For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

A spirit of comédie humaine suffuses this collection of short stories set largely among Orthodox Jewish communities. Englander has an affectionate comic touch, and that’s obvious here.

Just as important is his gift for limning out the pain of people pulled between the comfort of belonging on the one hand and, on the other, the urge, perhaps the need to rebel.

The story of many American Jews is a story of tension: between assimilation and continuity, universalism and particularism, Jewishness and Americanness.

The stories in Nathan Englander’s debut collection, a number of which are set in the sealed-off world of Orthodox Jews, center on tensions between the spiritual and the secular, the sacred and the profane.

To wit: the title story is about a Hasidic Jew whose rabbi permits him to see a sex worker “for the relief of unbearable urges.” Englander, who grew up Orthodox himself, is a master of the short story form, and his work gives readers a… show more.

While Nathan Englander (especially his novels) weighs in a little heavier on the horror side of my humor-horror scales, his collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges does have a thread of humor running through it that juxtaposes that darkness in such a beautiful way as to make it all the more terrible. 

The story “Reb Kringle” is about a cantankerous Jewish man who works as Santa in a department store.Or "The Tumblers", a story about a group of Polish Jews on a train headed for the death camps, who, realizing something is terribly wrong, pretend to be a group… show more.