The Hasid kid

>> Nathan Englander's improbable success

by JULIET WATERS

That a 28-year-old writer, who spent the first two decades of his life living in a Hassidic community, could get a six-figure advance for a book of short stories these days seems improbable, if not miraculous.

The dark, tragicomic fables of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are impressive but seem like they should be from another era and don't exactly sound like standard bestseller material. As Nathan Englander explains over coffee: "The structural element of all my stories is that in a line they sound terrible. Like the one they published in the New Yorker a while ago--this guy goes into a peep show and the strippers turn into naked rabbis... ba dum pa."

But his unexpected financial success does start to make more and more sense as we hit the neo-religious frenzy of the last month of the millennium. Just this week, pocket-size sections of the Bible, with introductions by E.L. Doctorow, Doris Lessing, Nick Cave and Bono, have been released as hipster stocking stuffers. Writers and rock stars are becoming more than just the priests of celebrity culture, now they're marketable biblical authorities. And Nathan Englander has mega talent, as well as fabulous hair.

Not to take away from the talent, but the hair inevitably comes up in any interview. There's the anecdote about someone at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where Englander studied for two years, trying to spread a rumour that he was an ex-member of Ratt. And then there's his short story about an aging wig maker who tries to recapture her youth by buying a young man's hair. There are few hints of autobiography in most of his stories, but Englander does admit that the idea for this one came from a woman telling him that his hair would make a perfect wig.

Going from sheltered orthodox Jew to celebrity writer is in many ways just like going from one religion to another. He credits two things with saving him from the effects of massive early success: moving from New York to Jerusalem, and his stint at Iowa.

"In a lot of ways moving from New York to Iowa was more of a stretch than New York to Jerusalem. But I loved it. I got a thick skin. Anything I've run into since the publication of the book is just a broader version of something I experienced in workshop. You're just living in this compressed world in the middle of corn fields. And there's nothing more important than writing out there. It's a nice thing. You can skip a funeral or leave someone stranded at the airport, and just say, 'Sorry I was home writing, man.' And they'll be like 'Okay, catch ya later.'"

But the improbable events of his life kind of fit right in with his fiction. Many of his stories hinge around unlikely circumstances, fortunate and unfortunate. In "The Tumblers," a group of Polish Jews escape extermination by impersonating acrobats. In "Reb Kringle," a rabbi with a beautiful beard makes ends meet by playing Santa in a department store. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a wasp businessman devastates his trophy wife when he has a sudden epiphany that he's a Jew.

"A story interests me most when it seems unexecutable to me. Like the idea of writing a Holocaust fable like 'The Tumblers'. It seems unwritable to me when I begin. But when you write you have to decide at the start--either everything's been written because we already have the Bible and if you want some later stuff you can add Romeo and Juliet on top of it, or you can decide that language is infinite and every story can be new. I chose the latter, but the stories still have to boil down to life and death. They better boil down to large stuff, otherwise you shouldn't waste people's time. It's a busy world. And there's a lot of stuff on cable." :

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander, Knopf, 191pp, hc, $31