It is told in large part as a story within a story: A Jerusalem vegetable merchant explains to his young son how his friend and fellow Holocaust survivor becomes a killer. It is soon revealed that she has spent her life fearing a second Holocaust, playing the "Anne Frank game," first as a young girl and later with her husband to determine "Who Will Hide Me." Unfortunately, the story is overshadowed at every turn by Carver's unsettling masterpiece, and Englander is never able to achieve the devastating effect he desires.Įnglander is at his best when he allows his substantial storytelling talents to operate within a tight, focused narrative.įree Fruit For Young Widows movingly illustrates how the aftershocks of the Holocaust ripple through time. The story meanders, lacking the tight structure of the rest of the collection, and finally takes a turn when the ultra-Orthodox male guest equates intermarriage with the Holocaust, "the one that takes more than fifty per cent of the Jews this generation." The female host is suitably horrified, and the seed is planted. Englander's updated version involves two couples, one secular, the other deeply religious, around a kitchen table in suburban Florida drinking, smoking marijuana and debating the idea of what it means to be a Jew. The collection begins with the title story, a lengthy homage to a Raymond Carver story. In fact, to borrow a phrase from William Faulkner, the past is not even past. Religious Jews in crisis, the ephemeral nature of the written word and, most pointedly, the enduring trauma of the Holocaust are explored with abundant humour, tenderness and heartache.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank ((his first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, was published in 2007)) returns to the same fertile territory as Englander's first book of stories.
The stories, infused with the wisdom, authority and authenticity of an old-world master, were not written in Russian or Yiddish like those of his literary forebears, Isaac Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer, but in a precise, unadorned English that is both amazingly fresh and hauntingly familiar. It has been nearly 13 years since the publication of Nathan Englander's brilliant debut, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an ambitious story collection written by a twentysomething Jewish writer raised in a religious community in suburban New York.
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