From the acclaimed author of Foreskin’s Lament, a memoir of the author’s attempt to escape the biblical story he’d been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his family.

SYNOPSIS

FEH - A Memoir by Shalom Auslander

Synopsois by Don­ald Weber. Shalom Auslander’s 2007 mem­oir, Foreskin’s Lament, nar­rates his strug­gle to break from the ultra-Ortho­dox Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of Mon­sey, New York. The var­i­ous trau­mas Aus­lan­der endured grow­ing up in a phys­i­cal­ly and ver­bal­ly abu­sive fam­i­ly filled him with debil­i­tat­ing shame and self-hatred. The cost of going OTD (“off the derech,” or ​“way”) result­ed in him feel­ing utter­ly alone. At the end of his first mem­oir, in a rare moment of hope, Aus­lan­der dreams of a com­mu­ni­ty of fel­low ​“fore­skins,” a home­land for the detached and dis­card­ed to call home.

Feh both revis­its and expands on Auslander’s lament about the emo­tion­al wounds inflict­ed by any extreme reli­gious ide­ol­o­gy that pre­sumes mankind to be fall­en by nature. ​“I am still pos­sessed,” he admit­ted in a recent NPR inter­view. ​“Feh,” Aus­lan­der explains in the book, is a Yid­dish term denot­ing dis­gust, a thing with­out worth, a judg­ment by God, an object of con­tempt. Aus­lan­der remains haunt­ed by Monsey’s dark view of human nature. ​“I go through life as if beneath a shroud,” he writes. Indeed, he con­tin­ues to feel ​“the tumult around and with­in me.”

This feh-induced tumult over­whelmed his already wound­ed, dimin­ished self, pro­duc­ing shame and dan­ger­ous self-hatred. In har­row­ing detail, Aus­lan­der recounts his near-fatal expe­ri­ences tak­ing tox­ic weight-loss drugs and sur­viv­ing a hor­rif­ic car acci­dent. ​“Feh,” Aus­lan­der told NPR, ​“had me close to the edge.” Like the enslaved Jews of Pharaoh’s Egypt, Aus­lan­der will nev­er be deliv­ered from his bondage so long as he remains afflict­ed by the patholo­gies of reli­gious ortho­doxy. And, sad­ly, Aus­lan­der is feh​’s help­less emis­sary: ​“I dark­en all.”

Feh charts Auslander’s efforts to soft­en the debil­i­tat­ing self-hatred and shame that con­tin­ue to plague him as he approach­es mid­dle age and longs for mate­r­i­al suc­cess as a writer and tele­vi­sion showrun­ner. The most mov­ing, indeed enlight­en­ing sec­tions of the book reveal how Aus­lan­der slow­ly begins to break out of the dark. He explores the treyf lit­er­ary world, encoun­ter­ing the deeply iron­ic voic­es of Kaf­ka and Beck­ett and the blis­ter­ing rou­tines of the late Bill Hicks, the lat­ter of whom skew­ered all forms of reli­gious belief. Aus­lan­der feels a pro­found kin­ship with these fel­low fehs. ​“I felt Kaf­ka knew me,” Aus­lan­der writes, respond­ing to the accus­ing son in Kafka’s Let­ter to His Father. Aus­lan­der sees Kaf­ka as an awe-inspir­ing exam­ple of Jew­ish fil­ial resis­tance who did not ​“suc­cumb to feh.”

Even more inspir­ing are Auslander’s rela­tion­ships. He had a soul-nour­ish­ing, life-sav­ing con­nec­tion with his psy­chi­a­trist, Ike. He also enjoyed a brief but indeli­ble friend­ship with the late actor Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man, a com­plex life force who agreed to star in Auslander’s short-lived tele­vi­sion series, Hap­py­ish (2015). (Aus­lan­der iden­ti­fied with Hoffman’s irony-inflect­ed, Irish Catholic world­view: ​“Feh knows Feh,” he writes.). Above all, Aus­lan­der cred­its his sur­vival to his clear-think­ing, green-eyed, artist wife, Orli, who nev­er fails to make him laugh. For in the end, the psy­cho­log­i­cal pain caused by feh can be eased only through laughter.

In his online col­umn, ​“A Word to the Unwise,” Aus­lan­der con­fess­es that ​“at fifty-three, I’m just as unwise as ever. I don’t feel like I’ve found any answers.… I still stum­ble about, try­ing to find the light.” At the end of Feh, Aus­lan­der begins to glimpse that light, reflect­ed in the glit­ter­ing eyes of Orli and his two sons. He dis­cov­ers an alter­na­tive com­mu­ni­ty, a tribe of feh out­casts who sur­vive by jok­ing away their shame.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shalom Auslander (born 1970) is an American novelist, memoirist, and essayist. He grew up in a strict Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Monsey, New York, where he describes himself as having been "raised like a veal" His writing style is notable for its existentialist themes, biting satire and black humor. His nonfiction often draws comparisons to David Sedaris, while his fiction has drawn comparisons to Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Groucho Marx. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages and are published around the world.

 

shalomauslander.com • shalomauslander.substack.com