Master of his brief

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is Nathan Englander’s third book since his unanimously praised 1999 debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. With this latest collection, Englander comfirms his place as a master of the short story form, staking a place for himself as an heir to the traditions of Raymond Carver — whose famous story ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ he pays tribute to in his title story — and of the great Jewish storytellers Isaak Babel and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Brought up in an East Coast Jewish Orthodox community, Englander turned secular while at Binghamton University in the mid-Nineties. Despite this unusual turn away from religion, Englander’s darkly comic fiction is animated by the tensions inherent to Jewish culture, whether religious, secular, social or political. The major themes treated by way of eight stories are fraught with complexity — anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, modern Israel and its history — and yet the author manages to find a lightness of tone and subtlety admirably suited to representing Jewish culture in all its diversity.  
 
In the title story, a secular couple in Florida hosts an old friend and her husband, Ultra-Orthodox settlers on a rare visit from Jerusalem. The narrator fears Mark-Yerucham and Lauren-Shoshana’s visit for the frictions that may arise from their remarkably different attitudes to Judaism. But the guests soon reveal that the only way to cope with having ten kids back in Israel is to get stoned: ‘“It’s like the Sixties there,” Mark says. “Like a revolution. It’s the highest country in the world.”’ Over a few spliffs pilfered from the teenage son’s laundry basket, the couples bond until a paranoid parlour game — ‘The Righteous Gentile game’ — turns sour and sows doubt among the Orthodox couple. The edgy, provocative premise here is admirably handled through dialogue peppered with comedy and a deft smattering of politics.

‘Camp Sundown’ echoes Englander’s concern with the memory of the Holocaust. Josh runs a holiday camp for Jewish pensioners and children on the banks of an isolated lake. Pensioners, particularly old Jewish ones with strange accents and syntax, are funny, but things, again, turn to tragedy after a self-proclaimed vigilante group of ex-camp inmates go after a fellow holidaymaker in the belief that he is a Nazi camp guard in hiding. In ‘Sister Hills’, the logic of Zionism is put into perspective through the life of Rena, a West Bank settler driven by solitude to abduct another settler’s daughter on the basis of a superstitious pact. This is the most politically-charged story, where Englander pries into the rhetoric and ideology of the Ultra-Orthodox mindset in Israel. Singer and Babel echo strongly here, particularly in the early, quasi-mythological scenes of the city’s foundation in 1973, but unease reigns throughout.

The personal and biographical also intersect with the fictional in two other memorable stories. The first, ‘Everything I Know About My Mother’s Side’, is animated by Englander’s quest to learn about his — or a narrator named Nathan’s — maternal family’s past. There are shades of Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five here in the manner in which fiction and reality intersect, while the author’s very real love sickness transpires in his desperate plea to a real or imagine ex-girlfriend. Emotionally, this is probably the most earnest, heartfelt story of the collection. In ‘The Reader’, finally, an ageing author tours the empty bookshops of America to promote the novel it took him twelve years to write, echoing the concerns of every author — who will read me? And will it last?         

On this front, Nathan Englander does not have much to fear: he has carved out a niche for himself as a daring chronicler of Jewishness, unafraid to tackle, as he may have been with his first collection, its multi-faceted political dimensions. His stories fizz along, swiftly gripping and driving the reader along through twists and turns, joy and discomfort. It is good to see a writer of such ability devoting time to (and being given the publication space to showcase) this oft-maligned and overlooked form. With this latest collection, Englander, now in his early forties, fulfils both his and the form’s potential.