From Library Journal
This story collection, based on Jewish themes, is getting a big push from Knopf president Sonny Mehta.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A debut collection of nine stories that explore the condition of being Jewish with an often hallucinatory, epigrammatic eloquence that is, as advertised, reminiscent of the fiction of Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow, and especially Bernard Malamud. The pieces are set variously in contemporary Brooklyn Heights and Jerusalem, Nazi-ravaged Europe, and Stalinist Russia, and they feature such comically tormented characters as the title story's sex-starved husband, who is granted ``relief'' from his wife's extended menstrual cycle by the rabbi who sends him to a prostitute; a devoutly Orthodox Jew pressured by his materialistic wife into moonlighting as a department-store Santa Claus (``Reb Kringle''); and ``The Gilgul of Park Avenue,'' an unassuming Wasp who inexplicably ``realizes'' he has become an Orthodox Jewto the bellicose dismay of his astonished wife (``You threw out all the cheese, Charles. How could God hate cheese?''). As beguiling as Englander's comic tales are, though, his skills are even more impressively displayed in several pieces that strike more somber notes. ``Reunion,'' for example, paints a graphic first-person picture of a manic-depressive Brooklynite whose travels in and out of institutions make a living hell of his marriage and fatherhood. ``The Tumblers'' fashions its fable-like story of an insular city that resists contact with the outside world into a trenchant allegory of all the stages of Jewry under Nazism, from denial through martyrdom. ``The Twenty-Seventh Man'' is unpublished writer Pinchas Pelovits, who finds his voice, and completes the work he was born to create, after he is mistakenly rounded up among a group of eminent writers doomed to execution by Stalinist thugs. And the concluding ``In This Way We Are Wise'' memorably dramatizes the emotions of an American Jew in Jerusalem imperfectly adapting to both ongoing terrorist bombings and the city's phlegmatic fatalism. An exemplary fusion of what T.S. Eliot called ``Tradition and the Individual Talent,'' and a truly remarkable debut. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Englander's voice is distinctly his own--daring, funny and exuberant." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition." --The New York Times Book Review"Remarkable art. . . .The author fills each of these pieces with vivid life, with characters that jump off the page." --Newsday"Every so often there's a new voice that entirely revitalizes the story. . . . It's happening again with Nathan Englander, whose precise, funny, heartbreaking, well-controlled but never contrived stories open a window on a fascinating landscape we might never have known was there. It's the best story collection I've read in ages." --Ann Beattie"His characters are marvelously sympathetic creations. . . . What is most striking about the collection is not the subject matter but Englander's genius for telling a tale. . . . Invite[s] comparison to some of the best storytellers--Gogol, Singer, Kafka and even John Cheever." --Time Out New York
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Publisher
"A debut collection of nine stories that explore the condition of being Jewish, with an often hallucinatory, epigrammatic eloquence that is, as advertised, reminiscent of the fiction of Issac Singer, Saul Bellow, and especially Bernard Malamud. An exemplary fusion of what T.S. Eliot called 'Tradition and Individual Talent,' and a truly remarkable debut."--starred Kirkus Review"...the questions with which James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor pried at Catholic doctrine [Englander] now aims at Orthodox Judaism."--VLS
From the Inside Flap
Already sold in eight countries around the world, these nine energized, irreverent stories from Nathan Englander introduce an astonishing new talent.
In Englander's amazingly taut and ambitious "The Twenty-seventh Man," a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison with twenty-six writers slated for execution at Stalin's command,
and in the grip of torture Pinchas composes a mini-masterpiece, which he recites in one glorious moment before author and audience are simultaneously annihilated. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a Protestant has a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi. In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man incensed by his wife's interminable menstrual cycle gets a dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute.
The stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are powerfully inventive and often haunting, steeped in the weight of Jewish history and in the customs of Orthodox life. But it is in the largeness of their spirit-- a spirit that finds in doubt a doorway to faith, that sees in despair a chance for the heart to deepen--and in the wisdom that so prodigiously transcends the author's twenty-eight years, that these stories are truly remarkable. Nathan Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for Auschwitz and in a deft imaginative twist turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way; he takes an elderly wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. Again and again, Englander does what feels impossible: he finds, wherever he looks, a province beyond death's dominion.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of stunning authority and imagination--a book that is
as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad, and that heralds the arrival of a profoundly gifted new
storyteller.
From the Back Cover
In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man gets a special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. "The Wig" takes an aging wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. In "The Tumblers", Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, in a deft, imaginative twist, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of startling authority and imagination -- a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.
About the Author
Nathan Englander grew up in New York and lives in Jerusalem. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a recent recipient of the Pushcart Prize. His stories have appeared in Story magazine and The New Yorker.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From "The Twenty-Seventh Man":
The orders were given from Stalin's country house at Kuntsevo. He relayed them to the agent in charge with no greater emotion than for the killing of kulaks or clergy or the outspoken wives of very dear friends. The accused were to be apprehended the same day, arrive at the prison gates at the same moment, and--with a gasp and simultaneous final breath--be sent off to their damnation in a single rattling burst of gunfire.
It was not an issue of hatred, only one of allegiance. For Stalin knew there could be loyalty to only one nation. What he did not know so well were the authors' names on his list. When it was presented to him the next morning he signed the warrant anyway, though there were now twenty-seven, and yesterday there had been twenty-six.
No matter, except maybe to the twenty-seventh.
The orders left little room for variation, and none for tardiness. They were to be carried out in secrecy and--the only point that was reiterated--simultaneously. But how were the agents to get the men from Moscow and Gorky, Smolensk and Penza, Shuya and Podolsk, to the prison near the village of X at the very same time?
The agent in charge felt his strength was in leadership and gave up the role of strategist to the inside of his hat. He cut the list into strips and sprinkled them into the freshly blocked crown, mixing carefully so as not to disturb its shape. Most of these writers were in Moscow. The handful who were in their native villages, taking the waters somewhere, or locked in a cabin trying to finish that seminal work would surely receive a stiff cuffing when a pair of agents, aggravated by the trek, stepped through the door.
After the lottery, those agents who had drawn a name warranting a long journey accepted the good-natured insults and mockery of friends. Most would have it easy, nothing more to worry about than hurrying some old rebel to a car, or getting their shirts wrinkled in a heel-dragging, hair-pulling rural scene that could be as messy as necessary in front of a pack of superstitious peasants.
Then there were those who had it hard. Such as the two agents assigned to Vasily Korinsky, who, seeing no way out, was prepared to exit his bedroom quietly but whose wife, Paulina, struck the shorter of the two officers with an Oriental-style brass vase. There was a scuffle; Paulina was subdued, the short officer taken out unconscious, and a precious hour lost on their estimated time.
There was the pair assigned to Moishe Bretzky, a true lover of vodka and its country of origin. One would not have pegged him as one of history's most sensitive Yiddish poets. He was huge, slovenly, and smelly as a horse. Once a year, during the Ten Days of Penitence, he would take notice of his sinful ways and sober up for Yom Kippur. After the fast, he would grab pen and pad and write furiously for weeks in his sister's ventless kitchen--the shroud of atonement still draped over his splitting head. The finished work was toasted with a brimming shot of vodka. Then Bretzky's thirst would begin to rage and off he would go for another year. His sister's husband would have put an end to this annual practice if it weren't for the rubles he received for the sweat-curled pages Bretzky abandoned.
It took the whole of the night for the two agents to locate Bretzky. They tracked him down in one of the whorehouses that did not exist, and if they did, government agents surely did not frequent them. Nonetheless, having escaped notice, they slipped into the room. Bretzky was passed out on his stomach with a smiling trollop pinned under each arm. The time-consuming process of freeing the whores, getting Bretzky upright, and moving him into the hallway reduced the younger man to tears.
The senior agent left his partner in charge of the body while he went to chat with the senior woman of the house. Introducing himself numerous times as if they had never met, he explained his predicament and enlisted the help of a dozen women.
Twelve of the house's strongest companions--in an array of pink and red robes, froufrou slippers, and painted toenails--carried the giant bear to the waiting car amid a roar of giggles. It was a sight Bretzky would have enjoyed tremendously had he been conscious.
The least troubling of the troublesome abductions was that of Y. Zunser, oldest of the group and a target of the first serious verbal attacks on the cosmopolitans back in '49. In the February 19 edition of Literaturnaya Gazeta he had been criticized as an obsolete author, accused of being anti-Soviet, and chided for using a pen name to hide his Jewish roots. In that same edition they printed his real name, Melman, stripping him of the privacy he had so enjoyed.
Three years later they came for him. The two agents were not enthusiastic about the task. They had shared a Jewish literature instructor in high school, whom they admired despite his ethnicity and who even coerced them into writing a poem or two. Both were rather decent fellows, and capturing an eighty-one-year-old man did not exactly jibe with their vision of bravely serving the party. They were simply following instructions. But somewhere amid their justifications lay a deep fear of punishment.
It was not yet dawn and Zunser was already dressed, sitting with a cup of tea. The agents begged him to stand up on his own, one of them trying the name Zunser and the other pleading with Melman. He refused.
"I will neither resist nor help. The responsibility must rest fully upon your conscience."
"We have orders," they said.
"I did not say you were without orders. I said that you have to bear responsibility."
They first tried lifting him by his arms, but Zunser was too delicate for the maneuver. Then one grabbed his ankles while the other clasped his chest. Zunser's head lolled back. The agents were afraid of killing him, an option they had been warned against. They put him on the floor and the larger of the two scooped him up, cradling the old man like a child.
Zunser begged a moment's pause as they passed a portrait of his deceased wife. He fancied the picture had a new moroseness to it, as if the sepia-toned eyes might well up and shed a tear. He spoke aloud. "No matter, Katya. Life ended for me on the day of your death; everything since has been but nostalgia." The agent shifted the weight of the romantic in his arms and headed out the door.
The solitary complicated abduction that took place out of Moscow was the one that should have been the easiest of the twenty-seven. It was the simple task of removing Pinchas Pelovits from the inn on the road that ran to X and the prison beyond.
Pinchas Pelovits had constructed his own world with a compassionate God and a diverse group of worshipers. In it, he tested these people with moral dilemmas and tragedies--testing them sometimes more with joy and good fortune. He recorded the trials and events of this world in his notebooks in the form of stories and novels, essays, poems, songs, anthems, tales, jokes, and extensive histories that led up to the era in which he dwelled.
His parents never knew what label to give their son, who wrote all day but did not publish, who laughed and cried over his novels but was gratingly logical in his contact with the everyday world. What they did know was that Pinchas wasn't going to take over the inn.
When they became too old to run the business, the only viable option was to sell out at a ridiculously low price--provided the new owners would leave the boy his room and feed him when he was hungry. Even when the business became the property of the state, Pinchas, in the dreamer's room, was left in peace: why bother, he's harmless, sort of a good-luck charm for the inn, no one even knows he's here, maybe he's writing a history of the place, and we'll all be made famous. He wasn't. But who knows, maybe he would have, had his name--mumbled on the lips of travelers--not found its way onto Stalin's list.
The two agents assigned Pinchas arrived at the inn driving a beat-up droshky and posing as the sons of now-poor landowners, a touch they thought might tickle their superiors. One carried a Luger (a trinket he had brought home from the war), and the other kept a billy club stashed in his boot. They found the narrow hallway with Pinchas's room and knocked lightly on his door. "Not hungry" was the response. The agent with the Luger gave the door a hip check; it didn't budge. "Try the handle," said the voice. The agent did, swinging it open.
"You're coming with us," said the one with the club in his boot.
"Absolutely not," Pinchas stated matter-of-factly. The agent wondered if his "You're coming with us" had sounded as bold.
"Put the book down on the pile, put your shoes on, and let's go." The agent with the Luger spoke slowly. "You're under arrest for anti-Soviet activity."
Pinchas was baffled by the charge. He meditated for a moment and came to the conclusion that there was only one moral outrage he'd been involved in, though it seemed to him a bit excessive to be incarcerated for it.
"Well, you can have them, but they're not really mine. They were in a copy of a Zunser book that a guest forgot and I didn't know where to return them. Regardless, I studied them thoroughly. You may take me away." He proceeded to hand the agents five postcards. Three were intricate pen-and-ink drawings of a geisha in various positions with her legs spread wide. The other two were identical photographs of a sturdy Russian maiden in front of a painted tropical background wearing a hula skirt and making a vain attempt to cover her breasts. Pinchas began stacking his notebooks while the agents divvied the cards. He was sad that he had not resisted temptation. He would miss taking his walks and also the desk upon whose mottled surface he had written.
"May I bring my desk?"
The agent with the Luger was getting...
