Furious & Funny (Foreskin's Lament - Shalom Auslander)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Foreskin's Lament - Shalom Auslander
Date:	18/05/09 (138 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: a highly original coming of age novel

Disadvantages: none

I'm a sucker for bizarre titles. I first came across Shalom Auslander's novel in a review in a German newspaper, "Oh, no," I thought, "they've done it again." Germans are the world champions when it comes to translating foreign book and film titles in the most idiotic way. Later I learnt, though, that the translation was correct, that the title was indeed Foreskin's Lament.

With the name Shalom Auslander on the cover it's clear that the lamenting foreskin is a Jewish one. The novel is an autobiographic account of the author's childhood and youth in an ultra orthodox family in an ultra orthodox community about 30 miles north of Manhattan and how he tries to cope with his religious upbringing. We follow him until the first birthday of his son.

I know nothing about ultra orthodox Jews, the nearest I've got to them was that I saw them in Jerusalem, but how they actually live has remained a mystery to me. The insight I get from reading Auslander's account gives me the creeps. I think it's common knowledge that Orthodox Jews don't work on Sabbath, but can Gentiles imagine what that really means? The family are at home doing virtually nothing, Shalom reading the text on the cornflake boxes for the umpteenth time, father lying on the floor sleeping off the kosher wine, the others just staring holes into the air.

There are 39 categories of work that cannot be performed on a Sabbath among which is also sitting on grass. Why's that? The grass could dye your clothes - dyeing, category 15. Should you make a hole with your heel this would mean ploughing - category 2, should the grass be pulled out of the ground by the heel of your shoe, it would mean reaping - category 3.

From very early on Shalom rebels against the rules and also against his brutal father, eats non-kosher food, smokes weed and defiles his body. He also shoplifts very successfully, his pious outfit, yarmulke and zizits, making him invisible in the shops. It's odd that his parents don't become suspicious about the many expensive books in his room, and what does he do with all the clothes he steals?

All the time he argues with God who he sees as a sadistic, cruel, bored man sitting on a chair in heaven, his elbows on his knees looking down on his people and amusing himself. From his mother he's learnt, "Man thinks and God laughs." When something goes wrong, Shalom thinks at once, "This is so God!" When nothing goes wrong, he doesn't calm down, he knows that God is only playing a practical joke on him and will strike when he least expects it. There's hardly a page without Shalom cursing God in the most blasphemous way.

When he's caught shoplifting in the end and has to do community work which he can hardly endure, he decides to go to Israel for a year, something his parents had wanted him to do anyway. Right at the beginning he thinks, "Israelis sold pot, 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." When his mother urges him to write a note to God and shove it into the Wailing Wall, he does so, but the note begins with the F word.

God-bashing literature has become quite fashionable recently, but whereas Dawkins et al write from an academic point of view, Auslander does so from a personal one, and he spares us nothing. He rages, he fumes, his humour is black and biting. He's a brilliant writer and the way he weaves the threads of himself as an ultra orthodox youngster and the adult who tries to free himself from the horrors he had to endure is comic and tragic at the same time. Foreskin's Lament is an original performance of the well-worn genre Coming of Age. The title, btw, refers to the problem whether to circumcise his newborn son in the orthodox Jewish way his parents insist on or not.

What makes reading the novel a creepy experience is the fact that Auslander, who isn't an observant Orthodox Jew any more, is still, "painfully, incurably, miserably religious." His wife tells him, "They really did a number on you" and "You were theologically abused". He knows that this is true, but what can he do?

The Acknowledgement at the end of the book is a gem in its own right. "...So, God, I beg you, please don't kill my wife because of this book. Don't kill my son, and don't kill my dogs. If you absolutely must kill somebody, kill" - and then he names all the people who helped him write the novel! The last sentences are: "It's just a f****** book. Sorry."

Hilarious and creepy. As one reviewer said, "This is not so much a laugh-out-loud book as a howl-out-loud book."

Highly recommended.

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Picador
310 pages
RRP 7.99 GBP

Summary: the autobiographical account of an ultra Orthodox Jew