A balancing act of faith

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

fundamental sense of religious desire.

“I was hard-wired for things,” Englander said. “There are things that

become reflex actions, whatever your logical beliefs. There are some

things that really come from the gut, and you have to be honest with

yourself and see what you’re doing.”

If the tension between the world and faith makes for personal unease, it

can also make for powerful fiction. Englander’s explorations of the

sometimes perverse nature of belief in God have something of the strength

of the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor’s curious portraits of American

Southerners -- a strength that derives from an ability to see both the

folly and the wisdom in metaphysical conviction.

“I’m not bitter about the world I left,” Englander explained. “If I was

an angry, bitter person, it would poison the fiction.”

Far from rejecting his roots, Englander continues to view himself as

“culturally Jewish.” While he takes a mildly agnostic view of the

specifics of religious doctrine, he speaks with respect of the notion of

faith and imbues the faithful characters in his stories with an

undeniable dignity.

What comes through in “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” is not

bitterness but a sophisticated, sympathetic portrait of a culture many

Americans know little about. If its subject matter is sometimes

challenging (“Jewish readers will come and ask me, ‘Do Gentiles read this

book?”’ Englander said) it is treated in a style that is by turns

engagingly lyrical and refreshingly contemporary.

“I love John Cheever, and I love Raymond Carver,” Englander said. “I

really like Denise Johnson.” These fairly recent influences on the short

story are as much a part of Englander’s work as older artists he cites,

writers like Dostoyevsky and Gogol.

Though he is hesitant to claim that his work does so, Englander is

insistent that art, at its highest level, should be able to translate

across cultures.

“I believe in the universality of fiction,” he said. And though he is

certain that some people will get more than others out of the details of

his stories, he hopes that the thematic heart of the work -- the earnest,

sometimes comical grappling with faith and tradition -- will resonate

with a wide audience. “I believe there’s good fiction and bad fiction,”

Englander said. “I hope I write good fiction.”

WHAT: Nathan Englander, author of “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges”

WHERE: The Jewish Community Center of Orange County, 250 E. Baker St.,

Costa Mesa

WHEN: Noon Sunday

HOW MUCH: $10 for members, $15 for nonmembers; cost includes brunch

PHONE: (714) 755-0340