Books: Yiddish angst, secrets in sweaters and reality TV origins

The title of Shalom Auslander’s memoir Feh is Yiddish, explains the author, and it is used to convey disgust and disapproval. “It was also the name of the story I had been told ever since I was a child. It was what God said about us, about humankind; and ever since, humankind has agreed.”

Auslander grew up in Monsey, a strict Jewish Orthodox town about an hour’s drive from New York. His earlier memoir, Foreskin’s Lament (2007), reflected on the harmful emotional impact of extreme religious beliefs. Nearly two decades on, Auslander is in a loving marriage with two young sons, but still dogged by the idea that he sees at the root of everything: “we suck!” 

Worse still, he now believes that it’s not just religions that peddle the line that we are the awful antagonists of our own lives. Philosophers and atheists are singing the same tune. “The story of you suck is stronger than ever”, says Auslander, claiming that in politics and TV, “everyone’s shitting on everyone else. It’s a feh-stival.”

If that sounds bleak, never fear. Auslander is a superb writer of black humour. “Ever since I was a child, laughter has been my salvation, my under wastewater breathing apparatus, my Davidian slingshot against the Goliath of being,” he writes.

In this book he struggles through Covid, works on a TV pilot with Philip Seymour Hoffman, and deals with self-loathing by trying to make it big. “Of all the drugs I’ve taken in my life to ease my feh, none has been more potent than money. Psychiatrists should prescribe it.”

There is something like hope at the end.  “Perhaps we humans aren’t the virus. Perhaps the virus is the story that tells us we are”, he writes. 

Speaking on the podcast Virtual Memories, Auslander says: “It’s not that I’m optimistic, it’s just that pessimism has let me down.”

“Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending? On Wednesday, March 12, 1980, Carl Fletcher, one of the richest men in the Long Island suburb where we grew up, was kidnapped from his driveway on his way to work.”

So begins Long Island Compromise, the second novel by New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner. 

After a week in captivity and the payment of a hefty ransom, Carl is returned to his pregnant wife and young family, and as we move on to meet the grown children now in middle age, the traumatic event continues to haunt the entire family.

Carl, who has taken over the hugely profitable polystyrene factory business on the death of his Holocaust-survivor father, retreats into himself, becoming what his wife Ruth describes as “a husband who might as well have been a sofa cushion”.

Their eldest son, Nathan, is forever fearful, not so much a man as “a collection of tics: a composite panic attack”. Second son Beamer (Bernard) is a failed script writer in Hollywood, addicted to drugs and dominatrix sex. Daughter Jenny is constantly fighting against her family’s capitalist foundations, believing that wealth is “a crippling starting position” in life.

But this is so much more than the tale of a dysfunctional family; it’s a witty observation of modern life - and it’s seriously funny. For example, while Ruth rails against Beamer for marrying a shiksa whose “ancestors had left their ability to share their feelings on the Mayflower and had never called lost luggage to pick it up”, she finds Nathan’s religious Jewish wife too frum, saying “we’re Jews who eat bacon”.

Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel Fleishman is in Trouble (2022) was made into a TV series, and this one is headed the same way.

Born in Melbourne to Polish Jewish refugee parents, physician and award-winning writer Leah Kaminsky has had a sustained career in both medical and literary spheres. As the title of her most recent book of poetry, Disorders of the Blood, suggests, this collection of works combines the two strands of her professional life.

With the focus on the hospital ward, human frailty and decline, the reader can imagine Kaminsky having penned many of them in her doctor’s scrubs. They are beautiful, haunting and sometimes wickedly funny.

There is much about death in this book; some poems were written during her residency at the Brooklyn Morbid Anatomy Museum.

In Mourning (sic) Rounds, Pandemic, she writes “it’s been thirty years of listening to this play-track of the ones who’ll die”. In Death Watch, there’s perhaps a few more years to “swim between the flags before drowning in illness”. The poem In Transit: Intensive Care sees Kaminsky liken a dying patient’s experience to a plane landing where “in emergency, plastic tubes will drop down from the heavens”. 

When there is humour, it is very black.  Hymn for the Flies I Just Sprayed. Another, On Becoming a Fridge tells the tale of a wife whose husband has demanded a beer while watching a sports replay and when she goes to get it, she turns into a fridge. She contemplates avenging herself by killing him with her weight but, “no, for him to be dead is not revenge enough/ better to freeze his beer.”

On a grander scale, the book’s final poem, Homeostasis Chart, Midnight, reads like an emergency admission form, with vital signs listed for “Patient: M. Earth . . . DOB: 4.543 billion years ago” and concludes “Prognosis: Uncertain”.

Lucy Adlington is a textile historian who not only tells the story of fashion from the past but uses clothing as a unique lens on history, especially the period covering WWII and the Holocaust.

In Four Red Sweaters, Adlington follows the lives of four young Jewish women, all teenagers at the start of the war, who did not know each other but shared one item in common with which the author knits their experiences together: a red jumper.

Anita Lasker’s sweater saved her life. Snatched from a mountain of plunder in Auschwitz, an act which could have got her killed, she hid it and wore it until liberation. Jock Heidenstein’s jumper made the journey with the 12-year-old from Berlin to London as one of the few possessions she was able to take with her on the Kindertransport. The garment was a cherished item - her parents had bought one each for her and her two sisters – and it tethered her to the family and life she left behind.

Chana Zumerkorn took off her red jumper and pressed it on her brother as he escaped Lodz in Poland by train, and it became a “talisman of hope” for him, though he was never to see her again. While her ability to knit socks for the German military kept Chana alive in the ghetto for a while, she was eventually transported to Chelmno and murdered.

Regina Feldman was also knitting for the military in Sobibor before escaping in the famed camp uprising. The red jumper in her story is the one she was forced to knit for an SS officer. Unlike the other three in this book, it resides in no museum.       

This book continues the theme of Adlington’s previous work, The New York Times best-selling The Dressmakers of Auschwitz, looked at the women who survived through sewing and making tailored garments for the wives of high-ranking Nazis.

Reality TV doesn't have the best reputation. Shows like Keeping up with the Kardashians, Married at First Sight, and Love Island celebrate and encourage some of our worst qualities through cannibalising the resources for quality scripted content. Anti-intellectualism, vanity, hedonism, and schadenfreude abound. Little wonder the genre is often blamed for the “brain rot” of younger generations.

But as Emily Nussbaum tells us in her book, Cue the Sun! (a title borrowed from the 1988 film The Truman Show), this is no 21st century phenomenon. Tracing its origins in the 1940s through what she calls “the explosion” of the genre in the naughties, we are expertly guided through the many twists and turns reality television has taken. 

Nussbaum took up TV reviewing after her early infatuation with the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In 2016, during her tenure as the TV critic for The New Yorker magazine, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The award’s citation read: “for television reviews written with affection that never blunts the shrewdness of her analysis or the easy authority of her writing”.

This style shines through in Cue the Sun!, which is compellingly written and packed with examples of a genre that shapes tastes and takes its lead from prevailing cultural trends.

Nussbaum also shows us a rich Jewish cast in the genre's history, including Allen Funt, creator of Candid Camera (a case is made for Funt being the creative predecessor to modern Jewish pranksters like Sacha Baron Cohen), and Chuck Barris (The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show). 

With the recent success of subversive reality programming such as Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, perhaps contemporary Jewish entertainers will lead a cerebral revival of the genre.

At the age of 90, in the last few years of her life, Peter Godwin’s mother Helen started speaking in the voice of a stranger. Affecting an upper-class Edwardian accent, much like the young Queen Elizabeth II, happy becomes heppy and house hise.

Because of this, Peter and his sister Georgina (with whom Helen now lives in London), refer to her as the Empress Dowager or Her Grace (the latter conveniently providing the same initials as her name).

In Exit Wounds, Godwin, an awarded author and war correspondent, gathers together the strands of his life on three continents - growing up in Zimbabwe, working as a journalist in London, and then moving to New York and establishing his family.

This is set against his visits to his dying mother, once a respected and much-loved obstetrician in Africa, and one of the first six women to study in Britain's oldest medical school. Their conversations involve her reciting poetry and clever literary allusions but lack the emotion he craves. “We Godwins are paragons of stoicism”.

The book’s title refers to a course Goodwin took as a war-bound correspondent for the BBC in which a combat surgeon said, when shot with a bullet, “it’s the exit wound that kills you”. For Goodwin, the wounds are emotional, caused by the exit from his life of those closest to him: his mother; his older sister Jain, murdered in her twenties just before her wedding; and now his wife, who is demanding a divorce. 

His father has also passed away, confessing on his death bed to his surprised middle-aged son that he was Jewish, sent from Warsaw as a child to the UK to learn English. Hitler invaded Poland days before he was due to return and he never saw his family again.

These complex tales are gathered together in a book that is beautifully crafted, warm and affectionate.