Circumcizing God

Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir
By Shalom Auslander
Picador, 320 pages

Reviews edited by Andy Ross

Reviewed by Ian Sansom
The Guardian, March 1, 2008

Auslander describes himself as religious but he is an apostate. In religious terms, he is a denier and a transgressor, yet he can't escape his deeply ingrained religious habits of mind.

As an adolescent and as a young man, Auslander has the heart and soul, and the fine black hat of a frummer, but the body and the urges of an Alexander Portnoy. Large parts of the book detail Auslander's youthful addiction to pornography.

He makes several attempts at self-diagnosis. The religious, he suggests, suffer from "a metaphysical form of Stockholm syndrome. Held captive by this Man for thousands of years, we now praise Him, defend Him, excuse Him, sometimes kill for Him". Elsewhere he posits that what he is suffering from is "theological abuse". "It involves adults, known or unknown to the underage victim, telling them a Lunatic runs the world, that He's spying on them, that He's waiting for them to break a rule."

Which brings us to Auslander's agonies over whether or not to have his son circumcised. "Why don't you just punch him the face?" suggests a friend, appalled that Auslander is even considering observing the ritual. "Wait eight days, invite the family over, put out some wine and kugel, and just punch him in the fucking face."

This is not a book to read if you're in search of fine theological argument. But, if you want a laugh ...
 

Reviewed by William Sutcliffe
The Independent, 24 February 2008

Shalom Auslander has launched a new sub-genre, the Anger memoir. Auslander's anger is directed at two entities: his family and God.

Born into a family of ultra-orthodox Jews in Monsey, New York, Auslander was brought up under a regimen of brutally strict religious observance. Quite aside from the religion, his home was never a happy place. What makes this memoir original and interesting is where it dwells on the writer's other adversary: God. Never, frankly, can there have been a more blasphemous book.

His most sacrilegious act occurs on a visit to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the holiest place on the planet for Jews, where if you write a prayer on a piece of paper and place it in the cracks between the stones, these will supposedly be the first prayers answered by God. Auslander writes "Fuck you", and shoves it into the wall.

If there is a defining thread that runs through Jewish-American literature it is in the ability of writers to intermingle pain and humour seamlessly. Shalom Auslander comes directly out of this tradition.
 

Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir
By Shalom Auslander
Riverhead, 312 pages

Reviewed by Benjamin Anastas
New York Times, October 21, 2007

It has been another good year for God everywhere but in the bookstores. Now Shalom Auslander has entered the ring, flying off the ropes, pro-wrestling style, with his memoir.

''My relationship with God,'' Auslander writes in a typically bracing passage, ''has been an endless cycle not of the celebrated 'faith followed by doubt,' but of appeasement followed by revolt; placation followed by indifference; please, please, please followed by'' -- well, a series of rebukes that can't be printed here.

To Auslander, the God of the Jews is a great divider, tearing apart families over questions of ritual and turning life into a chessboard ruled by commandments and laws no human being could ever fulfill. After discovering as a rebellious teenager that a yarmulke and zizits are a license to shoplift, Auslander is shipped off by his parents to a yeshiva for wayward teenagers in Israel: ''Israelis sold pot, I was told, and Arabs sold hashish; I didn't know what hope there could possibly be for the Middle East if they couldn't even agree on how to get high.''

Framing these episodes is the story of Auslander's excitement and dread as he and Orli prepare to have their first child, a son. Why the dread? Well, for starters, there is the knife. And after that, the Covenant with God that Auslander has spent a lifetime trying to nullify by finding an escape clause.

''Thousands of years ago,'' Auslander writes of the Prophet Jeremiah, ''a terrified, half-mad old man genitally mutilated his son, hoping it would buy him some points with the Being he hoped was running the show. ... Six thousand years later, a father will not look his grandson in the face, and a mother and sister will defend such behavior, because the child wasn't mutilated in precisely the right fashion.''

With his middle finger pointed at the heavens and a hand held over his heart, Auslander gives us this memoir. Mazel tov to him.
 

Reviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
LA Times, October 14, 2007

As a child in the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of the upstate New York town of Monsey, Shalom Auslander was a victim of what he half-seriously calls "theological abuse."

Auslander's book is not about how he disburdened himself of religious anxiety. It is about how even now the Lunatic continues to consume him. "I read Spinoza. I read Nietzsche. I read National Lampoon. Nothing helps. I live with Him every day, and behold, He is still angry, still vengeful, still -- eternally -- pissed off."

The book is full of shtick. There is shtick about his self-abuse with his mother's Oil of Olay: "I was depressed and I was lonely, but my genitals never looked younger." In turning his terrible fear to bathos, he cheapens his story.

Auslander takes theodicy as a given of the world; he doesn't consider the possibility that it is instead a function of his religious psychology. Why, he refuses to ask, does he feel such a strong need to believe in a God that is so irrational?

This disinclination for self-examination seems behind the shtick. Great Jewish clown intellects such as Woody Allen could carry off absurdist responses to an irrational God because they didn't seem to really believe in one. But Auslander's digressions on divine absurdity culminate in the deaths of people he loves. The humor fails.

This book could have been an intimate and widely relevant story about how a sense of heavenly irrationality gained such dominion over his imagination. Auslander did have a very difficult childhood.
 

AR  Horrible. I will not read such stuff.