Showing results for "Shalom Auslander" in All Categories

Foreskin's Lament reveals Auslander's youth in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox community, and recounts his rebellion and efforts to make a new life apart from it. Auslander remembers his youthful attempt to win the "blessing bee" (the Orthodox version of a spelling bee), his exile to an Orthodox-style reform school in Israel after he's caught shoplifting Union Bay jeans from the mall, and his 14-mile hike to watch the New York Rangers play in Madison Square Garden without violating the Sabbath.

The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: No one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there. To begin again. To start anew. But it isn't quite working out that way.

Shalom Auslanders Jugend ist geprägt von einem schrecklichen Respekt vor Gott...

Sie heißen Chaim Yankel Rosenberg, Stanley Fisher oder Rabbi Pearlstein. Sie leben in Brooklyn oder in der Upper West Side von Manhattan, genau 5693 Meilen entfernt von Jerusalem und Tel Aviv. Und sie alle haben ein Problem mit Gott. Oder er mit ihnen, je nachdem. Bloom zum Beispiel hätte bei einem Autounfall ums Leben kommen sollen, aber sein Volvo war sicherer als der Plan, den Gott für ihn vorgesehen hatte.

Hear writers Shalom Auslander and A. J. Jacobs on this edition of Fresh Air. Auslander is the author of the memoir Foreskin's Lament, about growing up in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox Jewish community and his attempt to break free of it. Tom Perrotta (author of Little Children) describes the book as a "scathing theological rant, a funny, oddly moving coming-of-age memoir."