c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In his new memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament,” Shalom Auslander writes with anger, fear, humor and profanity about growing up in a dysfunctional Orthodox Jewish family in upstate New York and his raging against a vengeful God that he can’t stop believing in.

Auslander, 37, desperately wants to protect his pregnant wife and unborn son from God’s wrath and destruction. The central conflict in the memoir is whether he should circumcise his son.

Auslander’s story alternates between the present, where he awaits the birth of his son, and his blackly comic past in a house with an alcoholic, abusive father, a death-obsessed mother and a life hemmed in by the 613 Jewish religious commandments, from keeping kosher to marrying Jewish.

Ever the rebel, he prays for the death of his father and tries nonkosher beef jerky at the age of 9. It is then a slippery slope to eating McDonald’s, reading pornography and shoplifting. Auslander is sent to a reform yeshiva in Israel, becomes a religious zealot, breaks his faith and sleeps with a prostitute.

Again and again, he curses the God he believes will crush him. He is saved by marrying an escapee from a British Orthodox community who has a sailor’s mouth. The final break with his family is searing and irrevocable.

Q: How did you decide to write this memoir?

A: When my book of short stories came out, my editor suggested I write some articles and try to get on (Chicago Public Radio’s) “This American Life.” I wrote a couple of stories, and I wrote a few more, then it developed into a full book.

I hated myself for writing a memoir. In the literary world, pornography is a step up. There aren’t many that I admired. They all had endings that mine didn’t seem to have. I don’t wake up with a family. I don’t get over God. As I was writing, I realized, “Here I am, about to become a father. I am not picking out Nike shoes and football wallpaper. I am worrying about God and whether to commit a brutal act on my son’s little willie.” There is no room for excitement or joy.

Q: Throughout the book, you have an ongoing, ranting conversation with God. He is also your only confidant. Why?

A: He was my imaginary (jerky) friend. Because I went through so many changes, from practicing to not practicing, in the family and out of the family, I had no choice but to confide in him. He knows everything. He’s like an evil Siamese twin that I can’t get rid of.

Q: How would you describe your dysfunctional childhood household?

A: At some point, I called my mother “the belle of the misery ball.” She was obsessed with death and dying. Everything with her was incredibly sad or syrupy sweet. You never felt that there was anything genuine there.

My father was an angry, untalkative, unemotional father whom I was terrified of as a child.

Q: You gather up all the pornography and sex toys in your house and burn them, risking an almost certain beating from your father. Why?

A: There is a hierarchy. If I do something to appease God, then there was this sense in my head that he would protect me when the time came. I was an idiot. I knew that I wouldn’t get hit by my father, but I would get hit by my father in heaven. A lot of the stuff I did … was to save my family by the rules I was taught. In the early part of the book, I was trying to save my family, while in the later part of the book, I was trying to save my son. Full salvation for me meant relief from God.

Q: You went down a slippery slope from eating Slim Jims and McDonald’s cheeseburgers to shoplifting literary works and musical soundtracks. Could you describe your fall from grace?

A: I started stealing things that I needed in my new world. I began stealing soundtracks and things that made me happy. In Manhattan, I was stealing glimpses of the outside world _ art books, poetry books. I had an attraction to the darker writers. I was stealing Stephen King, things goyish.

Q: After the birth of your son, your ties with your family were truly severed. What happened?

A: In the first place, it was a severing that I wished for and worked hard at. There was an insistence on maintaining a certain myth of family that never existed, and it caused everyone a lot of pain to maintain that story, which is a bad metaphor for religion. Blood is thicker than water, but thinner than the five books of Moses. I was shocked. To see my newborn son in his car seat on the dining table and to feel that rage (over the circumcision issue) coming from my parents, I thought, “I can’t do this.”

Q: You write about having a cheeseburger and having sex with a hooker in your car on the same night, before you were married. What was the response to that story?

A: I was giving a reading in London. I told that story. There was time for one last question. An 80-year-old man with a yarmulke pushed himself up on his cane. His hand was shaking. I thought, “Oh, no, I’m going to get an earful.” He asked, “Which was better, the hooker or the hamburger?” I said, “I don’t remember. I was having them at the same time.”

(Dylan Foley writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

KRE/PH END FOLEY875 words

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