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Art & Books Books

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK by Nathan Englander (Knopf), 207 pages, $27.95 cloth. Rating: NNNNN


Nathan Englander has nerve, or “chutzpah,” the Jewish word for that quality of daring to do or say things guaranteed to provoke. Englander’s stories push the envelope in ways that will make you giddy.

In the title story, paying homage to Raymond Carver’s story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, two couples (the women are former best friends) reunite and spend the evening drinking and smoking dope – surprising given that one pair are assimilated Jews in America but the other are Orthodox Jews living in Israel/Palestine.

The dialogue is devastatingly real. Mark tells the religious couple that with their 10 kids, they could have their own reality show. And the night ends with a game in which the four ask which of their non-Jewish friends would hide them should anti-Semitism take over.

In the second story, Sister Hills, a woman makes a pact she regrets with the woman living on the next hill of a settlement pressing up against a Palestinian village. The story is a near-perfect metaphor for the intractability of the Mideast conflict.

A story called Camp Sundown portrays Jewish elders – some of them on the brink of dementia – seeking mindless revenge against a fellow summer camper they think may have collaborated with the Nazis.

The last, most devastating tale – riffing off a Holocaust trauma – manages to shed light on both Israeli intransigence and ambivalences. A triumph.

Not all of them are gems. Peep Show takes on sexual longing and hypocrisy but doesn’t have much bite. And a story that uses short snippets to convey a man’s alienation from his personal history lacks the heft of the others. But they don’t take away from the rest of these gripping stories, written in direct and vivid prose.

While they do have a level of specificity, they’re not for Jewish readers only. Englander’s sharp mind and honest interpretation of Jewish experience lead to exactly what we need to make peace: understanding and empathy.

The most important book by a Jewish author since Harold Jacobson’s The Finkler Question.

Englander reads as part of the Harbourfront Reading Series on Wednesday (February 22). See listing.

Write Books at susanc@nowtoronto.com

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