Mean Books

Are nasty memoirs and thinly veiled revenge fiction the future of Jewish literature?

If you spit up at God, the old expression warns , it could fall back in your face.
In the case of Shalom Auslander, however, spitting up at God has made him a bestselling author.
Auslander’s memoir, “A Foreskin’s Lament,” is the tale of an Orthodox family’s dysfunction and one man’s rejection of the hypocrisy and strictures of a rigidly observant life. The provocative title refers to his being cast-off and “bloodied” by his experiences.
“My family and I are like oil and water, if oil made water depressed and angry and want to kill itself,” Auslander writes.
No detail of his life is spared the chronicle, from Auslander’s war with God, his longing for his abusive father’s death, his secret binging on non-kosher food, casual drug use and kleptomania to his sexual longings and what sordid findings turn up in a thorough search of his parents private possessions.
The pages drip with contempt for both his parents and God. For it is they, not he, who bear responsibility for his legion of misdeeds, we learn, in one of the biggest evasions of personal responsibility since George W. Bush tried to explain Iraq.
Other kids come from abusive, dysfunctional religious families and manage to stay on the right side of the law. God knows why Auslander was different.
Another best-selling book by a Jewish author that has stirred controversy while flying off the shelves is “My Holocaust” by Tova Reich. Though a fictional account of shady officials running the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum, it happens to evoke events and situations that mirror those of her husband, Walter Reich, who was fired as director of the museum for what he considered a principled stand at odds with his board members.
So scathing is her narration, and so devoid of redeeming value are the central characters, that the book comes off without a sentence of believable dialogue and with situations so bizarre and metaphorical that it plays out like the revenge fantasy of a disgruntled Holocaust museum employee on acid. Particularly grating is the fake European accent of the main character (it would be unfair to call him the protagonist), Maurice Messer, that sounds like how a neo-Nazi might mimick a Holocaust survivor.
Auslander and Reich share a catharsis that accomplishes the opposite of their intent, assuming (perhaps by giving too much credit) that their motive is more than just selling books.
Auslander escaped his tortured childhood family life by replacing it with a loving wife and child. Good for him. Too bad he pays the bills by wearing his pain on his sleeve, the kind of victimhood he seems to loathe when complaining that Jewish holidays are all about suffering. It’s wrong for Jews to make a festival out of Purim, when the Jews escaped mass murder at the hands of a tyrant. But it’s all right for Auslander to parade his sob story before the public for his own self-aggrandizement?
More hypocrisy: Auslander complains that his parents were devastated by the loss of a child that preceded him, lamenting that it affected their ability to function as parents. Why couldn’t they get over it?
And yet his own obsessive later worry that ill will befall his own child as God’s revenge for his misdeeds is enough to send the now-grown up Auslander into therapy. Auslander’s pain has a hechsher. His parents’ is treif.
Reich’s book has been received as a send-up of how Holocaust remembrance, cynically dubbed as “The Shoah business” has become an industry that sacrifices morality on the altar of money and places a higher premium on Jewish suffering than that of myriad other groups that endured their own “holocausts.” But it comes across more as a screed against a venerable institution that, while not above reproach, has sunk nowhere near as deeply as she suggests. It’s all too easy to imagine Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites reading this book with glee. That’s less of an argument against it, however, than the fact that it’s dull and tedious.
Scornful books about Jewish life are nothing new, and Auslander seems to be heavily influenced by precursors such as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. But Jewish literature may be undergoing a phase not unlike network TV in the age of ascendant cable channels. Will publishers increasingly prize shock value over message, torture over triumph and spleen venting over enlightenment?
Let’s hope not. Authors like Reich and Auslander are clearly out to get even. But we are the ones they punish.