For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander

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In his spectacular debut story collection, 28-year-old Nathan Englander portrays the human condition in all its wisdom, folly, exuberance, and sorrow, with a compassion and understanding rarely shown by so young a writer. The nine stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are set within the insular world of Orthodox Jewry and range from Nazi-occupied Europe to Stalinist Russia to present-day Israel and New York. But if Englander's focus is sharply trained on the Orthodox community in particular, his themes are universal. "I have no interest in a fiction that isn't universal," he says. "If it's not universal, then it's not functioning."

Like Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer, to whom he has been quite deservedly compared, Englander is intimately connected to his characters and the world they inhabit. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community on Long Island (he now lives in Jerusalem), and by his own admission, he had a "right-wing, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, fire-and-brimstone, free-thought-free, shtetl-mentality substandard education." But when the men in charge of his religious education were unable to satisfy his basic theological questions, Englander began to look elsewhere for answers: "I began to read literature," he says. "Simple as that." Later, he started writing because "it was the one thing that I had the tools for. The single available outlet. If we had a decent blowtorch at home, I might be a welder or an industrial sculptor or a pyromaniac."

The collection begins dramatically with "The 27th Man," a brilliant story-within-a-story in which Stalinsecretly orders the apprehension and execution of 26 eminent Jewish writers. But Stalin's overzealous henchmen do their job only too well, and a 27th man, an unpublished dreamer named Pinchas Pelovits, is added to the list. Unperturbed, Pelovits spends his final hours in prison composing a fable about faith and denial, a valedictory masterpiece that he recites for his literary cellmates in the moments before facing the firing squad. Englander wrote this story after learning of a historical incident in which 26 people were executed (many, but not all of them, writers) during Stalin's purges. "From the time I first learned about the killings I dreamed of writing these writers a final story, providing them with a fictional end. It's not a political story to me. It's a story about identity, with a very political setting."

Englander sustains both the technical skill and the emotional power of this opening story throughout the collection. "The Gilgul of Park Avenue" puts a deliciously comic spin on the term "midlife crisis," when a 55-year-old WASP comes to the realization that he is the bearer of a Jewish soul and trades in his psychiatrist for a renegade rabbi from California. In "The Wig," a Brooklyn wig maker trapped in a thickening body and a passionless marriage decides to recapture the glamour of her youth by making a wig for herself. And though she nearly ruins her business and her reputation in order to purchase a handsome young deliveryman's gorgeous mane of hair, the result is "worth every penny and every shame." The subversively irreverent "Reb Kringle" finds a devoutly Orthodox Jew pressured by his wife into moonlighting as a department store Santa Claus -- with tragicomic results. "The Last One Way," which brought Englander national exposure when it was featured in The New Yorker earlier this year, is the story of a lonely, bitter, and unhappily hirsute woman who blackmails the matchmaker responsible for her loveless marriage so that he, in turn, will terrorize her belligerent husband into granting her a get. Set in Israel, the title story plays out the conflict between carnal desire and spiritual obedience through the long-suffering figure of Dov Binyamin. Sexually frustrated by his wife's self-imposed celibacy -- a condition she attributes to an interminable menstrual cycle -- Dov is granted a special rabbinical dispensation "for the relief of unbearable urges" and ordered to see a prostitute. But, predictably, Dov refuses to wear a condom ("It is a sin to spill seed in vain") and is rewarded for his scrupulous adherence to Scripture with a shameful venereal disease.

Though Englander has been criticized within the Orthodox community for portrayals such as these, he handily dismisses such narrow-mindedness. "My characters are often flawed and often Jewish. I don't see how this should be made scandalous. Flawed and Jewish. Human and Jewish. I don't see the contradiction." Indeed, it is the essential humanity of Englander's characters that allows readers to cross the threshold of fiction and see themselves in another's place, to gain an understanding -- however small -- of what it means to live as they do. Outrageous, heartbreaking, and profound,For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a truly remarkable literary debut.

From the Publisher

One of the most stunning literary debuts of our time, these energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories introduce an astonishing new talent.

In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man gets a special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. "The Wig" takes an aging wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. In "The Tumblers," Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, in a deft, imaginative twist, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way.

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of startling authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad. It hearalds the arrival of a remarkable new storyteller.

Economist Review

A pointed and poignant debut group of short stories set in the Hassidic community, which manages to offer illumination not just on the Hassidim (who are rarely described in fiction) but also universal desires.

Salon - John Perry

The Jews in Nathan Englander's short stories are mainly displaced persons. Some of them are the refugees one would expect to find in tales of the Soviet Union, the Holocaust and present-day Brooklyn. But most suffer a more intimate exile, dislodged from their own lives by causes mundane or miraculous — hair loss, manic depression, reincarnation.

Location and dislocation are central to Englander's brilliant debut collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. Despite their impressive range of settings and situations, the nine stories all fall within the terrain of Orthodox and Hasidic life. Englander never lets his treatment of this world become self-conscious or sound like travel writing; the Yiddish and Hebrew studding his pages are simply part of the landscape.

Instead he focuses on the tensions between his characters, their communal responsibilities and the spiritual and moral universe in which they move. The manic-depressive hero of "Reunion," for instance, resentfully depends upon his rabbi to mend the family rifts his manic episodes cause. In "The Wig," a faded Hasidic beauty yearns for the hair shorn from her head and regularly slips into Manhattan to indulge an obsession with "immodest" shampoo advertisements.

Recognizing the comedy that can accompany displacement, Englander displays a fine eye for situational irony. In "The Tumblers," a group of war-era Hasids boards a stalled circus train rather than the fatal transport to the east. Mistaken for acrobats, they desperately prepare a clumsy act — only to be acclaimed by their Nazi audience as brilliant parodists of "Jewish ballet." In examining the layers of impersonation demanded by a cruel fate, Englander displays a rare originality.

Occasionally his sense of humor does drift toward Woody Allen territory. WASP financial analyst Charles Luger realizes suddenly that his body houses a Jewish soul in "The Gilgul of Park Avenue." The disruption to his life and the anguish of his Mia Farrowesque wife are amusing enough, but what saves the satire is Englander's ability to make his characters poignant. Describing Charles' furtive performance of Shabbos prayers, Englander writes, "He closed his eyes and thought back to his first night away from home, sleeping on a mattress next to his cousin's bed. He was four or five, and his cousin, older, slept with the bedroom door shut tight, not even a crack of light from the hallway. It was the closest to this experience, the closest he could remember to losing and gaining a world." This small book is full of such spare, haunting moments.

Although he's been compared to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, Englander recalls for me — and I mean this without irony — the best of John Cheever. Even though his characters would never sit down at the same table with Cheever's, his invented Orthodox community of Royal Hills, Brooklyn, has a presence and an undercurrent of longing reminiscent of Cheever's suburban enclaves. Subtle characterizations, an instinct for detail and a sense of restraint already mark the 28-year-old Englander as a substantial talent in short fiction.

Bookforum - Benjamin Taylor

The special grace of Nathan Englander's stories is their ability to evoke, richly and authoritatively, a circumscribed milieu, while reaching out to the turbulences of flesh and spirit that are not only Jewish but comprehensively human.

Entertainment Weekly

...[An] accomplished collection....affecting, accessible...

New York Times Book Review - James Young

E....[An] extraordinary debut collection...brilliant...hilarious...profound...a revelation of the human condition.

Michiko Kakutani

Daring, funny, exuberant....His stories [share] the powerful mixture of allegory and quotidian detail that Bernard Malamud pioneered...At the same time, Mr. Englander's voice is distinctly his own — keenly attuned to both the absurdities of life and its undertow of sadness. —The New York Times

San Francisco Chronicle - David Wiegand

His debut collection of unforgettable stories establishes his voice as unique.

Time Out - Erik Huber

His characters are marvelously sympathetic creations — deeply pious Jews whose lives are disrupted by unbearable urges towards conjugal satisfaction, vanity, reconciliation, even piety itself. What is most striking is Englander's genius for telling a tale.

Wall Street Journal - Sharon Cleary

Deeply affecting...It provokes an array of reactions, from shocked tears to guilty belly laughs.

Publishers Weekly

"I suffer greatly under the urges with which I have been blessed," says Dov Binyamin, an orthodox Jew agonizing over his wife Chava's self-imposed celibacy, and one of several protagonists in Englander's stellar first collection who seek often ill-fitting rabbinical answers to thorny modern problems. When Dov's rebbe grants him authorization to see a prostitute, the consequences (not least of which is a case of VD) offer a moral fable of pathos and hilarity that is the signature key of these nine graceful and remarkably self-assured stories. Ranging expertly from contemporary Israel to New York and to isolated Yiddish communities in Russia and Europe, they spin a vision of 20th-century orthodox Judaism under siege from both political tyranny and the rapid pace of modern life. Englander's prose is spare and crystalline, capturing the singsong rhythms and sometimes contorted English of a primarily Yiddish cast, often striking a deliberately archaic tone, as in "The 27th Man," the Chekhovian tale of Pinchas Pelovits, a dreamy, unpublished writer in midcentury Russia. Not unlike Englander, Pinchas has "constructed his own world with a compassionate God and a diverse group of worshipers. In it, he tested these people with moral dilemmas and tragedies." Abducted by Stalin's henchmen, Pinchas composes a miniature masterpiece, a parable of faith in spite of an absent God, which he recites to his cell mates only minutes before being gunned down by a firing squad. Despite their surface mixture of humor and horror, these are stories of ideas, offering complex meditations on Judaism through the eyes of an astonishing range of characters: a disconsolate middle-age orthodox woman imprisoned in limbo by a husband who won't grant a divorce; a Cheeveresque Park Avenue financial analyst with a taxi-cab epiphany that he's Jewish; an American navigating the streets of contemporary Jerusalem during a terrorist campaign. Englander's reported $350,000 advance for this collection has made it one of the most bruited literary debuts of the year. Such brouhaha shouldn't cloud the achievement of these unpretentious and powerful stories.

Newsweek - Malcolm Jones

Anyone anywhere who loves good stories will take these wonderful tales to heart.

The New York Times Book Review - James E. Young

...[An] extraordinary debut collection...brilliant...hilarious...profound...a revelation of the human condition.

Wall Street Journal - Sharon Cleary

Deeply affecting...It provokes an array of reactions, from shocked tears to guilty belly laughs.

Newsday - Dan Cryer

Englander fills each of these pieces with vivid life, with characters that jump off the page.

Philadelphia Inquirer - Susan Miron

One of the most impressive literary debuts I've come across in 10 years of reviewing books.

Time Out - Erik Huber

His characters are marvelously sympathetic creations -- deeply pious Jews whose lives are disrupted by unbearable urges towards conjugal satisfaction, vanity, reconciliation, even piety itself. What is most striking is Englander's genius for telling a tale.

Time Out New York - Freeman

Nathan Englander ought to be on the literary scene for a long time, judging by the maturity of his literary debut...From Stalinist Russia to shtetl life in New York City, Englander's stories are populated by old-world Jews. While his style alludes to Malamud and his characters to Singer, Englander is a true original who mines his orthodox Jewish background and gives it universal appeal.

Talk Magazine

This is an exquisite, stirring glimpse into the world of Orthodox Jewry.

Talk Magazine's 10 Best Books of 1999

Kirkus Reviews

A debut collection of nine stories that explore the condition of being Jewish with an often hallucinatory, epigrammatic eloquence that is, as advertised, reminiscent of the fiction of Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow, and especially Bernard Malamud.

The pieces are set variously in contemporary Brooklyn Heights and Jerusalem, Nazi-ravaged Europe, and Stalinist Russia, and they feature such comically tormented characters as the title story's sex-starved husband, who is granted "relief" from his wife's extended menstrual cycle by the rabbi who sends him to a prostitute; a devoutly Orthodox Jew pressured by his materialistic wife into moonlighting as a department-store Santa Claus ("Reb Kringle"); and "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," an unassuming Wasp who inexplicably "realizes" he has become an Orthodox Jew-to the bellicose dismay of his astonished wife ("You threw out all the cheese, Charles. How could God hate cheese?").

As beguiling as Englander's comic tales are, though, his skills are even more impressively displayed in several pieces that strike more somber notes. "Reunion," for example, paints a graphic first-person picture of a manic-depressive Brooklynite whose travels in and out of institutions make a living hell of his marriage and fatherhood. "The Tumblers" fashions its fable-like story of an insular city that resists contact with the outside world into a trenchant allegory of all the stages of Jewry under Nazism, from denial through martyrdom. "The Twenty-Seventh Man" is unpublished writer Pinchas Pelovits, who finds his voice, and completes the work he was born to create, after he is mistakenly rounded up among a group of eminent writers doomed to execution by Stalinist thugs. And the concluding "In This Way We Are Wise" memorably dramatizes the emotions of an American Jew in Jerusalem imperfectly adapting to both ongoing terrorist bombings and the city's phlegmatic fatalism.

An exemplary fusion of what T.S. Eliot called "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and a truly remarkable debut.

What People Are Saying

Ann Beattie
Every so often there's a new voice that entirely revitalizes the short story. It happened with Richard Ford, and with Denis Johnson, and with Thom Jones. It's happening again with Nathan Englander, whose precise, funny, heart-breaking, well controlled but never contrived stories open a window on a fascinating landscape we might never have known was there. It's the best story collection I've read in ages.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Nathan Englander: Doing well, thanks.

Nathan Englander: I draft my stories obsessively. And often the ideas sit with me for years before I start to compose. I'm not sure which story took longest from start to finish. It's probably "The Twenty-Seventh Man" or "The Tumblers." I walked around with the idea for "The Twenty-Seventh Man" for about four years and then rewrote on and off for another five.

Nathan Englander: I'm happy if you think the themes in the stories are universal. As for the Jewish experience as a lens -- I'm not sure what to tell you, except that I simply wrote about worlds that I know, even if the settings or events are foreign.

Nathan Englander: I love Gogol's stories. And books like THE TRIAL and THE PLAGUE were big early influences.

Nathan Englander: I was raised modern Orthodox. So it wasn't an issue of reading secretly. The issue was more the lack of priority that secular education was given.

Nathan Englander: The ideas for the stories came from vastly different places. And the settings are very foreign to my own. It's the emotional threads in the collection that are most autobiographical.

Nathan Englander: The settings have little physical connection to places that I've been or spent time in -- as would be obvious with, say, "The Tumblers." (Though I did visit Eastern Europe about ten years ago.) As for home, I guess it's Jerusalem these days.

Nathan Englander: I'm a big fan of nostalgia. Each stage is most daunting when I'm in it and then seems more romantic when I'm on to the next.

Nathan Englander: I don't know of any unified response from the Orthodox community. I do know that friends and neighbors have been most generous. Which I am thankful for. As for being treated like a heretic, never in New York. Jerusalem is a different story.

Nathan Englander: Sadly, I don't speak Yiddish. Wish I did. I'd love to be able to read Yiddish literature in the language in which it was written. I do a lot of historical research (and then take endless liberties). And I usually do my most serious research after I've written the stories.

Nathan Englander: There is an event that the story is very loosely based on. Twenty-six Yiddishists (not all of them writers) were executed by Stalin in 1952.

Nathan Englander: Radically different.

Nathan Englander: What can I tell you? I grew up with a very specific way of looking at the world. Looking at this collection, I'm definitely not surprised at the preponderance of Jews. One could safely expect a few members of the faith in the novel as well.

Nathan Englander: I think your answer is in your question. The ones that took the most out of me are the ones to which I feel most connected.

Nathan Englander: I'm naturally nocturnal. For years I never got started writing before 4:00 pm and then worked the night shift. I was writing six days a week. And as work on the collection progressed, my stamina increased (that is, the productive part of my days greatly increased).

Reading Group Guide

1. "The Twenty-seventh Man"
Is it fitting that Pinchas Pelovits be executed alongside the Soviet Union's best Yiddish writers, even though he is completely unknown and included only by accident?

2. Analyze the story that Pinchas composes in prison. What is the relationship of this strange tale to the frame story? What does Englander's story suggest about the interplay of crisis and creativity?

3. "The Tumblers"
The so-called Wise Men of Chelm, who happily reshape the terms of reality when it fits their needs, are well-known figures in Eastern European Jewish folklore. Why does Englander relocate these familiar characters into a story about the Holocaust, something terrifying and historical? How does the Nazi roundup of the Jews change all the terms of reality for the Mahmirim Hasidim, and what is significant about the particular way in which they respond to this challenge?

4. What constitutes magic and illusion in this tale? Are the Wise Men of Chelm the only ones in the story who invent their own reality? Why, of all the roles of circus performers, does Englander decide to turn his pious characters into acrobats?

5. What is the relationship between chance and fate in this story? Between faith and fate? What is the effect of the story's unresolved ending?

6. "Reunion"
When Marty brings the rabbi's schizophrenic brother along for a suprise reunion, the rabbi rebukes Marty with the words, "You are a man without boundaries. . . . There are limits, prescribed, written. . . . Nowhere does it say I must forgive" [p. 79]. Is the rabbi a hypocrite? Is Marty right to challengehim?

7. Is Marty a difficult person because he is mentally ill or because he refuses to accept his place in the community? Why does his wife Robin say, "A sick man is not a devil. You, Marty, are both" [p. 80]? Do you sympathize with Marty or with his wife?

8. "The Wig"
What does natural hair symbolize for the women in this story, and particularly for Ruchama? How do each of the major figures in this story attempt to satisfy their forbidden yearnings?

9. Why do Ruchama's desires spiral out of control? Is it significant that the hair she will be wearing in her new wig is that of a man, and not a woman?

10. "The Gilgul of Park Avenue"
How has his conversion experience changed Charles Luger? How has it changed his wife Sue? Is there a sort of spiritual awakening on her part as well as his? Is it surprising that she wants to stay with him?

11. Rabbi Zalman Meintz was living in Bolinas, California, and was "addicted to sorrow and drugs" [p. 116] when he discovered his Jewish soul. Are we meant to take the notion of "gilgulim" -- reincarnated souls -- seriously or not? How is spiritual identity defined in this story?

12. Sue asks, "Well, if you have to be Jewish, why so Jewish? . . . Why do people who find religion always have to be so goddamn extreme?" [p. 122]. Why wouldn't Luger be satisfied with being what Sue calls "a West Side Jew" rather than a scrupulously observant Orthodox Jew? Does the idea of being a real Jew stand for the need for ritual observance and spiritual meaning in daily life?

13. "Reb Kringle"
In what ways is the Jewish boy who celebrates Christmas but longs for a menorah in a position similar to that of Reb Itzik? What is Englander suggesting about the challenge to religious identity in a consumer culture?

14. Is the rabbi a sympathetic figure? Is his wife betraying something sacred by sending him out to make money in this way? Does the story leave open the possibility that he will refuse to return to the store the next day -- or are we to assume his wife will force him to do so?

15. "The Last One Way"
Why does Gitta's husband Berel refuse to give her a divorce? Is Gitta justified in forcing Liebman, the matchmaker, to help her? How does this story highlight the lack of privacy within Orthodox communities?

16. Why does Gitta end up telling Berel the truth about the pregnancy? How is he able to extract this information? Did he really intend to give her a divorce, as he says he was ready to do?

17. What kinds of violence are there in this story? Is the emotional violence Berel employs more or less vicious than the physical violence to which he is subjected?

18. "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges"
How does this story highlight the difficulty of reconciling the demands of religious observance with the realities of sexual and emotional life within a marriage? How does it compare to "The Gilgul of Park Avenue, " in the ways it examines a marriage in crisis?

19. How good is the rabbi's advice? What do you think of the fact that Dov gets a venereal infection because of his attempt to obey the biblical injunction that "it is a sin to spill seed in vain" [p. 188]? Why can't he tell his wife what has happened?

20. "In This Way We Are Wise"
Why does Englander choose to end the collection with a terrorist bombing in present-day Jerusalem, seeming to shift into the realm of nonfiction? Why does he use his own name for the protagonist of this story?

21. What is he saying about the distance between the Jerusalem in this story and the Zionist ideal of Jerusalem "nestled away like Eden" [p. 203] on which he was raised? Or between the ideals fostered in Jewish tradition and the contemporary nation of Israel? What is the meaning of the story's title?

22. Often when reading fiction we don't have a sense of the presence of the writer, but this story seems to move us closer to Nathan Englander. How does it change your perception of the stories that have come before?

23. Topics for discussion of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
1. The characters in this collection are nearly all of one religion and ethnicity, but this hasn't prevented the book from winning wide praise and interest in the literary press. What is it about Englander's themes and concerns that his work can be shared and enjoyed by a far more diverse group of readers?

24. 2. In several of these stories, a character is removed from a comfortable, homogeneous world and placed in a new and bewildering situation. Englander himself, who has broken with his Orthodox upbringing, has said, "I'm a fourth-generation American. I lived in a shtetl with strip malls around it. Everything was so forbidden. But when you know nothing else, it gets to be a real adventure to find another world." How do his characters respond to these challenges?

25. 3. Many of the stories in this collection are quite funny, though in different ways. How would you characterize Englander's sense of humor and the way it affects the style of these stories?

26. 4. At the heart of several stories is an exploration of the problems of marriage and intimacy. What sorts of troubles arise in the marriages in this novel? Do marriage and sexual intimacy seem to intensify rather than bridge boundaries? Why?

27. 5. What is the relationship between religious orthodoxy and contemporary American culture in these stories? What are the ethical conflicts, for the faithful, that arise out of their collision?

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