Alex Coolman
"What do I do religiously?" Nathan Englander wondered out loud.
The 28-year-old writer, author of a New York Times best-selling
collection of short stories, was sitting in a hotel room in Cleveland,
Ohio, waiting for room service to bring him his breakfast.
"I try to go to the gym religiously," Englander decided. "And sometimes I
skip that and eat another bacon-turkey wrap in the hotel."
The answer, for readers who have heard of Englander's work, may come as a
surprise. His debut collection, "For The Relief of Unbearable Urges," is
a book that deals primarily with the experiences of Orthodox and Hasidic
Jews. A rich sense of spiritual and cultural tradition informs his
approach to his subject.
But Englander, who will read Sunday at the Jewish Community Center of
Orange County in Costa Mesa, says he hasn't practiced his religion in
years. Though he was raised in an Orthodox community in Long Island,
Englander had intellectual difficulties with Judaism from an early age.
At 19, during his first trip to Israel, he broke with the faith of his
childhood.
"My first weekend there, I gave up on religion, sort of," Englander said.
"It was the very first time I'd been in a vehicle on the Sabbath."
In the lives of Englander's characters, though, God is still a vivid, if
problematic, presence. The nine stories in his collection feature a Jew
tormented by the conviction that his part-time job -- as a mall Santa
Claus -- is sinful, a WASP who suddenly realizes he is Jewish and begins
to consult a rabbi, and a wig-maker who is shamed by her desire to wear a
voluptuous head of curls.
In the background of each tale lurks the challenge of maintaining faith
in the context of a society that places little value on such conviction.
"In This Way We Are Wise," the last story of the book and the only one
told in the first person, it makes this dilemma overt, relating the
narrator's desire, in the wake of a bombing in Jerusalem, "to find
religion. To decide that one god is more right than another, to uncover
in this sad reality a covenant -- some promise of coming good."
The narrator admits this desire, and then, in the next paragraph, seems
to reject it.
"Witchery and superstition," he says. "Comforts."The story, Englander
said, "gets extremely close to what the book is about for me."
"I think it does boil down to that balance between faith and a faithless
world."
It's not a balance Englander feels he has figured out -- in part, he
thinks, because his rational doubts about Judaism are at odds with a more
