For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories
by Nathan Englander
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nathan EnglanderEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-03-21
ISBN: 0375704434
Number of pages: 205
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories
Book Review: A superb work by a promising new Jewish voice.
Summary: 4 Stars
In "The Trial", Franz Kafka places his protagonist Joseph K. in an authoratative world full of absurdities and secret courts that extend their rule from the sweltering heat of stuffy garrets. A single, independant man, K. feels reduced to the size of a number when he considers the power of the secret courts he is up against which have placed him under arrest. Kafka may have been depicting the isolation of conformity that modern life imposes, but when one considers that he was a Jewish writer living in Prague writing a few years before the outbrake of WWII, Kafka can be seen as a profit of the dehumanizing conditions that would insue from the Hollocaust, when Jews were alloted as much worth as numbers on a page. This especially seems likely when taking into account the ending of "The Trial" in which K. is ultimately executed by police of the secret court.
Many years later Nathan Englander comes along and depicts Jews not as numbers caught up in the gears of an inscrutable system, but as characters with unique and human qualities. The nine stories in Englander's first book, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" are written in poetry-like prose, where every sentence seems to be well thought out and painted in smooth brush strokes. These are stories that look back into the past (e.g. the Hollocaust) and that also explore the complexities of modern Jewish life today. In the nine stories Englander takes us from Communist Russia where subversive Jewish writers await execution to modern day Israel where a bomb rips through a busy commercial district while the witnesses are left to deal with the psychological aftermath. Many aspects of the Jewish experience are touched upon in "Urges" including stories which include Hasidic Jews. Inclined as they are to living their lives according to a strict set of rules and rituals, one would think Hasidic Judiasm to be a difficult subject matter to broach. However, Englander adroitly personifies the multifaceted layers of Hasidic life and the Hasidic individual. He breathes life into his Hasidic characters and they start to seem as real and internally conflicted as though they were made of flesh and blood instead of just words and sentences. Most memorable is Dov Binyamin, an Isrealite who, acting on the advice of his rabbi, sleeps with a prostitute in order to save his marriage. It is quirks like this that make "Urges" fun, as well as funny, to read. The characters may sometimes be dark, but they're not scary. In one story a woman attempts to have her husband killed so she can be formally divorced, but the story is so underscored with an undercurrent of humor that it ends up envoking more laughter than gasps. It is this clever balance of levity mixed with somber subject matter that makes Englander score as a story-teller. He knows how to tell a good story but is detached enough in telling it so as not to sound melodramatic. Nathan Englander's "Urges" deserves a space on every well read person's bookshelf. Personally, on mine, it sits between Kafka's "The Trial" and "The Diary of Anne Frank." A superb work by a promising new Jewish voice.
Summary of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories
One of the most stunning literary debuts of our time, these energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories introduce an astonishing new talent.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. It hearalds the arrival of a remarkable new storyteller.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is an astonishment. Whether Nathan Englander is creating the last days of 27 condemned Soviet writers or the first in which a Park Avenue lawyer finds religion (in a taxi, no less), his gift is everywhere in evidence. Englander's specialty is the collision of Jewish law and tradition with secular realities, whether in Brooklyn, Tel Aviv, or Stalinist Russia. In one tale, a wigmaker from an ultra-orthodox Brooklyn enclave journeys into Manhattan for supplies and, more importantly, inspiration--frequenting a newsstand where she pays for the right to flip through forbidden fashion magazines. If all Ruchama wants to do is be beautiful again and momentarily free of communal constraints, others ask only to survive. In "The Tumblers," set in World War II Poland (with a metafictional twist), followers of the Mahmir Rebbe get into a train filled with circus performers rather than into a cattle car. Their only chance is to camouflage themselves as part of the troupe:
Their acceptance as acrobats was a stretch, a first-glance guess, a benefit of the doubt granted by circumstance and only as valuable as their debut would prove. It was an absurd undertaking. But then again, Mendel thought, no more unbelievable than the reality from which they'd escaped, no more unfathomable than the magic of disappearing Jews.Another story, "Reb Kringle," is almost breezy by comparison. Each year, one Brooklynite dreads his holiday job from hell, playing Santa Claus in a Manhattan department store: "There were elves posted on each side of Itzik; one--a humorless, muscular midget--wore a pair of combat boots that gave him the look of elf-at-arms. His companion might have been a twin. He wore black high-tops but had the same vigilant paramilitary demeanor." Itzik can put up with the children's accidents and greed, with his sciatica, and even with a mischief maker's attempt to cut off his beard. But when one boy admits that what he really wants to do is celebrate Hanukkah, "the infamous Reb Santa" loses it. Though this is undoubtedly the collection's lightest piece--proof positive that you have to be a saint to be a Jewish Santa--it is no less piercing an examination of identity and obligation than Englander's more heavyweight entries. --Kerry Fried
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