|
| |
| |
| |
Painfully, crippingly, incurably, miserably, religious
Interview: Shalom Auslander By Babette Dunkelgrun
4. 30/34
Reading Shalom Auslander's 2007 memoir Foreskin's Lament, one will likely expect the author to be angry. Indeed, there is a great deal for him to complain about, having been raised under the extreme doctrine of orthodox religion. According to the teachings of his orthodox Jewish community of Monsey, New York, Auslander was to be terrified of God. Speaking to him in person, the author indeed appears to be conflicted, but he does not seem all that angry.
There is room for him to simply question the ‘Word of God’ which is preached to children at such an early age that the image is never shaken. Some might find the conflicts that the author currently deals with overwhelming. Indeed, so may Auslander himself, judging from the hopscotch stream of consciousness in which he expresses himself in our interview.
| |
Screwed at an early age
‘The Jesuits have a saying: “Give me a boy until he is seven and I will give you the man.” They know that all they have to do is fuck up a kid's head for the first seven years of his life, and no matter what he does, where he goes, or what he's preached after that, they've got him where they have to get him.
Like I say in my book, someone raised that way, damaged, cannot simply read some Spinoza or some Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens at age twenty and say: “Oh, I'm cured now.” When you've gotten screwed by it at such an early age, it's hard to get past. That doesn't mean that I don't side with them intellectually at this point, but I can't get there. Everybody comes up to me with their own advice as well, telling me to join the reformed, to take their God. But that God sounds like a hippy to me. My God's
| |
| |
going to kill that God.
People laugh because the book is funny, then they drop their voice and say: “I kinda feel the same way too. But we're all fucked and I don't know what to do about it and thanks for the book.” I started out thinking this is just me, this is a craziness that I have, and selfishly maybe, putting it down on paper will help me. I wasn't even sure I'd publish it. I couldn't write this book knowing I would publish it, so I had a secret with my wife that we wouldn't spend too much of the advance. I was afraid of punishment so I needed to know that I could bail on the whole thing. Part of that was burning the manuscript a few times because I needed some sort of action that proved that I wasn't going to write this thing, to God but also to myself. I think people realize now that it's not a condemnation of Judaism or even religion in general. I'm not saying religion is a doctrine. Religions can be wonderful. Life is bad; whatever helps get you through, go for it.’
| |
A sign of the times
‘I hope the book isn't postmodern. Postmodernism seems to be about looking at everything and taking it apart. Ultimately it seems to lead, unfortunately, to a nihilistic place. I'm not trying to do that, I'm not that person. I think I'm a product of having been an outsider for so long to one world, but in leaving it also becoming an outsider to the original world, which results in me being an outsider no matter where I go. So either that's a particularly Jewish experience (which a Jew would want to say), or it's an immigrant experience (which an immigrant would want to say). Either way, it just happens to be where I find myself.
It's a head-on collision: a collision between an ancient religion and a very modern world; between wanting the comforts of a community and being subjected to the horrors of that community; between dreaming of an outside world and getting to that promised land only to find you don't like that either. These are all things that are a product of a globalized world, where you have ancient and modern cultures in constant contact with each other. Now I feel like this is a big ball that's been around for a while with lots of different people on it - so where do I go, where do I land, how do I figure all this out?’
| |
Pissing off God
‘Part of me still thinks that there should be a God. It makes sense that there would be, that God should be kind and have our best interests at heart, but that doesn't mean there is. So I struggle with it. I don't know that I want to believe in the God I was brought up with but I also don't know that I don't want to believe in anything; it's a difficult place to be. One of the hardest parts about writing the book was just admitting, on paper, the fear that God's going to knock me down. It was 2004 when I was writing the book - who the hell thinks God is looking down on them and gave them a flat tire? We have the web, we have brain scans
| |
| |
and we have space exploration. You don't believe in God in 2004; you'd have to be crazy. It's worse now after 9/11 because if you say you believe in God you're one of those crazies who did the bombing. So it's easier to be an atheist now than it is to have doubt.
I lived in New York, around artists, writers and journalists, and even if you did believe in God, you wouldn't admit that. So it was hard to believe that I had such a juvenile, adolescent conception of God, but that is the conception I was raised with. Having put it down on paper, it turns out to be a common conception: God as some kind of brute, who no one can make heads or tails out of, who flies off the handle all the time, loses his temper, threatens, kills, destroys. Having been raised with this idea, we're sitting here trying to figure out how to get through the day without pissing that guy off.’
| |
Shoplifting Kafka
‘I read a lot as a kid, nonfiction mostly. I was desperate to know every bone in the body; science, math, everything. I was pulling away from my community and my family. I dropped out of college after a couple of weeks and took a job in advertising because it's the only way I could get a job in writing: I couldn't be a journalist and writing a book was very far out of my head, so I started to write humor pieces for Esquire. It wasn't until I'd written a letter to my mother asking her not to speak to me anymore that I knew I could use writing simply to express myself. The night I sent that letter I started to write one of the stories that became part of my first book, Beware of God [2005]. That was the moment when writing changed from a way to make some money and to cheer myself up by writing funny stuff into a way to also look inside myself, and that's what it's been ever since.
In Foreskin's Lament, I write about stealing books by Beckett and Kafka; something tells me they would laugh knowing their books are being shoplifted all these years later. I always thought they were really funny. There was boldness in the way they wrote, there was darkness, and most of all there was humor. There were a few of these guys: Harold Pinter, Flannery O'Connor, and even Voltaire. When, in my mid-twenties, I ran out of books to read by them, I started reading books about them. It surprised me that these books were taking those authors very seriously. I had no idea this was “world literature” and I couldn't believe how seriously they were being taken. The guy turns into a bug, that's the story. You can read 400 pages of literary theory about why that happens but it seems so silly to me. Beckett's novels are impossible to get through without some help, but it's obvious what Waiting for Godot and Endgame are about; he's obviously having a chuckle at the shittiness of life!
I got so much more comfort from reading that than from anything I read in Judaica, theology or even Spinoza. He didn't cheer me up but Kafka makes me laugh, Gogol makes me laugh. This is a crazy fucked up world and it ain't gonna get any better, but to quote Beckett, “I can't go on, I'll go on”. In a similar way, comedians like Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks were rolemodels. They didn't talk about answering machines, airline food, or all the other stuff that stand-up comedians usually talk about. They talked about heavy, heavy shit and made it
| |
| |
funny. They didn't feel like they had to go to a shrink and get unangry - that anger drove them, it was the engine of their art and for that reason I adored them.’
| |
Complain to the teacher
‘I didn't write Foreskin's Lament for it to be a memoir. A thirty-four year old doesn't write a memoir, because hopefully you've only lived a third of your life. I was thirty-four and going to be a father and instead of being happy I was terrified that I wouldn't circumcise my son the right way. That fear was the reason for the book. It's not about my life; it's about the question how a person turns out to be the way that I am in this day and age. In order to honestly examine how I got where I was, I had to go back in my life and tell some of those stories. Luckily, most of us are not like Proust; we don't need to write about every moment in our life. The idea was to put in “me” at this point in my life, but of course it isn't all of me.
People from all sorts of religions complain to me that the book is anti-religion. It's not. I tell them: “Don't complain to me. People, in your God's name, are teaching children horrible things. You're telling me God is loving, peaceful, and just wants the best for all of you? Well good for you. But somebody out there is saying that your God is a detail-oriented son of a bitch, so don't come to my readings and complain to me. Go to that school and complain to the rabbi, imam, or priest. I was the taught, complain to the teacher.” Whatever -ism you believe in, whether you're a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew doesn't make a goddamn difference to me; if they're telling you that God is going to boil you in semen if you jerk off or that he's gonna kill you if you don't do this or that, that's fucked up, that's wrong. The same goes for my first book, which was a collection of short stories. They weren't all saying God is bad; some said God is good and people are bad, some said there is no God and we're praying to nothing, some said God just has a bad PR firm.’
| |
Middle ground
‘I ran from this little town outside New York and made my way to Manhattan. The first thing I did there was eat a cheeseburger and have sex with a hooker. It was only two hours from home, but it was thousands of years away, and I didn't like what I saw. I expected to find freedom and openmindedness and no God, but there were hundreds of Gods in that city: your address, Donald Trump, the Village Voice, the New York Times. There were Gods everywhere and everyone prayed to them. So I felt kind of stuck: I couldn't go back to where I came from and yet the shallow “work nine-to-five to make money to give your kids a video game so they can play people shooting each other and then complain to me that I didn't get them the better game system” seemed like an existence I don't want either. So where I am right now is “where do we go?”, which I think is everybody's struggle.
We all want to find some kind of middle ground. We're all walking around in the desert, not sure where to go. I hope it won't be forty years in my case. It took me thirty fucking years to leave my community, and then when I leave, I get published and my work is called Jewish-American literature! I just heard that son of a bitch laughing the whole way through. I've read one-and-a-half of Philip Roth's books: I didn't want to
| |
| |
read about Jews, I wanted to read about the rest of the world. Woody Allen was considered the worst Jew on the planet; he was self-hating and made fun of Jews, so people in my community hated him. Like Roth, I write about that community, and I'm at least as cynical as Allen. Far stronger influences were Irish writers, existentialists, and stand-up comedians. I love Joseph Heller and Stanley Elkin, neither of them wrote specifically about being Jewish. If you're black and fairly aware of the history of slavery, does that make you an African-American writer? At any rate, I guess that's half the publishing industry and half God's big joke.’
| |
We are all foreskins!
‘Now with a child, what I'll probably end up writing more about is: “Where do we go from here?” Writing is not fun or easy, it's a lot of struggle but having that is a good way to direct certain emotions, so that when I go home in the afternoon I'm not a prick. I didn't expect this book to come out; I never expected to have a writing career. It's been such a weird decade that I can't imagine what comes next. I just hope it has a similar honesty. I don't mean that in a self congratulatory way; I hope it's honest and brave in terms of going into the places inside myself I'm otherwise afraid to go. If I don't, now people will know I was afraid to. It's easy to be dishonest in writing, in anything;
it takes time to dig around.
It's been six years since I've had contact with my family. For animals survival is a drive to stay with the family; you never see a deer just run off and do its own thing, because then a tiger eats it. I just had to get away and go through reverse survival, a reverse exodus. So now I feel like a foreskin, cut off from my background. But many of my friends are also foreskins. As for God, I still don't want to piss him off. He's still holding the cards, I can't kill him. I can kill the idea of him but that doesn't mean he doesn't exist. I still have that character in my head; I still worry that they might have been right. What if the most negative pessimistic view of existence is right, which is the one I was taught: “This is all just a big show, thumbs up or thumbs down, run by a lunatic in the sky”?
That's my default fear; I can create some other images - a God who's laughing at all of this, or a God who really digs the book I wrote because he's tired of people talking in his name, or maybe he's just a guy who set a world into motion and can't really interfere until it has run its course. So I develop those ideas, and they can offer some comfort, but still there's always the lunatic God. Right now, we're at a stalemate: he's not fucking with me; I'm not fucking with him.’
| |
| |
nu verkrijgbaar bij meullenhoff
|
|
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd