Parallel Journeys and ‘Unbearable Urges’

Imagine Nathan Englander as a tailor. Not the type who works with clothes and buttons, but a more metaphorical variety, a tailor of human allegories, of human lives. His first book, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” is very much a garment sewn of these components, a short fiction collection whose nine stories stitch a surprising range of influences, aesthetics and narratives into a delicately patterned whole.

“There are many remnants,” the 29-year-old author admits as he sips a quiet Sunday morning cup of coffee in the dining room of Westwood’s Doubletree Hotel. “Different stories announce different things for me. But I also think they go together. It’s like Michelle Shocked’s album ‘Short, Sharp, Shocked.’ That album has this sort of heavy metal track at the end. I’m always cruising in my car, and it throws me. And I don’t know if I did one of those, but I wanted the stories to tie together in that kind of way.”

At first glance, Englander appears an unlikely source of such intention; dressed in jeans and a green Henley shirt, face framed by shoulder-length brown curls, he exudes the self-conscious intelligence of a precocious college student, so intense he sometimes stumbles over his words. The truth, however, is that, at an age when most people are still figuring out what they’re doing, he’s already lived a couple of lives. Born in West Hempstead, Long Island, he was raised in a close-knit Orthodox Jewish environment, where, he explains, “you only knew people from the community, only dealt with people in the community. It was a specific, specific, closed world.”

He Finally Left Religion for Good

Still, although he describes himself as “a sincere child,” Englander was very young when he began to test the narrow boundaries of that universe. After completing what he calls his shtetl, or village, education, he chose the more secular State University of New York, Binghampton, where, as an undergraduate, he finally left religion for good.

“Emotionally,” he says, “I was out for a long time, and I stayed because that’s what you’re supposed to do. But I see the steps I was taking. I questioned from maybe 13, 14. I was already asking questions that very much upset grown-ups in power positions, the simple theological questions that can’t be answered, that threaten people because they don’t know to say, ‘That’s an issue of belief.’ How do we know there’s God? I’d still be a religious man today, probably, if somebody had said, ‘We don’t know there’s God, but we believe.’ But it makes people sweat if you get too close to what they don’t know, or what they don’t know how to explain.”

Given the nature of his experience, it’s tempting to consider Englander in terms of exile, to see his stories--especially those dealing with Orthodox life--as gestures of rebellion, a way of breaking with the tribe, as it were. Englander, however, says this has never been an issue, that he has nothing but respect for the community in which he grew up. If he’s struggled with anything, it’s the Orthodox sense of the word as sacred, as the fundamental building block of the universe, from which everything is imagined into being.

“I was taught to pile books in order of importance,” he recalls, with a lingering resonance. “The most holy books go on top, and they don’t touch the floor. You kiss them when you close them. So it was a very big deal to decide that I was going to write.”

The turning point came when Englander graduated from college and moved to New York, where he got a job with a commercial photographer who demystified the artistic process by stressing the importance of the smallest details, like mopping the studio before a shoot.

“When he taught me how to mop,” Englander says, “I saw how you start from the ground up. You don’t set lights until it’s mopped, until the lenses are clean. Obviously, you hope to be inspired, but you don’t wait for it. You can’t get to art without craft.”

Of course, for all the difficulty of being taught to think of books as holy, Englander acknowledges a certain benefit as well.

“I grew up in a world of stories,” he says. “Stories told as truth, and with great passion.” Because of that, he believes, his fiction aspires to a certain timeless quality, having less to do with any particular historical moment than the elemental questions of human existence, where even the most specific accounts end up transmuted into myth. There are no young moderns in these pieces, no pop culture, just people--many of them middle-aged or older--wrestling with their own identities, often in opposition to the hierarchies of which they are a part.

In “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” for instance, a Manhattan WASP discovers one evening that he is, in fact, the bearer of a Jewish soul, while “The Wig” describes what happens when an Orthodox wig maker creates a spectacular headpiece for herself, only to fall prey to vanity, which she concludes is “worth every penny and every shame.” Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in “The Tumblers,” a story about a sect of World War II Hasidim who avoid the Nazi death camps by simply boarding a different train. Here, Englander recasts history as parable, referring to the Germans only as “invaders,” and drawing his readers into an absurd but logical universe, where reality is determined by the power of belief.

“For me,” he says, “ ‘The Tumblers’ is an important story, where I tip my hat to a lot of different generations of storytellers in a certain tradition, the chelm Jewish fable tradition. This is a very big subject, the Holocaust, especially dealing with it as an American boy, fourth generation, grew up in the ‘burbs. There’s a responsibility in that, but I also felt that there is nothing I should not be writing about if I’m so inclined.”

Listening to Englander describe his work as part of a Jewish storytelling tradition, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. But it also reveals the degree to which, despite his claim to “have no pull toward religiosity,” he remains very much marked by his background, after all. For the last three years, actually, he has made his home in Jerusalem, where, he suggests, reality often mirrors his fiction, if only in the way everything becomes a philosophical question when taken to the ultimate extreme.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he says, “especially my tie to Jerusalem. I have no interest in living in Tel Aviv, or anywhere else. But in Jerusalem, it’s often like living inside one of my stories, where the Hasidim in this one yeshiva won’t use electricity on the Sabbath because there are people at the power plant working. I love these kinds of things, which are the kinds of things my characters worry over. I love seeing that in the paper there.”

For all that, though, Englander remains wary of being defined as a particular kind of writer, wary of being categorized in any way.

“I do not call myself a Jewish writer,” he declares simply. “I don’t pretend not to be Jewish, and there are some Jewish themes in the book. But I write fiction. It happens to be that this book is about Jews. Part of it. But it’s about a lot of things.”

His Own Process of Self-Discovery

If such a statement seems contradictory, in many ways, it’s just another thread for Englander to sew. On the deepest level, it has to do with his own slow process of self-discovery, his move away from Orthodoxy to a more individual interaction with the world. This notion as much as anything connects the myriad pieces of “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” and by the author’s own admission, it’s one he will return to in his next book, a novel, which also deals with Judaism and community, in the context of a trip he took to Argentina in 1991.

“For me,” Englander says, “writing and religion are parallel journeys. But obviously they crisscross, and bleed into each other. My books sit, and I work over long periods. I absorb things slowly, and it takes me a long time.”