LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 2002

The Rebbe of Annandale: Nathan Englander

The first recipient of the Bard College Fiction Prize, a non-teaching residency awarded to a writer under age 40, Nathan Englander enters into conversation sparingly, reverting to innuendo as brainy introverts sometimes do. But get him going on what inspires his prize-winning portrayals of Orthodox Jewish experience and he’s off like a locomotive, chugging into anecdotes like the urgent passengers in his short story “The Tumblers,” who plot their escape while riding a death-camp-bound train.

The suburban Long Island native descends from Jews who fled Brooklyn and built up Orthodox communities in the 1960s. Since Englander is a third-generation American, he considers himself a well-informed observer rather than representative of mid-century Jewish struggle. As he explains, “The Tumblers” is about how generations removed from actual survivors remember the Holocaust, a subject he absorbed attending yeshiva 10 hours a day during his childhood. Indeed, similar in premise and setting to “The Tumblers,” Radu Mihaileanu’s 1999 film The Train of Life, about Jewish villagers constructing a fake deportation train to elude the Nazis, brought Englander to the realization, “These images are not our images but those we were educated with. I grew up while Holocaust museums were being built and am fascinated by education versus remembrance.”

Among the author’s earliest national publications (in American Short Fiction), “The Tumblers” landed in Best American Short Stories 1999, selected by Amy Tan. Also that year, The New Yorker (which added Englander’s name to their Twenty Best Young Writers in America roster) published “The Last One Way,” and Atlantic Monthly “The Gilgul of Park Avenue” (anthologized in 2000 in both Best American Short Stories, edited by E. L. Doctorow, and the O. Henry Prize Anthology). Not to mention that all three stories joined six others in the then 28-year-old’s breathtaking debut volume For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a collection that earned Englander the PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award, the American Academy of Arts & Letters Sue Kauffman Prize and a slew of other purses. An international best-seller translated into six languages and reprinted in the United States 11 times in hardback, a Vintage paperback edition already boasts its sixth printing. Critics for the New York Times, Newsweek, Miami Herald, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Oregonian, Publisher’s Weekly—and the coast-to-coast list goes on—have showered the book with accolades, christening Englander a prodigious talent.

The young author breathes not a word of these accomplishments, acknowledging in a blushing voice the Bard Prize only when asked, as if not quite convinced of the fact. He seems equally incredulous at recently having filled in at Boston College when panelist Cynthia Ozick took sick, sharing the stage with heavies Kathleen Norris and Joyce Carol Oates and speaking on the subject of evil. “I noticed from that talk that the fiction I love is about injustice and the ‘flipped world,’ about people being trapped,” he said. Englander locates his ability to establish characters in similar roles in being raised by a pack of women in a closed community. “I felt trapped myself and also saw a lot of talented women with big dreams who got married at eighteen and never got to lead a certain life.” As a result, a feminist strain runs through his stories containing women protagonists.

Englander’s storytelling inevitably summons that of Philip Roth, Woody Allen and especially Bernard Malamud of The Magic Barrel period, albeit in teeter-totter manner. The younger author’s gilgul (of reincarnation or rebirth in Judaism) fable, which opens just as Charles Luger instantly “has gone from Christian nonbeliever to Orthodox Jew” in the back seat of a taxi, reads like an inverted take on Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews.” Retribution sought through their long-ago matchmaker by an Orthodox wife whose husband refuses to divorce her in “The Last One Way” reverses the action of Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel.” Punishment exacted upon a Jerusalem husband’s infidelity in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges’ title story reflects like a dark shadow the fate of Allen’s title character in “The Kugelmass Episode.” Mention these observations to Englander and he treats them like words from a wise rabbi. “I’m thinking about what you said,” he muses, as if discovering unknowns about what animates his craft.

Englander himself places his sensibilities closer to Isaac Singer’s than to Malamud, who so craved an American identity that he penned a classic baseball novel like The Natural. “I didn’t grow up wanting to be not Jewish; in my community we wanted to be so Jewish,” Englander says. “In writing, I’m coming from a closed world and want it to open up, like in Singer.” Still, his wonderment at unwittingly joining these literary lions rivals that of Pinchas Pelovits, writer suffering mistaken celebrity in Englander’s “The Twenty-Seventh Man.” Due to a clerical error, Pinchas is rounded up with the 26 greatest Yiddish writers of the Stalinist era, only to face the firing squad soon after joining their august ranks. “That story is about the decision to write—you just have to want it so badly. I still feel the same terror after the first book—none of it is really a choice.”

Revealing that he composes strictly by longhand, Englander admits, “It slows me down but makes me pay attention to what I’m doing.” In his hands the process equals precision; words and images glide along his stories like they do in those of great modernist writers he admires and to whom he is often compared—Gogol, Kafka and John Cheever.

And yet For the Relief of Unbearable Urges still manages two decidedly postmodern tales as bookends. Englander is, after all, an urbanite coffee-shop writer who has since graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-90s divided his time between Jerusalem and New York City. The book’s final selection takes place in one such cafe. “It’s about the two Jerusalems—the metaphysical, ancient one I was raised with (I moved there looking for Eden in a sense), and the Jerusalem I’m broken-hearted about: gas masks, neighborhoods blown up, and the threat of terror very prominent everywhere.”

As one whose full-time occupation since graduate school has been writing, “an endless list of terrors—survival, money” perpetually haunt him. Playing the recluse in Israel, now back in the States he claims, “I’m trying to build a daily schedule.” Nodding to existentialism he concludes, “You can see how writers get lost in the act. You really see how much life is a construct when you construct your whole existence.”

Englander also is venturing into the unknown territory of novel writing, his project at Bard. He contends, “It’s very weird to be writing this novel having lost a year and a half on a book tour. With a shorter work, you can pull out every piece and if the story doesn’t come tumbling down then it goes. In writing a novel, I can’t believe these characters are still around! I’ve had to retrain myself.” On the subject of the book-in-progress theme, he remains as mum as one of his own cagey creations.

Those interested in sneaking a preview of his recent work can hear Nathan Englander read at the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College on Wednesday, February 6 at 7 pm.