Foreskin’s Lament:
A Memoir
By Shalom Auslander
Riverhead Books, New York
2007, $24.95, pp. 320
Auslander’s Complaint
I am the wrong reviewer for this book. I am an old lady. This memoir is written by a young man who, only yesterday, was a sex-longing boy up to no good. I am not a person who prays, except when in a foxhole. I was raised on Park Avenue, while the author grew up in an Orthodox family in upstate New York. I went to dancing school; he went to the mall where he stole CDs, clothes, and pornography. I had a collection of cashmere sweaters, while he wore a yarmulke and tzitzit. Yes, we are both Jewish-—but that’s like saying that a zebra and an anteater are both animals.
Foreskin’s Lament is a story of a lifelong fight with God and orthodoxy, which has not been my fight. So it is a testimony to the power of good writing that I laughed and laughed and felt sorrow and ached for our hero and his sweet sassy wife Orli. The story of Shalom’s tortured relationship with tradition is told as an explanation for his anxiety, his gigantic anxiety, surrounding the birth of his child: Should Shalom, who has rejected his Orthodox upbringing, have a bris for his son?
I recognize Shalom from early Philip Roth. Recall Portnoy in the bathroom with the slab of liver, or the child on the roof of the Yeshiva refusing to come down until his rabbi admits that immaculate conception is possible. Here is the same rebellious child, the same unwillingness to accept conventional illogical gibberish from rabbis or parents. Here is the same sex-crazed naughty kid, the one who insists on seeing the world his own way, bringing grief to everyone, including himself. But here is a sharp new version, without a pleasing intention anywhere in his horny heart. I applauded our hero. I loved his spirit. I rejoiced at his escape. I hated his enemies, those Shabbat-observant, frummer-than-thou, unforgiving, unthinking others. I hated the merciless, mean-spirited rabbis who controlled his childhood and taught him a version of religion that ignored the wonders of creation and love and kindness, rabbis who failed to appreciate the author’s acute mind and endless search for real moral truth. I hated his brutal father and his ineffectual mother, a victim herself of everything sexist and life-denying in that community. “Run, run,” I would have shouted at the book, if I didn’t know that the very existence of these pages told me that the hero had made it out the door. With every fiber of my being I wanted the author’s baby to be born into a world free of those torture instruments that had bedeviled his father. How could a boy survive this constant drumbeat of guilt accompanied by an endless fear of punishment?
The big, tragic joke in this book is how seriously this child took his elders’ fantasies and how profoundly guilty he felt when he broke any rule, a small or a great one. As a child, Shalom saw that God was cruel and capable of great destruction and revenge. He was constantly afraid that he or someone in his family would die because of the most minor transgressions. These fears re-emerge years later when he discovers that Orli is pregnant. Will this child make it into the world? The author is afraid that God will kill his wife, will harm those he loves. That, as he says, “would be so God.”
When he was a young man, those fears hadn’t scared Shalom into good behavior-—he was just scared. As he grew, he committed more and more of the acts his community called sinful. He ate food that was forbidden. He bought dirty magazines that assisted in his spilling his seed all over his bedclothes. He expected retribution from an angry God, but it never came. Ironically enough, this sinner believed in God more profoundly than the most observant Jews around him.
He sees the pompous and snobbish congregants in his parents’ synagogue for what they are: unholy seekers of status. He sees his mother’s famous rabbi brothers not as the great scholars they are supposed to be, but as ungracious and cold men without kindness or love in their hearts.
The book is punctuated with words like “fuck,” “shit,” and “prick,” which are repeated and repeated. This is not mere cursing but a flag thrown in God’s face, efforts to provoke Him, despite Shalom’s terror of pissing God off.
When Shalom is in the third grade, a classmate’s father dies. This episode follows: “Rabbi Goldfinger advised each and every one of us to pray to Hashem, the Holy One Blessed Be He, for forgiveness so that He wouldn’t decide to kill our fathers too.”
What the rabbi doesn’t realize is that Shalom hates his father, who beats Shalom’s brother and makes them live in terror.
“My heart leaped…. I could sin so much Hashem would have to kill my father…. That night, just before bed, I ate a drumstick, washed it down with some milk, touched myself and flicked the bedroom light on and off. ‘Break those lights and I’ll break your hands!’ my father shouted.”
But his father doesn’t die.
This young man’s memoir exposes our naked religious impulse. We see our great fear in the face of the unknown universe and our frantic desire to appease the hostile forces of destiny. We see our craven wish to manipulate fate with endless praise. We see our vulnerability peeking out from behind the bandage of religion that covers our terrified hearts.
Yes, some jokes recur, and some points are made repeatedly. Yes, the author slights the bits of awe and beauty also found in his tradition. Seeing only the harshness and the coldness of the rules, he is blind to the wonder of the language, the lilt of the chant and the peace of the candlelight. But that is the way he saw it and the way it was given to him, and he has made of his experience a book that may save someone else’s life, a harrowing yet amusing tale in which the soul survives and a child is born into a better place.
Anne Roiphe is the author of eight novels, including Secrets of the City and nonfiction work, including 1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir and the National Book Award nominee Fruitful. She lives in New York City.
