#530 Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side- Nathan Englander

#530 Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side- Nathan Englander

Nathan is an apostate, someone who has renounced religion and connection to their faith. Although it’s not as easy at that. This is a story broken up in 63 sections. Nathan loses his girlfriend because he is closed off about his past. Although his family is thoroughly Jewish he doesn’t feel that long, deep connection. He feels his life is shallow in the shadow of what should be a rich history.

“But what do you do if you’re American and have no family history and all your most vivid childhood memories are only the plots of sitcoms, if even your dreams, when pieced together, are the snippets of movies that played in your ear while you slept?”

His girlfriend, a Bosnian on the other hand feels a strong connection to her lineage.

“Her family tree is written into the endpapers of a bible whose leather cover has worn soft as a glove. She was raised in the house in which her mother was raised, and her mother’s mother, and in which, believe it or not, her great-grandmother was born.”

As Nathan explores his family history he finds secrets, lies, and hidden truths everywhere. The truth is sometimes hard to track down, and maybe it should stay hidden in the past.

Notable Passage: “It’s not only the past that can be altered and forgotten and lost to the world. It’s real time now. It’s streaming. The present can be undone, too.”

Rating: 10-9-9-9 Total= 37

#495 Peep Show- Nathan Englander

#495 Peep Show- Nathan Englander

Allen Feinberg looks down at his $500 shoes he just scuffed and is stricken at how far he has come, or worse how much he has changed. His name changed to Fein, his marriage to a Gentile all come to him with the backdrop of the new, family friendly Times Square that surrounds him.

He sees one of the last remaining “Peep Shows” promising a visual and sensual nirvana for only twenty-five cents. He goes in for the first time since he was a kid. Not much has changed inside that den of lurid desire. But his mind starts playing tricks as the guilt builds up—not only the guilt of being married and going to a peep show, but guilt of how far from his Jewish roots he has strayed. The dancing women turn into his rabbis and his psychologist.

“The rabbis’ return is a lot for him to process. He has worked hard at breaking from their world and he doesn’t remember ever wanting it back.”

All he wanted was a little harmless peek, not of flesh but of his past, of the world that has been left behind, but he finds himself at a spiritual crossroads.

“Where the rabbis are involved, there is always a path to be followed. Either you stay on it or stray into darkness: This is the choice that they offer. And, much as Allen feels bitter and lied to for all these years, he half wishes he could live in their realm, where a man is religious or he is not, a good husband or bad.”

Yes, things have changed, and choices have been made, but the window for your soul will stay open, it doesn’t close—but do you want to go through it or don’t you?

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total= 35

#474 How We Avenged the Blums- Nathan Englander

#474 How We Avenged the Blums- Nathan Englander

Three Blum brothers have been under steady harassment from who they only call The Ant-Semite. The smallest, Zvi has just been knocked unconscious and left hanging by his underwear from his friends to find him. The police are called, something not all the Jewish families are willing to do, but nothing of consequence happens.

“Our parents were born and raised in Brooklyn. In Greenheath, they built us a Jewish Shangri-la, providing us with everything but the one crucial thing Brooklyn had offered…a toughness. As a group of boys thirteen and fourteen, we grew healthy, we grew polite, but our parents thought us soft.”

With the grudging support of their rabbi and parents, the Jewish children begin a self-defense training program. They not only want to protect themselves but they want vengeance from past transgressions. When the Blum’s mother is attacked, the kids finally spring to action, but really what good did it do?

I’m not sure what message we are supposed to glean from this story. Not only do the children not really learn self-defense, or proper teamwork, but in the end their “revenge” was wrought by a ringer they brought in to help. Zvi did stand up for himself, but that was it, all the other children acted as mere onlookers. I wasn’t expecting a big good-guy-wins type of ending, but I still missed some sort of conclusion.

Rating: 7-7-6-7 Total= 27

#453 Sister Hills- Nathan Englander

#453 Sister Hills- Nathan Englander

This is an allegorical tale about the re-claiming of a settlement in the West Bank. Started by two families in 1973 during a time of war, the Sister Hills were “settled” soon after by seven boys, turned quickly into seventy, then in a span of fourteen years, emerged as a metropolis. The story begins with a fight over a tree. As complicated as this topic is, the following dialogue is a pretty brilliant break-down of the fight over this land:

-If it was your tree, I’d have seen you at my side last year during harvest. I’d have seen you the year before that, and ten years before that, and a hundred.

-You weren’t here yourself a hundred years ago. And anyway…you don’t look back far enough. The contract on this land is very old.

-A mythical claim, as meaningless as the one you make today

-It looks like [a war] not a judge [will decide].

Sadly in real life, that’s exactly how this has played out, but of course war hasn’t settled anything. And unfortunately, extremism and stubbornness has stopped the progress of any lasting peace:

-We’d prefer to avoid that kind of extremism.

-Then you do not have my trust.

I have no stirring or lucid insight into the politics of the Israel/Palestine question, but I think Englander does a great job shining a light on the issues.

Notable Passage: “For a judge can know how his heart would decide, but his obligation is always to the law. And they had sworn, these three. Sworn on their lives. A terrible promise to make.”

Rating: 8-9-9-9 Total= 35

#433 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank- Nathan Englander

#433 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank- Nathan Englander

You immediately know two things from reading this title: one, it’s paying homage to the great story by Raymond Carver, and two, the subject matter is going to be pretty serious.

Deb and Shoshana were friend at Yeshiva twenty years ago. Shoshana and her husband have been living an ultra Hasidic life in Israel and are visiting Deb and her husband in Florida. They have a long, tense, emotional discussion over what it means to be Jewish.

Most of it focuses on whether it’s healthy to make the Holocaust the defining characteristic of your life, culture, religion. They tell a story about two Holocaust survivors that realize after forty-years that their camp tattoo numbers are only three apart. The observers expect an emotional recognition of this incredible event—surviving and existing this long after having been so close to each other at the beginning –but instead the man with the higher number just say that it proves that he cut the line back then just as he does now. Meaning, that he wanted his life defined by his own actions not by others from his past.

Obviously, these discussions will cause much debate and anger and tears. The part I found the most interesting was talking about the difference between religion and culture and the dangers of tying one with the other.

“With religion comes ritual. Culture is nothing. Culture is some construction of the modern world. And because of that, it is not fixed; it is ever changing, and a weak way to bind generations. It’s like taking two pieces of metal, and instead of making a nice weld, you hold them together with glue.”

This was brilliantly crafted with impeccable dialogue. I’ll let others more qualified analyze the meaning and religious aspects of this story.

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40