{"id":1346,"date":"2007-10-02T14:17:23","date_gmt":"2007-10-02T14:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/idolchatter\/2007\/10\/foreskins-lament-chronicles-or.html"},"modified":"2007-10-02T14:17:23","modified_gmt":"2007-10-02T14:17:23","slug":"foreskins-lament-chronicles-or","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/idolchatter\/2007\/10\/foreskins-lament-chronicles-or.html","title":{"rendered":"“Foreskin’s Lament” Chronicles Orthodox Judaism, Skepticism and Alienation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBeing something of a disaffected Orthodox Jew myself, I was captivated by Shalom Auslander\u2019<\/a>s no-holds-barred evocation of the right-wing modern Orthodox world in his new memoir \u201cForeskin\u2019s Lament.\u201d
\nEchoing the themes of his debut story collection, \u201cBeware of God,\u201d \u201cForeskin\u2019s\u201d travels along parallel tracks, documenting Auslander\u2019s increasing God-centric paranoia, fueled by his wife\u2019s pregnancy, while detailing how a product of the yeshiva day-school system ended up living a proudly secular (albeit God-haunted) life in Woodstock, New York.
\nAuslander is at his macho-man silliest when he concentrates on the former, detailing the gruesome fates he envisions for his wife and unborn baby like his day job was screenwriter for \u201cSaw 12.\u201d Having spent his life escaping the crippling expectations of his family and religious community, it is entirely understandable that Auslander would want to avoid encumbering himself with equivalent literary burdens. And yet, the shock value of his wife’s grisly (imagined) death, a clever side-step around readers\u2019 expectations of \u201cproper\u201d subject matter the first time he brings it up, is increasingly less entertaining the next 25 times. Auslander, or his authorial stand-in, is still standing in front of that same chain-link fence, the one with the \u201cBeware of God\u201d sign, pondering the source of the feral snuffling coming from behind it, and daydreaming about rattling the fence just one more time. Auslander has spent a lifetime removing the shackles of religion, but God, CEO of the \u201cDepartment of Ironic Punishmentation,\u201d still threatens to bite, intent on zinging Shalom for all his real and perceived trespasses against the deity.<\/p>\n


\nAuslander is a fabulist, a spinner of tall tales, but his ace in the hole is the arc of his own life–from his ultra-Orthodox day school to a stint at Yeshiva University\u2019s high school and a year at a reform school\/yeshiva in Israel. Having once been an insider, and now removed himself from the closed circle of Orthodoxy, Auslander is an astute observer of this alien world–educated in its ways but deeply skeptical of its assertions. Readers unfamiliar with Orthodox Judaism will imagine that Auslander is prone to exaggeration; those familiar with its ways will know how little he does. From the competitive blessing bees to young Shalom\u2019s forbidden desires for non-kosher Slim Jims to \u201cthe warm security blanket of absolute belief\u201d he briefly wraps around himself in Israel, Auslander\u2019s story is that of any rebellious Orthodox son dreaming of escape into the wider world outside the prison-house of religion. Whether every word of Auslander\u2019s memoir is literally true is debatable (I\u2019m guessing that quite a bit of it is exaggerated for effect, as is his right); but there is no doubt that \u201cForeskin\u2019s Lament\u201d feels true.
\n— written by Saul Austerlitz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Being something of a disaffected Orthodox Jew myself, I was captivated by Shalom Auslander\u2019s no-holds-barred evocation of the right-wing modern Orthodox world in his new memoir \u201cForeskin\u2019s Lament.\u201d Echoing the themes of his debut story collection, \u201cBeware of God,\u201d \u201cForeskin\u2019s\u201d travels along parallel tracks, documenting Auslander\u2019s increasing God-centric paranoia, fueled by his wife\u2019s pregnancy, while…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\n"Foreskin's Lament" Chronicles Orthodox Judaism, Skepticism and Alienation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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