Tottenville Review

A new review of books focused on debuts, translations, and all works that would otherwise go undetected. It is a collaborative of authors, translators, and reviewers bound by one purpose: to contribute to the dialogue of literature.

Posts Tagged ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank’

What We Talk About When We Talk About Nathan Englander

A review of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander

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In Hasidism and Modern Man, Martin Buber, the great philosopher and folklorist, tells of a traditional account between a Jewish zaddik, a person of outstanding virtue and piety, and his young son. The zaddik asks his son, “With what do you pray?” And the son, perhaps in an effort to impress his righteous father, responds: “Everything of great stature shall bow before Thee.”  When the son asks the same question of his father, the zaddick dryly says, “With the floor. And with the bench.” The anecdote, especially the zaddik’s practical approach to divinity, is an apt metaphor for the fiction of Nathan Englander. His first two books, the much praised short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and his wonderful novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, both interrogate the modern varied Jewish experience for often remarkable insights into the more universal story of humanity. Englander’s latest collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank continues that work, but with a more deliberate and complicated relation to the process of storytelling itself. These are stories about how we tell our stories. Continue reading "What We Talk About When We Talk About Nathan Englander"…

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