For the Relief of Unbearable Urges Book

Nathan Englander is only 29, but his first collection of short stories has already been compared to the work of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. His characters are Jewish Americans--Hasidic to boot--and his subject-matter is the agony of family life, love lost and found and that favourite Jewish stand-by: guilt. Englander's touch, though, is light and relentlessly comic. His characters' fast-talking, self-deprecating dialogue wouldn't seem out of place in the TV series Seinfeld (when the newly converted Charles and his wife serve up a kosher dinner they promise "eighty dollars' worth of the blandest food you've ever had"; or then there's Mendel who wakes up thinking he's dead, says a prayer for himself, then worries "that the first thing he had done upon being dead was sin"). So deeply does Englander get into Yiddish culture that a glossary of terms would be useful to the goyshe reader, but it does enhance the atmosphere wherein a troubled people struggle with religious and cultural strictures that, at times, threaten to swamp their individuality. This is a deeply felt book, and Englander is a brilliant, subtle writer who challenges the neuroses of these chosen few with flair and the sympathy of a knowledgeable insider. --Lilian Pizzichini Read More