FEH
A Memoir
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
ONE OF THE TIMES' BEST LITERARY NON-FICTION BOOKS OF 2024
'Hurrah for one of our most merciless humorists. Auslander's prose isn't just laudable, it's frightening' David Sedaris
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.
Shalom Auslander was raised like a veal in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York: the son of an alcoholic father; a guilt-wielding mother; and a violent, overbearing God. Now, as he reaches middle age, Auslander begins to suspect that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't so easily escape: a story. The story. One indelibly implanted in him at an early age, a story that told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting, a story we have all been told for thousands of years, and continue to be told by the religious and secular alike, a story called "Feh."
Yiddish for "Yuck."
FEH follows Auslander's midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari, and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles.
Can he move from feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that? Auslander's recounting of his attempt to exorcize the story he was raised with-before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him-isn't sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt, and fearlessly provocative.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Auslander (Mother for Dinner) delivers a poignant if scattered study of the religious guilt he incurred while growing up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Rockland County, N.Y. Titled after the Yiddish word for disgust, the book hinges on Auslander's attempts to shake the conviction, drilled into him from childhood, that human beings are "totally, irredeemably feh." That sense of divine judgment, which plagued him through marital problems with his wife, Orli, financial struggles, and professional disappointments, culminated in a recent suicide attempt that Auslander dispassionately recounts near the beginning of the memoir. After he recovered, Auslander attempted to shed his fatalistic worldview on behalf of Orli and his two sons. In episodic chapters, he recounts trying to smile through Super Bowl parties, revisits guilty memories of watching porn as an adolescent, and talks with a Christian pastor in L.A. about God's judgment. Though he never quite manages to come out the other side of his shame, he learns to coexist with it, and realizes that a "constant refrain of self-contempt and derision becomes self-fulfilling at some point."Auslander's gallows humor won't be for everyone, and the account's lack of resolution undercuts some of its impact, but the glimmer of hope coursing through the narrative keeps it alive. The result is an often-brutal, sometimes-rewarding journey out of the darkness.
