Auslander's Dangerous Comedy

By DONALD WEBER

FORESKIN'S LAMENT
A Memoir
By Shalom Auslander
320 pages. Riverhead Books. $24.95

In Foreskin’s Lament, Shalom Auslander's acerbic memoir about his break with the strict religious enclave of his youth, the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York, the author keeps faith with the one congregation he would, I imagine, wish to join. I refer to the tribe of truly dangerous comics whose rebbe is Lenny Bruce, and whose acolytes include Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks. Self-appointed outcasts and latter-day Jeremiahs, these stand up artists tapped into their rage, releasing a subversive art, an unholy spritz-seeking, to demystify all forms of belief, all structures of illusion.

In an epigraph to his previous collection of knife-edged stories, Beware of God (2005), Auslander cites Hicks—a cult figure in his own time, the son of Southern fundamentalists, he died of cancer in 1994 at the age of 32—as a spiritual brother in religious blasphemy. In his routines Hicks exploded social and political orthodoxies, voicing what the theater critic John Lahr calls “acid home truths.”

In its raw, truth-telling desire (or is it an act of ungenerous “informing,” a shanda for the goyim?), Foreskin’s Lament draws on Auslander’s own substantial reservoir of pain growing up on 7 Arrowhead Lane, the angry son of observant, but non Hassidic, parents on the social margins of Orthodox Monsey. Auslander’s anger is local, nourished in part by the veiled disrespect the son feels the community has for his carpenter father. In a rare moment of empathy Auslander wonders about his father’s lowly status, “To be good with your hands in a world that judged people by their heads.”

In apparent tormented response, the father acts out his hurt in drunken rages and frequent beatings of Auslander’s older brother (the death of a child years earlier also haunts this profoundly dysfunctional family).

Auslander’s anger is also cosmic, an endless indictment of a God imagined as vengeful and merciless, a Supreme Being who terrifies Auslander to death.

Listen to Auslander’s deeply-felt meditation on the subject of his “faith”:

My relationship with God has been an endless cycle not of the celebrated “faith followed by doubt,” but of appeasement followed by revolt; placation followed by indifference; please, please, please followed by fuck it, fuck you, fuck off. I do not keep Sabbath or pray three times a day or wait six hours between eating meat and milk. The people who raised me will say that I am not religious. They are mistaken. What I am is not observant. But I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each one more hateful and bloodthirsty than the next, and I’m doing my best to lose Him. I’m failing miserably.  

Despite his protest, Auslander is of course truly “observant,” in a secular sense: he is mordantly observant in the mode of the stand up artist raking his despairing (no longer bemused) eyes, cursing the universe.

Foreskin’s Lament narrates Auslander’s deviant wandering in search of some zone of spiritual comfort. Alas, nothing appears to salve his bereft soul, for he is sickened by the lacerations of family strife and the perceived deadly outcome of religious belief. Not even the olfactory pleasures of Slim Jims, the public swimming pool (“a rabbi-free rectangle”), pornography, and frequent masturbation provide any relief, let alone nourishment.

In this respect, Foreskin’s Lament amounts to Auslander’s cosmic/comic geshray at the world of Monsey, a provincial enclave governed (to his mind) by 613 impossible mitzvot and the endless prohibitions of the Sabbath:

I didn’t like Sabbath, I didn’t like the meals, I didn’t like the rules. I didn’t like the dress pants and the dress shirts and the blazers, and I didn’t like the way ties felt around my neck. I didn’t like the way shoes looked on my feet, or the way they slid on the carpet, or the sound they made on the street when I was walking to synagogue. I didn’t like walking to synagogue. I didn’t like synagogue. I didn’t like being separated from the women, and I didn’t like being stuck with the men. I didn’t like standing there for hours at the mercy of the cantor with the sun shining outside and the birds singing and the whole world enjoying the day, thinking,--Shut up, shut up, shut up, will you just shut up?

[To my Hebrew-school-shtick-attuned ears, Auslander’s cadenced rant sounds like a wicked parody of the liturgical chant, “Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh.”]

If at some level Auslander’s Shabbes spritz sounds silly (Sabbath dress codes offend his fashion sense?), the whining of the restless son who’d rather play baseball than pray, his ultimate goal seems deadly serious: the complete severing of his “orthodox” self from the emotionally-disabling sphere (in his experience) of religious fanatics.

In this respect Foreskin’s Lament offers a telling counterpoint to recent Jewish American fiction on the theme of “return”—as in Tova Mirvis’ The Outside World—or, in contrast, the appeal of the secular--as in Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls. Unlike Auslander, Mirvis’ Baruch (ne “Bryan”) interprets his newly-adorned black hat as the symbolic link to his ancestors: “in the parade of bearded, black-hatted men, he saw the true bearers of the past.” Having barely survived the debilitating claims of orthodoxy, black hats make Auslander cringe: they loom as the uncanny sign of what continues to haunt.

What, ultimately, remains unclear in Foreskin’s Lament is Auslander’s actual vision of the self in the world beyond Monsey. In the example of Elizabeth, Goodman’s rich portrait of Orthodox yearning in Kaaterskill Falls, we witness a fluid Orthodox-observant self fascinated by the “quick and subtle negotiations of the outside world,” taken by its “shimmering, spinning” aspect. Goodman’s heroine “romanticizes the secular”; like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, she is absorbed by the allure of the new world.

By contrast, the self Auslander conjures is restless and glum, never at peace. Married to his fellow “theologically abused,” spiritual soul mate Orli, the couple lives in continuous exile, moving from spiritually inert Teaneck to the equally soul-less East Village. Auslander even runs a satiric eye over his current would-be homeland, Woodstock, New York, whose counterculture legacy makes him laugh. In the end, he darkly asserts, “we are all lost, each in our own terrifying, ludicrous desert that seems to stretch on for eternity.”

Significantly, he names his first child, a son, “Paix,” in the hope that the boy will inherit a peaceful, less religiously-driven world. Anxious that Paix, son of Shalom, “would drag the past back into the present,” Auslander chooses not to have his son ritually circumcised, a gesture that completes his journey in alienation from God, family, and community.

What, finally, can we make of Auslander’s cosmic scowl?

In my own view, the stand up’s subversive stream of angry observations has to count for something; the manic spritz has to flow from the spritzer’s troubled soul. As Lahr observes of the legendary Bill Hicks, in his best routines he revealed the freedom born of disenchantment: “He made that show of freedom by turns terrifying, exhilarating, and hilarious. He was what only a great comedian can be for any age: an enemy of boundaries, a disturber of the peace, a bringer of insight and of joy, a comic distillation of his own rampaging spirit.”

Foreskin’s Lament seeks to disturb, to transgress, in the tradition of Philip Roth and other dangerous comic artists. Auslander aspires to release us from orthodox—all orthodox—boundaries, but in the end his dis-enchanted self remains fixed, haunted by unshakable dread and chronic restlessness. “Finally it is only Roth who takes himself entirely to pieces,” shrewdly observes the critic Clive James. Before you can enter the exhilarating landscape staked out by the unkosher tribe of stand ups, the self must take the risk of self-deconstruction, indeed of self-annihilation (just ask Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor). Only rarely does Foreskin’s Lament approach this terrifying, treif-saturated psychic zone.