nine stories that explore the condition of being
Jewish, with an often hallucinatory, epigrammatic eloquence that is, as
advertised, reminiscent of the fiction of Issac Singer, Saul Bellow, and
especially Bernard Malamud. An exemplary fusion of what T.S. Eliot
called 'Tradition and Individual Talent,' and a truly remarkable
debut."--starred Kirkus Review
"...the questions with which James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor pried at
Catholic doctrine [Englander] now aims at Orthodox Judaism."--VLS
From the Back Cover of
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander
"Every so often there's a new voice that entirely revitalizes the short
story.
It happened with Richard Ford, and with Denis Johnson, and with Thom
Jones. It's happening again with Nathan Englander, whose precise, funny,
heartbreaking, well-controlled but never contrived stories open a window
on a fascinating landscape we might never have known was there. It's the
best story collection I've read in ages."
--Ann Beattie
About the Author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander
Nathan Englander grew up in New York and lives in Jerusalem. He is a
graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a recent recipient of the
Pushcart Prize. His stories have appeared in Story magazine and The
New Yorker.
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