Taking the Lord's Name in Vain

"Foreskin’s Lament: A memoir: Stories" by Shalom Auslander, Riverhead Books, Hardcover, 2007. 320 pages, $24.95

Book Review by AUSTIN WALTERS, Contributing Writer

Continuing his struggle against the rules of religion into adulthood, he is panic stricken when he learns that his wife is pregnant with their first child and he’ll be expected to be a role model. Foreskin’s Lament, an amusing new memoir, chronicles Auslander’s frenzied path to fatherhood.

Reflecting back on his youth, Auslander identifies key moments of hypocrisy in his Orthodox upbringing. One summer, his father spent entire days building a new ark for the synagogue and entire nights getting uncontrollably drunk. The father would threaten and hit the boys while drinking, with the same devotion and determination that he used to turn ordinary wood into a magnificent structure and homage to God’s glory.

The rules of the Sabbath also seem to interfere with leading a normal life, especially with so many restrictions on food and pleasure. Starting with a Slim Jim at a summer baseball game, Auslander begins to buy or steal any banned item he can get his hands on, vowing that he’ll go back to his kosher ways at any time. When he discovers pornography in the house, he justifies his own clandestine masturbation by immediately burning and denouncing the soiled pages.

He attends a reform school in Israel hoping it will make him devout. But when that plan fails, Auslander walks away from his family and his community, leaving everything behind except his guilt-laden fear of God. He worries that his unborn child will pay the price for all the crimes that the father has committed against God, and convinces himself that his child is doomed. The thoughts are unbearable--“a never-ending horror film festival plays in my mind, ” he writes, with constant gruesome images of death, anguish and torture.

When an ultrasound reveals that they are having a son, the foreskin debate starts to embody every contradiction in Auslander’s life. Removing it feels like giving into a belief system that he has worked so hard to escape; leaving it alone could mark a final symbolic break from the Orthodox system, but it might also cause heartache for a child who is physically different from his peers.

Can one person really suffer all of this pain and torment in the hands of God? Auslander’s inner dialogue is utterly ridiculous and hilarious all at the same time. After writing some inflammatory essays on the computer, he mutters at God “I’m stopping now okay, You Pain in the Ass? Relax.” Sensing her husband’s angst, Auslander’s wife says, “They really did a number on you” when he returns from checking that their baby is not dead for the fifth time in one night.

Foreskin’s Lament is a funny theological rant and a touching rumination on marriage and family, however it may offend more than it delights (how many swear words can one person sling at God anyway?) Auslander’s irreverent message should be read as humor and can be enjoyed by any of us who struggle with family, God, or the seemingly arbitrary rules that govern so many facets of our lives.