Beware of God (Shalom Auslander)

Genre: Short stories
Year Published: 2005

Have you ever read the Old Testament and thought to yourself, "Goodness, that God character is one homicidal, psychotic jerk"? Then this is the book for you.

In a passage typical of the book, a man who's being "stalked" by God is consulting his therapist for assistance.

Most stalkers, explained Dr. Herschberg, are lonely, isolated members of society, seeking intimacy or friendship. The stalking is simply a partial satisfaction of their voyeuristic, sadistic tendencies.

"That sounds like Him."

"You need to stop responding," said Dr. Herschberg.

"That's what my wife said," replied Schwartzman. "He's not easy to ignore."

"Are you afraid he might become violent?"

"If history's any indication."

The whole book is filled with similar indictments of the Jewish God (Auslander was raised Orthodox, and all his characters are Jews, some religious, some otherwise), executed with brilliant black humor. In pieces where God is actually present, He is universally depicted as a world-weary, out-of-touch braggart with little mercy and no answers.

You might think this would make for a terribly depressing read, and for the most part, you'd be correct. Interestingly, though, the truly difficult stories in the book are the ones in which God is not a character. There are a few allegories, which are obvious almost at the level of political cartoons with labels, but they manage to work anyway: two hampsters, one who believes their owner will return, the other a doubter, debate; the characters of Peanuts divide themselves into inventive religious factions; a man makes a golem and realizes he has no idea how to treat his autonomous creation.

However, the story that is saddest and perhaps most telling of Auslander's obvious distaste for certain aspects, at least, of religious Jewish culture is entitled "Holocaust Tips for Kids." It is long -- for Auslander, at least, whose stories tend to fall short of the 20-page mark -- and written in the unmistakable voice of a child. The child in question, never named, is a young boy, perhaps nine or so, who has been taught things about the Holocaust and religion that (the reader begins to think) should have been saved for later years.

Kevin calls my yarmulke a beanie. I am Beanie Boy.

If Kevin becomes a Nazi, the first place he'll tell the SS to look for me and Deena is in his attic. But we'll be in Florida.

Anne Frank was murdered in Bergen-Belsen after someone reported the family to the Nazis, so really -- don't tell anyone where you are going.

They're not really showers.

They'll probably make New York City into a ghetto, like the Warsaw Ghetto. If you live in a big city where there are Jews and one day there's a Holocaust, you should leave right away.

This line of thinking is, unfortunately, pretty familiar to any Jewish kid exposed to the facts of the Holocaust at an early age. But what differentiates this story from the typical Jewish kid's musing on that subject are the voices of his mother and rabbi, who tell him, respectively, "[Kevin's] mother is a no-good anti-Semite" and "the Holocaust happened because the Jews assimilated" (among other things). Beyond the terror of imagining that the Holocaust could happen in modern-day America, the child is made to doubt and fear the non-Jews around him, and to believe that his religion is less about joy and faith, and more about guilt and punishment. Auslander skewers this attitude, not only in this story, but throughout the collection.

Recommended? This might be a for-Jews-only read. Hey, Christians can have Left Behind; we can have our own unique brand of dark satire.

In the Image (Dara Horn)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 2002

No cutesy intro, this time, dear readers: I loved this book, and I'd like to say that as soon as possible. I loved it for its characters, for its fluid incorporation of Jewish culture and law, for its multiple, true-to-life plot threads, but most of all, for its language. Some of the passages in In the Image forced me to put down the book and breathe for a while, just so I could bear to continue reading. Sometimes it was because Dara Horn writes beautifully, but more often it was because the words matched my own thoughts or experiences so closely that it was eerie. I feel the need to provide a few examples, so here goes:

Leora and Lauren and Melanie slept on futons, ate off of hard plastic picnic plates, hung their posters on the walls using poster gum, and lived their evenings by the light of halogen lamps. They recycled their newspapers, deleted their answering machine messages, and rarely were in the apartment at the same time. They each bought their own food and never even considered consolidating their shopping, preferring somehow the three half gallons of orange juice that clogged up the refrigerator each week. Every woman for herself. Only Lauren bothered to clean the bathroom. There were a few pots and pans, hauled in by various parents on various move-in days and duly bequeathed to the apartment at large upon move-out, but only the spaghetti pot received any kind of regular use. The vast majority of their drinking glasses were mugs embossed with the names of insurance companies. It was as if all of them had signed a secret unwritten lease stipulating that it wasn't worth buying real forks or getting things framed or having real beds, that this wasn't real life but rather some kind of dress rehearsal for it, that they wouldn't be there long.

Or, moving from the mundane to the sublime, this is the interior monologue of a man who's fallen in love with Leora (the main character):

Being with [her] . . . does not so much resemble a time as it does a place. A moment spent with Leora does not join the moments of his life alongside the other moments, sliding like a bead onto the string of his life and clicking into place next to the moment spent walking to meet her at a restaurant and followed by the moment spent squinting at the sky alone later that evening while trying to make out a star. No, a moment spent with Leora separates itself, refusing to associate with the drab neighborhood of memories around it, walling itself off like an ancient quarter of a city filled with crooked streets, where you don't need to know where you are going because you are already there.

Anyone who's ever moved out of their childhood home has experienced the first, and anyone who's been in love has experienced the second. But the language and the clarity of metaphor that Horn employs are stunning to me. Her novel reads like prose written by a particularly clear-headed poet.

The novel is about equally balanced between the present-day life of Leora, and the recounting of one Jewish family's experiences with life in America and in Europe throughout the twentieth century. The Holocaust barely figures, however; the novel is very much about individuals, and all of the people we follow closely are lucky enough to escape the Nazis' path. They are not, however, particularly lucky in other respects, and Horn catalogues mental illness, domestic abuse, cruelty, and death with the same crystal-clear voice she uses in the above passages. Only her matter-of-fact treatment makes some of the worse incidents readable, but as a reader you feel she is only being historically fair, never sadistic, in making her characters' lives difficult.

I think that this book will be easier to read and understand if you are, in fact, an American East Coast Jew of Eastern European extraction. But I don't think that non-Jews should skip over this book because all the characters are Jewish. As long as you pay attention, you will get a glimpse (or maybe more) of the interwoven symbols and themes -- Jewish and irreligious -- that populate each chapter of In the Image. Horn is careful to slip explanations of all her straightforward Jewish usages into the text, and you can appreciate the book just fine without the deeper understanding you would get from a background in the Bible. Prose this good is too precious to pass over because you don't happen to share the author's religion.

Recommended? Hell yes.